3 ms·

Intuitively, this feels very right with my experience being on both sides of the fence. I would need to do a study on one aspect of this in particular that gut-

Intuitively, this feels very right with my experience being on both sides of the fence. I would need to do a study on one aspect of this in particular that gut-wise is the core of this IMO: The way people treat you shapes your personality and how you treat others in the future. To me this is more to the heart of the issue. For example, when I was poor, people treated me like I was not really wanted or that I was expected to go the extra mile to please. I tended to feel less important with less confidence and didn't feel I was special in any sense, which in some sense made me more selfless to a degree. On the flip side, having money, the service industry kisses your ass and women treat you like you're the hot item on Black Friday. This inflates your ego and you expect that treatment after awhile, becoming more picky and discerning of everything, moving in the direction of being a selfish asshole. This is the same reason IMO why beautiful women tend to be perceived as rude or the "B" word as they see most men as just a commodity as they are inundated with unwanted attention.

internaut 10y ago
This is a huge problem in our society in so many ways. Three examples I've personally noticed. 1. While working at typical working class jobs, if you happen to talk about geek/intellectual stuff e.g. with coworkers - middle class people typically do NOT like that. It really grinds their gears. Even passing references to do with current events. You can talk about sports or something else you're supposed to be interested in. This is allowed. You can explain this a dozen different ways but I am convinced it shows something nasty in their character. Don't get me wrong, these are good people but they have this weakness. 2. Not so much attractive women per se as socialites, they have a real problem when they lose their looks. I think the more social you are the worse it gets. Broadly speaking women gradually become less attractive to the opposite sex over time and they are painfully aware of this. Some women are so invested in their appearance that when it goes they undergo terrific emotional turmoil that men probably can't understand (imagine going senile in front of your competitors!) and it produces a mother lode of neurosis. On the other hand women who accept themselves warts and all are easier to get along with. 3. Some people are plain or even ugly. This makes them invisible to many people on a bunch of levels. It can't be a great feeling. The general point is that all kinds of people should keep an open mind about others. Obviously our bodies are a vehicle and it is what our minds are that really matters. There is also a huge diversity of minds, and that is fine too. I don't know if you've ever had a meet-up with people from an online forum before who you've previously talked to for years, but contrariwise to internet opinion people are never what you expect. Without the online community you'd probably have never talked to those people in a thousand years. That's why I didn't like Facebook. It was a return to the old badness.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- sebringj 10y ago
  Those are some great points, especially about how women's identities change as I've seen that from some of my relatives. But just to be slightly different, I view this as an observation of human nature in general rather than it necessarily being bad or good, although it does seem unfair. I doubt this will ever change unless we somehow genetically modify people to be more empathetic but could be jenga for something else.
  - internaut 10y ago
    I share your concern about jenga! Evolution makes blithely shortsighted errors. We're about as intelligent as we are required to be in order to survive. We're stuck at local maxima at every level from the personal to the political and that is a problem. That is why using artificial aids like books for recording memories and genetic splicing is the right thing to do. Biology should not be accepted as Physics. It is alright to cheat and interfere. I will now sound like I'm contradicting myself but I'm not. Evolution has accomplished results with brute force that we do not comprehend. Some of those results appear stupid to us but there exist secret underlying patterns that are not available to our minds. Our instincts contain heaps of responses that we often regard as stupid e.g. blushing, jealousy but they are likely adaptions that helped us survive so we will require an understanding of their function. This is the great truth of conservatism and complex systems. Things are the way they are because reasons. That the proponents of this view can't explain themselves articulately is not relevant. The reasons are real. You are not your frontal cortex. That's just the Speaker in the house of parliament. That's why jenga is a problem. Jenga gives us the FDA. Jenga eventually produces a caste system. The great project is to somehow open a third door nobody has noticed. Let me know if you figure it out! Uncoincidentally I like Patri Friedman's idea of constructing seasteads. I don't want to sound like I'm allergic to work but real change is hard work! It is like everything interesting happens at edges of things.
    - sebringj 10y ago
tryitnow 10y ago
To play the devil's advocate: What's wrong with being more selective? I don't think anything is. What's problematic is how people go about it. Our society doesn't teach us how to be selective with grace and manners. So when people realize they have power in a situation they freak out a bit and might over react in being excessively picky or rude to others.
- Kalium 10y ago
  Nothing is wrong with being more selective. Everything is wrong if you're the person or group strongly selected against.
- ZeroFries 10y ago
  Because it raises the conditions necessary for you (i.e. makes those circumstances rarer) to be content and at peace.
- internaut 10y ago
  The problems with class warfare are similar to those of racial discrimination. The problem is not that there is no basis for using a filter but that assuming everybody is identical within a class (or subset, which has a 1:1 mapping to the notion of class) is a logical error. It is not about morality so much as logic. Suppose I find Italians to be corrupt and untrustworthy. Well evidently there exist Italians who are honest with good intentions. That some of set of Italians genuinely do belong to a mafia is not indicative of the larger group, even if it were so that a majority of Italians were mafiosos. Of course real life is complicated, people have to resort to satisficing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satisficing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satisficing) and worse yet harmful behavior patterns aren't limited to any subset of the group. Notoriously there exist robin hoods and bad cops. Choosing not to go down the wrong street is reasonable under satisficing but rejecting job candidates for having the wrong names is. All of this is to say that discrimination in of itself is not illogical but discriminating indiscriminately IS.
  - jospoortvliet 10y ago
    The problem here is our lack of understanding of statistics. Yes, there probably are differences in averages on things like criminality, intelligence, lazyness and so on between groups like male/female, ethnicity, gay or straight and so on. But, besides the fact that the difference might not be in the direction you think it goes, in all these cares, inter-group variability is tiny compared to intra group variability. That means: it doesn't matter in practice. Whether men ow women are on average more intelligent, those 1-3 average IQ points are so irrelevant compared to the 15-30 points 5 random people in a room would generally differ from each other that it is barely of academic interest and certainly useless to use to judge a random men or women you meet. This thing is true for many differences between groups often discriminated against. Scientist are thus inclined not to research these differences: if they exist they are rarely helpful for policy (too small) but often their reporting results in people misbehaving even more due to their misunderstanding the impact (or rather lack thereof).

internaut 10y ago

This is a huge problem in our society in so many ways. Three examples I've personally noticed. 1. While working at typical working class jobs, if you happen to talk about geek/intellectual stuff e.g. with coworkers - middle class people typically do NOT like that. It really grinds their gears. Even passing references to do with current events. You can talk about sports or something else you're supposed to be interested in. This is allowed. You can explain this a dozen different ways but I am convinced it shows something nasty in their character. Don't get me wrong, these are good people but they have this weakness. 2. Not so much attractive women per se as socialites, they have a real problem when they lose their looks. I think the more social you are the worse it gets. Broadly speaking women gradually become less attractive to the opposite sex over time and they are painfully aware of this. Some women are so invested in their appearance that when it goes they undergo terrific emotional turmoil that men probably can't understand (imagine going senile in front of your competitors!) and it produces a mother lode of neurosis. On the other hand women who accept themselves warts and all are easier to get along with. 3. Some people are plain or even ugly. This makes them invisible to many people on a bunch of levels. It can't be a great feeling. The general point is that all kinds of people should keep an open mind about others. Obviously our bodies are a vehicle and it is what our minds are that really matters. There is also a huge diversity of minds, and that is fine too. I don't know if you've ever had a meet-up with people from an online forum before who you've previously talked to for years, but contrariwise to internet opinion people are never what you expect. Without the online community you'd probably have never talked to those people in a thousand years. That's why I didn't like Facebook. It was a return to the old badness.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
sebringj 10y ago
Those are some great points, especially about how women's identities change as I've seen that from some of my relatives. But just to be slightly different, I view this as an observation of human nature in general rather than it necessarily being bad or good, although it does seem unfair. I doubt this will ever change unless we somehow genetically modify people to be more empathetic but could be jenga for something else.
- internaut 10y ago
  I share your concern about jenga! Evolution makes blithely shortsighted errors. We're about as intelligent as we are required to be in order to survive. We're stuck at local maxima at every level from the personal to the political and that is a problem. That is why using artificial aids like books for recording memories and genetic splicing is the right thing to do. Biology should not be accepted as Physics. It is alright to cheat and interfere. I will now sound like I'm contradicting myself but I'm not. Evolution has accomplished results with brute force that we do not comprehend. Some of those results appear stupid to us but there exist secret underlying patterns that are not available to our minds. Our instincts contain heaps of responses that we often regard as stupid e.g. blushing, jealousy but they are likely adaptions that helped us survive so we will require an understanding of their function. This is the great truth of conservatism and complex systems. Things are the way they are because reasons. That the proponents of this view can't explain themselves articulately is not relevant. The reasons are real. You are not your frontal cortex. That's just the Speaker in the house of parliament. That's why jenga is a problem. Jenga gives us the FDA. Jenga eventually produces a caste system. The great project is to somehow open a third door nobody has noticed. Let me know if you figure it out! Uncoincidentally I like Patri Friedman's idea of constructing seasteads. I don't want to sound like I'm allergic to work but real change is hard work! It is like everything interesting happens at edges of things.
  - sebringj 10y ago

tryitnow 10y ago

To play the devil's advocate: What's wrong with being more selective? I don't think anything is. What's problematic is how people go about it. Our society doesn't teach us how to be selective with grace and manners. So when people realize they have power in a situation they freak out a bit and might over react in being excessively picky or rude to others.

Kalium 10y ago
Nothing is wrong with being more selective. Everything is wrong if you're the person or group strongly selected against.
ZeroFries 10y ago
Because it raises the conditions necessary for you (i.e. makes those circumstances rarer) to be content and at peace.
internaut 10y ago
The problems with class warfare are similar to those of racial discrimination. The problem is not that there is no basis for using a filter but that assuming everybody is identical within a class (or subset, which has a 1:1 mapping to the notion of class) is a logical error. It is not about morality so much as logic. Suppose I find Italians to be corrupt and untrustworthy. Well evidently there exist Italians who are honest with good intentions. That some of set of Italians genuinely do belong to a mafia is not indicative of the larger group, even if it were so that a majority of Italians were mafiosos. Of course real life is complicated, people have to resort to satisficing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satisficing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satisficing) and worse yet harmful behavior patterns aren't limited to any subset of the group. Notoriously there exist robin hoods and bad cops. Choosing not to go down the wrong street is reasonable under satisficing but rejecting job candidates for having the wrong names is. All of this is to say that discrimination in of itself is not illogical but discriminating indiscriminately IS.
- jospoortvliet 10y ago
  The problem here is our lack of understanding of statistics. Yes, there probably are differences in averages on things like criminality, intelligence, lazyness and so on between groups like male/female, ethnicity, gay or straight and so on. But, besides the fact that the difference might not be in the direction you think it goes, in all these cares, inter-group variability is tiny compared to intra group variability. That means: it doesn't matter in practice. Whether men ow women are on average more intelligent, those 1-3 average IQ points are so irrelevant compared to the 15-30 points 5 random people in a room would generally differ from each other that it is barely of academic interest and certainly useless to use to judge a random men or women you meet. This thing is true for many differences between groups often discriminated against. Scientist are thus inclined not to research these differences: if they exist they are rarely helpful for policy (too small) but often their reporting results in people misbehaving even more due to their misunderstanding the impact (or rather lack thereof).