I truly don't know anything more shocking than the neverending literature on how every tractable 'nurture' effect disappears by early adulthood
Like, you'd think that if some nurture thing reliably makes kids do worse in junior high there's gonna be a chain reaction leading on to less good college prospects, then less fancy job and whatnot, but instead the influence just disappears!
The only sane interpretation I can think of is that modern Western societies are structured to involve a bunch of resets in between, like, 12 and 21. Adolescence, and then young adulthood, is designed exactly to disrupt feedback effects from parental nurture
By the way, the usual caveat applies that by 'nurture' we're looking at parents and not at cultures or cities or neighborhood
Still, absolute insane stuff, with hardly a study anywhere to challenge it
If 'nurture' straight up didn't work that would be one thing, but 'nurture works till puberty than all downstream effects slowly wash out until they're gone by 23' is a real mystery
We know that parental 'nurture' influences juvenile delinquency, for instance, so the fact that even that has no downstream effects by 23 is genuinely weird to me
Kind of seems like holding class and race constant, Western countries do in fact supply basically infinite Bildung-redos and reputation-redos between 12 and 21?
Actually I'm not 100% sure how many studies I've read that aren't mostly from a white middle class community, so maybe it's just 'holding a white middle class community constant'
If parental nurture effects don't 'wash out' in the same way when you study an e.g. black working class community, that could be a nuclear quant validation of 'only white people get to freely fuck around and find themselves'
OP wasn't meant to rehash 'nurture' argument in general, but to get at the specific weirdness that recorded effects on (for example) junior high behavior don't have long-term consequences
Would Western Marxists say pure math is something like a limit case of relative autonomy? In the sense that, like, good luck mapping the movement of pure math to the movement of anything else at a scale finer than 'geometry first emerged to price land'
What I mean is, pure math seems like strong proof of concept for the possibility of formalism in the arts: an autotelic human enterprise that interacts with other world historical processes only haphazardly
I'm talking about pure math as an aesthetic tradition with a logic of development, not about mathematical truths
So here's the take: it's plausible that shards whose activation context is metacognition will have predictable values that are somewhat independent of the (initial) values of the first-order shards the metacognition shards benefit, and that these values will reshape the agent
I'm gonna try expressing something I've been struggling for years to make explicit: why I started caring about 'continental' philosophy, and what I think the basic drive that guides philosophy like that is
There are a few different things people get from theism or spirituality, I think. There's security in the rightness of their values, and security that good will prevail, but there's also a special kind of possibility for mystery and surprise in the realm of value
There is a lightly P versus NP quality to the good in a spiritual or theistic world: we're meant to love the mitzvahs or love Li in part because we recognize, in every step, new good and beauty that unfolds on the path of the mitzvahs or of Li which we couldn't invent ourselves
Thinking about the Hegelian opening of @lastpositivist's White Psychodrama paper, I'm struck by how much I think this desire for reconciliation is tied to the irrelevance of 'goals' or 'preferences' or 'utility' for guiding life
Why is the answer to 'how do I make what I do make sense given my circumstances' not 'bro just have a utility function'?
I think the need to find some manner of describing one's self or subculture or society or civilization or species as a good process is because 'good process' is an actually more fundamental concept than 'good outcome'