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Classism in America

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321–330 of 341 posts

Re: Classism in America

#321
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For shoes new yorkers walk a lot than others and need better shoes.

you also need different shoes for different weather conditions.

you also need a lot of shoes if you want to be fashionable, and New Yorkers are damn fashionable

Re: Classism in America

#322
post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and who are genuinely ashamed of how much money they make. Are you sure that isn't an act? People pretend socially acceptable emotions all the time. If they donated the excess to the IRS (the IRS accepts donations!), I'd be a bit less skeptical.

> Are you sure that isn't an act? It isn't. I'm from a economically below-average country in Europe, have lived in a couple others and I've settled down in the north. Almost none of my friends (particularly back home but here too) know how much I make because it's genuinely embarrassing. It's something of a "why do I make so much more when I'm no better than anyone else here?" feeling. Also I know it's not just me, I…

I had associated it with survivors/metaphysical guilt. It's similar to the guilt that survivors feel when an accident happens and injures/kills others but not them. It's not that we did anything wrong to be ashamed of, but instead almost a guilt about being lucky or being who we are.

It's an interesting phenomenon and I've begun studying it more after moving out of Silicon Valley and suddenly realizing how very privileged I really am. A specific point is that generally you can't discharge the guilt just by doing good things. Donations and volunteer work don't seem to help because there's nothing to atone for.

Re: Classism in America

#323
post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This writing style is itself a performance of Rationalist culture. Read anything by The Last Psychiatrist or Scott Alexander or Eliezer Yudkowsky for comparison.

You think The Last Psychiatrist is performing Rationalist culture? I hadn't noticed such a relationship, and at a moment's consideration I still don't notice it, and if you really do think that, I'd appreciate any evidence you can point me to.

I do think so; hard to prove if reading the content isn't argument enough. One fact is that TLP is the third link on the left-hand blog roll on SSC's website, so there's at least a one-way relationship. Anecdotally I remember reading something by Scott Alexander that mentioned that TLP was part of the LW community at one point, but I can't back this up with links.

Re: Classism in America

#324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And country bumpkins despise townies... so everyone hates everyone! Let's just get that out there :)

Sure, but I'd wager that the rural folk would be fine if all the city dwellers disappeared, and that the opposite is not true.

In the United States, if the "city dwellers" all disappeared, the "rural folk" would go from barely getting by despite being heavily subsidized by everyone else to some kind of devolved state that looked like an Amish version of The Road Warrior.

If the opposite happened, urban areas would buy their food somewhere else and eventually save some money thanks to the increased competition in the market and the lack of agricultural subsidies, not to mention all the other ways we subsidize rural America's inefficiencies.

Re: Classism in America

#325

I live in South America and classes here are, similar to Europe, not really tied to your money. It's really funny: I grew up in a slum, but software now gives me as much money as politicians and senior executives of public companies. In my first paying contract overseas, I went to the most expensive restaurant in my town. Although I wore the same clothes and belonged to the same race, everybody was staring at me. The…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcrZIK3gqbU ;)

Re: Classism in America

#326
post #272
post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This particular point has always been a bit funny to me. I mean, sure, there are super racist areas in the south. I grew up and lived in mostly rural Alabama for the first 20+ years of my life, and there were some rural areas that were just as terrible as people imagine (cross burnings, open Klan meetings, etc, though that was starting to die down in the last 10 years or so I lived there). That said, a lot of cities…

I talked to a lot more black programmers in meetups in Atlanta than I have in San Francisco (I'm not American and was a visitor in both places) & was surprised by how biased against the former people in the latter were, despite evidence to the contrary.

In Atlanta race is not a special issue, it's a fact of daily life. Interacting with black people isn't an unusual event where you get to pat yourself on the back for 'not being racist'. It's simply what happens everyday.

Or maybe I am just bitter about a 70% white city talking about how racist a 53% black city must be.

Re: Classism in America

#327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't deserve the downvotes. I grew up in Seattle and still live there. If you voice any opinions that are not in a narrow band of the far left wing, they (including recent transplants) will attribute you holding that opinion to your place of origin, rather than listening to any justification you have for holding that opinion.

My girlfriend's company in Capitol Hill is super big on diversity. It's a huge part of their hiring process. They're about 50 to 60 people large. I asked her how many conservatives work there. Answer: zero. Along some axes Seattle is very diverse. But along others not so much.

I don't believe you. How many ethnic people at her company? 3 Asians?

Re: Classism in America

#328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're talking about inclusion and exclusion from any particular groups, you're going to talk about "shibboleths". It's quite a common term and no more flamboyant than talking about "MathML" or "hyperlinks" on HN. Or Shibboleth, of course. I'd actually expect quite a few folk here to know the word from the SSO solution.

I don't know, I'm not sure I've ever encountered it before. Since it's rooted in Hebrew, perhaps it has to do with exposure to Jewish vulture, or people that express Jewish culture? Certain Hebrew words have become common in American culture (I would say due to long history of excellent Jewish comedians, from Brooks and Allen to Seinfeld), but others are more esoteric (to my view). Of course, it's entirely possible i…

Oh, I meant common within the field of social geography. I noted that they'd talk about shibboleths of various sorts (language, accent, dress, manners). I wouldn't expect your average person to know about it but it's not obscure in any way for the type of article this is.

OTOH, I first heard the term it was from working with academic institutions in the UK, because Shibboleth seems to be the favoured form of SSO there (though apparently it came from the Internet2 group, which is US).

So anyone doing SSO or SAML etc would probably have heard the word and you'd have to be fairly incurious not to look it up :-)

Re: Classism in America

#329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since no-one else mentioned it yet in this subthread, the phenomenon you are discussing is called a sociolect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociolect Basically, since class is culture, and cultures have language, a sociolect describes the language of a class, the ways you have to talk to perform that class. And, naturally, this goes both ways. Someone talking the sociolect of a certain class is seen as performing th…

Back in the middle ages, when the French conquered Britain, the ruling class spoke French and the peasants spoke English. A lot of French words flowed into English as a result. But even today, if people use the words of French origin rather than the old English words, one is regarded as being from the upper class, such as using 'purchase' instead of 'buy'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_Frenc.…

However this comes with the interesting caveat that the English upper classes don't like to appear too French, especially when it comes to pronunciation, where using the foreign pronunciation can be considered rather lower class. This is reflected in class shibboleths such as:

Upper class: valet [val-ett], fillet [fill-ett]. Middle class or lower: valet [val-ay], fillet [fill-ay].

Upper class: claret [clar-ett] (from French clairet). Middle class or lower: Bordeaux.

Re: Classism in America

#330
post #88
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While the outright assertion that a black suspect would have been shot is unjustified, it seems counterintuitive to simultaneously make reference to one erroneous snap judgment (the cop assuming the white woman was not the shooter) without acknowledging the other side of that coin. Why is the cop an allowable surrogate of societal stereotypes when he assumes the white woman is not the shooter, but an "individual that…

> it seems counterintuitive to simultaneously make reference to one erroneous snap judgment (the cop assuming the white woman was not the shooter) without acknowledging the other side of that coin. No supporting evidence has been presented that a person will necessarily attribute the same level of certainty when positively or negatively associating a person to a category, either globally or under specific circumstanc…

In the long-form radio story, the cop very clearly presents that it was the shooters apparent gender that confused him and nearly cost him his life and the life of the perpetrator. They also noted in the story that officers are briefed on active shooter situations to assume a white male suspect. This was in Nevada, a state that has become (thanks largely to this and other similar stories) a paragon of officer education on the nature of cognitive biases and how to understand and use them to greatest affect.
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