In a messy real world, social norms expressed in language typically have many iffy boundary cases and ambiguities. This wouldn’t matter if boundary cases were decided randomly, but that seems unlikely. Instead big brain gains come five ways:
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Unnormed – We engage in coalition politics on acts uncovered by norms, but in ways that will fit organically into the fabric of our social norms.
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Skirt – We find self-advantageous ways to behave that are near but not over edge of violating norms.
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Cover – When we observe others behaving near normative boundaries, we perform political calculations to decide whether to report those actions within our group and to group outsiders.
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Frame – We find lawyer-like ways to argue about whether an action violates social norms, always to our own advantage, always in the interest of "impartiality and fairness"
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Conspire – We form coalitions based on how we wish to to publicly interpret normative boundary cases.
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When I first understood this, it was a skeleton key to decoding all human behavior. What if hypocrisy, rather than being an aberration, is the essential character of all humanity?
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Norms have meta-norms against consciously trying to evade them. Self-deception helps here; we sincerely believe we just do our jobs and “tell it like it is”, but we selectively report and frame acts, and support interpretation coalitions, and unconsciously act to our advantage.
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0 HP Lovecraft, Eldritch and Void-Soaked Retweeted Robin Hanson
Instead of “man the tool user”, we might be better understood as “man the sly rule bender.” Critically, the essential hypocrisy at the core of all human behavior is _unwitting_, which is to say, self-deceiving.https://twitter.com/robinhanson/status/1023526757473890304 …
0 HP Lovecraft, Eldritch and Void-Soaked added,
Robin HansonVerified account @robinhanson"That self-deception could be a win win proposition that upholds your social standing while furthering your endgame flies in the face of conventional wisdom. Especially for clinical psychologists." https://www.pressreader.com/canada/fashion-canada/20180801/281590946284989 …2 replies 2 retweets 18 likesShow this thread -
What this means is that almost everyone is evil and almost everyone is innocent of their own evil tendencies. People who act in "good faith" are nevertheless acting for their own advantage. And how could they do otherwise? And how could you expect otherwise?
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Congrats. I realized this years ago in college when I concluded that everyone was both corrupt and self-deceptive
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Replying to @Axel_McKibbin
Yes. Many people have trouble hearing or understanding the lesson though, and for this reason it is necessary to repeat it in many ways. Also it is foundational to my worldview, so it was necessary to say it, and defend it
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