but as far as I remember Scott Alexander eventually retracted his claims about this.
Scott's comment is here. To me it seems like the retraction only concerns the claim that Vassar was a central figure to all that happened, as opposed to using his method on a few people who later used the method on others without Vassar's personal involvement.
More generally, consider the outside view.
In theory, it is possible that everyone else is an idiot and was doing X wrong, but you are a smart person with IQ over 9000, and you also did a lot of research on internet, therefore nothing bad will happen to you. But it is also possible that you are uninformed and overconfident, you have only read the sources that confirm your point of view and dismissed the ones that don't, and you will end up as yet another example why people should avoid X.
I am not saying that the latter option is necessarily the right one, but you should spend at least 5 minutes seriously imagining the possibility that it is.
This is amazingly clear!
I would steelman "a [collective] relationship with the Christian God" as something like:
These generally seem like things that help individual well-being, and probably increase productivity because people need to spend less resources defending against each other.
As opposed to a situation where:
...which is basically the modern way of life for most people. Unless you build your own community, but that is often just a small bubble in a larger dysfunctional sea.
they lacked the conviction to push any other distinctive brand (and in some cases the situation made alternatives infeasible).
I guess it is difficult to promote the brand of Tough No-Nonsense Prosecutor in the age of Defund The Police.
Which is really unfortunate, because it seems like "defund the police" was actually what woke white people wanted. Black people were probably horrified by the idea of giving up and letting the crime grow exponentially at the places they live. Unfortunately, the woke do not care about the actual opinions of the people they speak for.
why we have to go beyond nostalgia for the retro-future
A part of this is the natural "hype - disappointment" cycle. The 21st century is better, but we were promised that it would be 100x better, and it is only maybe 10x better, so now we feel that it sucks. What we would need, psychologically, is probably some disaster that would first threaten to destroy us, but then we would overcome it, and then feel happy that now the future is better than we expected.
But we had covid, which kinda fits this pattern, except the popular reaction was opposite: instead of "thanks to the amazing science and technology of the 21st century, we have eradicated a pandemic in a year" the popular wisdom of the cool people became "it was never dangerous in the first place, the evil Americans just tried to scare us". Instead of admiring the mRNA vaccines, people seem outraged that we didn't let more people die naturally instead.
Another thing is that people are bad at noticing gradual change. If you could teleport 10 or 20 years in the future, you would be shocked. But if you advance to the future one day at a time, it mostly feels like nothing happens. (Even the proverbial flying cars would be a huge disappointment if we at first got cars that can only fly 1 cm above the surface, and then every year they could get 1 cm higher.)
Jetson thinks government fraud-detection agencies are underfunded.
Maybe the people who profit from the fraud want it that way, and lobby against the funding?
A business owner would need to put some thought into whether they trust your local police department or district attorney to have the same belief. I apologize to non-American readers of this piece who believe I am spouting insanity. It has been an interesting few years in the United States.
Uhm, our experience in Eastern Europe is that police was never optimizing for us, and quite often against us.
We could steelman the part about the is-ought gap: People look at the question of "what should be done" as if they are outside the universe. (As if they are talking about what should happen in some movie, especially a movie that no one is watching.) But they are not really outside, they only imagine that.
one thing I valued highly was free time, and regardless of how much money and status a 40 hour a week job gives you, that's still 40 hours a week in which your time isn't free!
Yeah, the same here. The harder I work the more money I can get (though the relation is not linear; more like logarithmic), but at this point the thing I want it not money... it is free time!
I guess the official solution is to save money for early retirement. Which requires investing the money wisely, otherwise the inflation eats it.
By the way, perhaps you could have some people check your resume, maybe you are doing something wrong there.
Some guesses at a possible mechanism:
Gena Gorlin hosts a discussion on "psychological safety"
Good point in comments, that different people see different (sometimes opposite) things necessary for psychological safety. For some, it means they can speak candidly about whatever they think and feel. For others, it means that some things cannot be said in their presence.
I think, you can make it both, as long as it is one-sided, e.g. in a therapy, where the client could say anything, and the therapist would be careful about their feedback.
But this wouldn't work at a workplace or any other larger group... unless you split people into "those who are safe" and "those who have a duty to make them feel safe", and even then, maybe someone in the former group could make someone else from the same group feel unsafe.
You make a good point that it is not enough for your boss to tell you "you can speak freely", you must also believe that it is true. (I also have a negative experience here: I was told to speak freely; I did; it had consequences.) This would probably sound more credible if other colleagues are already speaking freely. Also, if you generally don't feel like your job is at risk somehow. For example, if your performance is below the average (and by definition, half of the team is like that), you might believe that neither your performance nor the candor alone would get you fired, but their combination would.
I think that technically makes you a participant in the coverup.