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Keep Your Identity Small (2009)

paulgraham.com

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Re: Keep Your Identity Small (2009)

#301

Post by Mediterraneo10 »

teachingassist wrote: post #282
meowface wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I can tell, both the "political class" and the regular people aren't very good at understanding or productively participating in politics. The only decent and thoughtful political discussions I've ever seen have come from philosophers. Which perhaps could be considered an "elite" class, too, but IMO there's zero economic or status hierarchy that serves as a barrier to entry, unlike being a politician.

Can you name a poor philosopher? If anything, the barriers appear to me to be greater.

> Can you name a poor philosopher?

Diogenes.

Re: Keep Your Identity Small (2009)

#302

Post by teachingassist »

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #301
teachingassist wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you name a poor philosopher? If anything, the barriers appear to me to be greater.

> Can you name a poor philosopher? Diogenes.

If we must go back 2400 years, "his father minted coins for a living" doesn't really make it sound like he came from a deprived background.

Re: Keep Your Identity Small (2009)

#303

Post by jimkleiber »

SyzygistSix wrote: post #265
jimkleiber wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I appreciate how you framed this and helped me see how identity can help us streamline the decisions we make in what we do. I think identity can have a secondary effect of communicating to others those decisions we've made about what to do. For example, Someone: What do you do? Me: I give speeches. Someone: So you're a speaker? It can be a way to bundle a bunch of actions/beliefs/etc into something that is quicker/ea…

>The challenges may come in the disagreements we have about which actions belong to which identities. This is where the benefits of using tools like E-Prime, a form of English language that avoids usage of the verb "to be" help me. Thinking about things in terms of e-prime allows me to realize that while using labels as a shorthand for more specific information is convenient, I lose specificity and precision, and beg…

Sweet, I'll check it out! I had heard of it but never dove too deeply into it. I have used a lot more of the semantic primes framework, which may yield similar results by parsing phrases into very simple, irreducible concepts. If you like E-Prime, you may like semantic primes :-)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_primes

Re: Keep Your Identity Small (2009)

#304

Post by eyelidlessness »

mkr-hn wrote: post #299
dnissley wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. Those things seem big when you first discover them -- there's really nice feeling that comes with finding them out. "Ohhh, I'm X, so that explains why I have preference Y". But some people try too hard, to hang onto the euphoria that came with that discovery. They identify with that experience, and center their lives around it, and group together with others who do the same. They are often threatened by o…

I saw a jokey-serious "transition timeline" photo set where it started with elaborate, carefully done outfits that would put Natalie Wynn's best to shame, then ended with something like "passed out drunk at 3am in a pile of unwashed bras" You wouldn't know I'm nonbinary from looking at me because I look like any dude walking around with clothes plucked out of the closet at random. Presentation is just not a huge part…

Hey, I mostly decided I didn’t have more energy for this thread than I already devoted. But I appreciate your response and you, and wanted you to know I feel very similarly.

Which isn’t to say I haven’t had my fair share of exploring non-gender-norm presentation. It just doesn’t matter that much to me other than what feels good for me at the time.

To a stranger’s eye, I present he/him. I have a big beard and a shaved head, im tall with broad shoulders. And I’m not at all motivated to challenge that perception (to the point my preferred pronouns are he/him/they/them and when I came out NB to friends and family I made it clear I don’t expect to be addressed differently).

What was important for me was acknowledging that I never felt any attachment to that he/him perception, except the painful part of navigating other people’s expectations not matching my reality.

Re: Keep Your Identity Small (2009)

#305

Post by eyelidlessness »

Retric wrote: post #210
eyelidlessness wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Queer, non-binary, autistic is a small fraction of your identity. I don't even know how to take this seriously. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt if you want to clarify, as it seems like you don't want to minimize the big stuff, but... this feels like that. - - - Edit: it’s entirely possible people who don’t identify with these just don’t understand how huge they are for people who do. Which is part of what I…

Note the contradiction of big things and small part. Importance isn’t the same thing as taking up a large fraction of your identity. Suppose you wrote an autobiography, the big stuff like age, religion, or sexual orientation are shared with millions of people. They have huge impacts, but the details are going to be stuff like past partners not simply repeating “I am Bi” for hundreds of pages. Height is a great exampl…

I tried to write a response to you this morning and bailed on it because this conversation has been exhausting.

You’re taking important/big to you and projecting it on me. You’re insisting that the things about my identity that I consider big are small.

I could almost understand if you don’t fully appreciate the impact of discovering one’s sexuality and gender feels like. But you’ve included autism as small, and that suggests either you’re really ignorant of what that entails or, like so many other “big” things you listed you just don’t see how they intersect?

Either way it feels dismissive as hell. What’s small to you isn’t to me. If that doesn’t speak to identity than what does?

Re: Keep Your Identity Small (2009)

#306

Post by eyelidlessness »

int3 wrote: post #154
eyelidlessness wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Why is it in your interest Because a society where we can have less partisan opinions and more fruitful discussions is a better one. But I'm not attacking you, and I don't think most of the other commenters are, either. You expressed a disagreement with its thesis and explained how identity has been useful to you. I just pointed out that perhaps there is a way to achieve the same goals without expanding your identi…

I was absolutely engaging in a discussion. I just kept being told that my identity doesn’t count in some way. It’s not a discussion if I have to concede the points of the article to engage.

> Because a society where we can have less partisan opinions and more fruitful discussions is a better one.

Okay. What is partisan about me being queer or non-binary or autistic, other than those are immutable facets of me that either people hate or callously disregard?

Re: Keep Your Identity Small (2009)

#307

Post by eyelidlessness »

jmiskovic wrote: post #196
eyelidlessness wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mea…

> The article or discussion in comments isn't about you

It’s about identity. And specifically about rejecting expansion thereof. How could I not have personal feelings about it?

Re: Keep Your Identity Small (2009)

#309

Post by ttonkytonk »

runawaybottle wrote: post #91
reader_x wrote: post #78

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…

Why are people seemingly so drawn to identifying themselves as anything at all? Sheer scale. There’s so many of us, and everyone is mostly replaceable. Not just in the economy, but in everything. The identity is the one flag in the ground that screams ‘I stand for something’. I’m upset at myself and everyone for bringing back high school into our adult world. The book bags adorned with band stickers, the clothes, the…

I like to think you got to live as long as one of the Mesopotamian kings before you're really an adult, i.e. 10,000+ years.

Re: Keep Your Identity Small (2009)

#310

Post by ttonkytonk »

teachingassist wrote: post #224
IncRnd wrote: post #77

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…

> regular people You're skipping over the fact that only property owning white men were initially allowed to vote. That was the group which expected to gain political power from the Declaration and Constitution - that was the target audience. Defining "regular people" has a fraught history in the USA.

It probably has a fraught history everywhere.
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