This is a wider net than you might think, since it includes all scripts, including scripts nominally devoted to change and progress rather than preservation. They may even work. It’s just that they work so slowly, and are so stable across generations, there are scripts for them.
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A social justice mission that might slowly make the world fairer over decades (socialism) or centuries (Christianity, Islam) will induce scripts you can follow blindly.
Ditto economic development scripts that work for decades. “Silicon Valley” is 3 generations old already.
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And scripts often position themselves as breaks from *other* scripts. But they’re scripts nevertheless. If it can be parodied, it’s a script. Even if it’s too young to have acquired multiple generations. And if it’s a script, it’s distorting your view of civilizational risks.
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Being parodied and anomie are the 2 strong push-pull signals that can keep you ahead of maturing scripts. Though that’s no guarantee that your distortions will weaken. But being captured by scripts is a guarantee that your distortions *will* harden into judgmentalism.
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It would be interesting to actually model the portfolio effect somehow. If you had 100 people with say n entrepreneurs, m social workers, p investigative journalists, q frontline first respondents, r soldiers, s homeless people etc, what does the net civ risk profile look like?
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It’s hard to think of a societal role, however apparently lowly, that *doesn’t* contribute to the net risk reward function. There are no true NPCs.
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Even people who seem obviously beyond the pale, like people building uninsurable homes in floodplains/hurricane zones/fire boundaries and expecting bailouts post-disaster, are helping learn the global risk function. Though it’s admittedly hard to be sympathetic.
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Do you know in what ways *you* are building on a flood plain? Is for eg. all of academia a flood plain? Is making art and expecting Patreon/NFT income that different from building in a hurricane zone and expecting FEMA bailout? Super easy to rationalize your thing as prosocial.
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I can’t actually think of a single unambiguous risk you can take that moves you from free-rider column over to net-societal-surplus column in an expected-value sense (ie regardless of outcome). Nobody deserves either zero benefit of doubt or uncritical admiration for their risks.
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Fun thought. If we got rid of all government and did all redistribution through GoFundMe, perhaps our global risk-reward function would be a lot clearer. Impractical, like direct democracy, but revealing as a thought experiment.
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Replying to @vgr @pixlpa and @DnlKlr
And look at how easily people raise gofundmes for FEMA situations
FEMA is like the NEA for lifestyle design art
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Replying to
The main thing that changes risk tolerance is actually taking risks. Which progressively drives your perception of risks away from that of others. Divergence strikes again. Which might be why not taking risks makes you judgmental. You increasingly can’t fathom the divergence.
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Test: if you take a real risk, your ideology will inevitably shift a little. If your ideology isn’t moving, you’re not actually taking risks.
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Picture of the day
A stopped clock is right twice a day, a stopped ideology is right twice in a lifetime.
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I think I just figured out precisely why I really distrust strong-halo charismatic derp. People who preach an unchanging gospel for a long period are taking no real risks and never breaking from scripts. It’s a kind of degen ideological yield farming.
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Converse not necessarily true. Ideological drift is necessary but not sufficient to conclude continuous risk-taking is going on.
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this justifies my ideological drift therefore it must be true twitter.com/vgr/status/157…
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