Based Camp - Based Camp： How Religions Rank Competence (Jews vs Catholics)

00:00:00.480 Hello, gorgeous.

00:00:02.280 Hello, Simone. 0.69

00:00:03.360 This is an episode I was so excited to record because what we had done an episode on how

00:00:10.300 our mainstream society and how the virus or the urban monoculture, how it sorts the intellectual

00:00:17.240 hierarchy of status.

00:00:18.680 And we had people say, that's a really interesting topic.

00:00:21.180 I'd love you to go deeper on this concept.

00:00:25.660 And what really got me excited is some conversations we had had afterwards with people from different

00:00:31.060 cultural traditions, because different cultural traditions do this status sorting quite differentially

00:00:38.560 between them.

00:00:39.920 And I think that's a really interesting thing to dig into because it allows you to hypothesize

00:00:45.660 on the pros and cons of these different methods for determining this.

00:00:51.060 Hmm.

00:00:52.860 So in other words, what we're going to explore is the ways in which different cultures sort

00:00:59.040 for leaders and how that could affect their success, their vulnerability to memetic viruses,

00:01:05.960 their overall long-term potential, and all sorts of other factors.

00:01:10.860 Correct?

00:01:11.580 Yeah, yeah.

00:01:12.280 Would you like to know more?

00:01:14.440 And I think the first place you see this is in where you get long-tail results, like where

00:01:19.660 certain cultures seem to perform unusually well or unusually poorly.

00:01:25.060 So an example that I often mention, which I think is a very interesting and telling example,

00:01:30.280 is that when you're talking about the conservative intellectual movement, like if you look around

00:01:34.160 at most, almost all of the mainstream conservative intellectuals today, like I'd say like 95% of

00:01:38.400 the well-known ones, they are typically from Jewish backgrounds or Catholic backgrounds.

00:01:43.680 They are very few from Protestant backgrounds.

00:01:46.500 And yet the majority of conservatives in the United States are from Protestant backgrounds.

00:01:52.900 And so this is very interesting.

00:01:54.060 And it's what's causing this?

00:01:55.960 Why do we see this phenomenon?

00:01:59.020 And part of it has to do with how the Jewish and Catholic groups sort their internal power

00:02:06.060 hierarchies, which are, and one of the things we always say is, so if you're talking about

00:02:10.840 really progressive Jews or really progressive Catholics, they all just buy into this mainstream

00:02:16.740 urban culture.

00:02:17.660 So there isn't as much difference in how their power hierarchies work.

00:02:21.080 But when you're talking about very conservative iterations of each of these, there's actually

00:02:25.020 a really enormous difference.

00:02:28.060 So do you want to jump into, we were talking with a Haradi rabbi friend recently around how

00:02:33.040 he said his culture was sorted for internal intellectual hierarchy?

00:02:36.500 Yeah, I think what we found was really striking about it is it did not sort based on credentials

00:02:43.120 or time.

00:02:44.980 It was sorted based on demonstrable knowledge that was easily verifiable.

00:02:51.260 So if you came in to a group of people and you were able to refer to and quote a text really

00:02:57.020 eloquently, but also accurately, then you were able to do so better than the other people

00:03:02.300 in the room.

00:03:02.740 You would climb above in the hierarchy and it was really easy to verify the eloquence and

00:03:08.520 accuracy with which someone quoted and therefore understood a certain text because you could

00:03:12.520 just quickly look it up, right?

00:03:14.740 Yeah.

00:03:15.180 And so it allowed for this really interesting phenomenon where when you were meeting with

00:03:20.220 another person, like another Jewish man in one of these communities, you could say, what

00:03:25.220 are you studying right now?

00:03:26.600 And from the text, they said they were studying.

00:03:28.680 You could know approximately how advanced that they were in their general knowledge of this

00:03:34.220 field.

00:03:34.860 And then you could test them on that by saying, oh, well, page 56 or whatever.

00:03:40.440 What do you think of this?

00:03:41.460 Right.

00:03:41.860 And they need to know how this quote was sourcing other material, how it interlinked to other

00:03:46.340 material.

00:03:46.960 And it's a quick way for you to determine where they are in the hierarchy relative to you.

00:03:51.440 It's almost like, let's say, let's take the religion out of this and let's pretend that 0.99

00:03:56.320 this is a totally different community.

00:03:57.780 Like it's a twilight fan fiction community.

00:04:00.220 So if, if you were trying to gauge using the same general system and framework, you would

00:04:05.200 ask, oh, like, well, have you read this fan fiction?

00:04:07.780 Well, what did you think about when the werewolf like hooked up with the confederate vampire in

00:04:14.740 this particular alliance to destroy this weird faction?

00:04:19.140 And then if, if they didn't really know how to comment on it eloquently, you would understand,

00:04:22.960 well, they haven't gone that deep into the canon.

00:04:24.920 They haven't gone that deep into the lore.

00:04:26.820 Therefore, I am above them in the status hierarchy.

00:04:29.060 And they would understand that they are below me because they haven't read that book yet.

00:04:33.020 Or they didn't, they said that they did, but they don't really know the lore that well.

00:04:36.560 They didn't really take it in.

00:04:38.220 Yeah.

00:04:38.400 And a really interesting phenomenon you can get with this and a really interesting advantage to

00:04:42.480 this system is it allows for different subgroups within the wider ultra-Orthodox Jewish

00:04:48.460 community to focus on different texts.

00:04:51.640 So some groups might believe that one text is like a more important thing for a learned

00:04:55.200 person to know than another group.

00:04:57.240 And because of the way this power hierarchy structure works, these groups will begin to

00:05:01.660 interact with each other less and less because there isn't a cross communication between their

00:05:07.440 power hierarchies a lot.

00:05:08.700 Like the way that they have dedicated their time doesn't cross to status within another community.

00:05:13.740 Yeah, it's almost like Fifty Shades of Grey fanfiction community branching off from Twilight

00:05:18.520 fanfiction community.

00:05:19.540 And at first they were the same base, but then they steered in so many different directions

00:05:23.420 that they could no longer really be interchangeable in terms of merit.

00:05:28.180 So one leader from one advanced version of that group couldn't immediately go over and

00:05:32.840 own the other group.

00:05:34.660 But what this allows for cultural evolution-wise is it allows for the texts that end up being

00:05:43.340 more important in terms of resisting the social virus right now.

00:05:46.900 Those communities will naturally out-compete the ones that are following groups of texts that

00:05:52.500 are less strong at doing that.

00:05:54.820 Or texts that are more useful at, say, making the group uniquely good at surviving and competing

00:06:01.520 in a really highly technological age.

00:06:03.640 Those groups will naturally out-compete the other groups.

00:06:06.240 And one of the very interesting things about Judaism that quite differentiates it from many 0.80

00:06:10.380 other traditions is most Jewish groups can reintegrate with most other Orthodox Jewish

00:06:16.300 groups after they have split from each other.

00:06:19.020 And why this is the case is actually fairly memetically complicated.

00:06:23.300 And we go into detail in the Fragmentist Guide to Crafting Religion, and it's not totally

00:06:26.280 germane to this conversation.

00:06:27.320 But it's something worth noting here, because what it allows for is the less successful

00:06:32.580 groups, the groups that are studying texts that turns out to be less competitive in current

00:06:36.820 environments, can then reintegrate even when they don't do as well.

00:06:40.980 They just reintegrate as lower status because they don't know as much about the texts that

00:06:44.840 other people are following.

00:06:46.000 But where this gets really interesting with a Catholic comparison here, because we're going

00:06:50.120 to get to that system next, is it allows for a Jewish individual.

00:06:55.480 And this happens with rabbis in ultra-Orthodox communities, where a rabbi might be giving

00:07:00.400 a speech to a group, and if a younger individual essentially shuts them down, like they show they

00:07:06.260 know more than the rabbi, then that's over.

00:07:08.500 Like people just walk out of the room.

00:07:09.820 It's done.

00:07:10.680 They have lost status.

00:07:12.360 And that's a really interesting phenomenon, because that really contrasts with the Catholic 0.99

00:07:17.680 system.

00:07:18.140 So one, I hope broadly you can see how this Jewish system would encourage people who are

00:07:25.060 intellectually inclined to move into philosophical pursuits.

00:07:30.420 And that's why you will often see them in the political space disproportionately, because

00:07:34.460 if you are intelligent and in a conservative Jewish community, you are rewarded pretty dramatically 0.80

00:07:41.980 for pursuing philosophical pursuits.

00:07:44.080 So this is really interesting in how it contrasts with the Catholic community.

00:07:51.620 So the Catholic community also really rewards people who are uniquely intellectual or uniquely

00:07:59.480 intelligent from engaging disproportionately with philosophy and theology.

00:08:04.720 But the status of individuals within the Catholic community, like how smart they are,

00:08:10.180 isn't determined using one of these organic systems that you see within the Jewish community.

00:08:15.240 Instead, it's determined by a central bureaucracy, which then determines, okay, who below me in

00:08:21.100 this bureaucracy, who below me in the hierarchy am I seeing is high, like high quality in terms

00:08:26.700 of their intellect, and then let's raise them higher within the hierarchy. 0.99

00:08:30.940 So within a Catholic sermon, you would never have somebody who is being preached to show the

00:08:37.440 person up and then say, okay, now I'm the, I'm the preacher.

00:08:41.280 Now I'm the high status individual now, because these are two different systems for sorting for

00:08:46.300 intelligence in the Jewish system.

00:08:48.820 It's actually the audience that's sorting for intelligence.

00:08:51.880 Whereas in the Catholic system, it's the broadly agreed upon more intelligent people who have been

00:08:58.020 certified by the central bureaucracy who are sorting for intelligence, which creates, it's a really

00:09:04.260 good system if it, and like, it's, it's not, it can sound like it's an easily abusable system,

00:09:09.660 but it's actually really good at sorting for genuine intelligence and preventing weird little

00:09:15.660 culty buds.

00:09:16.860 One of the problems with the Jewish system is because you can get like one group focused on

00:09:20.900 this book and one group focused on this book and one group focused on this book is you can get

00:09:24.580 esoteric cult-like buds almost forming that become quite different from what most people would think of

00:09:30.900 as mainstream Judaism. Whereas within the Catholicism, you have this centralizing force.

00:09:35.940 And because also there's not the only culture that, that, that operates this way. You also see this

00:09:40.320 within like, for example, the Mormon community uses a somewhat simpler status sorting mechanism.

00:09:46.420 What I think is interesting here, when I'm thinking about these scenarios, the scenario in which

00:09:51.940 someone stands up and is like, hold on. And the conditions in which that person is actually given

00:09:57.620 space or given respect in contrast with other groups. So with some Jewish groups, and I would

00:10:03.940 say some, not all, I would say more Orthodox Jewish groups. If you stand up and you're like, hold on,

00:10:08.860 you are given a platform and you are given status. If you are able to back up your statement with true

00:10:16.700 demonstrated knowledge in, in the Catholic systems, you describe it. If you stand up and you say,

00:10:21.780 hold on, well, first off, like you probably shouldn't do that. Cause you should respect your authority

00:10:25.880 more that you should be scouted based on your merit. And based on that, then you're given the

00:10:30.820 right. So you have to be scouted and you have to show your merit by basically participating in the

00:10:34.840 system, but more through a back channel kind of way. And then I think about, in contrast,

00:10:39.120 a lot of other cultures, both secular and religion in which people who stand up and say, hold on,

00:10:45.860 are given respect, not because they show their merit genuinely through their actual argument in the

00:10:50.720 moment and knowledge in the moment, but literally because of their status and often because of their

00:10:56.440 victimhood status, which I think is really interesting. So in, in these, in these Catholic 0.79

00:11:01.820 and Jewish examples that you present presenting a victim or someone who has been disadvantaged in some

00:11:08.640 way is going to have zero privilege and perhaps many disadvantages because they don't have the

00:11:13.580 knowledge. They don't have the ability to show people up. So they're not given a, they're

00:11:17.060 systematically continue to be disadvantaged. Whereas in these other groups, they're given a lot

00:11:20.900 of voice, but is that voice helpful to those groups? And I think that's the sort of really

00:11:24.980 controversial question. Like, should we be giving voices to people who have victim status because

00:11:29.360 are they even capable or in a position of doing good for the organization and the people on the

00:11:33.980 whole or not? I don't know. What you just mentioned is actually one of the dangers of the Catholic 1.00

00:11:39.260 system is the Catholic tradition has long lauded people who undergo suffering on behalf of the

00:11:46.440 church. But some people have confused that with victimhood status, which are actually two

00:11:52.660 different things to suffer for your faith. It's very different than to give somebody status

00:11:58.060 just because they suffer broadly.

00:12:01.400 I feel like martyrdom or other forms of sacrifice actually have to come from a position of privilege

00:12:08.400 because you have to have something that you're giving up. And if you don't have anything that you

00:12:13.280 give up, then you can't, you literally can't make that sacrifice. So literally like the ultimate

00:12:18.020 victims can't even be a martyr or a sacrificer in the Catholic system.

00:12:23.940 Well, and I think that the iterations of the Catholic tradition, which make this differentiation

00:12:28.520 are going to be the ones that survive this period. Another really interesting thing about the Catholic 0.99

00:12:34.240 system for sorting hierarchy is its biggest flaw. Its biggest flaw is that it doesn't allow for

00:12:39.580 quick cultural evolution. So you look at the Jewish system and we talked about this budding

00:12:43.560 dynamic system within the Catholic system or the very closely related Mormon system, the people

00:12:48.880 in power are almost always going to be older individuals, very much older individuals. They're

00:12:53.660 going to be from previous generations and they're going to be hugely incentivized to largely keep

00:12:58.460 things the same. Now, unlike Mormons, Catholics are one of the longest surviving continuous cultural 1.00

00:13:04.460 traditions. So the question is, how did they survive this? Because that's a very interesting problem to

00:13:10.400 have. And they survived it through this really beautiful mechanism, which is essentially creating

00:13:18.280 new deviant subcultures within the central Catholic organization. And that is what the religious

00:13:26.240 orders are. The religious orders allow for sort of an internal incubator within the Catholic church,

00:13:34.060 where a group has a slightly different culture than the mainstream church, a slightly different way

00:13:39.380 of doing things in the mainstream church, and is often more fervent and lives in a very different

00:13:44.300 lifestyle than the mainstream church, which brings in the sort of rebellious, pushing, cultural limits

00:13:51.180 type people. And what's really fascinating is most of these orders, as they get older, they then become

00:13:56.920 more opulent, more hedonistic, and they become less cool and they fall apart. And then you've got the

00:14:02.080 other, the new order. But what these orders allow the Catholic tradition to do is to almost like

00:14:07.980 taking stem cells from like a younger tradition, they can take the individuals who have honed

00:14:13.920 themselves within these orders, and then re-inject them into the top of the Catholic hierarchy in a way

00:14:20.560 that keeps the tradition acting much younger than it actually is, and much more dynamic than should be

00:14:27.640 possible, given the hierarchical system. So it sounds almost like a skunkworks or like innovation or VC

00:14:36.500 branch of a business that's trying to stay fresh, where they will spin off businesses, and maybe those

00:14:41.540 businesses ultimately will be strategically useful to... Exactly, but it's like a skunkworks, but like

00:14:46.540 having multiple skunkworks departments that are competing against each other. Yeah, which is ideal. Yeah. Which is 0.95

00:14:51.480 ideal and a really fascinating cultural solution. Another big problem that you're going to have with

00:14:57.700 the Catholic system is, okay, you've got this system, you're going to end up with nepotism is going to be

00:15:02.120 a major problem. Right. Because people are going to be disproportionately motivated to promote their

00:15:05.580 kids. I mean, that happens in any system like this. So how does Catholic tradition deal with that?

00:15:11.180 Another really interesting solution, which likely has, I think, more probably long-term negative

00:15:16.280 consequences and positive consequences, which is to say that if you're entering the central hierarchy,

00:15:20.520 you can't have kids. Now this had some really interesting effects. One, if you look and you

00:15:27.200 can look at the Wikipedia article on this, it's really fascinating. I think it's something like

00:15:30.160 40% of Catholic clergy is same-sex attracted. And this is one of those things that I talk about when 0.96

00:15:35.820 I say that becoming gay is just the progressive solution to being same-sex attractive. Different 1.00

00:15:42.300 religious traditions have come up with different solutions to this historically. In many ways,

00:15:47.460 it was understood if you were like really intellectually gifted and same-sex attractive

00:15:52.540 and you were born in a Catholic culture, you would go into the priesthood. It's almost like a

00:15:56.920 ethically sourced eunuch. Now, of course, there's many downsides to this cultural solution that I think

00:16:03.800 we've seen fall out from the many downsides of this cultural solution, but it is a very interesting

00:16:09.460 cultural solution. Actually, one of the biggest downsides to it is one that people don't think of,

00:16:14.240 which is where the Catholic tradition is dominant. These regions didn't need to evolve culturally as

00:16:22.020 many protections against nepotism, specifically family-based nepotism, because they would have

00:16:27.900 people in the church often running governmental organizations historically. As these regions

00:16:32.340 secularized, because they didn't have as much protection against familial nepotism, you see familial 0.55

00:16:39.320 nepotism way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way higher in these regions. So if you look at majority 0.56

00:16:45.320 Catholic regions, politics in those regions typically have way more familial nepotism than regions that were

00:16:51.720 historically Protestant, which I think is a really interesting outcome from this.

00:16:56.440 That is, yeah. Well, what could Protestantism do or shift about its culture? Like, let's say that 0.76

00:17:04.220 you're part of a Protestant faction and you're like, well, I would like my group to have more influence

00:17:11.480 in business, culture, politics, media, whatever. How would you change its meritocratic or whatever,

00:17:19.160 its hierarchical sorting?

00:17:21.620 Yeah, so this is really fascinating. So the Protestant tradition should also not be thought of as a

00:17:26.040 monolith. No, definitely not. I'm going to contrast two Protestant tradition solutions to 0.80

00:17:32.140 this. Okay. The Calvinist solution and the Quaker solution. So now I've got to go back to how these 0.93

00:17:37.620 two cultures understand truth, which we've talked about in other videos. To Quakers, truth is something

00:17:42.520 that comes from within. That's why in their meetings, in one form of their meeting, you will have people

00:17:48.160 just stand up when they feel internally moved, because truth is this internal emotional thing that

00:17:53.420 bubbles up within you. Within the Calvinist tradition, even having a preacher was in more

00:17:59.020 strict Calvinist face standing in front of the room. If you read things out of order, that could

00:18:04.160 incept people with your way of looking at the text. If you read things with an inflection that could

00:18:08.200 incept the way people are looking at the text. If you add any commentary, if you do a play, all of that

00:18:13.760 is highly sinful. It's supposed to be just completely logically self-determined in the moment.

00:18:19.980 Like IE, I need to study my natural environment. I need to study the Bible. And that is where I can

00:18:25.880 determine truth. Now, both of these lead to very different types of status hierarchies within the

00:18:32.340 Calvinist tradition. And you saw this from our cultural perspective in the video on like, how do

00:18:37.580 we determine who we view intellectually? We're both from a Calvinist tradition and the Calvinist

00:18:42.620 tradition historically views a person's ability to compete in real world environments, like their

00:18:48.560 ability to actually like do well in the world as a sign of their competence. And that is why often

00:18:57.220 when you have leaders in Calvinist churches, they're often people who have been successful in other

00:19:02.180 endeavors before they moved into that movement. And in addition, it's pretty common within Calvinist

00:19:08.460 churches to have church leaders historically. Now the new Calvinist church is a different species in the

00:19:14.380 old Calvinist church that's wearing it almost like cosplay. It was historically common for them to

00:19:19.060 have jobs outside of running the church, because that is how you showed like that you were a competent

00:19:24.000 individual, but also that your loyalties weren't divided, that you weren't reliant on the church for

00:19:28.540 money, because that's another thing that could corrupt you. The Calvinist tradition is very focused on

00:19:32.420 all of the things that can corrupt a source of truth. And this leads to many negative

00:19:37.040 externalities. The biggest negative externality is that they distrust everything. And if you look at

00:19:44.240 a lot of the traditions today, like QAnon and stuff like this, these definitely evolved out of the

00:19:49.100 Calvinist tradition. This, everything's a conspiracy, only trust yourself. I can provide you with some

00:19:55.300 clues like look here and here, but at the end of the day, truth can only come from you logically looking

00:20:00.600 at the world. The Quaker tradition did something very different and we'll argue in other longer videos

00:20:06.020 that you can guess what evolved out of Quaker tradition, but they have always, if you read

00:20:10.160 the LBMC to the very good sort of analysis of early Quaker tradition, their internal hierarchy was based

00:20:17.000 on virtue signaling from even the early Quaker tradition. Showing that you were a good person

00:20:23.060 through what you were saying was the way within these, these settings were like you had God speak

00:20:29.780 through you. So you would stand up when you felt moved to say something. Well, how do you show your

00:20:32.620 status vis-a-vis other people? You show things that seem more Christ-like and what that meant

00:20:40.340 within the Quaker tradition began to deviate more and more. Today, we know how virtue signaling goes 0.91

00:20:45.680 wrong, but historically they would have said, well, we don't judge people by how smart they are.

00:20:50.580 We judge people by the quality of their character. That's how we sort our internal hierarchy. And that

00:20:56.260 actually sounds really smart and enlightened. It just leads to negative externalities after it's been

00:21:01.400 allowed to like run on its own for a really long period of time. Well, because in the end, charisma

00:21:06.220 is, is not always right. It's not always correlated with, with output or outcome or ability to build

00:21:14.240 things. Right. And also there's the, the, the sort of inverse correlation between people who are willing

00:21:20.540 to sit around and politic and signal and people who are willing to sit in, in churn and build. Right.

00:21:27.120 And, and so when you have a system that sorts more for the signaling and the politicking,

00:21:32.200 you're sorting for leaders who are good at signaling and politicking rather than building.

00:21:38.320 Yeah. And that's one of the reasons why we're so obsessed with slash interested in this topic is

00:21:42.880 we think constantly about, well, how, how do we put people at the top who are genuinely most able to

00:21:49.600 build things in a way that's really meaningful without necessarily sorting for people who are good at

00:21:54.860 politicking. Although you need a little bit of that because any leader also has to be able to lead

00:21:58.920 other people and convince them to do things. And so politicking is important.

00:22:02.940 Well, so another Calvinist thing that was used to sort internal hierarchical structures that had

00:22:06.980 nothing to do with a person's competence, but led to a lot of stereotypes about Calvinists was the level

00:22:12.360 of personal suffering that you were willing to undergo to achieve something. So Calvinists would often

00:22:19.200 try to show off to other Calvinists, how austere their lifestyles were or how intense their daily

00:22:25.960 suffering was. And this is why in, in, in many Calvinist stereotypes, you see them being visibly

00:22:32.360 disfigured. Like they would show off more than other people, their, their physical disfigurement 0.99

00:22:37.040 or ailments, like walking with a cane or something like that. So you look at Calvinist stereotypes

00:22:42.660 throughout media, like Scrooge is a great Calvinist stereotype, right? He's a guy who's hoarding his wealth,

00:22:47.120 like he's very wealthy. Like that was always a traditional Calvinist stereotype is they're very

00:22:51.100 wealthy because that's how they determine their, their position within their local status hierarchy,

00:22:54.680 but he didn't spend his wealth even within his daily life. They talk about in the story that he

00:22:59.900 would eat gruel, that he had no servants who worked for him, that he wouldn't heat the house,

00:23:04.440 which is something that even Simone and I do. So he wasn't like saving money to spend it on himself,

00:23:09.820 which I think a lot of people read the story today to know actually Scrooge is a very interesting

00:23:14.500 story. It's a, it's a corrective rape fantasy about Calvinist moral values because Scrooge was

00:23:20.340 accurate. Giving the money to Tiny Tim's family was not the most effective use of charitable funds.

00:23:26.240 And it was, it was quite indulgent based on his sort of personal community to, to do that. That's

00:23:32.220 just not the way a good Calvinist would do that. And a lot of people today, because they're not

00:23:36.580 familiar with the Calvinist stereotypes, they read the story and they think Scrooge is a Jewish

00:23:41.360 stereotype. He was from Scotland. Like that's a classic Calvinist stereotype. He, he said,

00:23:46.160 bah humbug to Christian. Again, thinking holidays, obscuring holidays is another classic Calvinist 0.86

00:23:51.240 stereotype. Being tall and gaunt is another classic Calvinist stereotype. Thinking you're morally

00:23:55.760 superior to people is another classic Calvinist stereotype. But having your own moral framework

00:24:00.640 and not engaging with the world's moral framework is another classic Calvinist stereotype. And what's

00:24:05.020 really interesting is even though Calvinists aren't that common in the world today,

00:24:07.760 you still see this stereotype in media all the time. What are some other things you see?

00:24:10.880 Typically they wear red and black. They often wear vests or Scottish attire. They're often

00:24:15.960 physically disfigured in some way. And they are often seen as obsessed with pain to some extent.

00:24:21.720 So Scrooge, again, Scrooge McDuck-Donoff is Scrooge of the classic Calvinist stereotype.

00:24:26.320 Silco from Arcane is a pretty good depiction of a Calvinist stereotype.

00:24:30.080 I just find it really funny that Ebenezer Scrooge is like this, this, this caricature argument

00:24:38.120 against effective altruism you're saying. It's kind of true.

00:24:41.820 Well, it kind of is. What's another one I'm thinking of? Vader.

00:24:44.900 And Anakin to an extent. Because another, the flip side to the Calvinist stereotype is either

00:24:48.900 seen as being very like uncaring or sort of like manic. Like businessy, manic, and houses full of

00:24:57.580 inventions. That's another Calvinist stereotype is the invention thing and having houses strewn with

00:25:01.500 inventions that I know even some of my ancestors, when you go to their house, you would talk about like

00:25:05.580 all the little inventions they had everywhere. Because that was a way that you showed how your

00:25:10.980 intelligence had real world applicability to visitors to where you live, which was, was really

00:25:17.440 interesting. And a good list of these is actually found on a Puritan spotting by a star site codex.

00:25:23.080 He did a thing on these, these Calvinist stereotypes and I'll include a link to that.

00:25:26.380 The one interesting part of the Calvinist stereotype that he did not touch on in Puritan spotting

00:25:31.060 was the stereotype that if they have a SO or family, that they are almost always featured

00:25:39.980 as working together. Like the way that they emotionally relate to other people is through

00:25:46.860 their work. And when people look at Simone and mine's relationship, it can look really unusual in

00:25:52.740 that we run our companies together and stuff. But that was actually traditionally the way things

00:25:57.880 were done within the Calvinist tradition. And it's something that you will see throughout

00:26:01.700 Calvinist archetypes. Now, some people might say, oh, like George Lucas didn't say that this was the

00:26:07.080 stereotype he was going for, but he also didn't say that Jewish was the stereotype he was going for

00:26:11.640 with Watto or racist, just general racist was the stereotype he was going for with Jar Jar Binks.

00:26:17.280 He seemed to pull culturally evoked sets of things that seemed to go together in his mind

00:26:22.700 without realizing that these cultural sets came from like imprinted stereotypes because these

00:26:27.880 cultural groups existed in the world around him or had existed and therefore had imprinted

00:26:31.920 themselves onto media, even though now Calvinists are mostly extinct as a cultural group.

00:26:35.720 But anyway, something that you had mentioned about the way these different cultures differentiate

00:26:40.400 from each other that I found really fascinating. Yeah. Talk about the IQ shredder concept.

00:26:46.460 Yeah. I mean, you and I were talking at first about how we were like, wait, this meritocratic

00:26:50.780 sorting system in Orthodox Jewish communities is super awesome. Like the fact that, that there 1.00

00:26:57.940 is a provable way to, to demonstrate your merit, like, oh my gosh, these are exactly the sorts

00:27:04.260 of people I would want to have ruling my culture. And then we realized, oh, but wait, like these

00:27:10.880 are, these are people who are going in and spending all their time in deep, deep, deep esoteric

00:27:17.060 religious study. And per our cultural background, we're like, oh no, like we want them to like

00:27:23.680 build spaceships that take us to Mars. We want them to get us off planet. We want them to solve

00:27:29.980 like all diseases. And they're reading these. So we, we did find it really interesting where like,

00:27:34.940 this is a significant deviation from our culture and that our culture is like, okay, take these people

00:27:40.320 and like have them solve the world's problems. But I guess per the moral framework of many of these

00:27:46.580 very Orthodox Jewish communities, I mean, the biggest problems are delving into these deep 1.00

00:27:52.680 religious texts and the solution isn't necessarily to like go off planet because there's a lot of other

00:27:58.440 important religious stuff that's going on that they need to work on.

00:28:00.940 But there is a downside to what you're saying, right? And there's a reason that their culture

00:28:04.980 doesn't do that. So that is essentially what reform Judaism did is they said, we'll still 0.97

00:28:09.580 sort our status hierarchy by how intelligent a person is, right? But we'll, we'll outsource that

00:28:16.400 to a form of intelligence sorting that has more real world applicability, specifically the degrees

00:28:23.000 that people were getting. This is why you have the stereotype in traditional Jewish families of go

00:28:26.720 be a doctor, go to this fancy university because, and I also think it's why you saw Jewish families

00:28:32.000 overrepresented in Ivy league schools, partially because there is more cultural reward for Jews 0.98

00:28:39.420 going into Ivy league schools than there are, for example, for a person of a Protestant background.

00:28:44.240 In fact, I would be quite shamed within a lot of Protestant cultural circles for mentioning the

00:28:50.400 fancy schools that we went to. It's just seemed really negatively like, like as, as if you actually

00:28:55.840 weren't able to achieve things in the real world. Now, this outsourcing worked for a while.

00:29:01.600 The problem is, is it left a giant gaping back door for the virus to get through, which is as soon

00:29:08.620 as the virus took over the institutions, it specifically was sorted into positions of power

00:29:13.980 was in the reform Jewish movement. And it allowed the movement to be really quickly and aggressively

00:29:20.980 corrupted by the virus as happened to all cultural traditions that sorted for intelligence by degrees.

00:29:29.700 We also saw this within the Unitarian Universalist movement, which, which did something similar.

00:29:35.720 And what was really interesting to me is this more orthodox approach to Jewish intelligence.

00:29:41.360 They now actively like look down on the university system in part because they see how

00:29:46.640 effectatious this has gotten and that they feel like the cultural winners here. Like we followed the

00:29:51.520 old way of doing things that may not have looked like, why are you doing things this way? It may have

00:29:56.360 seemed less efficacious, but in the long run, it's keeping their fertility rates up and it's keeping 0.98

00:30:01.880 their cultural identity strong in a way that you're not seeing as much in the, in the reform

00:30:06.820 community, which is becoming just like holiday traditions and a few other differential things,

00:30:12.140 but not so much a genuinely different, like moral framework than society writ large, which I think is

00:30:17.840 really interesting. So there are negatives, but you're, you're trading one thing for another thing.

00:30:22.400 We have to remember as much as we talk about like the Calvin, the Calvinists went extinct.

00:30:27.140 Basically, they used to be the time of the signing around the declaration, at least among white 0.82

00:30:31.800 Americans, they were well over 50% of the population. And now they're like 0.5% of the population.

00:30:37.820 So it is a failed system. It may have done a good job of sorting for competence. That's why you got the,

00:30:42.340 the stereotype of the wealthy Calvinist. But I think where it really failed people who wanted to stay in

00:30:47.920 the tradition. Well, I also, I would, and there of course are many exceptions here, but the stereotype

00:30:54.280 of the wealthy Calvinist is also not the stereotype of a very pronatalist Calvinist. They...

00:31:02.600 Yeah. Yeah. Because I mean, you don't want to have fun. I mean, the classic, who wants to marry

00:31:06.860 somebody who thinks that dancing is, is, is sinful and Christmas is sinful and, and having too much fun

00:31:12.800 is sinful, which is funny, which those are all things that you and I put music is sinful. Famously

00:31:18.340 like Geneva banned me after becoming a predominantly Calvinist band, all music that had words for like

00:31:25.180 a hundred year period or something, because they didn't want people to have too much fun. That would

00:31:28.740 be very, uh, corrupting, which is funny that that's still very much in our sort of secular tradition.

00:31:34.020 So one of the questions we have for ourselves is, can we create an iteration of this tradition,

00:31:38.520 which, which is able to both resist the virus and motivate high fertility rates.

00:31:44.060 But I mean, the jury's really out betting odds would be against us, but this whole,

00:31:48.880 the reason we're having this conversation is I think it's really important for people to note

00:31:53.160 that there are actually like systemically, the way they sort their internal hierarchy,

00:31:57.600 the way they see the world, there are really big differences in the way different cultures

00:32:03.040 approach things. And those differences lead to different long tail consequences. The,

00:32:08.880 the Catholic system for, for sorting IQ is likely why the last Supreme court, seven of the nine

00:32:16.040 justices had a Catholic upbringing. One had one Protestant, one Catholic parent. So you might not

00:32:21.180 count them. And the other two came from Jewish backgrounds. Not a single one came from a Protestant

00:32:25.980 background. That is wild when you consider the demographics of this country, right?

00:32:30.860 But it makes a lot of sense. When you look at how these cultures sort for status,

00:32:35.180 you simply aren't going to get up. Even I growing up, remember the shame that my parents told me I

00:32:41.960 would be looked at within the family. If I became something as low status as a lawyer, whereas in many

00:32:48.560 other cultures, a lawyer would be seen as a very high status profession. And this has to do with how

00:32:53.460 these cultures relate to truth within the Calvinist tradition. The lawyer is the steward of the

00:32:58.880 bureaucracy. What could be lower status than engaging with the bureaucracy? You've become

00:33:04.700 mentally addled. You, you, you become nepotistically polluted, but it's very interesting. And I think 0.96

00:33:12.440 that through understanding these genuine differences within our different cultures and through better

00:33:17.520 clarifying them and understanding the advantages and disadvantages that each have, we can better

00:33:23.840 appreciate why we are all better off of being in a genuinely culturally diverse environment.

00:33:29.660 Because one of the things that I've always found really laughable about progressivism is they claim

00:33:35.020 to want diversity. And then you're like, Oh yeah, diversity is great because different groups are better at

00:33:39.700 different things. That's the point of diversity. Being different is the point of diversity. If it's

00:33:46.120 superficial, if you are going to pretend that all diversity is actually just completely superficial,

00:33:52.020 and doesn't really affect how different groups perform at different things, then you've created

00:33:57.360 this, this mockery of diversity and, and worse when you can't explain why different groups are doing

00:34:04.200 better at different things, then the only explanation you conceivably have is they're cheating.

00:34:10.340 They they've rigged the system in their favor there. And that creates animosity between groups. And that

00:34:16.200 creates, I think really interesting phenomenons where groups begin to tear each other down or

00:34:20.720 try to frame other groups is doing better. And you get this whole system, which is really bad for

00:34:26.780 groups that actually lead to better outcomes, like Jewish groups and Catholic groups, which I think

00:34:31.440 disproportionately do really well in bureaucracies and academic settings.

00:34:36.540 But I think it's also really important to think about these dynamics, because it doesn't matter if

00:34:40.780 you're looking at a friend group somewhere, or a secular group, or a fan community, or a religious

00:34:46.720 group, or even a family, looking at how they sort for the people that they put in positions of

00:34:52.260 leadership, will enable you to kind of understand where that group is going to go and what it will

00:34:58.600 be able to do. So all groups will produce something, but what it will be able to produce, whether that is

00:35:05.060 like really esoteric, creative, amazing things, or real world, or we'll say larger society agency,

00:35:11.600 all sorts of things that that depends on how meritocratic sorting works. So look closely at

00:35:18.360 that, and you'll be able to discover a ton of other things much more quickly than by analyzing a lot of

00:35:24.040 other elements of the group that would take more time. Yeah, it's a really fun way to think about

00:35:29.640 things, but also think about what you're doing for your own family. I think to a lot of people of this

00:35:33.340 generation, they grew up without a culture, because they didn't know what their culture was. And when they

00:35:38.080 move back to cultures, and they're trying to choose which one they adopt, or trying to recreate some

00:35:43.820 iteration of what their family's historic culture was, they often think it's just the theology, when

00:35:51.060 there's a whole worldview that worked alongside this theology, and a whole way of sorting yourself

00:35:57.300 culturally, that led to these cultural differences. And you can make a much more informed decision as you

00:36:03.780 recreate your family culture in the light of a virus that has eroded and erased so many family

00:36:10.660 traditions. Yeah, absolutely. It was fun talking about this with you. I know we've been talking

00:36:17.080 about it for days now. Yeah, you've helped all of these ideas. I might talk more, but a lot of these

00:36:21.540 are just me parroting the ideas that Simone is telling me in private. More like I just ask you dumb 0.99

00:36:25.840 questions, but that's our tradition. And I absolutely love it. Yeah, that's our tradition. That's the way our 0.97

00:36:30.340 gender dynamics work. Yeah, I ask really dumb questions, because I'm like, so confused. And 0.97

00:36:37.500 he gives really smart answers. And they're like, so sexy. And I'm so like, hot for it.

00:36:44.620 That's how you incept me with your worldview. It's your womanly ways. 1.00

00:36:48.860 My yeah, my feminine, my sexuality, which is for wherever it is. This is a pleasure. I'm looking for

00:36:58.160 to our next conversation, because I've got a good one coming up. Yeah. All right. Love you, Malcolm.

00:37:03.360 Love you, too.

Based Camp - July 13, 2023

Based Camp： How Religions Rank Competence (Jews vs Catholics)

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