Traditionalism is marked by uncritically mimetic behavior. The reason it is commonly politically+culturally conservative is, by definition that’s the most imitable pattern. In someone under 25, traditionalism is the opposite of rebellion.
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It isn’t all efficient test-driven trial-and-error learning. It has a lot of potential for breaking out of tradition because it is *bad* at tradition. Tradition is something youth settles into at 35 as it runs out of energy rather than locks on to at 19 after A/B testing of chaos
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Maybe I’m overfitting some very limited and sparse observational data, but I think there’s something real here. Something analogous, in fact, to deep learning AIs. Gen Z is deep-learning the world rather than GOFAI-learning it like every previous generation.
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It might seem weird to call this traditionalism, since the *content* is not necessarily traditional. It’s some uncanny valley memetic soup mixing ancient statuary, “classical” aesthetics, anime, black reaction gifs etc. But the low-energy signature is that of traditionalism.
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Is this good or bad? I don’t know. It’s like asking if deep learning is good or bad vis-a-vis GOFAI. I am trying to resist my own sense that it is bad. I’m trying to see how it might be adaptive. But it’s hard not to sense the cost being incurred.
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I can’t resist the sense that this is a prematurely aged, prematurely optimized, pattern-locked generation that has been *too good* at learning for its own good. That I was perhaps well-served by my learning environment being “bad”, anti-doerist, and forcing reflection.
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tldr: This is either an H. L. Mencken generation that has figured out the "an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong" for the complex problem of “life’ by trial and error, OR it is a transcended generation that is experiencing an enlightenment that will leave us oldies behind.
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End of conversation
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Gen z got to window-shop all options, very efficiently.
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