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It presents an interesting problem for those "left behind" who value shame, self-restraint, and other unpopular virtues. The neoliberal view is that you can pro

It presents an interesting problem for those "left behind" who value shame, self-restraint, and other unpopular virtues. The neoliberal view is that you can prove your point by forming subcultures that do better than the surrounding culture. I think that's true, but it's a plan B - plan A should be to fight hard to not lose those values in the first place. It's appalling that public discourse about systemic issues has entirely displaced talk of personal responsibility. It's appalling that a positive openness to alternative lifestyles has extended to an absurd dropping of ALL standards. Talk about throwing the baby out with the bathwater! Sean Carroll has a recent podcast episode descrying the "crisis in physics", which he (partially) articulates as a problem of perception. As much as he himself always wanted to be a science heretic, he notes that all previous successful heretics were experts in the established state-of-the-art, and now if a member of the public researches physics, ALL they hear from are "heretics" who don't know the first thing about established physics. It's like the act of rebellion itself has eclipsed the utility of the specific act.

cal85 3y ago
> The neoliberal view is that you can prove your point by forming subcultures that do better than the surrounding culture. Can you clarify who you actually mean here by neoliberalism? It seems a very loosely defined ideology. Do you just mean ‘the mainstream West’, or something more specific? It’s a strange -ism. It’s very vague in definition, and no one ever professes to be a member of it, yet it is ostensibly an ideology. And I only ever hear it used with a pejorative subtext, which is interesting.
- kaashif 3y ago
  > no one ever professes to be a member of it Go to reddit.com/r/neoliberal, there are lots of people claiming to be neoliberals there.
- javajosh 3y ago
  Well, I don't mean it pejoratively. It harnesses the ideas of mutation + selection which has been proven to be successful for 5 billion years. "Everything should be as simple as it can be, but not simpler," describes the limits of practical reason. People have a great deal of latent evil within them, and society should be the least oppressive it can be, but not less oppressive.
- nonethewiser 3y ago
  > It’s very vague in definition, and no one ever professes to be a member of it, yet it is ostensibly an ideology. And I only ever hear it used with a pejorative subtext, which is interesting. Is there a name for the phenomena? Its almost like a strawman but not really. I actually think the OPs comment was fair a d not maligning, but this is a real rhetorical trick. Perhaps not exactly the same but it makes me think about how many Atheists read the bible like fundamentalists. > For instance, Corey has fun rebutting an atheist who accuses a “devout” Christian girl of hypocrisy for having tattoos, because those are supposedly forbidden by the Bible—if you read the Bible like a fundamentalist. As a Christian myself, I’ve been accused by atheists of inconsistency for holding that neither Christians nor theists in general need believe that God created the universe in literally six 24-hour periods, somewhere between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago. It’s as if I can’t be a creationist at all without being what’s called a young-earth creationist. That would be news to St. Augustine as well as to many respectable contemporary Christian thinkers https://intellectualtakeout.org/2017/08/why-atheists-read-the-bible-like-fundamentalists/ https://intellectualtakeout.org/2017/08/why-atheists-read-th... In this case, you have someone who disagrees with an ideaology insisting on what the ideology is, in spite of many genuine believers espousing less extreme ideas.
  - bratbag 3y ago
    "I'm not a fundamentalist just a hypocrite who picks and chooses which truths are fundamental to suit my own agenda" is not the strong argument you might think it is.
davidmnoll 3y ago
If you’re talking about public policy, IMO personal moral opinions have no place. Do you really want the state teaching “personal responsibility”? Even if you did, do you really think they could do it effectively? We have the highest prison population per capita as it is. It’s been tried. Over and over. Using the idea that millions of people are just morally deficient as public policy is a proven failure. There’s always a reason when millions of people are doing the “wrong” thing, and the job of public policy is to assess the return on investment to society of removing those reasons or otherwise disincentivizing the behavior. Personal responsibility is a personal lesson that requires personal choices and experiences. It’s not something you can publicly mandate
- 1024core 3y ago
  > We have the highest prison population per capita as it is. It’s been tried. Over and over. You are conflating a flawed justice system (prison) with teaching morality. They are not the same.
  - webnrrd2k 3y ago
    I don't read the parent as conflating a flawed justice system with teaching morality. I read it as using the failure of the justice system as an example of his larger point: Personal responsibility is a personal lesson that requires personal choices and experiences. It’s not something you can publicly mandate. The justice system was one example of a failed attempt to publically mandate morality.
- pugets 3y ago
  I don't think the aim is to teach that "millions of people are just morally deficient," as you put it. Rather, the aim should be to reinforce that everyone has the capacity to do good or bad, and the direction of your life is influenced partially (if not majorly) by the average value of your decisions. In some aspects of our culture, shame still exists to great effect. For example, drunk driving is a behavior that never gets a pardon. Words never spoken: "We shouldn't judge Joe for his DUI, for if we were in his shoes, we may have done the same." The drunk driver may deserve all sorts of considerations: They struggled with alcoholism, their judgment was impaired at the time, they needed to go to work in the morning, they couldn't afford an Uber, their designated driver didn't show, they didn't speak English well enough to coordinate another ride home. In function, no excuses are allowed. As a culture, we believe that no matter your situation, you must always make plans to avoid driving drunk. What if this same type of intense shame existed towards other behaviors we wished to not see? To name one: What if we intensely shamed parents who let their young children become obese? Instead of blaming food deserts, lack of nutritional knowledge, lack of time to prepare meals, and so on, what if the blame went directly to the parents who are letting their elementary age children graze on a party sized bag of Doritos?
zmgsabst 3y ago
I think it speaks to the incoherence of their views they don’t consider culture, including teaching personal regulation and responsibility, as a feature of systemic problems. How can culture not be an aspect of a social creature’s systemics?
ezekiel68 3y ago
You're not wrong about displacing talk of personal responsibility. But, appalling though it may be, I doubt many would argue that horse has not already bolted from the stable (to a first approximation).
nonethewiser 3y ago
> It's appalling that public discourse about systemic issues has entirely displaced talk of personal responsibility. Well, many don’t believe in personal responsibility. Some argue individuals are inextricably bound by the shortcomings of society and society must account for that. Its kind of a self fulfilling prophecy.
dragonwriter 3y ago
> The neoliberal view is that you can prove your point by forming subcultures that do better than the surrounding culture. That has nothing to do with neoliberalism, which is an economic ideology. I guess its metaphorically connected if you interpret it as a market of subcultures, but that's a pretty strained metaphor, not a real connection to the ideology. > It's appalling that public discourse about systemic issues has entirely displaced talk of personal responsibility. It's appalling that a positive openness to alternative lifestyles has extended to an absurd dropping of ALL standards. Its apalling that public discourse has seen grounded criticism and fact-based debate replaced with ludicrous strawmen and hyperbole in which any connection to reality is so distant and minute as to be undetectable like this.
ttctciyf 3y ago
Carroll's episode is worth listening to, not least for it's exceptionally clear exposition of the current physics consensus around QM, qft, standard model, etc., and how they are related, but the point you specifically mention is a weak spot for me. For one thing he hardly mentions the epic failure of string theory to make good on its initial promises nor the murky waters of anthropic claims and metaphysical notions of beauty, etc., used to keep it suspended like Wile E Coyote after running off the cliff of empirical support. As non-crackpot physics profs and postgrads (e.g. [1], [2]) have pointed out, this has not engendered public trust and is a key ingredient in whatever "crisis" the discipline is undergoing. Not that Carroll doesn't make plenty of good arguments to support his views, but his seeming equation of any criticism of the field with crackpotist heresies is a cheap trick for a philosophy prof. 1: https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?cat=8 https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?cat=8 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kya_LXa_y1E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kya_LXa_y1E
- javajosh 3y ago
  >he hardly mentions the epic failure of string theory I'd argue that implies you don't know where string theory fits in the "pantheon" of physics. It applies to the realm well below the radius of the proton, required to explain only the most exotic times and places (like the moments after the big bang, or the boundaries/interiors of black holes). Carroll's point is that basically ALL of "everyday physics" is known - everything above the radius of a proton, which governs all the stuff and signals we are and deal with in our solar system and local chunk of galaxy. String theory is an example of a "weak" theory because it's not unique, but it also applies only to exotic things and it's haziness does not affect our understanding of the larger regimes.
  - ttctciyf 3y ago
    "Failure" in terms of producing any empirical support, that is, while its proponents have been predicting confirmation any time now for literally decades. See the example links I provided on this. It has now largely retreated these claims into an inscrutable and non-falsifiable "landscape" of possible theories, such that the question of whether it any longer qualifies as a scientific (rather than mathematical) endeavour has become legitimate to ask. The residual feeling that academic recruitment and budgets have been dominated by what essentially turned out to be physics vaporware is a large part of the perceived crisis that Caroll doesn't appear to want to fully acknowledge.
rayiner 3y ago
> The neoliberal view is that you can prove your point by forming subcultures that do better than the surrounding culture. Asian and other immigrant groups have done that and you can see the results. (In a country overrun by “white supremacy” poor Asians have almost three times the income mobility from the bottom quantile to the top quantile as poor whites in the US.) It works, so long as you can keep your kids from becoming Americanized. Another example is Mormons. They should be poor like Appalachians. They fled persecution to arid parts of the country nobody else wanted. But Mormons today are disproportionately likely to be middle class or upper middle class.

cal85 3y ago

> The neoliberal view is that you can prove your point by forming subcultures that do better than the surrounding culture. Can you clarify who you actually mean here by neoliberalism? It seems a very loosely defined ideology. Do you just mean ‘the mainstream West’, or something more specific? It’s a strange -ism. It’s very vague in definition, and no one ever professes to be a member of it, yet it is ostensibly an ideology. And I only ever hear it used with a pejorative subtext, which is interesting.

kaashif 3y ago
> no one ever professes to be a member of it Go to reddit.com/r/neoliberal, there are lots of people claiming to be neoliberals there.
javajosh 3y ago
Well, I don't mean it pejoratively. It harnesses the ideas of mutation + selection which has been proven to be successful for 5 billion years. "Everything should be as simple as it can be, but not simpler," describes the limits of practical reason. People have a great deal of latent evil within them, and society should be the least oppressive it can be, but not less oppressive.
nonethewiser 3y ago
> It’s very vague in definition, and no one ever professes to be a member of it, yet it is ostensibly an ideology. And I only ever hear it used with a pejorative subtext, which is interesting. Is there a name for the phenomena? Its almost like a strawman but not really. I actually think the OPs comment was fair a d not maligning, but this is a real rhetorical trick. Perhaps not exactly the same but it makes me think about how many Atheists read the bible like fundamentalists. > For instance, Corey has fun rebutting an atheist who accuses a “devout” Christian girl of hypocrisy for having tattoos, because those are supposedly forbidden by the Bible—if you read the Bible like a fundamentalist. As a Christian myself, I’ve been accused by atheists of inconsistency for holding that neither Christians nor theists in general need believe that God created the universe in literally six 24-hour periods, somewhere between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago. It’s as if I can’t be a creationist at all without being what’s called a young-earth creationist. That would be news to St. Augustine as well as to many respectable contemporary Christian thinkers https://intellectualtakeout.org/2017/08/why-atheists-read-the-bible-like-fundamentalists/ https://intellectualtakeout.org/2017/08/why-atheists-read-th... In this case, you have someone who disagrees with an ideaology insisting on what the ideology is, in spite of many genuine believers espousing less extreme ideas.
- bratbag 3y ago
  "I'm not a fundamentalist just a hypocrite who picks and chooses which truths are fundamental to suit my own agenda" is not the strong argument you might think it is.

davidmnoll 3y ago

If you’re talking about public policy, IMO personal moral opinions have no place. Do you really want the state teaching “personal responsibility”? Even if you did, do you really think they could do it effectively? We have the highest prison population per capita as it is. It’s been tried. Over and over. Using the idea that millions of people are just morally deficient as public policy is a proven failure. There’s always a reason when millions of people are doing the “wrong” thing, and the job of public policy is to assess the return on investment to society of removing those reasons or otherwise disincentivizing the behavior. Personal responsibility is a personal lesson that requires personal choices and experiences. It’s not something you can publicly mandate

1024core 3y ago
> We have the highest prison population per capita as it is. It’s been tried. Over and over. You are conflating a flawed justice system (prison) with teaching morality. They are not the same.
- webnrrd2k 3y ago
  I don't read the parent as conflating a flawed justice system with teaching morality. I read it as using the failure of the justice system as an example of his larger point: Personal responsibility is a personal lesson that requires personal choices and experiences. It’s not something you can publicly mandate. The justice system was one example of a failed attempt to publically mandate morality.
pugets 3y ago
I don't think the aim is to teach that "millions of people are just morally deficient," as you put it. Rather, the aim should be to reinforce that everyone has the capacity to do good or bad, and the direction of your life is influenced partially (if not majorly) by the average value of your decisions. In some aspects of our culture, shame still exists to great effect. For example, drunk driving is a behavior that never gets a pardon. Words never spoken: "We shouldn't judge Joe for his DUI, for if we were in his shoes, we may have done the same." The drunk driver may deserve all sorts of considerations: They struggled with alcoholism, their judgment was impaired at the time, they needed to go to work in the morning, they couldn't afford an Uber, their designated driver didn't show, they didn't speak English well enough to coordinate another ride home. In function, no excuses are allowed. As a culture, we believe that no matter your situation, you must always make plans to avoid driving drunk. What if this same type of intense shame existed towards other behaviors we wished to not see? To name one: What if we intensely shamed parents who let their young children become obese? Instead of blaming food deserts, lack of nutritional knowledge, lack of time to prepare meals, and so on, what if the blame went directly to the parents who are letting their elementary age children graze on a party sized bag of Doritos?

zmgsabst 3y ago

I think it speaks to the incoherence of their views they don’t consider culture, including teaching personal regulation and responsibility, as a feature of systemic problems. How can culture not be an aspect of a social creature’s systemics?

ezekiel68 3y ago

You're not wrong about displacing talk of personal responsibility. But, appalling though it may be, I doubt many would argue that horse has not already bolted from the stable (to a first approximation).

nonethewiser 3y ago

> It's appalling that public discourse about systemic issues has entirely displaced talk of personal responsibility. Well, many don’t believe in personal responsibility. Some argue individuals are inextricably bound by the shortcomings of society and society must account for that. Its kind of a self fulfilling prophecy.

dragonwriter 3y ago

> The neoliberal view is that you can prove your point by forming subcultures that do better than the surrounding culture. That has nothing to do with neoliberalism, which is an economic ideology. I guess its metaphorically connected if you interpret it as a market of subcultures, but that's a pretty strained metaphor, not a real connection to the ideology. > It's appalling that public discourse about systemic issues has entirely displaced talk of personal responsibility. It's appalling that a positive openness to alternative lifestyles has extended to an absurd dropping of ALL standards. Its apalling that public discourse has seen grounded criticism and fact-based debate replaced with ludicrous strawmen and hyperbole in which any connection to reality is so distant and minute as to be undetectable like this.

ttctciyf 3y ago

Carroll's episode is worth listening to, not least for it's exceptionally clear exposition of the current physics consensus around QM, qft, standard model, etc., and how they are related, but the point you specifically mention is a weak spot for me. For one thing he hardly mentions the epic failure of string theory to make good on its initial promises nor the murky waters of anthropic claims and metaphysical notions of beauty, etc., used to keep it suspended like Wile E Coyote after running off the cliff of empirical support. As non-crackpot physics profs and postgrads (e.g. [1], [2]) have pointed out, this has not engendered public trust and is a key ingredient in whatever "crisis" the discipline is undergoing. Not that Carroll doesn't make plenty of good arguments to support his views, but his seeming equation of any criticism of the field with crackpotist heresies is a cheap trick for a philosophy prof. 1: https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?cat=8 https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?cat=8 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kya_LXa_y1E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kya_LXa_y1E

javajosh 3y ago
>he hardly mentions the epic failure of string theory I'd argue that implies you don't know where string theory fits in the "pantheon" of physics. It applies to the realm well below the radius of the proton, required to explain only the most exotic times and places (like the moments after the big bang, or the boundaries/interiors of black holes). Carroll's point is that basically ALL of "everyday physics" is known - everything above the radius of a proton, which governs all the stuff and signals we are and deal with in our solar system and local chunk of galaxy. String theory is an example of a "weak" theory because it's not unique, but it also applies only to exotic things and it's haziness does not affect our understanding of the larger regimes.
- ttctciyf 3y ago
  "Failure" in terms of producing any empirical support, that is, while its proponents have been predicting confirmation any time now for literally decades. See the example links I provided on this. It has now largely retreated these claims into an inscrutable and non-falsifiable "landscape" of possible theories, such that the question of whether it any longer qualifies as a scientific (rather than mathematical) endeavour has become legitimate to ask. The residual feeling that academic recruitment and budgets have been dominated by what essentially turned out to be physics vaporware is a large part of the perceived crisis that Caroll doesn't appear to want to fully acknowledge.

rayiner 3y ago

> The neoliberal view is that you can prove your point by forming subcultures that do better than the surrounding culture. Asian and other immigrant groups have done that and you can see the results. (In a country overrun by “white supremacy” poor Asians have almost three times the income mobility from the bottom quantile to the top quantile as poor whites in the US.) It works, so long as you can keep your kids from becoming Americanized. Another example is Mormons. They should be poor like Appalachians. They fled persecution to arid parts of the country nobody else wanted. But Mormons today are disproportionately likely to be middle class or upper middle class.