MetaJess

Oh, I was unclear. Those were just sneer quotes. There’s no difference.

is the sneer caused by the culture-war loaded use of the word values? e.g. "values voters" etc. or are you dipping a toe into some post-nihilism here?

Well, the culture war usage (on both sides) is a particularly harmful manifestation. But “values” is a folk-psychological notion that doesn’t correspond to anything in reality, and is actively misleading in understanding motivations.

This depends partly on pre-replication-crisis results (especially situationism), but see http://humancond.org/analysis/social/attitude_behavior_gap … My take is that "attitudes" or values are adopted for social signalling rather than as basis for behavior.

But behavior patterns such as pro-natalist early reproduction vs. college/delayed reproduction are as @Meaningness has noted have something to do with "family values". Generally values are trotted out to support political positions, and are often quite vague. "Fairness", "family"

Yes, my take is that “values” are used (1) to signal personal characteristics, particularly tribe; (2) to retrospectively justify action that did not meaningfully involve them at the time; (3) to construct a coherent (but mostly factually empty) self-narrative. cc @edelwax

When I read your first tweet about values being a myth, my gut told me it was right, no explanation required. I'm now seeing appeals to "values" everywhere, people making earnest points involving them and I just keep thinking "luckily, values don't exist, hahaha!"

My fallback standard for "being real" is whether the thing is useful in understanding the world (pragmatic truth). Most convincing when it leads to better-than-random predictions. Do someone's stated or inferred values help you to predict them? IDK, outside tribal correlations.