Japan has a Ministry for Loneliness

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Yes I can't imagine what it must be like growing up in a class ridden society as Great Britain. In Australia class is replaced with socioeconomic group where the "upper classes" tend to be
land owners
private school and tertiary educated
wealthy

Essentially a proxy for how things are in the UK except in Australia you have social mobility. I think in the UK there is a toxic phobia about having parents who are working class or having been to a government school or poor/middle class home when you have to justify your existence to a member of the upper classes in a social setting.

I go to many work functions where heirarchy is well defined in the interaction between colleagues. I think most people are strategic and operate on a gameification of the playing field where (like some type of virtual reality game like SIMS) jockey for position. If you choose to not play the game then
1. it lowers your career prospects
2. it is a barrier to networking
3. it increases your loneliness

Yes, and the trouble with Britain is now that everyone is stressed with fewer prospects, so it's becoming a thoroughly nasty country to live in. I hope it changes.

No, the problem with Britain is now that there is a phobia about being 'posh' or 'upper class.' Everyone is trying desperately to prove they are stupid, ignorant and the opposite of posh. I don't know why this is, but it is a race to the bottom. There is a terrible attitude to education, learning, knowledge. Everyone hates school and does the worst they can, not realising this curtails their job prospects.

Then they (white Brits) complain because in general immigrants have a much better attitude to learning and education, and try their hardest, so they get the better jobs, which obviously they deserve if they work harder.

This has led to a very toxic, racist culture with white Brits moaning that 'immigrants are taking our jobs.'

These attitudes have got worse and worse over the last few years. It is a complete mess here.

The genuine posh people however, like to be posh and continue with their lives, laughing at the rest of us.

Britain needs a complete overhaul. Get rid of the monarchy. Get rid of First Past The Post voting and have Proportional Representation. Try and get rid of the class system.

Viva la revolucion!

You are right about what happens if you choose not to play the game. I am unable to play their games, so I've ended up in menial, low paid jobs all my life. Even though I am above average intelligence and have a degree

The degree of social and economic stratification does vary quite a bit from one era to another. I grew up in an era of relatively low social and economic stratification (at least here within the U.S.A.) compared to what exists today.

Besides today's lower tax rates on the wealthy, another big problem in today's world is that property values (and hence also rents) are kept artificially high by zoning laws. We need a well-organized mass movement in favor of not only taxing the rich, but also loosening up zoning laws.

Economics alone won't solve the problem, but is a key part of any reasonable solution.


One big problem we have in today's world is today's lack of consensus (to put it mildly) on the question of which (and whose) rights and freedoms should be regarded as sacred and inviolable vs. which (and whose) freedoms need to be reined in for the common good.

Any new "ethos" that serves the interests of people other than billionaires will need to start within well-organized subcultures of one kind or another, and will then need to be popularized beyond those subcultures.


Well, no, I certainly don't think an enforced hereditary caste hierarchy is the solution.

I hadn't heard the term "multipolar traps" before. Googling that term, I noticed that most of the people using it appeared to be either advocating or at least strongly flirting with the idea of a return to absolute monarchy or some other kind of reactionary authoritarianism.

A more mainstream term that seems to mean the same thing as "multipolar trap" is "social trap," about which see this Wikipedia article.

Yikes! Crabs in a barrel! Is there a popular justification for this attitude, and, if so, what is it?


Yikes!

There are periodic flare-ups of anti-intellectualism here in the U.S.A. too. But what you describe above seems a bit different.

I don't know what the justification is but it's been that way for decades. 'Whatever you do, don't be posh, educated, knowledgeable or you'll get mocked and bullied.' Very odd.

At the moment there is a backlash against experts. Anyone seen as an expert is mocked, ridiculed, ignored. So as you can imagine, that ensured that the coronavirus pandemic was managed efficiently...NOT!

I think it comes down from the government, who don't want experts showing them that their decisions are wrong, so then the government can make the public do stupid things.

I'm tired of Britain tbh. It is a sh|thole right now.

I don't listen to any monarchists, at best I'm aware that Nick Land and Kurtis Yarvin are out there and have some idea what their critiques are, I pull the term in from GameB and the conversations everyone is having over there. Multipolar traps are the guaranteed races to the bottom. it seems like the complexity theorists are looking at this as the fundamental problem that has to be solved - otherwise there's no better system to go to once this one collapses of it's own excesses.

Daniel Schmachtenberger's favorite example is competing fishing villages up north who have a whale species that's about to go extinct but they know that not catching a whale won't stop its extinction - rather they have to fish the last one or two whales out so that the other competing village doesn't get it. In this case the whale's are guaranteed extinction, it's just a question of who gets the benefit of the meat, blubber, etc. of those last dozen whales.

Scott Alexander wrote a pretty lengthy article on multipolar traps titled 'Meditations on Moloch' that gets cited often as well:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/m ... on-moloch/

IMHO this is the core dilemma of human existence, ie. really that which almost all substantial behavior-forcing dilemmas just seem to be variations on. It's also an answer to how abundance will never stop our pursuits of dominating one another (particularly when 'status' will always be a fixed rare commodity and can be ranked by percentiles no matter how the overall population changes).

This effect pretty much forces life to be gladiatorial from womb to tomb and it's part of why deception is almost the root fundamental in the social sphere (because it's a war zone).

We have a similar attitude among the "working class' in Australia. If my extended family who live in the UK are correct, this attitude you are referring to is also actually part of the class divide.

I think the UK like Australia went through a massification of higher education in the 1980s/90s resulting in more working class kids attending university. The problem was an oversupply of graduates into a limited workforce that was hit in the late 1980s and early 1990s by several global financial crises resulting in many people in your situation of having a degree but forced to work in menial jobs. I went through the same thing and was forced to eventually leave Australia for several years to find graduate work.

But the upper classes still value education (despite the pretence).

That is interesting, thanks!

I don't understand it. My granddad left school at 14 and spent the rest of his life educating himself so he learned a lot. That attitude has disappeared. These days people seem to delight in being as ignorant as possible e.g. an English person thinking Scotland is a city.

This is the law of economic development.
China is following the same path and encountering the same problems. We are only 40 years later than you Westerners. South Korea seems to be in the middle.

The cultural tradition of academic intelligence worship and technocratic worship makes the mainstream in East Asia respond in another direction (although a small number of people still look similar to the ideological trend in the West).

We have embarked on a more pathetic path - still trying our best to learn (not really to seek knowledge, but to try to practice test skills to get more scores) more than 14 hours per day, at least 6 days per week. This is mixed with numerous false promises from parents and teachers. Then, after failing to find a job suitable for a degree, we doubt what our sacrifice is for.
"4000RMB a month, you can't recruit a worker, but you can recruit a college student."
Then you see "lying flat", "low desire society", "Loneliness", low fertility and other East Asian issues.

This cultural struggle against economic laws will not last long.
Either the law of supply and demand for degrees will change, or we will eventually have similar ideas with westerners.
We live in this hurtful transformation.

if you go back 150 years, people around the end of the 19th and early 20th century valued reading books and newspaper and debating politics and society in bars, coffee houses and even in townhalls. Speakers would come and common folk, soldiers, tinkers, carpenters, storekeepers would attend and the speaker would go on for hours and the audience would be enraptured. Nowadays young people have the attention span of a gnat.

I noticed in school it was fashionable not to know some subjects like geography or history, I suspected kids used to pretend they didn't know the answer even when they knew. Perhaps education isn't that valued? even university students nowadays strategically gameify what they study to get into postgrad or get a job. The aren't naturally curious, they learn what gets them money or a good job.

My experience with foreign students from east Asia is that they follow "gameification" but they are under different pressures and objectives to local Australian students.

What I mean by gameification in the context of Chinese, Japanese and South Korean students is that they are under competitive pressure to get into the best universities. Then they are under financial pressure to pay tuition fees so they are forced to be economical with their time (less time for parties and frivolous extra curricular activities like sport). Second parental pressure to succeed follows them from highschool so when they get to college/university they play the game and learn precisely what they need sufficiently to overcome competency and threshold hurdles to either get into postgrad courses or desired jobs.
The level of pressure to succeed causes burnout leading to issues that plague young people in east asia and they find themselves isolated and alone.

It's beyond me. I've always loved learning and knowledge. Those speaking gigs sound fascinating, I wish I could go to one.

I suppose people just want to 'fit in' and not stand out. If they know more than everyone else they will stand out. That is a massive thing in Britain.

Have you heard of the Tall Poppy Syndrome? Where if someone is doing better than, or standing out from, everyone else, they have to be 'cut down to size' via ridicule and bullying. That's prevalent in Britain. I am often mocked as 'Professor' or 'The Oracle' or 'Miss Know it all' because I bother to use my brain.

Apparently the Tall Poppy Syndrome is barely known in America, they tend to encourage each other more. I don't know if it happens in Australia, you'll have to investigate.

Yes the knowledge culture that emerged following the industrial revolution created a environment of hope and high expectations of the future encapsulated by the World fairs held at the turn of the 20th century and novelists like Jules Verne predicting people would travelling into space in the near future. There was a great hope.

In the era before TV and the phone travelling public speakers were celebrities who attracted all manner of listeners who were eager to hear stories about politics, religion, arts. science or travel to exotic destinations. many travelling speakers who had visited the new world would bring artefacts or stuffed animals to the amazement of the audiences. It was a different time.

The tall poppy syndrome has always existed when one rises "above their station", I think it's also called the crab in the bucket scenario where if one crab tries to clamber out of the bucket another crab will grab it so it falls back in.

Its difficult to know when nerds emerged as a cultural stereotype? nobody ever liked "a know it all" who is full of irrelevant facts.

I am wondering if its a product of the higher educations system where larger numbers of young people studied at university creating a subculture of "know it alls" who irk "average joes". Certainly in the US when people think of nerds then they come up with Hollywood caricatures either revenge of the nerds or Steve Urkle (although I might be showing my age) where the caricatures were deliberately made to be annoying and disruptive to other people's lives.

Quiet intellects who build rockets, design buildings or make computers but keep their "knowledge" to themselves are seen as useful. I notice when doctors, lawyers or other smart people talk shop in front of others they are perceived as showing off.

I see, I'm not surprised that the tall poppy is a longstanding attitude. Pretty sad. I genuinely think it doesn't exist in America though.

That's the thing: I'm not full of irrelevant facts, I answer people's questions with what they want to know. One example:
When I was standing at the school gates waiting for our kids to finish school, one of the mums asked 'when's the school play this year?' I got out my phone because I always note down special events on the phone calendar. Another mum said 'let's ask The Oracle' and turned to me, they were all smirking. I told them the date of the school play. 'She always knows everything,' they said. Literally all I'd done was note down the date on my phone calendar, it was hardly a genius thing to do. Just common sense.

These 'average joes' seem to think 'information junkies' are showing off. We're not. We just find knowledge fascinating. Why is that such a threat to them? Strange.

Believe it or not but my daughter does this. Whenever kids in her highschool class can't remember the date of something from the calendar or remember some general knowledge question then they all turn to my daughter. She is quite proud of her memory but unfortunately she has been bullied for this as well.

She means well but sometimes goes overboard providing more information than asked.