LMD wrote on my forum:
Something in me says its a waste if you don’t actually achieve actual prime-mover greatness.
This attitude is toxic and I want to warn people against it. This wording suggests it's coming from Ayn Rand (without necessarily assigning blame) by using her prime mover terminology. I think she had some of this attitude but it also comes from David Deutsch a lot. Popper and Goldratt are much better about it (not at countering it, just at not doing/spreading it).
Due to having a mentor (Deutsch) who is bad on this issue, I've struggled with this (I didn't have the issue before the mentor). Personally, I'm happy with my abilities and accomplishments, but I've had confusions about how to view good but not great ideas, skills and actions.
The idea I got from Deutsch is sort of like: society is broken, the default status quo is broken, so you have to be way better than most people just to avoid disaster. It's not that you have to be super skilled in order to do awesome stuff; it's just that everyone who isn't super skilled does awful stuff. Like Deutsch basically says if you aren't a top 0.001% outlier, then you will be an abusive parent (I'm not exaggerating; he's actually used stronger rhetoric than that including comparisons with slavery). For Deutsch, you have to be one of the very best just to be OK, decent, acceptable – you actually don't really get to be considered great or special for doing that. It's all stick, no carrot. It's toxic.
Deutsch also basically said you have to question conventional romance and monogamy, and have great outlier ideas, or else have awful relationships. And you have to question conventional philosophy (like induction) and find something far better or else you'll have awful philosophy ideas (and therefore e.g. have poor prospects at doing good work as a scientist or AI researcher). And, according to Deutsch, if you don't adopt especially good versions of libertarian type ideas about politics and economics, then you'll have really awful ideas on those subjects, with various bad consequences. And if you practice a religion you're probably just full of really nasty static memes that drive you to really immoral behaviors and ideas; static memes make you have anti-criticism attitudes and biases and otherwise sabotage the means of correcting errors, which is according to Deutsch basically the most evil, immoral, depraved thing you can do. It's being bad at error correction (not e.g. something about violence) that Deutsch makes the centerpiece of morality in his book:
Deutsch wrote in The Beginning of Infinity:
Could it be that the moral imperative not to destroy the means of correcting mistakes is the only moral imperative? That all other moral truths follow from it?
A practical result of this is that many of Deutsch's fans lie about wanting all types and strengths of criticism on all topics, lie about their openness to debate, lie about how open to outlier ideas they are, lie about being thick-skinned, and lie about liking and wanting intellectual conversations when they are actually having negative emotions. They can feel especially pressured to be great regarding this specific issue to avoid Deutsch's moral condemnation, but they generally aren't already great at it, and some try to fake it until they make it, which I've never seen work. Others, failing to meet Deutsch's moral standards, give up entirely instead of doing some of this stuff in a way that would work for them.
Deutsch presents too many of his ideas in an all-or-nothing way where you have to do great at the whole thing or else be condemned, which leads to people giving up who could otherwise have done a good or OK job that actually would have been a lot better than nothing. Reasonable people want self-esteem and if greatness is required to have it, but they aren't already great, then they'll either be dishonest about how great they already are or they'll be alienated and reject that school of thought.
Another example of Deutsch's all-or-nothing attitude is when he tweeted:
All compulsory education, "tough" or not, "love" or not, in camps or not, and whether it "traumatises" or not, is a violation of human rights.
The tweet was a comment on Troubled US teens left traumatised by tough love camps, which it linked to.
So Deutsch was defending abusive teen wilderness camps as not being worse than other schools, because all schools are bad, so to him they're all the same (regardless of e.g. whether the children at the school are sexually assaulted or not). A school must be great or else Deutsch condemns it just as much as the worst schools.
He's also said stuff about how parents have to permanently give their young children total freedom, with no possibility of ever changing your mind, or else the children are unfree today and the parents are coercive no matter what their actual relationship with their children is like. You have to do everything fully how he wants, and sometimes even commit to it forever, or you're bad. Committing not to change your mind in the future is a problematic demand coming from someone who also says being open to changing your mind in the future is the key to both rationality and morality.
Another practical result of Deutsch's writing about morality is to confuse people. Most people are fairly concrete thinkers. Abstract statements about error correction being the only moral imperative can mislead people about other issues like violence that seem to be excluded from mattering morally. They might hear that violence is morally acceptable since there is only one moral imperative which does not mention violence. That wouldn't be the correct analysis but Deutsch didn't explain a better one. He brought the idea up briefly, enough to get people's attention (I've seen a lot of people remember and talk about this), but then he didn't explain it much or offer much help for dealing with it. Morality is a particularly bad topic to come in, say something really strong and really unconventional, imply that readers have to do a great job with it or they're immoral, and then leave readers to work out all the implications and details about what to do. People aren't good at reinventing morality based on a couple clues plus fear of being immoral.
Also he phrased it as a question but he's implying that the answer is "yes" and lots of readers take it that way. Being able to say you didn't make a claim, you just brought up a question to consider, is a way to get an idea across to readers while still being able to deny responsibility for it.
Also from The Beginning of Infinity:
This is a rare and deadly sort of error: it prevents itself from being undone.
That type of error is common not rare (as Deutsch himself argues elsewhere in the same book when he talks about static memes). And calling something "deadly" when basically everyone does it daily is toxic and also incorrect (if lots of people do it daily for decades without dying, then "deadly" is the wrong word; it being a metaphor doesn't prevent if from being a bad choice of words).
Returning to the bigger picture, I think Deutsch is wrong about greatness and I've unpacked, untangled and rejected some of it but I think some errors linger in my thinking and also sometimes people go read my old more-Deutsch-influenced writing and find more of these errors.
Deutsch's version is more toxic than Ayn Rand's. Rand didn't say that Eddie Willers or Mike (the construction worker who makes friends with Roark) is a bad or awful person. She thought lots of non-great people were decent, reasonable people who had fine lives. According to Rand, you don't have to be like Dagny just to avoid being like her brother; there's a lot of room in between.
I'm guessing that LMD picked up some of Deutsch's attitude.
One of the things that's been hard for me with rejecting Deutsch's toxicity is that I do think that Keynesian, Marxist and some other widespread economics that exist today are very flawed. I do think conventional parenting and relationships have lots of flaws. I think politics is a broken mess. I think the government is inefficient, clumsy, makes lots of mistakes, etc. and I also now (unlike Deutsch) think that about big companies (which I now also now think commit lots of fraud and do various bad things like poisoning us, see e.g. Silent Spring). I have a lot of criticisms of social dynamics, social status, social networking, etc.
I don't think society is very merit-based. I don't think merit rises to the top well. That's relevant: Deutsch is demanding that people be so great in terms of merit that often isn't rewarded by society, and may well be punished by society, as Deutsch himself has mentioned. When Deutsch demands that people be super rational, he's by implication telling them not to play irrational social status games that actually work and get you career advancement. It's problematic to tell your smart readers to be incompatible with most careers. And it's hypocritical because himself Deutsch put a lot of work into fitting in and getting along with people in order to advance his career; he didn't just pursue rational greatness as his only imperative above other concerns.
Seeing a lot of flaws in society makes it harder to think that being normal is just fine. So there's an issue there. I think it's toxic and false to tell everyone they have to be in the top 1% or else their lives will be disasters full of errors, misery and treating themselves and others immorally. But I do think there are a lots of big problems in the world. How do you tell people there is huge room for improvement without them thinking that if they don't improve they're bad? How do you tell people that some particular conventional ideas lead to concrete negative results, including harm, without telling them that continuing to hold those ideas is harmful and bad? Just saying that you're always going to be fallible and be at the beginning of infinity, and error is just an ever present part of life, and everyone can just do their best ... is not good enough to address this; it's not much of a solution (even setting aside that "do their best" could be taken (contrary to common usage) to imply striving as hard as possible for greatness).
There's also a related issue that comes up on a small scale. For example, if you don't smoke or drink alcohol or coffee because you think those things are unhealthy (for all humans, not just for yourself personally), how do you say that without people feeling that your opinion applies to them too? You can present it as a choice about your own life and how you want to live, but they can still see it as having implications about their life. They can feel judged or pressured. Ideas which are critical of things in objective, impersonal ways can be a big deal to other people.
I don't have all the answers here but I think the way Deutsch handles it is really toxic and Rand's handling is problematic though better than Deutsch's (due to giving aspirational positive examples and saying there's a lot of room to exist in between her heroes and villains). It's also notable that Deutsch is worse than Rand about this because Rand has a (partially fair, partially unfair) well known reputation for being especially toxic about this kind of issue.