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Keep Your Identity Small (2009)

paulgraham.com

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Re: Keep Your Identity Small (2009)

#191

Post by geraneum »

XorNot wrote: post #168
geraneum wrote: post #99

You might not always have control over what identities you’re attributed to. For example if you are an immigrant, based on your home country, you may have an identity assigned to you by the destination society even if it isn’t factual. You might ignore it and remind yourself not to care too much about it (try to keep your identity small) but when you have a harder time finding an apartment even when you’re qualified…

Supporting a political candidate is not , in any possible way "similar" to being an immigrant or a child of immigrant parents, as a social identity.

Of course it's not, and I agree. My intention was to use two different examples to demonstrate that regardless of your background, you might "take on" an identity which you didn't choose and thus cannot "keep it small" as easy as PG suggests.

Re: Keep Your Identity Small (2009)

#192

Post by mdiesel »

eyelidlessness wrote: post #149
int3 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If people can't think clearly about anything that has become part of their identity, then all other things being equal, the best plan is to let as few things into your identity as possible. I can respect that "all other things being equal" does not hold here. There are always tradeoffs. But there are real benefits to not identifying with things (as the essay discusses).

I think what makes me really uncomfortable about this whole discussion, the article and the interaction in the comments, is it’s being discussed like my identity is some dispassionate academic subject, rather than my living experience that isn’t up for debate. I’m not asking you to respect whether something in some article addresses my identity. I’m telling you I know what it is. It’s not a balance of tradeoffs. It’s…

We'd much rather live in a world where gender/sexual/health identities are as significant as being left/right handed. Can't jump to that stage without first going through what we are now, which is recognising those identities exist as part of who we are. Other commenters like myself have the pleasure of being able to talk about the ideal future scenario, you've got the problem of dealing with the present.

Right now having a group with commonality and a sense of belonging is very important and a huge improvement on where we were before leaving people isolated and alone. But don't lose sight of the end goal, which is for those problems that having a group identity protects against not existing at all. Those two things aren't in conflict, other comments here really are trying to be helpful, but in a theoretical physics sort of way that isn't going to help anyone directly in the next decade and ignores some practical hurdles we need to get over first.

Re: Keep Your Identity Small (2009)

#193

Post by geraneum »

int3 wrote: post #117
geraneum wrote: post #99

You might not always have control over what identities you’re attributed to. For example if you are an immigrant, based on your home country, you may have an identity assigned to you by the destination society even if it isn’t factual. You might ignore it and remind yourself not to care too much about it (try to keep your identity small) but when you have a harder time finding an apartment even when you’re qualified…

You don't have to ignore these things. You can acknowledge that they are real and affect you personally, but keep your identity and opinions separate from that. It's the difference between "immigrants tend to have a hard time" vs "white people are trash", or giving preferential treatment to your fellow countryman at work because "it's us against the world".

> You can acknowledge that they are real and affect you personally, but keep your identity and opinions separate from that

I think this is a good way to deal with the issue; they shouldn't be ignored. However it's challenging as you mentioned there are differences. It is not even feasible to merely ignore them if they happen to you and that's exactly my point here. You cannot presumably ignore them and "keep it small" as easily as the author suggests.

Re: Keep Your Identity Small (2009)

#195

Post by slim »

bellyfullofbac wrote: post #172
slim wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Identity is the fast mecanism for trust. Where one declares being part of a group by segregating himself from other groups. Thus you can apply to him the aggregated history of his group and decide if you can trust him.

But.. you apply to them the history as you think this history is, and this might be very different to what they think it is. This is IMO a great source of conflict. This is why I hate "-ism"/"-ists"-labels, because everyone seems to have a different opinion of what particular "-ism" words means. To use an example, Bernie Sanders' "socialism" is about sharing the wealth, meanwhile a lot of his opponents would argue be…

absolutely. Conflicts are functional to segregation. It does not work without conflicts.

Re: Keep Your Identity Small (2009)

#196

Post by jmiskovic »

eyelidlessness wrote: post #149
int3 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If people can't think clearly about anything that has become part of their identity, then all other things being equal, the best plan is to let as few things into your identity as possible. I can respect that "all other things being equal" does not hold here. There are always tradeoffs. But there are real benefits to not identifying with things (as the essay discusses).

I think what makes me really uncomfortable about this whole discussion, the article and the interaction in the comments, is it’s being discussed like my identity is some dispassionate academic subject, rather than my living experience that isn’t up for debate. I’m not asking you to respect whether something in some article addresses my identity. I’m telling you I know what it is. It’s not a balance of tradeoffs. It’s…

The article or discussion in comments isn't about you. It is about human experience. The given advice is in good faith, as far as I can read into it. It is up to you to decide its worth. I don't think _your_ identity is under scrutiny.

The core of advice is to keep the identity _small_. That way I can pick my battles. The more labels I put on myself the more I will alienate other people. Each of those labels also means I'm not honest with myself. Label is just a single word for describing complex world views, preferences and emotions. If I attach this label to my personality, then over time I will also change myself to better fit it. It can also be source of frustration when I don't meet expectations that are set by any given label. For example, before I considered myself a bookworm and it was painful to discard this label from my identity as I found less and less time for reading.

Labels are still useful. They provide decent defaults for social interactions, and a sense of belonging. Birds of a feather flock together. It is too many labels that can be problematic, in a sense of crippling social interactions and turning them into ego duels. Again, this is just how my experience aligns with the article, and not at all scrutinizing _your_ identity.

Re: Keep Your Identity Small (2009)

#198

Post by PeterisP »

XorNot wrote: post #167
narrator wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was talking with people I consider to be very smart and intellectual. We were discussing the California propositions. They did not want to hear the specifics of the propositions. They only wanted to know which organizations were supporting which propositions. This is what political discourse is these days. Figuring out which team you're on based on what political influencers agree with you. Nobody bothers to unders…

Why is this a problem? If there's a proposition out there the wording is going to be sufficiently dense that it's not super-likely a casual observer will have a good grasp of it's actual effect, whereas if you're gay and the local LGBTQI support organizations are coming out in favor of a proposition, then it's fairly unlikely this is something you want to oppose. There's a big difference between "this political party…

Arguably for most propositions it should be absolutely irrelevant to a gay person what the local LGBTQI support organizations think about it, since most propositions are about other, unrelated issues.

If, for example, gay people would be voting on gig worker law propositions based on LGBTQI support organization recommendations and gun right fans would be voting on housing law propositions based on what the NRA recommends, that (to me) seems like a big problem for democracy, as the issues don't get evaluated on their merits but purely on tribalism.

Re: Keep Your Identity Small (2009)

#199

Post by qsort »

bawolff wrote: post #171
ineedasername wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or distrust factual claims by people on Reddit until/unless you track things back to primary sources that you can review. Same goes for traditional news.

Primary seems a little extreme, and looking at primary sources in isolation can often be misleading. I think secondary sources (or even tertiary sources) are much more important when it comes to evaluating claims on the internet.

Strongly disagree. Secondary sources are more likely to introduce statistical artifacts, weird biases or cherry-picking, which are often hard to detect even for experts. We don't look at primary sources nearly as much we should.

The only exception is for claims so dumb ("the time complexity of mergesort is O(n), the earth is flat, 1+1=5") that anything at all directly contradicts them.

Re: Keep Your Identity Small (2009)

#200

Post by yesenadam »

mellavora wrote: post #170
confidantlake wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The wealthy landowner leading the revolutionary army became king, erm I mean president, after winning the war. The guy who wrote the Declaration of Independence became ruler a short time after him. They could have decided against being rulers, but they didn't.

To the rest of the HN community, note that they did decide against being rulers, nor did they ever act as kings. See George Washington's retirement speech: https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=false&doc=15&page... That's why we have a tradition of presidents only serving a maximum of two terms; which we only turned into a law when the tradition was violated.

> That's why

What's why? I skimmed that link, couldn't see a reference to two terms, maybe I missed it.

Maybe this is close to the truth:

"Surprisingly, many of the Framers—including [Alexander] Hamilton and [James] Madison—supported a lifetime appointment for presidents selected by Congress and not elected by the people,” the [National Constitution Center] writes. “That would have made the presidency what Virginia’s George Mason called an ‘elective monarchy,’ however, and when this was put to a vote it failed by only six votes to four."

Instead, they devised a complicated voting system involving the electoral college that would still ensure, as the framers desired, that presidential elections were not solely in the hands of ordinary voters. Within this system, they shortened a president’s appointment from life to four years. And because most of the framers didn’t want to set a limit on how many four-year terms a president could serve, they didn’t say anything about it in the Constitution.

Nevertheless, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson ended up setting a two-term precedent. Washington declined to run a third time, but did clarify that he would’ve if he felt he was needed. Jefferson, on the other hand, specifically thought that two terms was enough for one person, and that more might overextend executive power. After these presidents, two terms became the unofficial standard.

That is, until FDR broke tradition by winning elections in 1932, 1936, 1940, and 1944.

https://www.history.com/news/why-presidents-have-term-limits

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