So we have three people now. I hope this happens.
vinayak
Karma: 73
Oops, I guess I’m late—I just saw this post. In any case, I will come too.
It will be nice to come up with a more precise definition of ‘lowering the status’. For example, if some person treats me like a non-person, all he is doing is expressing his opinion about me being a non-person. This being the opinion of just one person, should not affect my status in the whole society and yet, I feel offended. So the first question is whether this should be called lowering of my status.
Also, let us assume that one person treating me like a non-person does lower my status in some way. Even then, shouting back at him and informing him that he is offending me and requesting him to take care not to offend me in future is obviously not a good way of gaining back the lost status. And yet, this is what comes naturally to most people’s minds on being offended. Why is that so?
Something related happens with me every once in a while when someone makes a statement of the form A → B and I say ‘yes’ or ‘ok’ in response. By saying ‘ok’ all I am doing is to acknowledge the truth of the statement A → B, however, in most cases, the person assumes that I am agreeing that A is true and hence ends up concluding that B is true as well.
One example is this -
I go to a stationery shop and ask for an envelope. The storekeeper hands me one and I start inspecting it. The storekeeper observes this and remarks, “If you want a bigger envelope, I can give you one.” I say, “Alright.” He hands me a bigger envelope.
We realized that one of the very important things that rationalists need is a put down artist community, as opposed to the pick up artist community which already exists but isn’t of much use. This is because of the very large number of rationalists who get into relationships but then aren’t able to figure out how to get out of them.