Ranking Socio-Economic Factors

I understand this tweet thread as saying there is some feature F that is mostly innate that determines the wellbeing and health of a society. Some people have F and when they're with others who have F, they naturally create the Good Society the way beavers build dams. Others have low quantities of F. They're still trying to be close to people who have high F because the benefits are large, but their presence among high F people slowly undermines the workings of that society. Kind of like mixing ethanol into gas for a gas engine -- it works at low mixtures but causes damage to the engine over time especially with higher concentrations. In our society we call this F "socioeconomic factors" which is simply mixing up causality. High F causes good socioeconomic factors and there is little if any causality in the other direction.

I hope that's a faithful telling of the story Wolf has in mind.

My question is this: can we figure out what this F is? People have called it "character, class, race, education, blood, physis, nobility, virtue, social trust, etc.", what is the ranking of these in their causal correlation to F?

My ranking would be like this:
1. nobility
2. virtue
3. physis
4. blood
5. race
6. class
7. education
8. social trust (backwards causality)

But of course these are just words and the concept is still a bit fuzzy to me. I just think it's important to study this because genetic engineering (and regular old sexual selection) allows us to acquire these traits for our children even if they are innate.

>>2420
If we wanted to figure out which genetic (and deep cultural) traits contributed to “socioeconomic factors” i think we would start with a more fine grained set of concepts than wolf did. He was giving different names the whole thing has been called, not trying to break it down into parts.

To break it down, here are some of my guesses: intelligence, bravery, athleticism, lawfulness, creativity, beauty, industriousness, etc.

But theres another part of the original thread you are not addressing, which is the cargo cult. Its not that the low-Fs are fighting their way in among the high-Fs, its that the high-Fs themselves chase certain kinds of material wealth to the exclusion of other goods because they implicitly believe it causes F and are unaware that they already have it and could use it otherwise. This is where we ourselves can actually get a big improvement, not in F, but in other values and in different expression of F.

The OP obviously is a hyperbolic exaggeration of the true state of affairs for twitter, but i know a good many people stuck on the upper middle class striver treadmill in a way that has almost exactly this character. They cant admit to themselves the true nature of what they are doing, and that its safe to stop striving so hard for trappings and fall back on inborn nobility.

I like it, maybe Wolf can be our modern day Luther preaching sola fide against works justification. You had salvation already (or you never did) so stop buying the indulgences.

I do think it's rational for UMCs to do the destructive tournament games because there doesn't seem to be another option at the moment. Our society allows you to get among high-F people by having the money. Your ability to make money in global capitalism is imperfectly correlated with high-F but it's not zero and so this arrangement kind of works. If UMC strivers stopped the striving, they'd end up in the abyss of low-F people and worse yet, their children (if they're lucky to have any) will end up there as well.

I get that he was being hyperbolic and a bit vague on twitter. I'm interested in being more specific because this is something of a practical concern for me. A lot of people just say select on race, and this ok as an easily observable proxy, but it's highly imperfect. There is a great deal of ruin within a race and even noble families degenerate over time (where's the Bush family?). None of us are taught how to identify the high-F people beyond the socioeconomic factors like, does he/she have a white collar job and a college education and an intact family with wealth? Identifying the high-F through other means would help even if we end up goodharting that as well in the future.

I guess the point is breaking out of our equilibrium would require showing an alternate way of life that is easily recognizable as healthy and being able to reproduce it.

One thing I would say up front is to not get hung up on genetics vs. environment. There is a joke among behavioral geneticists that "every interesting behavioral trait has a heritability of about 0.5." This is not literally true. Some are 0.3. Some are 0.7. But very few are 0.1 or 0.9.

We can't change our genes once we're born. But we can change our gene expression, through exercise, diet, and many other ways. We can also change the genes of our children by our choice of whom to marry.

The Greeks certainly believed in the importance of phusis. But they also strongly believed in paideia, especially for the well-born. And the Spartans had their agoge.

Above all, they believed in arete: excellence, which encompasses the traits of nobility. The most practical rule is to determine what true excellence is, in its various facets, and pursue that. Imitation is actually OK here, just not the imitation of bullshit upper middle-class strivers. As Nietzsche wrote, one would do very well to read Plutarch's Lives.

>>2424

More on arete:

There is a classical distinction between the virtue of megalopsychia, or greatness of soul, and the vice of ambition, which is more like cargo cult striving.

Here's a discussion of the distinction. It's from an evangelical Christian perspective, but it gives the classical perspective as well.

https://joelcarini.substack.com/p/is-ambition-a-vice

>>2422
I like the luther analogy. Let's stop buying the indulgences, and start calling out the true nature of socio-economic salvation. But what does that entail in practice?

>If UMC strivers stopped the striving, they'd end up in the abyss of low-F people and worse yet, their children (if they're lucky to have any) will end up there as well.

I don't believe this, especially not this strong version. It's not my experience at least. This is what's interesting about OP: the claim that the UMC striver catastrophic social downside risk thesis is not actually true. I've gotten more out of optimizing for intellectual adventure, wisdom, character, etc than I see people getting out of optimizing for UMC career and school stuff. Maybe my way is higher variance, or actually harder than I realize, but even without any particular talent for it, you hardly end up in a social abyss by default. You know you can just put some pants on, go to a nice church, and be friendly, right? I've met great very high quality friends by such method. As for children, the striveoids are the ones not having them.

So what's the real thing? This guy >>2424 is right to not focus on the genetics. It's liberating to be able to say "wait a minute, I'm white" and walk away from the fake striver stuff, but you actually do want to strive to develop the real thing.

Every people has its own ideas of true excellence appropriate to its place in the world, but here's my list:

* Risk Tolerance, Openness to Adventure. You will go farther and appear better in life by doing more exploring and risk taking than worrying about keeping up. "Keeping up" (downside risk) is a mental prison; ruin is fake.

* Liberal Education. You should be widely knowledgable in technical, philosophical, historical, etc matters, especially in a way that liberates your perspective from the narrowness of the institutions and superstitions of your own time and place and gives you superior perception of reality.

* Entrepreneurial Creativity. You should be able to conceive of valuable projects, get them done, and sell your work to others inside or outside of any institutional supports.

* Health and Athleticism. You should be strong, fit, metabolically and hormonally healthy. Good eating and lifestyle habits and self discipline go an unfairly long way here. Don't be fat or weak. Having skillfull motions and an air of physical power that comes from dance, combat sports, and other sports is socially powerful, too.

* Social grace. You should be able to talk to anyone, have great manners, become friends with who you want to, and resolve conflicts politely and gracefully.

* Trustworthy Character. You should be the sort of person whose word is just the truth, who can be trusted to do the right thing, to independently fix problems, to keep confidence, show up on time, work hard, etc.

* Taste in quality. Think clothing, material objects, grooming, decor, neighborhoods, cities. You should be able to distinguish actual quality and value from mere fashion and price.

* Efficiency. You should be able to accomplish what you need to on far less than the average slob consumer. I put this in explicitly to remind you that wealth consists not on having stuff, but in lacking wants.

The UMC bosses don't want you to know this but all of these can be trained for free and none of them are gated by institutions. If you made very little money but optimized on all of these, you would be in a very strong social position. The only one even remotely money-gated is the expression of taste in places to live and possibly clothing, and a good portion of that is just an empty tournament of the type OP describes. Even the best cities are quite financially sustainable if you are careful. You can do better than you think on less if you have the taste to compromise on the right things.

The point here isn't even that you shouldn't have or want money, but that most people waste enormous amounts of money chasing what are actually just the above by expensive and ineffectual means.

>>2426

Two more for good measure:

* Public Spiritedness. Take personal ownership of your society and its problems. Speak clearly about what is wrong and how to fix. Take your responsibility as a citizen seriously.

* Embody the will of God. Every society and every era is full of nonsense and bullshit that will not last. Constantly orient your attention to nature, reality, underlying substance. Imitate God, not the anthropoi.

Again, free virtues that make you actually higher class.