the otherwise dangerous behavior of being around poor people.
Are you trolling, and if not what the hell is wrong with you?
I’m sure there are plenty of subclasses of “poor people” that it’s best to avoid if safety is your priority. It is absolutely not the case that “being around poor people” as such is dangerous. If you are inclined to protest that statistically it’s correct, then I will remark that the same is probably also true of, e.g., “being around really unpopular people” (some really unpopular people are unpopular because of personality disorders that also make them dangerous; being around sufficiently unpopular people may get you lynched along with them) and “being around young men” (young men are disproportionately likely to commit violent crimes, and to be victims of violent crime); would you say the same about those groups? It’s quite likely also true of “being around depressed people” (suicide is slightly contagious) and it would have been true of “being around Jews” in, say, 1930s Germany (anything that makes you look like a friend of a persecuted group puts you in danger of being targeted by their persecutors). The conclusion I draw from examples like these is that saying “being around members of group X” is dangerous, even when true statistically, is liable to be very misleading; still more so, calling not doing so a “skill”, as you do later in the thread.
(Note 1. Some of the people I know are quite rich. Some are quite poor. I feel—correctly, I’m pretty sure—no less safe with the poor ones than with the rich ones. Note 2. I wonder whether “poor” in your comment is in fact a proxy for “black”. Note 3. I think LW could well do without the sort of “look how hard-headed and unafraid of social stigma I am” posturing that I strongly suspect is the underlying cause of this kind of comment.)
I will bite any and all bullets you care to present. It would be nice to live in a world where these things weren’t true. Unfortunately we do not, and I only care about outcomes, not being fair. I would, in fact, avoid associating with jews if I lived in 1930′s Germany and if you wouldn’t I would deem you insane and also avoid you. I do, in fact, avoid depressed, unproductive, and unpopular people and so do you.
Among the outcomes I care about is having other people not get screwed over. Shunning them because other things have gone badly for them contributes to not achieving such outcomes.
Another outcome I care about is associating with people who are interesting, good company, useful to me, etc. Shunning broadly-defined groups that contain many such people, when there are narrower groups whose shunning would be just as effective, contributes to not achieving such outcomes.
A policy of avoiding dangerous-seeming people seems very reasonable, especially if it’s applied flexibly. (One might, e.g., have a close and dearly loved family member who is dangerous, or an important business connection with someone dangerous. Personal safety is good but not the only thing that matters.) I think it’s very likely that “seems dangerous to me”, fuzzy though it is, is a much more accurate heuristic for identifying dangerous people than “is poor”, and that the same is true for most people here.
“A heuristic, not an algorithm”: what difference are you intending to convey? (I wasn’t trying to suggest that you think avoiding poor people gives some kind of guarantee, or anything like that. A heuristic is what I took you to be saying it was. For me, at least, a heuristic is a kind of algorithm.)
“Not … for safety”: do you mean that there are other purposes to it besides safety? OK, fair enough (though your presentation of this “skill” here has been all about safety) but I don’t think it makes a difference to what I’m saying: safety together with the other things you intend this to achieve are still not the only things that matter, and I gravely doubt that the broad-brush policy of avoiding poor people is a great way of achieving those other things (by comparison with less-simplistic heuristics) -- though on that point I’m prepared to be convinced.
A heuristic is a fuzzy set of principles that are correlated with the outcomes you want. An algorithm is a set of directions that give you the outcome you want. When I say “avoiding poor people is a heuristic” I mean that it is the high level abstraction of a bunch of low level behaviors in various situations.
Edit: the boundaries between algorithms and heuristics are complicated. Colloquial usage referring to heuristics as something like “rules of thumb” and algorithms as “a set of directions” is what was intended.
It would be nice to live in a world where these things weren’t true. Unfortunately we do not
I suspect it might depend on where you are.
I’ve never been in a physical fight myself, but the ones I’ve witnessed were usually initiated by someone wearing not-so-cheap clothes and jewellery. (Maybe rich people are more spoiled, i.e. more used to getting their way, and therefore more likely to get resentful when they don’t, or something.) And according to stereotypes at least, people in the Mafia and similar aren’t exactly destitute. OTOH, beggars and the like don’t look like people who might hurt someone.
YMMV if you’re living in a country where a sizeable fraction of the population legally owns and carries firearms.
the ones I’ve witnessed were usually initiated by someone wearing not-so-cheap clothes and jewellery. (Maybe rich people are more spoiled, i.e. more used to getting their way, and therefore more likely to get resentful when they don’t, or something.)
Where I live, in my experience, the most dangerous neighbourhood (for young men) is the one occupied by many middle-class teenagers. The dangerous ones are the ones who have something to prove about how tough they are. They also make a lifestyle out of pretending to live in american ghettos, and simultaneusly pretending to be wealthy. I was friends with these people growing up. They are entertaining and scary.
We don’t have american-style violent ghetto-dwellers here, though.
If that’s true, that’s one more reason not to choose whom to associate with based on how rich they look. Or by “not hanging out with poor people” do you mean you do an income audit on all your acquaintances?
Because they are terrible optimizers they don’t actually succeed. I can spot low-IQ, low-income, unproductive behavior a mile away. It helps to have grown up on welfare I suppose.
Really? Because reading random intellectual-sounding things on the Internet instead of actually getting things done seems like a fairly common failure mode… that, or playing World of Warcraft.
Actually getting things done is an unrealistic standard for the vast majority of humanity. We amuse ourselves while a few people actually push forward.
Are you trolling, and if not what the hell is wrong with you?
I’m sure there are plenty of subclasses of “poor people” that it’s best to avoid if safety is your priority. It is absolutely not the case that “being around poor people” as such is dangerous. If you are inclined to protest that statistically it’s correct, then I will remark that the same is probably also true of, e.g., “being around really unpopular people” (some really unpopular people are unpopular because of personality disorders that also make them dangerous; being around sufficiently unpopular people may get you lynched along with them) and “being around young men” (young men are disproportionately likely to commit violent crimes, and to be victims of violent crime); would you say the same about those groups? It’s quite likely also true of “being around depressed people” (suicide is slightly contagious) and it would have been true of “being around Jews” in, say, 1930s Germany (anything that makes you look like a friend of a persecuted group puts you in danger of being targeted by their persecutors). The conclusion I draw from examples like these is that saying “being around members of group X” is dangerous, even when true statistically, is liable to be very misleading; still more so, calling not doing so a “skill”, as you do later in the thread.
(Note 1. Some of the people I know are quite rich. Some are quite poor. I feel—correctly, I’m pretty sure—no less safe with the poor ones than with the rich ones. Note 2. I wonder whether “poor” in your comment is in fact a proxy for “black”. Note 3. I think LW could well do without the sort of “look how hard-headed and unafraid of social stigma I am” posturing that I strongly suspect is the underlying cause of this kind of comment.)
I will bite any and all bullets you care to present. It would be nice to live in a world where these things weren’t true. Unfortunately we do not, and I only care about outcomes, not being fair. I would, in fact, avoid associating with jews if I lived in 1930′s Germany and if you wouldn’t I would deem you insane and also avoid you. I do, in fact, avoid depressed, unproductive, and unpopular people and so do you.
Among the outcomes I care about is having other people not get screwed over. Shunning them because other things have gone badly for them contributes to not achieving such outcomes.
Another outcome I care about is associating with people who are interesting, good company, useful to me, etc. Shunning broadly-defined groups that contain many such people, when there are narrower groups whose shunning would be just as effective, contributes to not achieving such outcomes.
A policy of avoiding dangerous-seeming people seems very reasonable, especially if it’s applied flexibly. (One might, e.g., have a close and dearly loved family member who is dangerous, or an important business connection with someone dangerous. Personal safety is good but not the only thing that matters.) I think it’s very likely that “seems dangerous to me”, fuzzy though it is, is a much more accurate heuristic for identifying dangerous people than “is poor”, and that the same is true for most people here.
It’s a heuristic, not an algorithm for safety.
“A heuristic, not an algorithm”: what difference are you intending to convey? (I wasn’t trying to suggest that you think avoiding poor people gives some kind of guarantee, or anything like that. A heuristic is what I took you to be saying it was. For me, at least, a heuristic is a kind of algorithm.)
“Not … for safety”: do you mean that there are other purposes to it besides safety? OK, fair enough (though your presentation of this “skill” here has been all about safety) but I don’t think it makes a difference to what I’m saying: safety together with the other things you intend this to achieve are still not the only things that matter, and I gravely doubt that the broad-brush policy of avoiding poor people is a great way of achieving those other things (by comparison with less-simplistic heuristics) -- though on that point I’m prepared to be convinced.
A heuristic is a fuzzy set of principles that are correlated with the outcomes you want. An algorithm is a set of directions that give you the outcome you want. When I say “avoiding poor people is a heuristic” I mean that it is the high level abstraction of a bunch of low level behaviors in various situations.
Something can be an algorithm despite not necessarily giving you exactly the outcome you want. Hence approximation algorithms and probabilistic algorithms.
Edit: the boundaries between algorithms and heuristics are complicated. Colloquial usage referring to heuristics as something like “rules of thumb” and algorithms as “a set of directions” is what was intended.
I suspect it might depend on where you are.
I’ve never been in a physical fight myself, but the ones I’ve witnessed were usually initiated by someone wearing not-so-cheap clothes and jewellery. (Maybe rich people are more spoiled, i.e. more used to getting their way, and therefore more likely to get resentful when they don’t, or something.) And according to stereotypes at least, people in the Mafia and similar aren’t exactly destitute. OTOH, beggars and the like don’t look like people who might hurt someone.
YMMV if you’re living in a country where a sizeable fraction of the population legally owns and carries firearms.
Where I live, in my experience, the most dangerous neighbourhood (for young men) is the one occupied by many middle-class teenagers. The dangerous ones are the ones who have something to prove about how tough they are. They also make a lifestyle out of pretending to live in american ghettos, and simultaneusly pretending to be wealthy. I was friends with these people growing up. They are entertaining and scary.
We don’t have american-style violent ghetto-dwellers here, though.
Poor people in the first world are often poor partially because they optimize for not looking poor.
If that’s true, that’s one more reason not to choose whom to associate with based on how rich they look. Or by “not hanging out with poor people” do you mean you do an income audit on all your acquaintances?
Because they are terrible optimizers they don’t actually succeed. I can spot low-IQ, low-income, unproductive behavior a mile away. It helps to have grown up on welfare I suppose.
Are you equally good at spotting high-IQ, low-income, unproductive behavior?
Pretty good, but they’re uncommon so I have limited data to calibrate on.
Really? Because reading random intellectual-sounding things on the Internet instead of actually getting things done seems like a fairly common failure mode… that, or playing World of Warcraft.
Actually getting things done is an unrealistic standard for the vast majority of humanity. We amuse ourselves while a few people actually push forward.
Some people get less done than others. I, for one, am job-free. ;)