They don’t adopt, they espouse. They talk a lot, they signal with a few purchases (or purchase attributes) but they rarely turn them into embodied lifestyle habits. Actually *adopting* a value in that deep sense is approximately as hard as quitting smoking in the median casehttps://twitter.com/rechelon/status/971487206811422720 …
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Replying to @vgr
I encounter people constantly that make drastic life changes because of a persuasive argument, often in isolation and to extreme disadvantage. Of course I'm a writer that caters to such people, but I assure you they exist.
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Here are some things I encounter regularly: dropping out of school or quitting working, traveling homeless, building hidden cabins in the forest, ditching all of one's friends, drastic dietary changes, EA donations of majority of income, moving to syria to fight...
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Replying to @rechelon
I don’t doubt it. I’d say they’re a small minority.
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Replying to @vgr
Small minorities can be incredibly important to the overall dynamics of a system. Focusing on how most people aren't strongly idealistic misses how the idealists impact and shape the rest.
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Replying to @rechelon
Hmm. I don’t know. Most of these minority idealists die in obscurity. People who model highly contagious and imitible behaviorswhile strongly embedded have a much more decisive impact on the evolution of norms. Idealism typically only has an impact when it acquires guns.
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Replying to @vgr
Idealists constantly test and implement alternative tools, organizational forms, social norms... doing the development necessary before mass adoption. I could point to tons of things now in mass use that started and could only start amid a small circle of self-isolated idealists.
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Replying to @rechelon
I think you’re conflating values (which I’m skeptical of) and imitable behaviors (which I think are powerful) The two are not necessarily equally impactful when the same person comes up with both.
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Replying to @vgr
My argument is that values play an important role in driving the creation of imitable behaviors.
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Yeah I get that. My argument is that value-agnostic pragmatic trial and error by people who just want to solve a problem/issue is orders of magnitude more important. In fact their blindness to value implications is often the resulting problem.
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