[towski]

I enjoy the ideas that are thrown around in the article, and it seems to oscillate between pro and anti subculture. I definitely agree with the advantages of sticking to a subculture, but am also stuck with a horrible feeling of dispassion when I see people who are limited by their own subculture, and unable to interact outside their chosen subculture.

I agree that the larger culture suffers as people retreat from it, and no more is that more evident that the city. A large city like Los Angeles feels much more healthy culturally than a small city like San Francisco, and I think it's because people don't feel the need to retreat into their own subcultures, and not give anything back to the larger community. What makes Los Angeles great is the ability for many of the people to communicate between subcultures, and that would be my argument for what gives a place a "healthy" culture.

However, the American culture as a whole has always been fragmented, and perhaps it isn't possible to reconcile the separate parts. I certainly tried to cross between Los Angeles, Chicago, Portland, and San Francisco cultures, and found that it is almost impossible to understand the deep cultural assumptions of people who identify with one city, given experience with another.

[gwern]

> I enjoy the ideas that are thrown around in the article, and it seems to oscillate between pro and anti subculture.

I started this essay back in 2009; 4 years later, I still have no idea whether I am pro or anti.

[derefr]

Really, it's just a rephrasing of the meaning-of-life question, which itself is, as far as I understand it, incoherent; "what is the proper utility function" is a value judgement, and thus can only be answered by someone who already has a utility function by some means or another. (Even questions like "do you want your posthuman descendants to have this utility function or that" depend on the parts of our utility functions that finds comfort in familiarity, or interest in novelty, etc.)

Assuming that the less universally-agreed-upon aspects of our utility functions are mostly built during childhood through social interaction, whether you're better off in "culture" or a subculture depends entirely on which one you end up adapting yourself to. It's sort of like asking whether a refrigerator is better off plugged into 120V/60Hz or 240V/50Hz power: it depends entirely on which power system the refrigerator was designed for. Except, in a way, we design ourselves. I think the most important takeaway is that children should be made aware of the grand choice they are making, in hewing themselves to the mold of one reward system or the other; and of what sort of efforts they'll have to make, and games they'll have to play, to achieve happiness within one or the other system.