elon musk is the result of an accidental (?) form of memetic selection. criticize everyone for doing anything and you create a world in which the only people who do anything are the ones immune to criticism. and tbc, this is not good; immunity to criticism makes cult leaders
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wonder if it’s some kind of high modernist thing to believe that only the first-order effects of an intervention matter, and refuse to think ecologically
“oh, thing bad, better criticize it. this will definitely cause there to be less of thing. yep. that always works”
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related to why i feel pessimistic about “command” and “shame” as theories of change. “frequently backfires”
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2. “shame” - shame people for doing the wrong thing and they’ll do the right thing. sort of a variant of command. i’m pessimistic. i think shame has mostly broken as a mechanism for changing people’s behavior, and frequently backfires. i try not to use it myself
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yes. the most awful actors are like multidrug-resistant bacteria and they'll always shrug it off while the collateral damage from all this toxic shaming spreads everywhere and kills off anything that doesn't have a decent amount of resistance to it. it's really depressing.
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multiple-criticism-resistant humans
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