Summary: creepy traditionalism is intelligent 22-year-olds acting and talking like 70-year-olds in ruts when you’d expect some mix of rebellion and super-earnest politics + messy behaviors. It is creepy because it suggests premature pattern-locking as an anxiety coping mechanism.
Conversation
Why are we seeing this?
I have a theory. This is a generation that was raised in the cult of doerism. Hands-on everything. Trial-and-error. Gamified pedagogy. Self-directed learning. Hacking as growing up. They’ve been taught to distrust theory, reflection and contemplation.
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This works great for a lot of stuff industrial schooling is supposed to teach, but fails to.
People < 25 are used to their developmental environment world being figure-outable by trial and error, without manuals. Reflection is the all-else-fails option.
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What happens when you throw a doerist mindset into the much more complex and ambiguous world of adult society where most things aren’t set up to be learnable through trial-and-error doing?
You’re likely to quickly find, imitate, and lock-on to, the simplest patterns that work.
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Normal 14-25 ways of growing aren’t doerist. They include wild speculation, unreasonable experiments, weird obsessions, rebellion, etc. The space explored is much larger than efficiently learnable doerist space. It includes lots of angsty contemplation, inaction, reflection.
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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.
Replying to
Counter theory: their Boomer parents went hard away from tradition. Boomers never embraced institution building or norm upholding. They went directly from 70s counter culture to 80s me generation. Gen Z "traditionalism" is a radical reaction to their parents' neglect of tradition
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