Wikipedia says: "In sociology and social psychology, an in-group is a social group to which a person psychologically identifies as being a member. By contrast, an out-group is a social group with which an individual does not identify." Implying it is about psychological identification. This makes sense for groups like...
For many conventional things that are considered standard "stereotypes" about groups such as physical appearance-related assumptions about sex or gender, age, race, nationality, or style of dress, accent etc., that the general public employs? On the one hand, those in the rationality community emphasize the point to use whatever information...
Here's a phenomenon I was thinking about. In many situations, knowledgeable people don't just go out of their way to show off how much they're familiar with things that raise their clout with the ingroup -- for example, an artsy person rattling off names of obscure artists to his artsy...
It's the premature transhumanist idea that "whether you are an doesn't matter". A world without racism would be nice. But we live in a world with racism. Therefore pretending race doesn't matter exacerbates racial inequity and brings us further away from actually bringing about a transhumanist utopia.
To be charitable, in many types of human conversation, statements that sound like mere descriptions of people or society ("this is not who we are as a nation", "adults don't act like children", "in life, friends are more important than money") are frequently shorthand for normative ones ("I think our nation shouldn't act that way", "I think adults shouldn't act the way I perceive is childish", "people... (read more)
This seems pretty tough because humans easily form associations with negative events, relative to positive events (for instance, refusal to visit a place ever again that they were robbed in, or eat a food that made them terribly sick, even if later on they intellectually realize it was a chance thing).
I wonder if more positive encounters would help gradually change the bias, also for your own well-being (for example, having experiences where you were helped by, or have friendly relations with people who happen to be black, and overall being further exposed to that variability in all traits good and bad existing across humanity regardless of race).
But then again, not having been through the same situation (and not knowing if I would develop the same response, or if most people in general would, of having feelings of a certain way towards a group because of a given number of negative encounters), I'll refrain from too much theoretical postulating.
The phrase keep your identity small is a good thing to tell yourself when your identity is trivial and superficial. It is a harmful, insensitive thing to tell a discriminated-against minority when you are a member of the majority.
I think the ideal would be the majority (or the powerful, capable of doing the discriminating) keeps their identity small AND the minority (or the less powerful, the target of the discriminating) keeps their identity small (without said discrimination, there then would be lowered need for defensive identity-forming). Thus, making people super individualistic.
After all in some sense, it's because the majority doesn't keep their identity small but enlarges it to be the normative "norm"... (read more)
but outside of these exceptional cases of misassignment, using these expressions gives the impression the assignation is incorrectly made way more often than it in fact is.
I see what you mean, but perhaps to be charitable (if not pedantic), I feel like the term "assigned" doesn't necessarily tell you about accuracy, reliability (or perhaps goodness) of an assignment. For example, if I hear someone say "the policy-maker assigned a high economic value to X" or "the scientist assigned a high probability to the chance of a drought", I wouldn't think absent more info, that it was likely correct or incorrect, just that someone was reporting someone else's judgement.
I don't know about the majority, but I can say for at least a few, when they say "I don't see people in terms of race", they're being literal, not metaphoric. I was like this until my late teen years, when it changed, in a bad way -- which I can detail if there's interest. But the point is, until that moment I really couldn't see race, at all. I evidently noticed people had different skin colors, hair types, and eye shapes, but this didn't register with me as significant in any way, shape or form, concrete or abstract.
I can totally relate to this description and experience. I think the term "not... (read 487 more words →)
I only know of children and elderly people not eating the crust because it's harder to chew.
Interesting explanation, but does that hold for other foods -- do kids/adults that don't enjoy the crust because it's harder tend to also dislike other difficult-to-chew foods? Anything from jerky to raw vegetables? And those that do enjoy it, enjoy chewing other harder foods?
Clearly, there are lots of crunchy/chewy foods kids are willing to eat or at least are not stereotyped as off-putting the way bread crusts are for kids.
It'd be interesting to tease apart what is causing the dislike -- is it really texture, or taste or something else?
When I try to look up the question of why kids (often) don't like crusts, there is the occasional person that frames it as an "American" thing. Other disagree pointing out Brits, Europeans etc. also feel this way.
But is there any evidence that this varies by country, culture or nationality? If so why might this be -- differences in type of bread/baking styles?
I'm not sure if outside (ha!) the "rationalist sphere", other people have independently invented the phrase "outside view" or not but I feel there's some spillover of the term "outside view" with similarity to "outsiders' view" which I think is common enough in layperson speak.
An outsider's view (or third party view, attempt to be objective and look "outside" your current situation as an "other") as conceived of in daily life does have elements that are pointed at in this post for popular interpretations of outside view ("Bias correction, in others or in oneself", "Deference to wisdom of the many").
But it also could heavily involve the original meaning described and clarified in this... (read more)
In particular, "boldness" and "daring" seem to me as if they have very little to do with nonconformity
So, for instance, you could be bold and risk-taking but doing so because you want to live up to a norm (or are heavily driven by chasing an ideal that's "conventional")?
For instance, a manly warrior taking risks to show off his manliness or lack of cowardice, or desire to fill the warrior role in his tribe. Would that count?
Wikipedia says:
"In sociology and social psychology, an in-group is a social group to which a person psychologically identifies as being a member. By contrast, an out-group is a social group with which an individual does not identify."
Implying it is about psychological identification. This makes sense for groups like libertarians, socialists, rationalists and political ideologies or cultural leanings where individual choice and agency matters, perhaps more than for "immutable" characteristics bestowed upon people by birth. Even so, there is fuzziness (e.g. what if you call yourself one, but most people who call themselves one don't recognize you as one?).
But there are usages where it's unclear if ingroup and outgroup are about self-identification or... (read 208 more words →)
For many conventional things that are considered standard "stereotypes" about groups such as physical appearance-related assumptions about sex or gender, age, race, nationality, or style of dress, accent etc., that the general public employs?
On the one hand, those in the rationality community emphasize the point to use whatever information possible, and that means sometimes using statistical info that would be called stereotyping (the famous example of statistical discrimination being car insurance for men and women, and other practical things such as avoiding tall men in dark alleys but not short women).
However, rationalists often also emphasize updating priors so it could be that even if initial stereotypes are held, a big deal is... (read 195 more words →)
Here's a phenomenon I was thinking about.
In many situations, knowledgeable people don't just go out of their way to show off how much they're familiar with things that raise their clout with the ingroup -- for example, an artsy person rattling off names of obscure artists to his artsy friends, or a very patriotic person singing her country's historic folk songs or preparing its national foods.
It's also the case that many will go out of their way to deny or signal lack of knowledge about things that are either associated with outsiders or non-ingroup, if not necessarily outgroup, members.
For instance, a patriotic person bragging about how little he knows about foreign customs,... (read 706 more words →)
I don't have any stats on this, but while I wouldn't be surprised that groups considered the default say this (e.g. white, western males in the west), this seems less asymmetrical in principle in some other situations (e.g. I could see in principle a non-western non-white person being the majority in their majority non-western non-white country saying something similar if they've only lived with people of one so-called "race", under popular definitions,... (read more)