>>202112These articles on Luxury Beliefs (both the Medium article and the NY Post article linked within it) seem to me somewhat sloppy, in that they mix different things together.
-One of these seem to be "this idea is costly, but I can bear that cost" such as "you should only eat expensive organic food".
-Another one would be "this idea, if implemented, would affect other people but not me, so I have no problem supporting it" like "Abolish the police, crime won't be a problem afterwards because that's what my expensive private security is there for". While that example is about a rich person not suffering the consequences that the rest of society would suffer, there are examples which are not that related to wealth, for example wanting to ban the sale of non-electric cars while living in a warm or temperate climate, when electric cars perform very poorly in the cold. But if you don't live in a cold place you have no reason to care, regardless of how wealthy or not you are.
-The third one is just plain hypocrisy. The succubus saying that non-monogamy is just as good as monogamy, or that monogamy is actually harmful, while fully intending to stay monogamous, she's just plain being a hypocrite. Same with the private jet types lecturing the poors about how they should take the bus to work instead of driving, we need to save the environment! This also doesn't rely necessarily on wealth, I could easily lecture people on how vegan diets are the only ethical diets and then go have a nice, medium-rare steak.
These categories could be summarized as "costly, but I can deal with it", "costly, but for somebody else" and "costly, but I'm only going to pay lip service to it, not actually do the thing". The first one and sometimes the second one really are luxury beliefs, in my opinion.
>>202111The depression article makes a lot of sense, specially the parts that boil down to "the group is just barely tolerating you, they might kill you or kick you out soon, shut up and stay quiet in a corner, the less they see you the better" and the learned helplessness "stop trying to do X, you can't do X, give it up and stop pointlessly wasting your energy on it".
>>202112Evolutionary psychology has the problem that it's pretty much all trying to guess why some behaviour evolved, which is then effectively impossible to prove beyond "well, it seems to me like it makes sense…" Of course, pretty much all of sociology and psychology is just made up, but evo-psych is more fashionable a target.
As to anti-sociobiology being a luxury belief, it seems that the fundamental premise of luxury beliefs is that they attack useful beliefs. Only if sociobiology is useful, not correct or incorrect, but useful, would it be a luxury belief to disdain it. The main opposition to sociobiology seems to be ideological, since it can sometimes lead to conclusions that go against the political orthodoxy of mid-20th century onward (nature over nurture, differences between the sexes being innate, etc). Anti-sociobiology seems like a luxury belief in the second sense (of the ones I mentioned earlier in this post), in that the establishment likes it because it won't bear its consequences. On the other hand it seems to actively benefit them, while luxury beliefs are supposed to be harmful in general but less so (or not so) to the ones spouting them. In that regard it doesn't act as a luxury belief. I don't think that a king thinking that monarchy is a good form of government would count as a luxury belief, self-interest of the wealthy and powerful alone doesn't make something a luxury belief.