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Keep Your Identity Small (2009)

paulgraham.com

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Re: Keep Your Identity Small (2009)

#71

Post by deertick1 »

Swizec wrote: post #42
earksiinni wrote: post #11

It must be nice to have the luxury of choosing to keep one's identity small rather than having a big identity foisted upon oneself by society, history, and the circumstances of one's birth.

Fun realization I made over the past 18 months or so after 6 years living in USA continuously: When you're white, you can't be an immigrant. This whole time I thought I was a plucky immigrant seeking a better life (economically). Turns out I was and am just white. Still grappling with this. Learning your identity was wrong is very discombobulating. On some level it feels like maybe I've been here long enough that I'v…

Hey there just wanted to say : not everyone in America thinks like this. there is this strange brand of modern racism where people reduce everything down to a race issue even when it is not. Ergo immigrant = not white. Same type of people that will claim that a given communities lack of resources is because it is a black community, ignoring that the community is poor and that there is a white community not 20 miles away with the exact same problems.

Ironically, this seems to come from highly educated individuals whom I suspect have never 1) been to a third world country, off the resort 2) lived in a financially struggling household 3) worked an honest day of manual labor ever.

Kibda got off in a rant there, but just wanted to say, fuck anyone who says "you can pass" when you say your an immigrant. If you want to call them out in language their indoctrinated brains can understand, say "are you denying my lived-experience?"

I suspect if you make your way closer to the midwest you will meet less of these people, and more people who treat you like just another person and couldn't give a fuck how you identify.

Cheers

Re: Keep Your Identity Small (2009)

#72

Post by aazaa »

> Do religion and politics have something in common that explains this similarity? One possible explanation is that they deal with questions that have no definite answers, so there's no back pressure on people's opinions. Since no one can be proven wrong, every opinion is equally valid, and sensing this, everyone lets fly with theirs.

I'd suggest another guideline: keep your claims falsifiable.

The most heated online discussions I've witnessed have been around non-falsifiable claims. These discussions may offer an adrenaline rush for the participant, but not much else. Minds don't change in these discussions. Quite the opposite.

However, topics like religion are noteworthy in that none of the claims are falsifiable. Lots of political discussions (the more heated kind especially) deal in non-falsifiable claims.

PG suggests that such discussions can't happen around technical topics (JavaScript, baking?). I think there's evidence to the contrary on HN not to mention many other discussion forums.

Re: Keep Your Identity Small (2009)

#73

Post by dnissley »

bigdict wrote: post #8
vikingcaffiene wrote: post #3

> “As a rule, any mention of religion on an online forum degenerates into a religious argument. Why? Why does this happen with religion and not with Javascript” I got some bad news for 2009 PG from the future…

> No thread about Javascript will grow as fast as one about religion Seriously, this reads like satire now.

I don't think it does, so long as one uses a sufficiently broad definition of religion (e.g. crypto, wokeness).

Also my impression is that there was a spike of js hate ~3-5 years ago that has since subsided. I think it grew alongside the development of web applications, where more and more people who had little previous exposure to js were suddenly forced to confront it as some part of their workflow or other.

Can you point to a big dust up thread about js recently? I can't think of one personally. At most there are various complaints about specific js technologies like npm.

EDIT: Since everyone wants a definition of religion, here's the copypaste from my response downthread: Priests, holy writings, dogmatic beliefs, original sin, etc.

Re: Keep Your Identity Small (2009)

#74

Post by Swizec »

cdogl wrote: post #59
Swizec wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fun realization I made over the past 18 months or so after 6 years living in USA continuously: When you're white, you can't be an immigrant. This whole time I thought I was a plucky immigrant seeking a better life (economically). Turns out I was and am just white. Still grappling with this. Learning your identity was wrong is very discombobulating. On some level it feels like maybe I've been here long enough that I'v…

I think I understand the point you’re trying to make, but I don’t understand this formulation: “you can’t be an immigrant”. It sounds like you are, by definition, an immigrant. I wonder if this statement would more accurately capture the truth: “I realised that my experience is not aligned with some dominant popular narratives of immigrant life”. Or even: “generalisations of the immigrant experience are fraught”. If…

> If people are telling you that you can’t “complain or comment”

It’s because any such commenting is immediately seen in the context of the current social rights battles. Immigrant implies brown or hispanic in most people’s mind. Since I do not experience that sort of prejudice (supposedly), any complaining is immediately seen as “distracting”.

Re: Keep Your Identity Small (2009)

#75

Post by IncRnd »

numair wrote: post #43
imgabe wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand the connection between this and abusers. The advice is to avoid attaching your identity to any particular ideology. What does that have to do with enabling abusers?

Because when you are a witness to something with which you disagree, speaking out and acting on it is a matter of making an opinion, and then attaching your identity to that opinion. And thus, you might be a developer who only cares about the superiority of C++ over Scala, but now you’ve got to attach your identity to “I didn’t think it was okay for my boss to take our young female employees home if they got drunk at…

I don't think you are using the proper words for what you are trying to convey. Forming an opinion doesn't attach one's identity to such transient factors.

Re: Keep Your Identity Small (2009)

#76

Post by [deleted] »

cratermoon wrote: post #14
fortran77 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why does this happen with religion and not with Javascript or baking or other topics people talk about on forums? Or knitting, or Rust, or the second amendment, or patents, or bitcoin, or Prop 13, etc.

emacs or vi? windows or linux? Kirk or Picard? Marvel or DC? Han shot first!

[deleted]

Re: Keep Your Identity Small (2009)

#77

Post by IncRnd »

Politics are _meant_ to be understood by the common person, especially in the US. The Declaration of Independence and the Consitution were intended to be understood by regular people. This is so that there wouldn't be a political class, who believes the common person needs to be ruled.

Too bad we have that political class, anyway, along with regular people who believe politics should be inaccessible to regular people.

Re: Keep Your Identity Small (2009)

#78

Post by reader_x »

If people cannot argue fruitfully about questions that are part of their identity (and I agree with this premise), then it follows that for one to win politically (or convert them), the trick is not to convince people that your views are correct, but rather to convince people that their identity is threatened and that them maintaining their current identity (whatever that identity may be—and perhaps vagueness is key here) depends on you winning (or joining your group). Let them fill in the blanks on your views, wherever possible, as the specifics aren’t that relevant anyway.

This is what I perceive our political discourse has been reduced to. Maybe it never has been more than that.

I like the author’s conclusion that to keep an open mind, don’t make stuff your “identity.” Yet the instinct of many is just the opposite, so that not religion and party affiliation but even the most trivial things are stated as identity: “I’m a coffee person, not a tea person.” “I’m a dog person, not a cat person,” and other such bizarreness. Why are people seemingly so drawn to identifying themselves as anything at all?

Re: Keep Your Identity Small (2009)

#79

Post by nine_k »

Swizec wrote: post #42
earksiinni wrote: post #11

It must be nice to have the luxury of choosing to keep one's identity small rather than having a big identity foisted upon oneself by society, history, and the circumstances of one's birth.

Fun realization I made over the past 18 months or so after 6 years living in USA continuously: When you're white, you can't be an immigrant. This whole time I thought I was a plucky immigrant seeking a better life (economically). Turns out I was and am just white. Still grappling with this. Learning your identity was wrong is very discombobulating. On some level it feels like maybe I've been here long enough that I'v…

Compared to this, it's fun to live and work in NYC. Here everybody assumes that everybody else can be an immigrant, or at least moved across the country to live here. But everybody also assumes that everybody else may be local, independently from the skin color, eye shape, accent, etc.

(I personally love this arrangement. I've seen it in several other cities, like London and Moscow.)

Re: Keep Your Identity Small (2009)

#80

Post by runawaybottle »

vegetablepotpie wrote: post #13

> people feel they have to be over some threshold of expertise to post comments about that “that” being things that are not political or religious. What vaccines and 5G have shown is that you do not need to be qualified to talk about a topic. A strong opinion about anything is what qualifies you to be an expert in 2021. Based on that article and my memory, this is a phenomenon that has happened in the last 10 years.…

The word you seek is dilettante. It can make the sincere look insane when they react naturally to it.
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