3 ms·

I sometimes wonder how much the fear of something is actually an additional problem to the thing itself. NOTE: I am not denying agism exists, I'm wondering abo

I sometimes wonder how much the fear of something is actually an additional problem to the thing itself. NOTE: I am not denying agism exists, I'm wondering about the additional problem of fear of agism. The fear that someone might be agist, might make you look at them judgmentally/suspiciously. If you look at your interviewer judgmentally/suspiciously they likely won't hire you, and they probably feel pretty suspicious about you. If you walk into an interview and say, "I know I'm old, and you probably won't hire me because you want a young person", well, obviously they won't hire you because you sound depressed. Again, this is not to say that some people aren't agist, even if the candidate shows none of these signs. I'm just wondering how much of factor the fear of agism is, compared to agism itself, on a regional level. Are there any people who do clinical studies here?

mlthoughts2018 8y ago
While this might be interesting academically, I think if ageism is a problem that might generically scare candidates, then that too is the ageists fault for creating that culture of policy, and not a candidate's fault for sincerely being worried about something that is actually worth worrying about. We could say something similar about racism. "How much of a factor the fear of racism is, compared to racism itself..." It seems silly to really spend any time on this type of second-order extra effect when there are real, harmful, huge first-order effects (namely, actual racism and actual ageism) demonstrably happening. We should focus on the big, up-front, obvious monster standing right in front of us, instead of asking, how much of our problem is caused by the monster in front of us as opposed to a hypothetical monster in the closet, and letting it distract us (or worse, trying to flip things around and blame candidates for being too sensitive or try to sympathetically justify what ageist businesses are doing to their long-time employees or to older job candidates).
- danschumann 8y ago
  The racist wins if he can spoil your other interviews. Let's say you have 4 interviews, the first one has a racist, and it's obvious. Now let's say you get bitter and resentful, and you blow your other 3 interviews, even though those 3 people aren't racist. The racist is happy(if he finds out) because not only did he prevent you from getting his job, he messed with your head and prevented you from getting the attainable 3 jobs. So, within the scenario above, racism can take one toll or many tolls. And this is on the individual level, wherein people operate from day to day. They need a job. It would seem that being able to reset expectations, forgive, forbear, and go into the subsequent 3 interviews would be the ideal strategy to achieve success in job hunting, and prevent the racist from doing the most damage. Since you mentioned 2nd order effects: how much do the 2nd order effects recreate/reinforce the first order effects? This would be another psychological survey I would be interested in. If someone is fearful of racists, how many people are likely to become more racist as a result of this fear ( either themselves or people they come in contact with )? Isn't racism based on fear in the first place? Fear of other races? ( and therefore a reaction to fight or flight arbitrarily based on race? ) Batman: "Gee Robbin, I notice you are afraid when you are around people of other races" Robbin: "Well it's because I think they're racist against me" slap Batman: "Robbin you are becoming the thing you fear the most!"
  - mlthoughts2018 8y ago
    This sounds alarmingly similar to something like, the terrorists win if we don't watch the NFL on Sunday while drinking mainstream American beers. The racist or ageist "win" if they are not held accountable, with visible punishment, for their racist or ageist actions. They don't "win" through bespoke second order effects of their first order actions. In terms of what a candidate should do, it's a heuristic. I choose to apply the heuristic of, "be really wary and cautious that self-interested commercial entities have incentives to generally be ageist or racist." I pay a cost sometimes when that heuristic was suboptimal. But it's worth it to avoid super widespread predatory practices in a bunch of other cases. Worrying about the hyper-optimized policy that accounts for secondary perceptions of my fear of ageism seems like a huge waste, huge premature optimization effort that could be better spent choosing a simple heuristic and focusing on the up-front, obvious, primary ageism or racism issues. To boot, honestly, if an employer gets some kind of "weird vibe" from me because I ask questions or discuss policies from an anti-ageism point of view, and this leads them to reject me, then probably my heuristic was right, and really there are internal dysfunctions in that company that I am better off avoiding. Corporations can harm applicants and employees in so many ways that it often really is better to have a default belief that this is what they are trying to do, and take a very risk-averse heuristic to just avoid places that give off even slight signals, like if they treat you like you're weird for taking a proactive, positive stance on it. If they reject you, you're probably dodging a nasty bullet anyway.

mlthoughts2018 8y ago

While this might be interesting academically, I think if ageism is a problem that might generically scare candidates, then that too is the ageists fault for creating that culture of policy, and not a candidate's fault for sincerely being worried about something that is actually worth worrying about. We could say something similar about racism. "How much of a factor the fear of racism is, compared to racism itself..." It seems silly to really spend any time on this type of second-order extra effect when there are real, harmful, huge first-order effects (namely, actual racism and actual ageism) demonstrably happening. We should focus on the big, up-front, obvious monster standing right in front of us, instead of asking, how much of our problem is caused by the monster in front of us as opposed to a hypothetical monster in the closet, and letting it distract us (or worse, trying to flip things around and blame candidates for being too sensitive or try to sympathetically justify what ageist businesses are doing to their long-time employees or to older job candidates).

danschumann 8y ago
The racist wins if he can spoil your other interviews. Let's say you have 4 interviews, the first one has a racist, and it's obvious. Now let's say you get bitter and resentful, and you blow your other 3 interviews, even though those 3 people aren't racist. The racist is happy(if he finds out) because not only did he prevent you from getting his job, he messed with your head and prevented you from getting the attainable 3 jobs. So, within the scenario above, racism can take one toll or many tolls. And this is on the individual level, wherein people operate from day to day. They need a job. It would seem that being able to reset expectations, forgive, forbear, and go into the subsequent 3 interviews would be the ideal strategy to achieve success in job hunting, and prevent the racist from doing the most damage. Since you mentioned 2nd order effects: how much do the 2nd order effects recreate/reinforce the first order effects? This would be another psychological survey I would be interested in. If someone is fearful of racists, how many people are likely to become more racist as a result of this fear ( either themselves or people they come in contact with )? Isn't racism based on fear in the first place? Fear of other races? ( and therefore a reaction to fight or flight arbitrarily based on race? ) Batman: "Gee Robbin, I notice you are afraid when you are around people of other races" Robbin: "Well it's because I think they're racist against me" slap Batman: "Robbin you are becoming the thing you fear the most!"
- mlthoughts2018 8y ago
  This sounds alarmingly similar to something like, the terrorists win if we don't watch the NFL on Sunday while drinking mainstream American beers. The racist or ageist "win" if they are not held accountable, with visible punishment, for their racist or ageist actions. They don't "win" through bespoke second order effects of their first order actions. In terms of what a candidate should do, it's a heuristic. I choose to apply the heuristic of, "be really wary and cautious that self-interested commercial entities have incentives to generally be ageist or racist." I pay a cost sometimes when that heuristic was suboptimal. But it's worth it to avoid super widespread predatory practices in a bunch of other cases. Worrying about the hyper-optimized policy that accounts for secondary perceptions of my fear of ageism seems like a huge waste, huge premature optimization effort that could be better spent choosing a simple heuristic and focusing on the up-front, obvious, primary ageism or racism issues. To boot, honestly, if an employer gets some kind of "weird vibe" from me because I ask questions or discuss policies from an anti-ageism point of view, and this leads them to reject me, then probably my heuristic was right, and really there are internal dysfunctions in that company that I am better off avoiding. Corporations can harm applicants and employees in so many ways that it often really is better to have a default belief that this is what they are trying to do, and take a very risk-averse heuristic to just avoid places that give off even slight signals, like if they treat you like you're weird for taking a proactive, positive stance on it. If they reject you, you're probably dodging a nasty bullet anyway.