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Skills are different from responsibility. I think the world has become rather full of people with lots of skills but almost no sense of responsibility. Moral hazard actors. And they get away with murder by acting like impossibly high skill demands on others is fine.
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Yes. The world is also full of people who don't aspire to either skill or responsibility. If you look at classical goals of education, it has been to combine skill development with outward focus. You can't do this without individual responsibility.
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We've actively disassembled every method that is used to instill these qualities together. Didactic writing is bad. Selling yourself is good. Utilitarianism and pragmatism rule. Individual feelings and happiness are paramount (or individual success is paramount.) etc.
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I think where you and I might agree is that any skill and real earned agency is valuable and any kind of learned helplessness is bad. So long as you are adequately mindful about the value/meaning you ascribe to your agency.
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"Let them eat cake" is a real syndrome. For a queen, the "obvious" solution to not having bread is to eat cake. That sort of thing seems to count as "skill" to some. And that "skill" is then used to justify lecturing starving people to not act helpless.
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In my haste to leave, I misunderstood your point here. Yeah, people overvalue their experience instead of understanding others from first principles. Some preach options (cake) others don't have access to.
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But others make excuses because they can't imagine that ethics and accomplishment is possible at levels of, say, poverty they can’t imagine. They flat out deny agency and call it kindness. Greater standing should be granted to people who came up from similar situations:
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immigrants and people who escaped difficult upbringing. They will still overemphasize their own experience and their solution will be like eating cake for some. But, by default, the onus should be on others to prove why these approaches do not apply to them.
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I’m mostly an advocate for limited individual scale kindness. As in the attitude you bring to people very different from you who apparently have had worse outcomes from worse starting points. Institutional-scale equivalent is a different beast ofc.
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Without attempts to make it universal/objective indiv kindness is great and what humans always encouraged. Small scale allows assessment and limits abuse so you can lead with kindness. At large scales you are stuck choosing between being a jerk and institutionalizing victimhood.