Really good post, and I feel like I have way too many thoughts for this one comment. But anyway here are a few...
Maybe I’m the odd one out (or wrong about my intuition) but I don’t think I ever got the sense-even intuitively or in a low-fidelity way- that “agency” was identical to/implied/strongly overlapped with “a willingness to be social domineering or extractive of others’ time and energy”
Insofar as I have something like a voice in my head giving me corrective advice on this front, it saying asking “if not you than who?” much more than it’s saying “go get it!”
Of course,”if not you, then who?” isn’t always rhetorical; sometimes, you really should refrain from doing something you’re not qualified to do or don’t understand!
Worth distinguishing between being a “team player” in a vibes/aesthetic sense and in a moral/functional sense. If skipping school meant that you were getting out of, say, a tutoring commitment that you had signed up for, I’d say that yeah, you should think hard about whether it’s worth reneging
But what you wrote seems to imply that there was no functional or causally attributable harm to anyone from your missing school. If so, I think doing the weird rationalist thing and resisting the dysfunctional social norm of going to school was completely the right thing to do.
Also, while emotional reactions often encode valuable information, I think the negative emotional reaction you got from being scolded by your teachers was more like a non-functional misfiring due to being out of the evolutionary context; in a 100 person tribe, being scolded by two others indicates that your behavior is indeed likely to harm you, and in a pseudo-moral sense may be meaningfully uncooperative. In this case, (probably) it’s fine for you, your teachers, and whomever else if your teachers don’t think highly of you
I don’t think you’re the odd one out, I think via people’s psychology and other factors, some people hear what you heard and some people hear what Evie describes.
Agree with you that the school example for me doesn’t track what the broader thing is about.
I don’t think I ever got the sense-even intuitively or in a low-fidelity way- that “agency” was identical to/implied/strongly overlapped with “a willingness to be social domineering or extractive of others’ time and energy”
I wrote about this because it was the direction in which I noticed myself taking “be agentic” too far. It’s also based on what I’ve observed in the community and conversations I’ve had over the past few months. But I would expect people to “take the message too far” in different ways (obvs whether someone has taken it too far is subjective, but you know what I mean).
But what you wrote seems to imply that there was no functional or causally attributable harm to anyone from your missing school.
Yeah, nobody was harmed, and I do endorse that I did it. It did feel like a big cost that my teachers trusted/liked me less though.
Note that I was a bit reluctant to include the school example, because there’s lots of missing context, so it’s not conveying the full situation. But the main point was that doing unconventional stuff can make people mad, and this can feel bad and has costs.
Really good post, and I feel like I have way too many thoughts for this one comment. But anyway here are a few...
Maybe I’m the odd one out (or wrong about my intuition) but I don’t think I ever got the sense-even intuitively or in a low-fidelity way- that “agency” was identical to/implied/strongly overlapped with “a willingness to be social domineering or extractive of others’ time and energy”
Insofar as I have something like a voice in my head giving me corrective advice on this front, it saying asking “if not you than who?” much more than it’s saying “go get it!”
Of course,”if not you, then who?” isn’t always rhetorical; sometimes, you really should refrain from doing something you’re not qualified to do or don’t understand!
Worth distinguishing between being a “team player” in a vibes/aesthetic sense and in a moral/functional sense. If skipping school meant that you were getting out of, say, a tutoring commitment that you had signed up for, I’d say that yeah, you should think hard about whether it’s worth reneging
But what you wrote seems to imply that there was no functional or causally attributable harm to anyone from your missing school. If so, I think doing the weird rationalist thing and resisting the dysfunctional social norm of going to school was completely the right thing to do.
Also, while emotional reactions often encode valuable information, I think the negative emotional reaction you got from being scolded by your teachers was more like a non-functional misfiring due to being out of the evolutionary context; in a 100 person tribe, being scolded by two others indicates that your behavior is indeed likely to harm you, and in a pseudo-moral sense may be meaningfully uncooperative. In this case, (probably) it’s fine for you, your teachers, and whomever else if your teachers don’t think highly of you
I don’t think you’re the odd one out, I think via people’s psychology and other factors, some people hear what you heard and some people hear what Evie describes.
Agree with you that the school example for me doesn’t track what the broader thing is about.
Thanks for your comment Aaron! :)
I wrote about this because it was the direction in which I noticed myself taking “be agentic” too far. It’s also based on what I’ve observed in the community and conversations I’ve had over the past few months. But I would expect people to “take the message too far” in different ways (obvs whether someone has taken it too far is subjective, but you know what I mean).
Yeah, nobody was harmed, and I do endorse that I did it. It did feel like a big cost that my teachers trusted/liked me less though.
Note that I was a bit reluctant to include the school example, because there’s lots of missing context, so it’s not conveying the full situation. But the main point was that doing unconventional stuff can make people mad, and this can feel bad and has costs.