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Mar 21, 2022·edited Mar 21, 2022Liked by Jeremy Driver

This is perhaps unfair, but almost everyone who is instinctively anti-cheems is pretty fortunate in life — they have good families, they have access to assets and financial security, they are intelligent and talented and well-connected (maybe even physically attractive) and so on.

You say here (https://twitter.com/J_D_89/status/1504045155933999113) that cheems is divorced from a calibrated consideration of risk. I say that is, in fact, rational in most cases. Most people don't actually have the time or the brainpower to do a CBA on individual actions and will fall back on a heuristic. If you don't have all the blessings laid out above, your heuristic will be "trying something new usually leads to failure", because trying new things has usually led to failure in the past.

This is even true of political cheems. Political cheems is popular in Britain because almost every attempt at innovation in Britain has been an expensive failure (see Blunders Of Our Governments for many examples). Cheems is best understood as a rational heuristic developed as a defence mechanism to a hostile ecosystem where the innate qualities of the sufferer — whether individual or corporate — are inadequate to expansion of control of that ecosystem.

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