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TimS comments on [Link] How Signaling Ossifies Behavior - Less Wrong
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Comments (45)
To follow up handoflixue's points:
(1) many of the correlations you noted are very weak, relatively speaking (particularly dangerousness and mental illness) some of these labels are social coding, not bare fact (some people who are "voluntarily unemployed" are called housewives. are they lazy?)
(2) why do you care? even if voluntarily unemployed = lazy, what difference does that make in your life? That's the central problem of intolerance - it's mostly concealed, unstated judgment about how society should be.
It's possible that some of this is US v. Europe. Not sure how much. The popular culture use of "tolerance" doesn't match well with the real issue. Popular-culture-tolerance seems to do better in Europe.
Once upon a time, having a pager was weird - all sorts of social strangeness associated with them. Would they have been invented sooner if society was more open to social strangeness? Would mobile communication technology generally have progress faster?
About your (1) and (2): I'm not saying such negative judgements are justified! Sure, people make stupid judgements about risk and probability and correlation all the time, I'm discussing whether a negative judgement is due to "dislike for the weird and different" as a general tendancy, or to a specific (possibly wrong!) judgement against something.
The pager is a good example of an innovation hampered by intolerance; I remember a time where cell phones were negatively judged too; though even that could maybe be explained by it's association to a disliked group (Yuppies), not dislike of weirdness. I'm not very convinced by that explanation though, it may make the standard of what really counts as dislilke of weirdness a bit too high.
Points (1) and (2) are not closely related. A person could believe (2) without believing (1)
I think these comments from fubarobfusco and Qiaochu_Yuan explain the point that what counts as conformity is very culturally dependent. Non-conformity in those situations might just be a disguised way of saying that someone desires the culture to change.