"But suppose all the uncool kids agreed to think of themselves as cool, and to make fun of the currently-cool kids. Then you would just have two groups of kids, each considering themselves superior and looking down on the other. And the currently-uncool-kid group would be bigger and probably win, insofar as it’s possible to win these things. So why don’t they do that?"
Speaking only for myself: because being unable to play-act socially in this way is exactly (or at least part of) what makes uncool kids uncool.
Wow! Thanks for sharing this, did not expect this kind of rabbit hole. Although I will kiss y’all, now that I must unsubscribe from Alexander, Cowen & Co so I can finally live my prototype and not obsess over the script.
I have a powerful memory of my first day in middle school. I'd gotten into a magnet middle school while all the rest of my elementary school class had gone to the regular middle school up the street. In between first and second period a new kid (they were all new) walks up to me:
Kid 1: Hey
Me: Hey
Kid 1: What’s your name?
Me: Uh, *name*
Kid 1: Are you cool *name*?
Me: uhhhh what do you mean by cool?
Kid 1 (instantly): You’re not cool
He walked away confidently, having inflicted a powerful lesson. But the day wasn’t over yet. Sometime in the afternoon a new new kid and his friend (they were all new) walks up to me:
Kid 2: Hey
Me: Hey
Kid 2: What’s your name?
Me: *Name*
Kid 2: Are you cool *name*?
Me (instantly): Yeah. Yeah I’m cool
Kid 2 (to Kid 3): See, that’s how you can tell they’re really cool, no hesitation
I went to a 7-12 school for gifted kids, and on the first day of seventh grade, a chubby little pale kid in horn-rimmed glasses who already had his binder perfectly organized discovered that his seat-mate had screwed it all up. Whereupon Horn-Rim shouts "You imbecile!" at the top of his lungs and beans his seat-mate on the head with said binder. Minutes later, a kid whose mother sent him to school in a full suit and tie answered his name at roll call with "Present and prepared!".
While the subtleties about how to be cool are particle-physics nuanced, the broad strokes are obvious, undeniable, and objective.
Coolness is ordinal - it's a thing that cool kids have and uncool kids want. If it's not wanted, you just have different social ecosystems that may or may not intersect. Uncool kids can't just define away their want of coolness, or define a new coolness that the currently-cool kids will covet.
There's also logistical issues in forming an alliance as large as "all the uncool kids", but I was going to say something similar. I think "coolness" has at least some grounding in observable individual traits. If you could wave a magic wand and make everyone in the school forget the old status hierarchy so that they had to develop a new one from scratch, I predict the new one would look pretty similar to the old one.
I think the reason is that "coolness" is a prestige hierarchy; it means something close to "how much you would like to have this person as a friend". (Which probably starts with physical attractiveness and social skills as a baseline, and then gets modified from there.) This predicts that people who share your interests and who treat you nicely will seem cooler *to you*, even if they don't seem cool to other observers--plausible?
This is true. And.it's innate. I remember in kindergarten the leader of the class was the most beautiful and wealthiest girl, and we all did what she said.
The advantage of attending a high school with a graduating class of over 1000 students during the latter apathetic (that's literally what our elders called us) 1970s was that status hierarchies were plural and not that important. Most of the people in the school were relative strangers to one another, which created a kind of neutral public space. Finding your own people was way more important than climbing some general ladder of coolness or popularity.
I suspect this is less about the high school than the student.
The loner student who is blind to class distinctions and the desperately lonely student who understands every nuance of insult in Jane Austen (and her many imitators) will have very different experiences at the exact same high school.
I suspect also that the US TV/movie version of this that we all see is strongly skewed from the mean experience for precisely this reason -- the kind of person who gravitates to Hollywood (or to accumulating a million followers, or whatever) is very much the kind of person obsessed with every social detail (and snub) of high school, while 90% of the students don't know, don't care, about this drama going on within the 10%.
(Meaning, perhaps, that something like Gossip Girl, the "in-crowd" version of the story is maybe basically correct; while, I don't know, maybe Buffy or Young Sheldon, the "out-crowd" version of the story is much less correct -- very much a projection by the cool kids or at least the cool kid wannabe's on the couldn't-care-less vast majority.
It's interesting to see how shows aimed at actual teens and tweens, think the entire Dan Schneider corpus like Victorious, care very little about these supposed distinctions...
There are no cool vs uncool kids at Hollywood Arts except as a deliberate parody nod to "yes, we know, this is what school on TV is supposed to be like; isn't it ridiculous?")
I had this situation too. There were so many people that there wasn't an objective group of "popular" kids that everyone agreed were popular, because not everyone knew everyone else. Additionally, nobody became a loner due to weird hobbies, because there were so many other people they formed their own subgroups and became cool within those subgroups. The nerds don't need to beg the sports jocks for invites to parties when they can just go to gaming club and play with all of their gaming friends, or math club, or join the band. Every niche had many times more people in it, so people were a lot less lonely in their niche.
Same thing here, I went to a high school as large as some colleges (2800 students). The hallways during class changes were comically crowded - think commuting on the busiest NYC or Tokyo streets - with students shoulder-to-shoulder and crotch-to-butt trying to speed-shuffle across campus in like 3 minutes. Forget finding a seat in the cafeteria - there *were* never available seats in the cafeteria.
People would inevitably hang out in formal clubs and informal groups, but there wasn't a "popular" crowd and most people didn't know who was on the football team or being nominated for prom queen.
My *guess* is that it basically acts as the prototype for this sort of understanding of high school. There are earlier movies (American Graffiti? The Last Picture Show?) that show US high school life, but while you can of course see in them the eternals of human society (wealth, popularity, ...), you don't see the explicit carving up into cliques that was such a feature of Fast Times, and of course immediately embraced by John Hughes.
Points are
(a) Fast Times was, of course, based on Clairemont High School. Enrollment now 900 (I assume much the same in 1980, but ???). That's not as large as 2800, but it's also not what I would consider a small town high school.
By my experience it would count as a large high school, but by US experience of the past 20 years?
(b) Like a lot of what is claimed to be "standard" in US history, I see these school stereotypes as essentially constructed by pop culture, not natural. People then grow up into this pop culture and interpret it to fit their situation. (cf a certain type of girl grows up in the US today and interprets/controls her situation via anorexia. Exact same girl grows up in a very orthodox Jewish household 50 years ago and interprets/controls her situation via OCD. 100 years ago via "hysteria" ala Freud. 500 years via accusations of [or belief that she is] a witch. 1000 years ago via religious frenzy and becoming a nun.)
It's not *inaccurate* to say that certain behavior occurs, and to say that it's interpreted by the kids in a certain way. But the ways that behavior is explained as "intrinsic to society" or "proving my theory of humanity", and very definitely the claims that it is a universal experience, are, I think, bad world analysis.
It's another version of the stupid (but eternal) trope that the girls just over the ridge are willing to have sex with everyone (even you!) New Yorkers are saying the the California girls are just like that ("The Sure Thing"). Americans are saying the Swedish girls are just like that. British are saying that about the Australian girls. And so on and so on.
Believing this about the cool kids and the jocks is more of the same. Yes, in the movies Van Wilder and the Quarterback are rolling in wall to wall vaj. In the real world, there's basically not that much difference. The Quarterback may be going out with the prettiest girl, but the median experience is that he wants it now (and all the time) and she wants to wait. It's that she breaks up with him (or vice versa), he feel heartbreak, he finds it difficult to find someone else who makes him happy, etc etc. The cast may be prettier and wealthier but the emotions and the experiences are mostly the same intensity.
Hell, even Fast Times, being like I said, the prototype and still grounded in reality before the trope vanishes up its own fundament in fantasy projection. captures this. Brad Hamilton may be the most popular kid at school but he suffers heartbreak, and in the real world he loses his job and is laughed at.
As I try to say over and over again, one swallow does not a summer make.
Your school may have had one charismatic kid, and a reasonable number of bullshitters. But it likely did not have any Wilt Chamberlains, scoring with the fifty prettiest girls in school in his senior year.
The main difference that does matter is that there's a lowest 10% who are truly lonely; they cannot find a connection at the level they want with anyone. Mostly I don't think it's the STEM kids; they have each other and they're aware enough of delayed gratification to know that "it gets better". Of course they lust for the prettiest in the school -- we all do; that's what it MEANS to be the prettiest. But that's the human condition. We lust for the prettiest, we make do with someone nice, and if we're smart, lucky, and choose well, we manage to convert our choice into the prettiest *for us*.
The ones I truly weep for are the broken kids -- broken bodies, broken brains, broken minds and personalities. They are the ones perfectly aware of how undesirable they are, and perfectly aware they it ain't ever gonna get better. They are the ones who need every damn consolation religion can offer them.
The wannabe's (which is what the movies are projecting, as are most of these internet discussions) will do just fine, will mostly in time get what they deserve. The decent smart ones will get decent smart partners. The mean horrible ones will get mean horrible partners and will divorce and remarry five times. Karma's not perfect (not for the broken kids it certainly ain't) but it works out mostly OK at the wannabe (and STEM kids, and cool kids) level.
Spend less time thinking about the past, spend less time chasing perfection right now, and spend more time considering, of the pool of options available, what will keep you happy over the next fifty years. Coolness ain't it -- but niceness probably is. So make yourself nice, hang out with nice people, and let the cool kids play their status games.
Another common inaccuracy is the idea that all popular kids are gratuitously mean to the less popular. I'm sure that that happens, and exclusion from close friendship is certainly likely, but a lot of the good-looking popular types try to cultivate (or naturally achieve) a level of public graciousness that makes them seem more desirable socially. The people who like to bully and pick on the weaker and socially excluded are often either a few tiers down and looking to elevate themselves or are cultivating a "tough outsider" self-image of some kind.
It’s usually the social strata right above you that are the cruelest. The Uber cool have nothing to prove, the guys who are just barely cooler than you have to work to disassociate themselves with you
Paul Graham has an interesting perspective on this: cool kids spend all their time being cool, so they maximize their coolness function. Uncool kids ("nerds") spend some time on something else, so they can't do as well and lose the coolness competition. Also, uncool kids use phrases like "maximize their coolness function". http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html
I’m pretty sure no matter how much time I devoted to being cool I would have failed. But by high school I knew I was just too weird to ever be a “cool kid” and no longer cared.
One helpful thing was going to a gigantic high school. The coolness stakes are relatively low when you take ten steps away from your cool friends and *nobody recognizes you*. When they announced our prom king’s name, I had no idea who he was. He was popular enough to have been voted prom king, but My friends and I had never seen him before. That might have kept the cool kids grounded in reality and soothed the nerd psyche a bit more than a smaller environment would have.
In my experience, there were definitely some kids who fought their way up the hierarchy by focused effort. And there were some who probably could have been very high-status had they tried, but who didn't bother. But there were also heaps of kids who were almost effortlessly high-status, just by virtue of being naturally charismatic and/or good looking. And plenty who could never have become seriously cool even if they really wanted to (which some of them clearly did).
Personally I probably could have raised my status somewhat, had I dedicated myself to doing so, but there's no way I would have made it very far up the ladder. (Or, supposing it really was technically possible, it would have required broad and deep changes that most of the actual cool kids pretty clearly hadn't made.)
I'm in high school, and my group of friends (since I read this blog you can guess where I stand in coolness...) calls the phenomenon of popularity "quicksand," it takes so much of your attention to maintain that image that it sucks you from academic pursuits. I had a teacher the other day tell me that at her school our group would have been the "cool" group, but I just don't know how that would've worked. What was cool back then? Has it changed?
I’m not sure, but it was pretty unambiguous in my late 90s high school that we nerds actually *ran everything*. Who gave enough of a crap to stay and plan dances and the prom, run all the performances, manage the sports teams, and put together the yearbook? The overachievers. Almost the every social and extracurricular outlet was run by one of the 10% of the school in honors classes. The effect of this was that if large numbers of your peers were actually going to *see* you being cool, you had to be involved in some activity managed by nerds. I guess you could go be cool in the parking lot and maybe there were some hot people hanging out there, but if you wanted to hear a stadium or auditorium cheer or wolf whistle (the key barometer of your popularity before social media), you had to play ball with geeky people trying to pad their college applications.
Huh, that’s actually true. I guess I’ve had people basically pretend to treat me like an equal but then once I’ve helped them edit their essay or whatever just forget I exist. I’ve chosen to be a nerd though, that kind of stuff doesn’t hurt me bc I chose the path I did and I’m proud of it. But yes, the nerds are the ones who organize the sports event where the “cool” people get to show off.
In my wife's southern high school (and even middle school, I think) back in the 1970s they had "sororities" that contained the girls who planned all the dances and proms and such. They were emphatically not nerds, but tended to come from better-off families, and had lots of practice and role models for entertaining and throwing parties.
Interesting- I suppose a lot of this comes down to cultural expectations. I suppose where institutions like a high school sorority exist, you might be brought up in the expectation of filling a social role associated with popularity regardless of your personal attributes. This is probably more true if your mom was also in the sorority.
In my huge public high school in the NYC suburbs, we were fairly economically and socially homogenous, and projects more or less fell to those willing to do them. The result was a bit like the cast of “Big Bang Theory” planning a prom for the cast of “Jersey Shore”. Picture that if you will.
There's a Wonder Years episode where Kevin rejects the "picking teams" model, and just intentionally goes in reverse order to form the worst possible team. We started doing that in high school gym and it was actually pretty liberating. The games became total nonsense and the other team winning had no meaning, but us scoring a single point was talked about for weeks. The most dubious advocate of this strategy is probably Curley from Of Mice and Men, who only picks fights against bigger guys so he never really loses. Deng Xiaopeng's 24-character strategy is a bit about this. And I'm sure Hegel or Nietzsche would probably claim they covered this in some dialectic or aphorism.
Maybe this was happening at a broader social level as most of the geek hobbies became dominant at one point or another over the last thirty years.
I always went to relatively small schools (in the 100-250 students per grade, including college) and, in my observation, coolness was always a time-limited resource. Very important during freshman year but dropped off as time went on and became basically irrelevant by Senior year.
So, sure, freshman year you might live or die by your overall popularity, but that's because the group hasn't really atomized yet and coolness is the only metric by which you're judged. Come senior year though, well, the theater kids hang with the theater kids, the nerds hang with the nerds, the jocks associate with the jocks and so on and so on. I suppose there's still some need for inter-group social capital, but you're going to care more about maximizing your in-group "coolness" and when those two resources happen to diverge the correct play is always to maximize in-group coolness.
I read Fussell when it first came out and have reread it at least once a decade since. You could have done more with his "high prole" group, e.g., Trump. Prole taste + $$$ = ??
There are a number of posts on his previous blog on various aspects of this. "I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup", "The Toxoplasma of Rage", and "Untitled" are good things to read here, though the latter is more specifically relevant.
If you found those good reading, "Lies, Damned Lies, And Social Media (Part 5 of ∞)" and "Living By The Sword" are also good; section 7 from "Nonfiction Writing Advice" is peripherally relevant and the whole thing is useful for, well, nonfiction writing advice.
There are other posts, but those are as good a starting point as any.
"The idea of concept-handles is itself a concept-handle; it means a catchy phrase that sums up a complex topic.
Eliezer Yudkowsky is really good at this. “belief in belief“, “semantic stopsigns“, “applause lights“, “Pascal’s mugging“, “adaptation-executors vs. fitness-maximizers“, “reversed stupidity vs. intelligence“, “joy in the merely real” – all of these are interesting ideas, but more important they’re interesting ideas with short catchy names that everybody knows, so we can talk about them easily.
I have very consciously tried to emulate that when talking about ideas like trivial inconveniences, meta-contrarianism, toxoplasma, and Moloch.
I would go even further and say that this is one of the most important things a blog like this can do. I’m not too likely to discover some entirely new social phenomenon that nobody’s ever thought about before. But there are a lot of things people have vague nebulous ideas about that they can’t quite put into words. Changing those into crystal-clear ideas they can manipulate and discuss with others is a big deal.
If you figure out something interesting and very briefly cram it into somebody else’s head, don’t waste that! Give it a nice concept-handle so that they’ll remember it and be able to use it to solve other problems!"
Hmm, yeah, but like internet memes this can be troubling, especially when a "concept-handle" gives birth to material/political energy in which most nuance and independent thought has been burned off. Scott may enjoy seeing his well-thought-out conclusions "briefly crammed" into many heads, but not all heads are like Scott's, so they process the shorthand in endlessly different ways.
What remains is often a dumbed-down political consensus (political in the sense that people are comfortable enough with the facile implications of nebulous naming (like "wokeness" or "cancel culture") to declare their allegiances at water coolers and polling places even though they may only possess a cartoonish understanding of their newfound commitments.
Ultimately, sloganeering is a tool of propaganda. Useful sometimes perhaps in the real world, but an inherently ugly power tool when you really think about it -- not to be celebrated or elevated. Its abuses in totalitarian cultures are obvious, but it is also central to modern capitalism.
Should I "create my own opportunities" or "go with the flow"? Obviously, life requires balance, but instead I will brand myself according to whichever cultural nook or cranny I've nestled into, making me a living concept-handle!
I think there is a big advantage in having a clear term for a concept or phenomenon. It both helps you remember the concept, and helps you describe why it applies to some situation. Catchy self-describing terms are better for this than more obscure terms. Concepts like Nash equilibrium or the Bradley Effect are useful to have in your toolkit, but the terms don't help you remember them or make them easier to understand. By contrast, steelmanning, proves-too-much, paperclip-maximizer, etc., give you at least some hint about their meaning in the terms. Similarly, you can get this from other people: hate hoax (Sailer), rational astrology (Waldman), and the Cathedral (Yarvin) are all good examples of concept that are useful to carry around in your head, and whose names help you remember what they mean.
People can get concepts wrong, yes; that means it's better to put more attention into making them accessible, not less. Just ask any decent programmer about naming conventions. A good naming convention can not only make for easier reading, but assist with debugging.
"Against Murderism" ( https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/06/21/against-murderism/ ) is probably the most relevant; other relevant posts include "I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup", "In Favor of Niceness, Community, and Civilization", "Living By the Sword", and "Kolmogorov Complicity".
"Social Justice and Words, Words, Words" ( https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/07/social-justice-and-words-words-words/ ) is the one where he first introduced the concept of the Motte-and-Bailey fallacy, one of the more common epistemic flaws in the sort of wokeness Scott seems to be against (I'm sure Scott absolutely loves us posting the entire "things I will regret writing" corpus, but that's where he explained his moral and epistemic grounds for opposing wokeness so... (plus, it's good writing, necessary and true even when it can't be kind, and he shouldn't regret it))
It seems to help if the jargon term is not all that self-explanatory. Motte-and-bailey, for example, is opaque to most people even after it is explained to them repeatedly: "Which one are you really supposed to care about? ... Oh ... Why?" The fact that only some people can remember it makes it more appealing to some people.
As to the question of "why can't the uncool kids just declare themselves to be cool", it's because there are certain objective realities behind coolness that can't be wished away. Here's the most obvious, from a male-centric perspective: the affection of attractive women/girls (anticipating a certain response, while there is some room for subjectivity regarding what constitutes an attractive woman, there's a pretty sizeable area of agreement in practice).
No matter how much a group of high school nerds work to believe that they are cool, if the hottest girls in that grade are nonetheless all dating the jocks or the rich kids and steering very widely around the pizza-faced shut-ins playing Battletech in the halls, the nerds' self-belief will wreck upon the rocks of reality.
Which is not to say a nerd can't become cool, or isn't already cool - just that self-belief isn't what makes it so. There's a degree of social desirability that can absolutely be objectively tracked. It usually involves decent hygiene, some physical attractiveness, a lot of self-confidence, and skill at something more primally desirable to human society than a compendious knowledge of Pokémon stats.
Stereotypical "cool kids" also benefit from most media affirming that they're the cool kids. Even movies that paint the stereotypical jock in a negative light like Beauty and the Beast still shower Gaston with a mass of positive qualities like strength, virility, self-confidence and the like. Cool kids with those same qualities won't drop them even if 100% of the uncool kids effectively unionize against them.
True, but I feel like you're identifying an effect much more than a cause. The media could try very hard to make pizza-faced shut-ins who play Battletech in the halls seem cool, and I'm not sure if it would move the needle very much, because the media would in such cases be moving against mass human instinct rather than reinforcing it.
Put another way, Channing Tatum will be cool pretty much whatever he decides to spend his proverbial lunch hour doing, because Channing Tatum is incredibly handsome and therefore socially desirable. By no coincidence, though, the Channing Tatums of the world don't spend many lunch hours playing Battletech, because they have more enjoyable options open to them, like spending it making out with the homecoming queen.
That's a good point. It just helps the Cool kids coolness when they're buttressed by most media, even media that paints them as the bad guys like Gaston. Thinking about it now, Beauty and the Beast initially comes off as Jock vs Social Outcast with the Beast being the outcast, but by the end we see the Beast as a human and he looks like a conventional cool guy akin to Gaston. So it's less of jock v nerd and more jock v temporarily embarrassed jock.
That's an excellent point. Also, even when the Beast is beastly, he's still (in the animated version, at least) self-confident, nice deep voice, seven feet tall, super butch, able and willing to fight off an entire wolf-pack barehanded in defense of the heroine, mega rich, and an aristocrat. He's really cool, just uuuugly.
Tangentially, I realized on the heels of a different discussion awhile back that Disney has a favourite target when it comes to villains, and the two archetypes are (i) "traditional" alpha males and (ii) sniveling aristocrats. Every once in awhile, both at once.
The Beast starts the movie with a terrible case of self-loathing (contrast with Gaston's narcissism). He only thinks he's ugly; by the time of the ballroom dancing scene, he's become very handsome, like an "ugly" girl in a movie who just needs contact lenses and a haircut to be beautiful.
I think the part where the Beast saves Belle from the wolves is the key to the whole story; it's not so much that he saves her as that he got hurt doing it. This makes him appear much less threatening and much more sympathetic. Belle didn't have to go back and take care of him, but she did, and in the process the two of them start to interact as people and they both discover that beneath the self-loathing was a person capable of kindness and empathy. (Showing Belle the castle library was certainly not something Gaston would have done!)
Not a furry, and not gay, but he also seems facially symmetrical. I think if I was going to direct an adaptation, and I wanted to make the Beast genuinely ugly. he'd look pretty different. Even if the studio didn't let me give him insectile mouthparts or gelatinous sluglike flesh or somesuch.
As it is, he seems more ✌️ugly✌️ than ugly. He's not even fat, for chrissakes.
There are a number of memes (also not by furries) pointing out that the prince he transforms back into at the end of the animated film is comparatively less desirable - generically handsome, but dull.
Is this an American thing? There is no word for nerd that has a negative connotation, in Indian languages. Someone really good at math but not sports, and not trendy dresser, if that's one definition of nerd, would be cool in the India I grew up in. Such kids have good economic prospects :). Woukd that not make them attractive to the opposite sex?
Why isnt that a thing is American culture ? I'm confused. I'm talking about the India I grew up in. Who knows if it has changed.
American culture for the longest time has had a notion of strength and intelligence being separate, and the more you have of one the less you have of another. I think in many places it's going out of style, but it's still rather pervasive.
Additionally, something we absolutely haven't gotten rid of is our cult of youth. Most American women don't seriously think long term until they're out of college at age 23 or thereabouts. Before then, thinking about the "long term" doesn't make much sense, only an old person would do that!
I was quite strange then, reading "How to age gracefully" by Bill Cosby at 25. I remember reading around the same time, Don Camillo books, where the 19 yos say they "Over 25 is practically dead" :).
The weird part about this is that most of the “jocks” in my high school were actually pretty smart. I think there is a sort of generic “good genes” set that results in reasonable athleticism, decent looks, and above average intelligence, and that was plenty to get you on both the football team and the honor roll at my relatively small school.
There were certainly a few min-maxed “dumb jocks” who could lift heavy things but not name 10 states, but they were the exception. The real dumb kids were more likely to be stoner burnouts than sports stars.
"I think there is a sort of generic “good genes” set that results in reasonable athleticism, decent looks, and above average intelligence"
I think the stereotype of the physically pathetic super genius comes from the far end of the IQ tail where that level of intelligence is gained through being generally speaking a total mutant who would be at the other side of the curve if it wasn't for some odd favorable brain boosting genes. Most "nerds" however are not tail-end geniuses, and it wouldn't be surprising if in raw mental firepower the "jocks" beat them, but just aren't interested in weird nerdy topics because they are too busy playing sports, hooking up with babes, and just generally winning at life.
It does make sense that if you are a genetic trainwreck you won't be good at anything, and assortative mating is going to add to the creation of sets of genes that flow together through generations. Still, in certain populations that valued high intelligence and scholarship somewhat exclusive of physical prowess there's going to be decoupling. Controversially, the classic Hollywood stereotype of the nerd is kind of an ethnic stereotype of an Ashkenazim as well. This is a population known both for high intelligence/scholarship, but also elevated rates of genetic disorders, and there are a lot of Jewish writers creating scripts in Hollywood*, so it could be they are projecting their childhoods into these movies. Add to that, if you're investing a whole career into writing, you probably aren't a "jock" to begin with, although if your script turns into a major movie then you're also winning at life.
*(I'm not making a da jewz control society nazi point, cinema is just a demographically loaded industry)
How high are the rates of genetic disorders among Ashkenazic Jews? I know there are some, but I haven't heard of any in my social circle. I also
How high are the rates of genetic disorders compared to other groups?
Also, the bad ones that get names are extremely debilitating and/or deadly. I don't know whether the genetic basis of moderately bad coordination has even been studied. I'm talking about the sort of bad coordination which doesn't interfere much with daily life, but makes sports not feasible or not a pleasure.
I'm thinking more in terms of stereotyping with a small grain of truth. The rates of disorders like Tay-Sachs or Joubert Syndrome and so on are higher, but it's not like this means they are common (and since genetic screening has since helped with Tay-Sachs). Apparently, one in four Ashkenazim are carriers for the conditions on this list: https://www.uofmhealth.org/health-library/tv7879
Mildly debilitating genetic conditions are going to be more common in general than severely debilitating ones, but then something mildly debilitating enough isn't necessarily going to even get named and end up in a medical textbook. If I produce less of an irritant protection enzyme so my lungs are on the lowest end of the normal range, I can still play sports during summer, I just might suck at them.
The social message of a huge fraction of movie comedies at least since "The Graduate" is: "Hey, beautiful girl, don't fall in love with the tall, handsome, blond boy, fall in love with the short, dark-haired, funny guy."
This message of course has nothing to do with who writes and greenlights movie comedies. It's all just a coincidence.
I don't think it's a set of good genes as much as it is just the same basic skills and aptitudes being doubly rewarded here.
What does it take to get academic achievement? Well, you need a modicum of talent, a stable enough home-life to be able to devote time to studying and the discipline to work at it.
What does it take (in a small-enough school) to get athletic achievement? Well, you need a modicum of talent, a stable enough home-life to be able to devote time to studying and the discipline to work at it.
Sure, enough talent can negate the need for the other two, but you can get by far enough without it.
Well, I have all of those things but ended up short and uncoordinated, thus a good student but a poor athlete. So genes have at least a little to do with it 😆
As you say, good at math and non-trendy dresser is a proxy for [potential] wealth in India. It has been that way for a few decades now in America too, which is why "nerd" became a cooler thing over the time period, but note that, critically, the type of nerdiness that's cool is the type that also can act as a proxy for wealth and success. If you conjure into your mind a type of nerd that isn't cool by today's standards, I think you'll find that it's hard to imagine them becoming tech CEOs.
The genuinely STEM kids in US schools are uninterested in coolness; they can tell that other kids have charisma or are living a different life, but so what?
What you see on TV is basically a cool wannabe's projection onto STEM kids -- a TV scriptwriter wanted to be a celebrity in high school and cannot imagine that anybody else would feel differently. Thus the scriptwriter assumes that STEM kids must live in a state of perpetual social angst, constantly pining for the homecoming queen and wishing they could be invited to Richie MacWealthington's parties. While the STEM kids actually have zero interest in any of this...
(Sure, the STEM kids usually want to make out; they are biological humans. But sex and love are more primal than status anxiety, especially since status anxiety is easily displaced -- rather than caring about being Richie MacWealthington's 17th best friend, you care about getting the 17th best grade in the state for the Math Contest.)
Well, STEM kids frequently *do* live in a state of perpetual social angst, just not over the lack of hordes of lackeys. They live in a state of perpetual social angst because other people notice they have nobody to help them out or back up their complaints, and bully/bash the shit out of them.
I mean, until I was 25 or so I used to have dreams about murdering my many bullies, frequently in incredibly-painful ways like biting chunks out of them. I'd say that's a pretty-good indicator that I was greatly unsatisfied with the state of affairs.
Maybe so, but like Doug S’ comment on dancing, this has barely any connection to *wanting to be part of* the cool kids (except insofar as it is believed, quite possibly incorrectly, that they are not bullied).
We don’t understand concepts if they are treated emotionally, as catchphrases for all sorts of more or less tangentially related experiences.
I am pretty sure "cool" kids are immune to being held down by some children while others beat them, because they have friends to help fight the aggressors off or to seek help. I am pretty sure "cool" kids are immune to a lot of deniable pranks, because they have extra sets of eyes to identify the perpetrator.
Do "cool" kids get bullied? Quite possibly. Do they get captured and tortured for 10 minutes when they're out of sight of a teacher, or get needles attached to their chairs when they're not looking? I'm pretty sure the answer is "no".
My point is, there are *tangible benefits* to playing the ridiculous social games people play. Having status helps you retaliate against people who wrong you, which means people will wrong you less often. This is true whether or not you care about having status for its own sake.
I'm no expert on foreign movies, but I've definitely seen more than one Korean movie that checks all the boxes for "stereotypical nerd". Consider for example:
I think it’s also related to pressure to conform socially. This is one reason I think the cool-uncool dichotomy is more keenly felt in smaller schools and small towns.
In a traditional sense, one measure for how well you were doing overall as a young person was how well you were fitting in. After all, it was presumed you were going to stay in this town and around these people indefinitely, and being popular as a teen was a great indicator that you’d do well in life.
Now that we’re more likely to expect both cool popular kids and smart nerdy kids to skip town after graduation, being cool in high school probably means something rather different than it once did. It’s still a thing, of course, but it isn’t quite the thing it used to be when nearly everybody stayed put their whole lives.
This is so orthogonal to my existing priors that I'd love to see an example. Can you link any depictions in modern Indian media where a schlubby smart guy is effortlessly portrayed as cool?
I admit, my knowledge of Indian culture is mostly from Bollywood and westernized depictions, but the idea that the culture has assimilated signs of future potential earnings into attraction is bonkers to me.
You are conflating a poor, survival oriented society (that had also been been dominated by a small super nerdy elite, the Brahmans forever) with the most affluent society the World has ever seen. This after the US inherited a base level of affluence from the Europe which was already at the top of the World for a couple of centuries at the least.
I can see two solutions to the lack of girls problem:
1) There also uncool girls, it makes sense for the to join the uncool-but-actually-cool coalition. It's likely that some boys and girls in the coalition will secretly want to date the people not in the coalition, but in the spirit of the coalition they ought to at least pretend otherwise.
2) Be celibate and proud of it.
3) Compete for girls. Being part of a the coalition allows you to have peers that hold you in high esteem, which I would guess helps getting dates.
Option 1 makes more sense given that there is no particular reason not to include girls in the coalition given that there are also cool girls, but maybe the natural middle school gender segregation would prevent this from happening.
I don't think you've correctly interpreted the claim being made. It's not that women wouldn't be allowed in the coalition, it's that "objectively" desirable makeout-partners are already, almost by definition, part of the cool-kids coalition and having a good time there.
If you model "cool kids" as "the set of high school students who are hot," and model hotness as a fixed and objective characteristic which all high school students desire, then it's very obvious that calling yourself "cool" won't help you get a date anymore than saying "short is the new tall" makes you better at basketball.
Is this a good model of coolness, or a good model of hotness? I'm skeptical, but I'm also skeptical one can deny this dynamic as strongly as you are trying to with broad-based success. Surely some percentage of the uncool kids really do "need" to date cool kids, and I imagine it's a large enough proportion that the uncool-coalition supporters would find their dissent to be a major hurdle. Maybe not insurmountable, but major.
Whenever I try to imagine that dating dynamics are less stupid and obvious than how they are portrayed in 20th century sitcoms, I talk to my straight friends and am reminded that some things are obvious because they're true.
1) The uncool guys to uncool girls ratio is heavily heavily not in the guys’ favor. That’s why in nerdy environments, like an MMO guild for example, the minute a girl enters the equation a mad scramble for their attention inevitably ensues with few winners and bitter losers. I would also estimate that cool guys are much less concerned about the social status of girls to make out with than cool girls are about their guys and are taking from the pool of available uncool girls.
2)Aside from “celibate and proud” being a very obvious cope to just about anyone outside the celibacy bubble, this does exist in the form of the volcel and MGTOW communities, neither of which have particularly cool reputations.
3)Once again gender ratio is a problem here. It’s better to have a bunch of male friends in your coalition than being a loner but it’s really a whole lot of competition for a small “resource”
Exactly. "Coolness" is about internally being able to reliably and effortlessly signal higher status. It's upstream of the social hierarchy and any achievements in the theory of mind. Although having a high position on the hierarchy or producing achievements increases self-confidence, which affects "coolness" in a feedback loop, you can be cool without those things, and in fact being reliably able to signal high status without those things reads as even higher "coolness", because it's costlier.
Status does indeed confer attraction, but it's a well known fact that physical attractiveness confers both status and attractiveness. There are studies that indicate physical attractiveness is a very important predictor of attraction, see e.g https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19558447/
"The strongest predictor of attraction for both sexes was partners' physical attractiveness."
Attractiveness confers attractiveness, to put it short.
I feel like the Democratic coalition is already breaking and/or re-aligning over wokeness, in fact. I don't have time right now to delve into the specifics, but there appears to be an increasing consensus (among 'mainstream' [among regular people] but 'contrarian' [on Twitter] people like Matt Yglesias) that the Democratic party's embrace of wokeness and/or failure to message well on it (and specifically defund the police) is what led to some suggestive-of-a-possible-realignment (I wanted to say unprecedented, but I don't think that's right) swings to the GOP among black and hispanic voters. There's a lot of other stuff going on on the margins, like differential turnouts (turnout up among already-GOP hispanic voters, down among dem hispanic voters) and probably other causes.
I think you're radically overreading this. Like, yeah, I think that there's something going on where the cultural wing of the Democratic coalition thought it was a little more powerful than it actually was, hoped that the 2020 election would represent their agenda in a very focused way and were disappointed to find that they didn't have the kind of ascendency that they hoped for.
But this is in the realm of "some adjustments to strength within the coalition," not a cataclysmic event. The SJW wing of the Democrats aren't going somewhere else. Blacks and Latinos might be mildly more heterodox than they have been (or might not), but they will remain dominantly Democratic.
Dominant Democratic may not be enough. If Tim Scott becomes the next black President, we could see Democrats winning 60-70 percent of those groups. A Republican party that can win 30-40 percent of blacks and hispanics would be a hegemonic one, like Democrats during the FDR years.
Biden won about 87% of the black vote. He's very, very far from "60-70%" territory, and it's by no means clear that there's a real trend towards lower black support for Democrats, much less vastly lower support.
It is frustratingly difficult to get information about Latino vote totals, but in general, people have been hyperfocusing on a small minority of counties that had very dramatic differences. Again, I believe that Biden's vote share decreased overall only a few percentage points.
The name there wasn't accidental. There are apparently rumblings that Tim Scott wants to be president. If he wins the Republican nomination, I think he brings along at least another 15% of black voters. If those gains are permanent, it's a realignment.
I see very little sign that "nominating a black Republican" is what causes macroscopic changes in black political alignment. It's not like this is a new idea.
It may not be new but it hasn't been tried. And with the Republican party running around like chickens with their heads cut off trying to keep black folks from voting, maybe it won't be and maybe if it is it won't work.
I'm worried. I think we're underreacting, and David Shor has me convinced we're about to spend a decade in the wilderness. Probably it's not as bad as all that.
There were multiple forces at play in the democratic primary that I think can be pigeonholed into three lanes:
- The "I just want to go back to brunch" types who thought everything was great under Obama and if they could just get the Obama years back or some lesser imitation they could go back to not paying attention to the news and living their lives (Biden, Buttigieg, Klobuchar, etc)
- The economic grievance people who want large and lasting change (Sanders, Warren to some extent although she attempted a crossover appeal that failed)
- The wokes (Gillibrand, Castro, Harris)
It's revelatory that group #1 won, but perhaps moreso that group #3 ended up with a VP while group #2 is caught twiddling their thumbs with a couple (not even?) diminished backbenchers even though group #3 was defeated resoundingly at the polls
I have some disagreements with your analysis of the Democratic coalition -- and in particular about your model of it as keeping poor minorities in the coalition with cultural concessions. The demographic that is farthest to the left on cultural issues is very highly educated people -- and among Democrats, white people are substantially more culturally progressive than racial minorities. David Shor (whom I trust more than anyone with analyzing these things) thinks that Democrats' erosion in support among black and (especially) Hispanic voters in the 2020 election was in large part due to them adopting more culturally left positions, and those positions gaining salience. See https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/03/david-shor-2020-democrats-autopsy-hispanic-vote-midterms-trump-gop.html for a great interview.
This leaves open the question: why does the Democratic party take positions that are well to the left of most Americans? I think the answer -- which Julia Galef discusses with David Shor here: http://rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/show/episode-248-are-democrats-being-irrational-david-shor.html -- is that Democratic party campaigns are driven primarily be ideologues. That is, the people who get into running campaigns are people who are really excited to make a difference by promoting policies that they support, and those people tend to have mode ideologically coherent and extreme positions. The result is that Democratic campaigns end up reflecting the opinions of Democrats who are in politics rather than Democrats as a whole, and I think this ends up being to Democrats' electoral detriment.
I agree. It seems to me that the idea that poor minorities will be mollified by making white people feel guilty, rather than actually improving their lives, is to a large extent a delusion by extremely online white people who constantly get surprised that the masses aren't as woke as them and choose people like Biden over more woke candidates.
Full agreement. I thought Scott's analysis of the Democrats was just weirdly totally wrong. Seemed more like what a terminally online socialist claims the democrats are about.
This makes some sense, but I think being able to say/believe that you're protecting the underprivileged is as important for coalition-building and coalition-defending as actually protecting them in a way they themselves endorse.
The Democrats do have most minority groups now, this has something to do with them being some combination of performatively less racist and actually less racist than the Republicans, I don't think the average minority is up on the exact differences between Democrat and Republican policy that make the Democrats less racist than the Republicans, and even if they're actually less racist the performance helps advertise that fact.
The Democrats are also in the process of passing a $1.9T package that, while not perfectly aimed at poor people, is aimed at the lower half (3/4?) of the income scale more closely than either the CARES Act or the tax bill they passed under Trump.
This looks like Democrats attempting to "placate the powerless" through legislation that is popular with the powerless, not through culture war considerations.
It's somewhat ironic that the best example of placating poor minorities with anti-racist math that could be found was a link to the website of a NYC private school with tuition of $52,195 per year. Sure sounds like anti-racist math might itself be signaling by an elite significantly more progressive than are racial minorities...
Lots of folks here referencing the Shor piece in this thread.
I guess I wonder how much of this "fracturing" matters to Democratic politicians beyond the local level. Signaling aside, is there any national-level **policy** that's even remotely related to "woke math"? Even State-level? Democratic politicians don't seem to be going in for this stuff, so are we just talking about an increase in the amount of criticism the far left dishes out at the Democratic party? Is that actually a bad thing for the Dems?
I think a lot of the Democratic appeal to blacks (and hispanics and Asians, but more so to blacks), in particular, is pointing to both real and imagined racism on the part of Republicans and their coalition.
> When I was in middle school, I used to wonder - there are cool kids and uncool kids, right? But suppose all the uncool kids agreed to think of themselves as cool, and to make fun of the currently-cool kids. Then you would just have two groups of kids, each considering themselves superior and looking down on the other. And the currently-uncool-kid group would be bigger and probably win, insofar as it’s possible to win these things. So why don’t they do that?
Because if a bunch of middle-schoolers were socially adept enough to pull that off, they'd be cool enough already that they wouldn't need to try it.
the way you phrase is dismissive, it suggests that "being cool" is the prize, and "talking about the theory of coolness" is the consolation prize.
I don't think that's true. I think that most of the people interested in "theory of coolness" in fact find that vastly more appealing than actually being cool. (In the same way that people who care at the SSC level of "theory of politics" would far rather hang out with similar people than with either bona fide politicians or with political celebrities [journalists and suchlike].)
Have you ever actually spent time doing the supposedly cool things (ie loud parties where people spend the entire night saying "this one time I was so drunk")?
"(In the same way that people who care at the SSC level of "theory of politics" would far rather hang out with similar people than with either bona fide politicians or with political celebrities [journalists and suchlike]."
I thought this sentence was going to be about people who like political theory not wanting to do politics rather than not wanting to hang out with politicians.
But less germane to the point that, while the cool kids and the wanna-be’s both imagine everyone wants to hang out with them, most people actually don’t, most of the time, the intellectual kids least of all.
I actually have, although I didn't drink and it was a cast party for an amateur theater group at college rather than the fraternity/sorority scene. It helps if you are friendly with the people and you can dance well enough to enjoy it. Also some of the "I was so drunk, crazy thing happened" anecdotes turn out to be funny.
Of course everyone wants to go behind the velvet rope once!
The point is, do you want to do it again, after you've seen what's there?
Would you want to do it more often than maybe once a year?
I mean, it's just boring, isn't it? The first time, no, you're so busy seeing everything, hearing what people are saying, paying attention. But even by the third time you should start to realize that the innovation in this particular experience has been fully mined out, that all that's left is endless repetition.
At least that's been my experience as "guy, for various reasons, provided with the opportunity to move through an above average variety of social scenes".
Eh, dancing with pretty girls is something I've always enjoyed doing. And like I said, it's more fun if you're with people that already know you - trying to find a dance or conversation partner in a room full of strangers is harder and sometimes fails completely.
I thoroughly enjoyed my opportunities to drink and dance in clubs. It being pretty similar every time you do it wasn’t really a drawback. I’m hardly a party animal and it’s far from my favorite environment or social activity, but there’s something to be said for just bouncing along with a big crowd of happy people for a couple of hours.
See, the "-on" suffix made me think of French, but I'm at a loss to name any particular French word that fits the pattern. Any French medieval warfare buffs here?
>>This is a project that they have been *gesturing towards*, but I don't see any reason yet to take Hawley seriously in any sort of good faith when it comes to his policy goals.
>>But I honestly don't think Hawley is particularly interested in making this policy, he's just signaling his stance (and I'm honestly surprised that his aides didn't at least put more work into making that signaling a little more coherent).
I'll go a step further - this is obvious enough that the rhetorical package absent clarifying policy is pretty good evidence of either *bad* faith or political naivete. If "Republicans would be better if they spoke more like Hawley" is compelling, you either don't mind the incoherence or are unaware it exists.
In 2019 the FTC reached a $5b settlement with Facebook for violating privacy commitments it had made as part of a *previous* settlement in 2012. While they touted the topline number as setting a new record for a cash settlement, it was widely panned as a slap on the wrist given that Facebook had already told investors they expected to pay about that much, and the rest of the settlement was a cave-in (Facebook was not required to change any of its behavior, only to keep better records, and its corporate officers were granted unusally sweeping immunity which included the original 2012 conduct, the new violation, and also undisclosed violations not discussed in the complaint that we can only guess at).
This settlement was approved on a party-line vote by three Trump appointees, with the two Democrats dissenting. Senators (including Hawley) made some angry tweets about it. But FTC commissioners are all Senate-confirmed! Hawley also touted a bill that would "reform" the FTC by placing it under DOJ jurisdiction. But the DOJ approves settlements (and indeed approved this one) too!
As another example, conservative legal scholars have spent the last few decades gouging away at anti-trust law (see, e.g., Ohio v. American Express in which the Roberts majority massively raised the burden of proof to prove harm in "two-sided markets" such as payment processors, a decision with obvious benefits for Amazon should they decide to start throwing their weight around against sellers). Senators can make as many tweets as they want, but if they actually tried to break up Facebook it would get dunked on in court by the same FedSoc alums they just spent four years stacking the courts with.
What I'm gesturing at here is that Republicans are going to find it difficult to pivot against "Big Tech" beyond posting about it is their appointments are all still on auto-pilot from the Reagan era, and the bench of future appointees will probably stay that way for another few decades since that's the environment they all came up in and bureaucrats and judges aren't as sensitive to public sentiment as legislators.
There are, of course, ways around this. One is that anti-trust laws are simply statutes, and they can be amended. Another is that you could start holding these people's feet to the fire in confirmation hearings. But as long as the party coalitions are in transition, amending the law and spiking nominees would require cooperating with Democrats. I don't think that's in the cards. Hawley certainly doesn't seem interested. He was for $2,000 checks when Trump's name would've been on them and against them once Biden's name would've been on them (while Democrats enthusiastically voted for CARES even though the checks and superdole likely played a large role in Trump's electoral overperformance).
Maybe this will go beyond posting eventually. I have my doubts.
> Republicans are going to find it difficult to pivot against "Big Tech" beyond posting about it is their appointments are all still on auto-pilot from the Reagan era, and the bench of future appointees will probably stay that way for another few decades since that's the environment they all came up in and bureaucrats and judges aren't as sensitive to public sentiment as legislators.
Also (I think) judges "on autopilot from the Reagan era" are supported by the Republican voters, especially conservative Christians who oppose abortion and other Democratic culture-war issues and business leaders who support deregulation. On the other hand, many of these people would likely vote for the Republicans even if they tried to pivot, since they see the Democrats as even worse.
I am not sure that the cool kids are having more sex, although that fits the stereotypes. If one can use socioeconomic status as a proxy for coolness, then the opposite seems to be true. Recent reports indicate that those lower on the socioeconomic ladder tend to start having sex younger (and getting pregnant younger) than those at the top of the socioeconomic ladder (at least on a national scale). I've not seen data related to this within a single school but would be very interested in hearing such studies. Namely, do cool kids start having sex earlier and have more sex in highschool?
I think socioeconomic status is a poor proxy for coolness. I personally never thought “cool” correlated strongly with “rich”. Even hotness wasn’t all that reliable; looks didn’t make you cool if you were also shy or eccentric.
And nobody in my high school was having more sex than the marching band. Maybe some of them could have been considered cool, but I think the long hours together and frequent trips away from home were what really boosted their stats.
I said it very simplified, I'll try to expand it a little bit more. The cool kids have more status, this could be from a high socioeconomic background or not, maybe they're more athletic or charismatic. This gives them more sexual options... so it's not just "you have sex so you are cool", but you get to choose who you want to have sex with.
I think it depends on where you are. At my high school, almost all of us had the same socioeconomic status, but the one kid I knew was rich was cool, and the one kid I knew was poor was uncool. At my mother's high school, there was a bigger spread of socioeconomic status and it was very strongly correlated to coolness.
The oversimplified version is that coolness is what makes hot girls want to have sex with you even if you *don't* have money. Which isn't to say that you can't be both cool and rich, but if you poll e.g. an average rock star's groupies approximately none of them would defect to an investment banker with twice the money.
The oversimplified version of coolness for girls is given by Amy Dunne in "Gone Girl",
If cultural "class" is just what we buy in the marketplace then it's not really a very good indicator of class at all. A capitalist can buy the exact same goods in the marketplace as I. The only difference is that they can buy more than I can buy. A capitalist could buy a 50 million low-class items (let's says Affliction T-shirts), whereas I could only buy 50. Does this make the capitalist low-class? A capitalist can buy a Rolls Royce, and I can't, but maybe I can if I pool my money with 364 of my friends I could buy a Rolls Royce, then we can share it between us and each get it one day per year. Does this make us all high class?
The marketplace tends to flatten class distinctions in this manner. That's why Marx talks about class in the workplace, where ownership of the means of productions gives us a clear distinction in roles.
Fussell's conception of class as described here is cultural more than economic, based less on what you have enough money to buy than on what you value enough, or consider prestigious enough, to buy.
Not everything that people value comes from economic pressures. How people negotiate the limits placed on them by economic pressures varies by culture. Living within a certain set of economic pressures can lead to people developing common responses and values, and from there a community, but that is far from the most important unifying force.
Another way this is manifest is that shows of wealth top out. My example is a Rolex. A Rolex costs maybe 30k. If they wanted to, anyone with a 6 figure salary could buy one. So all the doctors, lawyers, and junior executives can wear Rolexes.
So what does someone truly rich do? If they buy a 100k watch, they run the risk of it looking like a gaudy show of wealth. It also doesn't buy them much superiority. The same people who can buy a Rolex can save up to buy the 100k watch.
How expensive does a watch have to be to gatekeep out a partner at a decent law firm or a neurosurgeon? Does anyone really wear watches that expensive?
Countersignalling can help a bit. Someone like Jeff Bezos can wear a Timex. This says that his wealth is so obvious that he doesn't need to prove anything, but it can't work for all the super rich.
Hi Scott, thanks for posting my anecdote (this is snav if my account info gets messed up)! I was hoping you could remove it, though, because the person in question occasionally reads this blog---my intent was to keep it buried in the comments section, hehe.
Well I cry dirty pool if you used this as an excuse to delete my comment about Snav's comment -- especially since mine stood on its own (buried safely here in the comments) without quoting Snav's work at all.
I expended untold minutes of my precious labor (living with chronic debilitating illness, no less!) to advance a particular point of view, which, I daresay, is relevant, unique, purposeful, and doesn't deserve to be "cancelled" on the basis of a technicality that I had nothing to do with.
I'm not seeing what would be construed as sarcasm exactly, but I did rely on my refined upper class wit -- nuanced, yet properly vague.
If Scott really did simply erase my creative labor, then yes indeed that pisses me off. And since this seems the most likely explanation for the vanishing comment I continue to speculate that he simply didn't value what I was offering -- and Snav's predicament gave him a ready excuse to hit delete while preserving his self-image of running a site opposed to "cancelling" people he disagrees with.
(I'm kidding about being upper-class. From where I come from "dirty pool" just refers to something brown in the water.)
The reason why the Democrats probably need their own essay is that their coalition is about as stable is nitroglycerine, and within a couple of elections, they're going to need a new script. Trump provided the forcing function that sculped the current coalition. His presence demanded this endless cramming strange bedfellows into the Democratic clown-car just to get rid of him. You will notice that the Democratic party has now lost all coherence and all sense of internal alignment. Everybody who currently supports the Democrats for election does so glumly and with great internal conflict.
You are, of course, exactly right that it seems downright weird how the Democrats have managed to somehow capture the rich, the middle class, the poor, and the ideological Left all at once. (Or, to be precise: to somehow capture slightly more than half of the people in those groups that vote.) But the Left and the rich are not a stable coalition, and the wokes and the middle class are not a stable coalition, all these people kind of hate each other, and something is bound to give.
Things might shift explosively, and result in a fruitful party realignment where the Republicans capture some important parts of the coalition. We would need to change our conceptions of what these parties are at a deep level. I kind of hope that happens, if only because it would be fun. Things could also undergo a controlled demolition, somehow only ejecting the powerless and useless parts of the coalition. So if I were going to write a 10,000 word essay of advice for Democrats, it would aim at getting the ball rolling on the controlled demolition process sooner rather than later, so they don't just end up with whatever coalition is left hanging together after the chaos ends.
People on social media are pretty distinct from the general population, but the glum conflicted democrats don't appear to be a majority; they're just more visible.
It seems like I don't read that article the way you do. "Enthusiasm" is not used in a way that implies enthusiasm for the Democratic Party or for its platform, generalized enthusiasm for voting probably mean Democrats really didn't want Trump to win.
It's true that Biden's favorability is surprisingly high.
If it was about not wanting Trump to win, I'd expect enthusiasm to be pretty similar to 2016 (there's a case to be made that the pandemic raised the perceived stakes of the election, but IIRC worsening pandemic numbers actually lowered enthusiasm in other polls). Satisfaction with the primary candidates was also high (https://news.gallup.com/poll/284360/democrats-viewed-divided-satisfied-candidates.aspx), as is satisfaction with Biden's cabinet picks (https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/01/15/views-of-the-incoming-biden-administration/). Admittedly, these are all imperfect proxies for satisfaction with the current coalition and platform, but I wasn't seeing any polls more specific to the discussion at hand on a quick search.
Have you ever filled in any sort of social science survey?
I strongly suspect that they are going the way of phone polls. At first only a few weirdos refused to respond to phone polls. Then the entire educated class learned about push polls and decided they weren't going to be part of that nonsense. At which point phone polls lost all connection to usefulness.
I suspect the same is coming for "surveys". Every survey I encounter now, I can see the ideological bias. Sometimes it's very obvious (surveys that rate the employee with whom you interacted, but which provide no place to criticize the company POLICIES which are the real issue that matters, not the poor shmoe who answered your email). Sometimes it's "fish in water" stuff -- the people creating the survey are so steeped in a particular analysis of the world that they literally cannot understand that the respondent does not carve reality along those joint-lines.
So I suspect that survey data is becoming less and less accurate; telling the surveyors what they want to hear, but bearing ever less resemblance to reality.
A big part of the decline of phone polls is that if you get a call from a number you don't recognize, it's almost always a spam caller of some sort; there doesn't seem to be an analogous situation with online surveys. Is there an alternative way to measure public opinion on an issue that you think is more trustworthy?
Is there an alternative? I don’t think so. The basic concept (what the public believes) is incoherent. Even when you and I agree on a concept, my rating of 3 may (in some world where we can peer inside brains) be the equivalent of your rating of 7.
But usually we don’t agree on concepts:
“Should Congress ban assault rifles?”
Well maybe I care about this as written. Or maybe I don’t like assault rifles but I think federalism is more important than getting my way on guns. Or maybe I think guns are a stupid culture war frivolity that the powerful use to keep the masses ignoring things like tax law and corporate governance? Or maybe the primary thing I care about is indicating allegiance to my team, so I’ll just tick whatever my team believes is the correct response?
Admitting the vacuity of surveys, as currently constituted, would mean admitting the vacuity of most of social science. And people with the brains for philosophy, or capable of the abstractions required for better measures of “what a multitude of people believe” tend not to go into social science. Hell, Arrow and Condorcet show how vacuous the idea is even in the most carefully constrained situation, ie voting.
So, yeah, anything survey-like is a dead-end. I think we’re better off with idea-driven social science ala early 20th C. You want to validate the predictions in various ways (unlike early 20th C) and you absolutely want to dismiss theories (and their adherents) that fail the tests (yeah, good luck with that...); but I think we’d be vastly better off with vastly fewer social scientists, all engaged in a lot more thinking and a lot less survey generation.
You're kind of overlooking the Obama years, eh? And remember Hillary handily won the popular vote even while kneecapped by Comey, the Russians, and nonstop trump lies.
Some small realignments obviously occurred in reaction to trump, but nothing fundamental -- which is why the GOP's only remaining strategy has become voter suppression.
Trump enthusiasts loved the idea of blowing everything up -- and you seem totally titillated by it still. But unless and until the GOP finds a more sophisticated bomb thrower they're going to have a tough time corralling a majority of even the electoral college again.
It would be accurate to roughly describe the two coalitions now as pro-democracy and anti-democracy, but I think trump just brought these pre-existing biases to the surface. The bullies were always emotionally prepared to throw the rules overboard, while the rest of us -- cucks and losers no doubt -- have always sought refuge in the rules, and thus are hardwired to fight hard for those rules (even when it took 100 years to reverse Dred Scott).
You definitely can't tell by accent in the US (almost all the distinctive accents are low class, but I think only a minority of people speak any of the distinctive accents). You might be able to tell on the basis of what they talk about.
It used to be more true, and its more true in some areas than others.
Southerners especially used to be able to tell a lot about where what class you were and specifically where you were from by your speech. I'm not sure that's true anymore. (And now that I've written this, I'm getting shades of "Albion's Seed"...hmm...)
And I was surprised when my husband told me the Crane brothers on the sitcom "Frasier" were supposed to be upper class Bostonians. I'd always assumed they were vaguely British, but my husband had relatives in his grandparents generation who sounded a bit like that. They weren't upper class themselves, but being a very old and extremely well-educated family, as my husband put it "the Brahmins wouldn't have been ashamed to be seen with us."
I've learned that this is a "Mid-Atlantic prestige accent" and used to be much more common and meaningful before WWII. It was indeed an amalgam of British and regional American pronunciation with its roots in Southeast English regional accents. The most elite schools in the US taught it, so it was a key class marker, similar to "received pronunciation" in Britain. It was formalized as "World English" in the 1920s and most notably became a standard for actors. So when you hear Katherine Hepburn talking in old movies, that's what posh sounded like in the 1940s. William F. Buckley was another late example. Eventually it became a caricature of itself and fell out of favor, so I'm not sure the upper class has a sound in the United States anymore.
I think most people middle class above have the "General American" accent, and most people working class and below have regional accents. With some exceptions for people who've changed class. There used to be a Southern aristocrat accent, but I don't know if anyone still speaks it.
Another point for Trump being working class: he has a New York accent.
A lot of it depends on how sensitive your ear is and what region. Southerners definitely do not speak with a "generic american accent", and doing so in the South will get you pegged as a "yankee". That is, to the Southern ear, a genericAamerican accent is "from up north", which means, "not the south." I'd guess that half of all southern accents in American TV / Movies are completely fake. Texas is not the south, and a Texas accent is quite different from a Southern accent.
The comments about generic american accents being the norm for all but the lower classes is probably true everywhere but the South.
Ahh, fair point. I was definitely not thinking of Atlanta, which is technically the South but is now urban enough that it's lost a lot of its Southerness. Same can be said of Nashville. In either place, generic american accents probably don't raise eyebrows anymore like they did even 20 years ago. Old-money Atlanta definitely still has that aristocratic southern accent, but new-money Atlanta suburbanites may not...
"Then you would just have two groups of kids, each considering themselves superior and looking down on the other. And the currently-uncool-kid group would be bigger and probably win, insofar as it’s possible to win these things. So why don’t they do that? I have lots of partial answers, but still no satisfying one."
I think this has a lot to do with attractiveness. High school is where the early mating hierarchy is sorted out. Status confers attractiveness to some degree, but there are also some (innately or at least relatively immutably) attractive/unattractive features that go a long way toward determining status. If the uncool kids refused to acknowledge their 'inferiority', good for them, but a) this wouldn't magically make them attractive, they would still disproportionately be the relatively ugly/uncharismatic group; and b) because of a), at some level they probably wouldn't fully believe their own collective self-assessment.
to put it crudely: if a member from group A offers sex/romance to a member of group B, how likely are they to be accepted? And vice-versa? The answers will tell you which group is higher-status and has social power over the other, and they won't change much just because the uncool group decides to declare independence from the hierarchy.
While having the billionaires and the poor masses is one way to get both dollars and votes, you can also do it by just getting the people from the 70th to the 99th percentile of income. In the highest turnout election in a century, we only had 2/3 of people vote, and turnout tends to be highly correlated with income. So if you can get the 70th to 99th percentile of income on your side, then you may well have a majority of voters in any election, and you also have a majority of the wealth (it looks like 90th to 99th percentile have a bit over a third of wealth, and so do 50th to 90th, so 70th to 99th must be somewhat over half).
"and poor minorities get to have anti-racist math in school or whatever"
Do they really want that? I get the impression that they would be happy with actual math, and the anti-racist math is really there because Democratic activists want it. The actual opinions of the poor minorities are treated as being of no importance at all. This is how the Democrats drove the poor whites to the Republicans in the first place. I would not be especially surprised if the poor minorities followed them.
I think that antiracist math, defund police, etc., could very well be a group of issues that could push a lot of poorer people of all races to the Republicans. If, if, the Republicans can get on that message, polish a solid outreach effort, and squelch some of their worst adherents - instincts. Wokeism is almost (entirely) an obsession of the privileged class of whatever race. They get somethings rightish but often propose "solutions" hated by the poor person on the street who can readily see that they are more feel good then helpful.
Your description of the Democratic coalition seems wrong to me. First, support for the Democrats negatively correlates with income, although the magnitude of the income-party correlation is admittedly small (they win a lot of rich areas because they win cities and cities tend to be richer, but they win cities because they win black voters and cities have a lot of black people, not because they do particularly well among rich urbanites). Second, I don't think it makes sense to describe wokeness as being about symbolic concessions to minorities - among other things, black Democrats are usually more religious and socially conservative than white Democrats. Third, Democrats actually do push more redistributive policies than Republicans, which is the opposite of what you'd see if they were the party of powerful class interests + symbolic concessions to the lower classes.
The traditional 'Republicans are the party of rural whites, Democrats are the party of urban voters and minorities' explanation seems to do a much better job describing the coalitions than the class-based approach. If anything, wokeness is about getting college graduates (who are in general upper/upper-middle class) to support policies that are against their class interests for social reasons.
Another strike against the class-based explanation is that in general we expect members of one class to aspire to being members of the class above them (that's why it makes sense to talk about 'upper' 'middle' and 'lower' classes - there's a hierarchy, and everyone in that hierarchy agrees that it's better to be at the top of the hierarchy than the bottom), but we don't see Republicans aspiring to become Democrats or Democrats aspiring to become Republicans; instead, both parties think they're the good party and the other party's the bad party (really, this is my general objection to the idea of cultural class as a distinct thing from economic class; economic class forms a hierarchy and people at the same place in that hierarchy plausibly have shared political interests, while cultural class doesn't form a hierarchy and members of a shared cultural class only have shared political interests insofar as culture is a proxy for something else).
It should be unsurprising that conflict theory does a bad job explaining electoral coalitions; since voting is a total waste of time from a self-interested perspective, anyone who votes must have some level of altruistic motivation for doing so. You can maybe explain political platforms and donations in conflict terms since coordination on those is at least in principle possible, but it's a poor fit for the voters themselves.
"not because they do particularly well among rich urbanites)"
Wrong. Even in 2000, the income divide was largest in red states and smallest in blue states. Dems do well among rich urbanites; if they didn't, politics in Manhattan (18% Black/47% NHW) would resemble politics in Georgia.
"Second, I don't think it makes sense to describe wokeness as being about symbolic concessions to minorities"
Agree. Hillary Clinton's campaign only started using it in 2015; it hardly existed in Dem politics before that.
"Third, Democrats actually do push more redistributive policies than Republicans, which is the opposite of what you'd see if they were the party of powerful class interests + symbolic concessions to the lower classes. "
"Third, Democrats actually do push more redistributive policies than Republicans, which is the opposite of what you'd see if they were the party of powerful class interests + symbolic concessions to the lower classes."
This is backwards, redistributive policies are how the upper class maintains the underclass in a state of dependence and forcing the competition (upwardly mobile middle class) to pay for these policies is how they keep members of the middle class from catching up.
Archaeologists can tell whether Roman-era jewelry was made for Roman aristocrats or barbarian chiefs, because the latter is heavier and more obviously expensive. The chiefs needed to impress their followers, but the old money only worried about impressing each other.
I grew up rich and live mostly on family money. That post made me think of a small, crystallizing, pre-COVID interaction. Out to dinner with leftist 20-somethings who don't know each other that well, someone volunteered to put the check on his card, so we all started the cash pile/venmo dance, but he stopped us.
Card-holder said "guys, I know this is awkward to say, but... I have money," and explained he was coming off a highly lucrative job and it really wasn't a big deal for them to pick up a pricey dinner for his friends. (Sounds dickish in writing, but he meant it self-effacingly, maybe because of the leftist part.)
This struck me as a big social class vs. economic class divide. I can't even tell you how many times I've covered dinner or the taxi or whatever and agreed to send the other parties a venmo request and just never followed up. I was taught to do this and almost nobody calls me on it. Why would they? Card-holder felt compelled to sheepishly explain and apologize for his newfound riches. How could he know The First Rule Of Wealth Club as it pertains to Talking About Wealth Club?
In my (UK) bit of the class hierarchy, quiet competition over paying for the thing and not asking the other party to share is extremely upper middle class behaviour - you show your moral superiority by being the one to quietly pick up the check first, you never ever talk about money.
The weird branch of middle class that is the highly paid technical class tends to be sheepish about money like your anecdote.
If both of you are so desperate to show your magnanimousness, you could both pay the full amount of the meal, and the server can take half as a tip. Everyone wins!
Ha - great idea. That would be worth doing just to see how the server reacts.
However my goal in trying to pay the check isn't to make a grand gesture; it's to *save these parents money*. I'm in my prime earning years and they're retirees on budgets!
>My girlfriend's father will actually call the restaurant in advance, arrange payment for whatever the check comes to, and tip the server upon arrival.
That is a class-ninja-master move. Doesn't get cooler than that - all you need to add is the server saying "your usual table Sir?"
Re why don't the uncool kids declare themselves cool, thereby breaking the middle-school class system:
One way you can test if this worked is for you and your new-cool friends to throw a party on the same night as an old-cool party. Which party would more people prefer to go to (assuming they were invited to both)? I'm guessing they'll prefer the old-cool party because of a mix of
-- fundamental reasons: the old-cool kids will have more alcohol, prettier girls, etc.
-- common-knowedge-type reasons: people wants to pick the same party that everyone else will pick, and it seems like this will resolve to them all picking the old-cool party.
(Not sure why, but this puzzle tickles the same part of my brain as the question "Why do stocks change price even though there's always an equal number of buyers and sellers?")
Something occurred to me while reading this on the subject of "what is upper class, actually, if it's not money or power or whatever?" / "Why would Bezos care to be in the club at all?" / "Why would they maybe not want Bezos in the club?"
In a word: History. In more words:
Imagine a $3mm+ Bugatti supercar that only someone rich could afford. It's a hand made super car, must be super classy, right? Wrong! It's a neat gadget and all, but you know what would be actually cool? The hand-made Bugatti supercar that King Aelfred the Great drove into battle against the Danes! This very car!
The one word "history" doesn't fully capture it, as demonstrated by a different example, which is that a very expensive house isn't cool until it's designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and clothing isn't cool no matter what it's made out of, unless it's designed personally for you by <someone world class famous>, and only then really if it pushes the envelope on what is possible for that kind of clothing, and not in a gauche way, but in a “now the world of this clothing item is forever different, and it all started with this particular… <smock>.”
It seems to sort of be about exclusivity, which is a word I hear in the space a lot, but it seems to me that it's really about whether something is "historical," ie. pivotally embedded in the structure of the world we know. The exclusivity seems like more a side effect compared to that. Details obfuscated for privacy, but I had a friend who owned a mansion near downtown <famous city> that had been a famous church in the past, but had been redesigned as a mansion by <world famous architect>--the coolness of it was a sort of trifecta of historic significance and cultural cache. It was a little overt for the upper uppers I think, but they have similar shit quietly going on all the time.
Anyway, taking the thesis, it's not hard for me to imagine that the decedents of JJ Astor or John Rockefeller are *themselves*, a little bit historically pivotal "artifacts." The actual sword of Napoleon, the actual heir of <your favorite robber baron>.
So for old money, there's a kind of rarefied air intrinsic to them. What of Bezos then?
Well being rich ain't it, but Bezos is historic now. He's not the rich tech CEO of bullshit app LCC, he's the historically pivotal founder of Amazon, which changed the world, and the world will be different now. Sure he’s crazy rich which doesn’t hurt, but the real thing is that in 100 years Bezos will be a name with cache, like Carnegie or something. You can tell that right now, even though he’s not yet “history,” he's obviously "historically important." So he, like the heir of a robber baron, has a rarefied air that's intrinsic to him, and so can be upper class.
The model is a little too crisp to be fully right, and I didn't talk about how something or someone falls from grace, but I think the gist is right.
As for the question of why the uncool kids can't just decide that they're the cool ones - in Rick Perlstein's excellent "Nixonland", he says that Richard Nixon had exactly this idea in college, and managed to make it work pretty well. He also ties this in to Nixon's future success at building a Republican "silent majority" coalition of anti-hippie reaction vs. the latte-sipping NYT-reading 70s liberal "consensus". If I may quote at length:
>As a schoolboy he hadn't a single close friend, preferring to cloister himself up in the former church's bell tower, reading, hating to ride the school bus because he thought the other children smelled bad. At Whittier, a fine Quaker college of regional reputation unknown anywhere else, he embarked upon what might have been his most humiliating job of all: learning to be a backslapping hail-fellow-well-met. ("I had the impression he would even practice his inflection when he said 'hello,'" a reporter later observed.) The seventeen-year-old blossomed when he realized himself no longer alone in his outsiderdom: the student body was run, socially, by a circle of swells who called themselves the Franklins, and the remainder of the student body, a historian noted, "seemed resigned to its exclusion." So this most unfraternal of youth organized the remnant into a fraternity of his own. Franklins were well-rounded, graceful, moved smoothly, talked slickly. Nixon's new club, the Orthogonians, was for the strivers, those not to the manner born, the commuter students like him. He persuaded his fellows that reveling in one's unpolish was a nobility of its own. Franklins were never photographed save in black tie. Orthogonians worse shirtsleeves. "Beans, brains, and brawn" was their motto. He told them *orthogonian*—basically, "at right angles"—meant "upright," "straight shooter." Also, their enemies might have added, all elbows.
>The Orthogonians' base was among Whittier's athletes. On the surface, jocks seem natural Franklins, the Big Men on Campus. But Nixon always had a gift for looking under social surfaces to see and exploit the subterranean truths that roiled underneath. It was an eminently Nixonian insight: that on every sports team there are only a couple of stars, and that if you want to win the loyalty of the team for yourself, the surest, if least glamorous, strategy is to concentrate on the nonspectacular—silent—majority. The ones who labor quietly, sometimes resentfully, in the quarterback's shadow: the linemen, the guards, the punter. Nixon himself was exemplarily nonspectacular: the 150-pounder was the team's tackle dummy, kept on squad by a loving, tough, and fatherly coach who appreciated Nixon's unceasing grit and team spirit—nursing hurt players, cheering on the listless, even organizing his own team dinners, entertaining the guests on the piano, perhaps favoring them with the Orthogonian theme song. It was his own composition.
>Nixon beat a Franklin for student body president. Looking back later, acquaintances marveled at the feat of this awkward, skinny kid the yearbook called "a rather quiet chap about campus," dour and brooding, who couldn't even win a girlfriend, who attracted enemies, who seemed, a schoolmate recalled, "the man least likely to succeed in politics." They hadn't learned what Nixon was learning. Being hated by the right people was no impediment to political success. The unpolished, after all, were everywhere in the majority.
> in the quarterback's shadow: the linemen, the guards, the punter
This line outs the author and his editors as of the conspicuously-ignorant-of-football persuasion: guard is one of the linemen positions.
For the curious:
- The offensive line is five positions, arranged from the middle out: center, two guards, two tackles.
- The defensive line is four positions, arranged from the middle out: two guards, two tackles.
These are usually the biggest and strongest players on the team. Their job is to battle each other for dominance of the line: the offense wants to prevent anyone stopping the quarterback from throwing the ball, and if possible open a hole for a running back to go through; the defense wants to stop anyone from running through the line with the ball, and if possible block a pass or tackle the quarterback.
I grew up not exactly poor, because the wolf was never at the door, but we sure didn't have any extra money, either. But in a million years we wouldn't have called attention to something we owned. That would have been unthinkably vulgar. These days I'm not what you would call spectacularly wealthy, but we're quite comfortable, and we still wouldn't dream of crowing about an expensive possession. Somehow we absorbed the lesson that you always keep a straight face and assume that any financial competence or luxury is completely normal, not worth comment. What's more, there's scarcely anything more vulgar than exhibiting anxiety over loss or damage to something fine, like a spill on a good carpet or knocking over a goblet. Wherever that comes from, it's not from ancestors in the Social Register.
The Siege engine thing is from Mitch Benn - I think it was on a live Edinburgh festival recording called "The Unnecessary Mitch Benn", which unfortunately does not appear to exist to buy any more - although anyone who finds it would have my gratitude!
In his version, he makes it sound more martial by sounding out the syllables - Rho - Do - Den - Dron!
Yeah, the democrats are on solid ground. It would have taken more vote switching to make HRC president in 2016 than Trump in 2020, after he botched literally everything about a pandemic. And now with an old white guy president they can't just scapegoat any criticism as racist, like when Obama intentionally maximised the number of foreclosures on poor people or refused to prosecute his Wall Street campaign donors for blowing up the economy. There is decidedly much less room for their usual dog and pony show. And I'm sure $2k right away that turned into $1400 for less people in 4 months and not even pretending to fight for $15min wage will really do wonders for base turn out. There has never been a ruling class more deserving of guillotines than ours.
Can you explain this to me? I thought argument back in December was, "$600 isn't enough, it should be $2000." So now they're plusing up the original $600 to make it to $2k total. Were people, back in December before the lame duck relief bill got passed, arguing for $2600? Or are they just trying to punish the Dem establishment for not moving far enough to the left?
I get using this as a rhetorical bludgeon if think $2000 wasn't enough to begin with, but it strikes me as completely disingenuous to act as if its some sort of broken promise.
Aside: It reminds me of the M4A debate, where the phrase "Medicare for All" got thrown around, gained wide acceptance, and then when plans started coming out, it turned into, "Nono, M4A actually means abolishing private insurance, and your universal coverage plan doesn't do that so you're a big liar" or something to that effect.
These are both intra-party conflicts with the Dems. Are there other examples I'm missing? Do Republicans do this too? (Border wall, perhaps?)
> Were people, back in December before the lame duck relief bill got passed, arguing for $2600?
Not specifically. The argument usually given is that many Democrats were apparently not interested in updating their messaging and were promising "a $2000 check" without fine print... in January, after the $600 was in the rear-view mirror.
One particularly egregious example from 1/14 had congressman Adam Schiff (D-CA) describe the plan on Twitter as "new $2k relief checks" (specifically using the word 'new') _while quoting_ a NYT reporter who correctly stated that Biden's plan contained "$1,400 checks for individuals".
Incidentally it might make more sense if you know that a common progressive ask since early in the pandemic has been _$2k checks monthly_. Even outside of the mixed messaging, that surely contributes both to a) the demand that the amount be $2K and b) the unwillingness to have a second check coming one to three months later considered part of the "same" payment.
"When I was in middle school, I used to wonder - there are cool kids and uncool kids, right? But suppose all the uncool kids agreed to think of themselves as cool, and to make fun of the currently-cool kids. ... So why don’t they do that? I have lots of partial answers, but still no satisfying one. I feel the same way about the upper class."
They don't do it because truly "cool" people have something ineffable called charisma. Charisma is totally real, and freaking amazing. I don't know quite how common it is; in my (upper class-ish) high school of about 400 boys I'd say there was one who was charismatic enough that solitary anti-social me noticed.
So I don't think the totality of cool kids at school are charismatic. But there will be one or two (the "genuinely cool") that are, and I suspect the rest get there by good looks, money and charisma's poor relative, confidence. Confidence ain't much in the real, adult, world, but it's rare enough in school that it will likely do in a pinch.
I raise these points because I suspect at least part of what counts as upper class is penumbrae around confidence and charisma. I suspect this also decays with generations. The founder of the dynasty generally has something special, some combination of extreme confidence, charisma, competence, and ruthlessness. Though he (usually he, let's get real) may be a lousy father, he still instills some sort of confidence plus above averageness in the kids. Throw in money, good tutors, good exemplars, and you have a generation that at least project confidence ala knowing how to dress, carry themselves, and talk to adults as adults. With decent wives along the way, this may even last through the grandkids.
But (generally by the grandkids, rare to even last to the 4th generation) the discipline and competence of the founder are no longer visible and we no longer see aristocracy as "the best among us", rather we see eurotrash. They have the money, they often have the undeserved confidence, they absolutely lack the charisma (or even charm), or the competence.
So I suspect the "uppermost class" is always one that is divided in two.
There's the sinking 3rd generation and later, the best of which just want to be left alone, the worst of which are constantly ranting about blood and breeding when they aren't snorting heroin.
Meanwhile there's the rising second generation or the founders (maybe considered nouveau richer, but too wealthy too ignore), people in whom there is a lot to genuinely admire, even if not the whole package.
As a single group, uncool kids don't have much in common with each other, so they can't make their own status ladder. But, as I recall, there were some groups that looked down upon each other and considered the others uncool.
There is no real lower class constituency for "anti racist math"
This sort of policy is for signalling among college educated people. It's a ratchet where the in group personal costs for being against it are much higher than the outgroup political costs for being for it.
This is David shors whole thesis. The Democratic party was captured by college educated white people. College educated white people are very different from most other groups.
He writes about how when he was working for a Democratic ad company and whenever his company had an ad that the people inside just loved... They would get the actual test results back and it would be shown to slightly increase trump support. That's because the people staffing the campaigns are idealistic college educated 20 somethings while the average voter is 51 with no college degree.
Ibram kendi doesn't speak for all black people. Heck, the implications of white fragility for Democratic strategy are entirely ignored.
"White fragility" says that when white people are reminded of their own role within/ benefits from systemic racism, they tend to react sangrily and defensively. For college educated white people, thats great. "We're going to go upset the oppressors and wake up the masses and right the injustice" They happily castigate and point out injustices and collect plaudits from fellow people in their own group.
Remember, it was black voters in South Carolina that out Biden over the top in the primary.
For actual minorities in the Democratic coalition, making white people angry and increasing the share of them voting based on racial grievance isn't a costless endeavour. They don't want to lose body cameras debates because people are turned off by "defund yhe police" They would really like the woke class to tone it down. They were the ones who said, "You know what? We will choose the boring white guy, because the 2 or 3% penalty we get from choosing someone who activates white animus isn't something that we can afford to lose.
I've seen two perspectives in the comments here about De Novo Coolgenesis in Homo Nerdicus - Either something very theoretical, or just because, well, if they were that socially adept, they wouldn't need to decide they were cool. I agree with the latter, so here's my attempt to flesh it out a little bit.
Social interaction is a dance. You can be genuine and not bother about the status games! But the "cool" people are defined as those that choose to play the status games, and do well at them.
But you can learn how to salsa. You can learn how to dance. So here's how to dance. Go up to a group of "cool" kids (Read: Kids whose majors are not especially intellectually taxing, if you're not in university) and introduce yourself. Be agreeable, don't look for reasons to start arguments. Observe the injokes and social mores of the group. Don't try to use them yourself, just make note of them. Inevitably, you will be asked a question, or somehow prompted to share about yourself. You have joined the dance, and now they are seeing if you can dance with them. Be careful about what you say. Reply with an agreeable answer, but don't make it seem like you're avoiding answering - it's fine to share your honest opinion, but present it well. Do not go out of your way to share some sort of unpopular opinion. Mind your body language - be confident, but don't force your way in. You have no social cachet with these people right now, and you're only really there because nobody has a particular reason to want you to leave.
Keep up the dance. Engage when prompted. Don't try to change the dynamic. Slip in. Have a good time. You know what? You won't get kicked out or ostracized. Hell, it'll probably work - these people will think you're a pretty nice person - by that, I mean Normal, and not Weird. Note that Normal and Weird are genuinely terms used to describe frat memberships, which should tell you about how blatant these social games get!
So what's the purpose of me telling you this? Well, it's tiring. If you don't do it often, it's real tiring. You have to be on a low level of alert for the steps and the moves of the dance, while picking up what your partners are doing. Personally, my studies wear me out enough - I simply don't have the energy, nor inclination or time, to engage in it. It surely gets easier, but social skills are a muscle, like anything else. It's tiring if you know the blueprint to follow. If you don't, and you try to dance with the cool kids? You'll trip over yourself. In this way, a feedback cycle is created. If, early on, you encounter social success and stay with the social arms race as it develops through the grades, you're a Cool Kid. If you fall behind early and don't get back on the truck in time, you're not.
If the Uncool Kids tried to decide they were cool, they would be using the label without the criteria, because coolness is defined as the ability to dance the dance. And if they were socially adept enough to see the relativity of those terms, they would already be able to dance the dance. That's how you get stuff being defined as "Cringe." It's not because people are passionate about stuff. It's because they're not dancing the dance when they express it.
I'd add that learning this dance will make you good at things like "networking" and "schmoozing", which my younger self was disappointed to find are actually very useful things for many careers.
> This also sparked a discussion about whether Donald Trump was “upper class”, with one person arguing in support that he owns gold toilets, and someone else responding that gold toilets are the least classy thing imaginable. Good summation of the difference between economic vs. cultural models of class!
The way I frame it is that Donald Trump appeals to some of the cultural lower class because he acts the way a cultural-lower-class person might (approvingly!) imagine themselves acting if they became a billionaire: solid gold toilets, still eating McDonalds, making big explicit fuck-yous to anyone in their way. Staying real instead of acting all hoity-toity.
I think the analysis Scott makes of the Democratic coalition is a bit off. Imo, David Shor has the correct take.
Basically, the Democratic coalition consists of two groups: (mostly?) affluent (always) educated whites that vote overwhelmingly for the left because they are genuinely left wing, at least in abstract terms, in both economic and cultural matters, and minorities that vote overwhelmingly D for historical reasons (or misconceptions, I guess, if you are a proud Republican). The minorities are usually poorer and more conservative in cultural matters, although even in economic ones they are less radical. The only way the coalition can remain competitive is if racial polarization remains very high. When minorities stop voting D overwhelmingly (when the 60s Civil Rights coalition inertia runs its course, as it seems to be happening since the last election) the game is up and they will have to become 25% less woke, maybe even slightly less wing economically, although not much because populism just polls well in general.
Corollary: anti racist math is really to please the elites in the Democratic party, it’s not a concession. The elites can afford such off-putting stuff because, as I wrote, 90% of blacks and hispanics will vote for them anyways. The Scott Hypothesis only works with the Republican party, which genuinely does culture war stuff to please its more prole base while pushing tax cuts nobody but the Kochs like.
"But suppose all the uncool kids agreed to think of themselves as cool, and to make fun of the currently-cool kids. Then you would just have two groups of kids, each considering themselves superior and looking down on the other. And the currently-uncool-kid group would be bigger and probably win, insofar as it’s possible to win these things. So why don’t they do that?"
Speaking only for myself: because being unable to play-act socially in this way is exactly (or at least part of) what makes uncool kids uncool.
As covered in the classic: https://hotelconcierge.tumblr.com/post/140529495929/need-a-title
Wow! Thanks for sharing this, did not expect this kind of rabbit hole. Although I will kiss y’all, now that I must unsubscribe from Alexander, Cowen & Co so I can finally live my prototype and not obsess over the script.
Miss* ;)
That person writes an awful lot like Alone (The Last Psychiatrist blog).
I have a powerful memory of my first day in middle school. I'd gotten into a magnet middle school while all the rest of my elementary school class had gone to the regular middle school up the street. In between first and second period a new kid (they were all new) walks up to me:
Kid 1: Hey
Me: Hey
Kid 1: What’s your name?
Me: Uh, *name*
Kid 1: Are you cool *name*?
Me: uhhhh what do you mean by cool?
Kid 1 (instantly): You’re not cool
He walked away confidently, having inflicted a powerful lesson. But the day wasn’t over yet. Sometime in the afternoon a new new kid and his friend (they were all new) walks up to me:
Kid 2: Hey
Me: Hey
Kid 2: What’s your name?
Me: *Name*
Kid 2: Are you cool *name*?
Me (instantly): Yeah. Yeah I’m cool
Kid 2 (to Kid 3): See, that’s how you can tell they’re really cool, no hesitation
Thanks Kid 1, your lesson reverberates still
I went to a 7-12 school for gifted kids, and on the first day of seventh grade, a chubby little pale kid in horn-rimmed glasses who already had his binder perfectly organized discovered that his seat-mate had screwed it all up. Whereupon Horn-Rim shouts "You imbecile!" at the top of his lungs and beans his seat-mate on the head with said binder. Minutes later, a kid whose mother sent him to school in a full suit and tie answered his name at roll call with "Present and prepared!".
While the subtleties about how to be cool are particle-physics nuanced, the broad strokes are obvious, undeniable, and objective.
"Ray, when someone asks you if you are a god, you say yes!"
If you happen to have an "A J Vermillion" in your family, I'd love to know which of my relatives reads Scott
Coolness is ordinal - it's a thing that cool kids have and uncool kids want. If it's not wanted, you just have different social ecosystems that may or may not intersect. Uncool kids can't just define away their want of coolness, or define a new coolness that the currently-cool kids will covet.
There's also logistical issues in forming an alliance as large as "all the uncool kids", but I was going to say something similar. I think "coolness" has at least some grounding in observable individual traits. If you could wave a magic wand and make everyone in the school forget the old status hierarchy so that they had to develop a new one from scratch, I predict the new one would look pretty similar to the old one.
I think the reason is that "coolness" is a prestige hierarchy; it means something close to "how much you would like to have this person as a friend". (Which probably starts with physical attractiveness and social skills as a baseline, and then gets modified from there.) This predicts that people who share your interests and who treat you nicely will seem cooler *to you*, even if they don't seem cool to other observers--plausible?
This is true. And.it's innate. I remember in kindergarten the leader of the class was the most beautiful and wealthiest girl, and we all did what she said.
The advantage of attending a high school with a graduating class of over 1000 students during the latter apathetic (that's literally what our elders called us) 1970s was that status hierarchies were plural and not that important. Most of the people in the school were relative strangers to one another, which created a kind of neutral public space. Finding your own people was way more important than climbing some general ladder of coolness or popularity.
I suspect this is less about the high school than the student.
The loner student who is blind to class distinctions and the desperately lonely student who understands every nuance of insult in Jane Austen (and her many imitators) will have very different experiences at the exact same high school.
I suspect also that the US TV/movie version of this that we all see is strongly skewed from the mean experience for precisely this reason -- the kind of person who gravitates to Hollywood (or to accumulating a million followers, or whatever) is very much the kind of person obsessed with every social detail (and snub) of high school, while 90% of the students don't know, don't care, about this drama going on within the 10%.
(Meaning, perhaps, that something like Gossip Girl, the "in-crowd" version of the story is maybe basically correct; while, I don't know, maybe Buffy or Young Sheldon, the "out-crowd" version of the story is much less correct -- very much a projection by the cool kids or at least the cool kid wannabe's on the couldn't-care-less vast majority.
It's interesting to see how shows aimed at actual teens and tweens, think the entire Dan Schneider corpus like Victorious, care very little about these supposed distinctions...
There are no cool vs uncool kids at Hollywood Arts except as a deliberate parody nod to "yes, we know, this is what school on TV is supposed to be like; isn't it ridiculous?")
I had this situation too. There were so many people that there wasn't an objective group of "popular" kids that everyone agreed were popular, because not everyone knew everyone else. Additionally, nobody became a loner due to weird hobbies, because there were so many other people they formed their own subgroups and became cool within those subgroups. The nerds don't need to beg the sports jocks for invites to parties when they can just go to gaming club and play with all of their gaming friends, or math club, or join the band. Every niche had many times more people in it, so people were a lot less lonely in their niche.
Same thing here, I went to a high school as large as some colleges (2800 students). The hallways during class changes were comically crowded - think commuting on the busiest NYC or Tokyo streets - with students shoulder-to-shoulder and crotch-to-butt trying to speed-shuffle across campus in like 3 minutes. Forget finding a seat in the cafeteria - there *were* never available seats in the cafeteria.
People would inevitably hang out in formal clubs and informal groups, but there wasn't a "popular" crowd and most people didn't know who was on the football team or being nominated for prom queen.
Fast Times at Ridgemont High is 1981.
My *guess* is that it basically acts as the prototype for this sort of understanding of high school. There are earlier movies (American Graffiti? The Last Picture Show?) that show US high school life, but while you can of course see in them the eternals of human society (wealth, popularity, ...), you don't see the explicit carving up into cliques that was such a feature of Fast Times, and of course immediately embraced by John Hughes.
Points are
(a) Fast Times was, of course, based on Clairemont High School. Enrollment now 900 (I assume much the same in 1980, but ???). That's not as large as 2800, but it's also not what I would consider a small town high school.
By my experience it would count as a large high school, but by US experience of the past 20 years?
(b) Like a lot of what is claimed to be "standard" in US history, I see these school stereotypes as essentially constructed by pop culture, not natural. People then grow up into this pop culture and interpret it to fit their situation. (cf a certain type of girl grows up in the US today and interprets/controls her situation via anorexia. Exact same girl grows up in a very orthodox Jewish household 50 years ago and interprets/controls her situation via OCD. 100 years ago via "hysteria" ala Freud. 500 years via accusations of [or belief that she is] a witch. 1000 years ago via religious frenzy and becoming a nun.)
It's not *inaccurate* to say that certain behavior occurs, and to say that it's interpreted by the kids in a certain way. But the ways that behavior is explained as "intrinsic to society" or "proving my theory of humanity", and very definitely the claims that it is a universal experience, are, I think, bad world analysis.
It's another version of the stupid (but eternal) trope that the girls just over the ridge are willing to have sex with everyone (even you!) New Yorkers are saying the the California girls are just like that ("The Sure Thing"). Americans are saying the Swedish girls are just like that. British are saying that about the Australian girls. And so on and so on.
Believing this about the cool kids and the jocks is more of the same. Yes, in the movies Van Wilder and the Quarterback are rolling in wall to wall vaj. In the real world, there's basically not that much difference. The Quarterback may be going out with the prettiest girl, but the median experience is that he wants it now (and all the time) and she wants to wait. It's that she breaks up with him (or vice versa), he feel heartbreak, he finds it difficult to find someone else who makes him happy, etc etc. The cast may be prettier and wealthier but the emotions and the experiences are mostly the same intensity.
Hell, even Fast Times, being like I said, the prototype and still grounded in reality before the trope vanishes up its own fundament in fantasy projection. captures this. Brad Hamilton may be the most popular kid at school but he suffers heartbreak, and in the real world he loses his job and is laughed at.
As I try to say over and over again, one swallow does not a summer make.
Your school may have had one charismatic kid, and a reasonable number of bullshitters. But it likely did not have any Wilt Chamberlains, scoring with the fifty prettiest girls in school in his senior year.
The main difference that does matter is that there's a lowest 10% who are truly lonely; they cannot find a connection at the level they want with anyone. Mostly I don't think it's the STEM kids; they have each other and they're aware enough of delayed gratification to know that "it gets better". Of course they lust for the prettiest in the school -- we all do; that's what it MEANS to be the prettiest. But that's the human condition. We lust for the prettiest, we make do with someone nice, and if we're smart, lucky, and choose well, we manage to convert our choice into the prettiest *for us*.
The ones I truly weep for are the broken kids -- broken bodies, broken brains, broken minds and personalities. They are the ones perfectly aware of how undesirable they are, and perfectly aware they it ain't ever gonna get better. They are the ones who need every damn consolation religion can offer them.
The wannabe's (which is what the movies are projecting, as are most of these internet discussions) will do just fine, will mostly in time get what they deserve. The decent smart ones will get decent smart partners. The mean horrible ones will get mean horrible partners and will divorce and remarry five times. Karma's not perfect (not for the broken kids it certainly ain't) but it works out mostly OK at the wannabe (and STEM kids, and cool kids) level.
Spend less time thinking about the past, spend less time chasing perfection right now, and spend more time considering, of the pool of options available, what will keep you happy over the next fifty years. Coolness ain't it -- but niceness probably is. So make yourself nice, hang out with nice people, and let the cool kids play their status games.
Another common inaccuracy is the idea that all popular kids are gratuitously mean to the less popular. I'm sure that that happens, and exclusion from close friendship is certainly likely, but a lot of the good-looking popular types try to cultivate (or naturally achieve) a level of public graciousness that makes them seem more desirable socially. The people who like to bully and pick on the weaker and socially excluded are often either a few tiers down and looking to elevate themselves or are cultivating a "tough outsider" self-image of some kind.
It was my experience that *most* kids are gratuitously mean to the less popular, except the kids at the very top.
It’s usually the social strata right above you that are the cruelest. The Uber cool have nothing to prove, the guys who are just barely cooler than you have to work to disassociate themselves with you
Paul Graham has an interesting perspective on this: cool kids spend all their time being cool, so they maximize their coolness function. Uncool kids ("nerds") spend some time on something else, so they can't do as well and lose the coolness competition. Also, uncool kids use phrases like "maximize their coolness function". http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html
I’m pretty sure no matter how much time I devoted to being cool I would have failed. But by high school I knew I was just too weird to ever be a “cool kid” and no longer cared.
One helpful thing was going to a gigantic high school. The coolness stakes are relatively low when you take ten steps away from your cool friends and *nobody recognizes you*. When they announced our prom king’s name, I had no idea who he was. He was popular enough to have been voted prom king, but My friends and I had never seen him before. That might have kept the cool kids grounded in reality and soothed the nerd psyche a bit more than a smaller environment would have.
In my experience, there were definitely some kids who fought their way up the hierarchy by focused effort. And there were some who probably could have been very high-status had they tried, but who didn't bother. But there were also heaps of kids who were almost effortlessly high-status, just by virtue of being naturally charismatic and/or good looking. And plenty who could never have become seriously cool even if they really wanted to (which some of them clearly did).
Personally I probably could have raised my status somewhat, had I dedicated myself to doing so, but there's no way I would have made it very far up the ladder. (Or, supposing it really was technically possible, it would have required broad and deep changes that most of the actual cool kids pretty clearly hadn't made.)
I'm in high school, and my group of friends (since I read this blog you can guess where I stand in coolness...) calls the phenomenon of popularity "quicksand," it takes so much of your attention to maintain that image that it sucks you from academic pursuits. I had a teacher the other day tell me that at her school our group would have been the "cool" group, but I just don't know how that would've worked. What was cool back then? Has it changed?
I’m not sure, but it was pretty unambiguous in my late 90s high school that we nerds actually *ran everything*. Who gave enough of a crap to stay and plan dances and the prom, run all the performances, manage the sports teams, and put together the yearbook? The overachievers. Almost the every social and extracurricular outlet was run by one of the 10% of the school in honors classes. The effect of this was that if large numbers of your peers were actually going to *see* you being cool, you had to be involved in some activity managed by nerds. I guess you could go be cool in the parking lot and maybe there were some hot people hanging out there, but if you wanted to hear a stadium or auditorium cheer or wolf whistle (the key barometer of your popularity before social media), you had to play ball with geeky people trying to pad their college applications.
Huh, that’s actually true. I guess I’ve had people basically pretend to treat me like an equal but then once I’ve helped them edit their essay or whatever just forget I exist. I’ve chosen to be a nerd though, that kind of stuff doesn’t hurt me bc I chose the path I did and I’m proud of it. But yes, the nerds are the ones who organize the sports event where the “cool” people get to show off.
In my wife's southern high school (and even middle school, I think) back in the 1970s they had "sororities" that contained the girls who planned all the dances and proms and such. They were emphatically not nerds, but tended to come from better-off families, and had lots of practice and role models for entertaining and throwing parties.
Interesting- I suppose a lot of this comes down to cultural expectations. I suppose where institutions like a high school sorority exist, you might be brought up in the expectation of filling a social role associated with popularity regardless of your personal attributes. This is probably more true if your mom was also in the sorority.
In my huge public high school in the NYC suburbs, we were fairly economically and socially homogenous, and projects more or less fell to those willing to do them. The result was a bit like the cast of “Big Bang Theory” planning a prom for the cast of “Jersey Shore”. Picture that if you will.
There's a Wonder Years episode where Kevin rejects the "picking teams" model, and just intentionally goes in reverse order to form the worst possible team. We started doing that in high school gym and it was actually pretty liberating. The games became total nonsense and the other team winning had no meaning, but us scoring a single point was talked about for weeks. The most dubious advocate of this strategy is probably Curley from Of Mice and Men, who only picks fights against bigger guys so he never really loses. Deng Xiaopeng's 24-character strategy is a bit about this. And I'm sure Hegel or Nietzsche would probably claim they covered this in some dialectic or aphorism.
Maybe this was happening at a broader social level as most of the geek hobbies became dominant at one point or another over the last thirty years.
I always went to relatively small schools (in the 100-250 students per grade, including college) and, in my observation, coolness was always a time-limited resource. Very important during freshman year but dropped off as time went on and became basically irrelevant by Senior year.
So, sure, freshman year you might live or die by your overall popularity, but that's because the group hasn't really atomized yet and coolness is the only metric by which you're judged. Come senior year though, well, the theater kids hang with the theater kids, the nerds hang with the nerds, the jocks associate with the jocks and so on and so on. I suppose there's still some need for inter-group social capital, but you're going to care more about maximizing your in-group "coolness" and when those two resources happen to diverge the correct play is always to maximize in-group coolness.
I read Fussell when it first came out and have reread it at least once a decade since. You could have done more with his "high prole" group, e.g., Trump. Prole taste + $$$ = ??
"I am against wokeness on moral/epistemic grounds"
Is there some other post where this is explicitly spelled out?
There are a number of posts on his previous blog on various aspects of this. "I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup", "The Toxoplasma of Rage", and "Untitled" are good things to read here, though the latter is more specifically relevant.
If you found those good reading, "Lies, Damned Lies, And Social Media (Part 5 of ∞)" and "Living By The Sword" are also good; section 7 from "Nonfiction Writing Advice" is peripherally relevant and the whole thing is useful for, well, nonfiction writing advice.
There are other posts, but those are as good a starting point as any.
I'm almost impressed by people who can reference SSC as if they were its official librarians as I am by the content of SSC.
I think it's partly that Scott is good at creating good "concept handles". To quote section #9 of https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/02/20/writing-advice/:
"The idea of concept-handles is itself a concept-handle; it means a catchy phrase that sums up a complex topic.
Eliezer Yudkowsky is really good at this. “belief in belief“, “semantic stopsigns“, “applause lights“, “Pascal’s mugging“, “adaptation-executors vs. fitness-maximizers“, “reversed stupidity vs. intelligence“, “joy in the merely real” – all of these are interesting ideas, but more important they’re interesting ideas with short catchy names that everybody knows, so we can talk about them easily.
I have very consciously tried to emulate that when talking about ideas like trivial inconveniences, meta-contrarianism, toxoplasma, and Moloch.
I would go even further and say that this is one of the most important things a blog like this can do. I’m not too likely to discover some entirely new social phenomenon that nobody’s ever thought about before. But there are a lot of things people have vague nebulous ideas about that they can’t quite put into words. Changing those into crystal-clear ideas they can manipulate and discuss with others is a big deal.
If you figure out something interesting and very briefly cram it into somebody else’s head, don’t waste that! Give it a nice concept-handle so that they’ll remember it and be able to use it to solve other problems!"
Hmm, yeah, but like internet memes this can be troubling, especially when a "concept-handle" gives birth to material/political energy in which most nuance and independent thought has been burned off. Scott may enjoy seeing his well-thought-out conclusions "briefly crammed" into many heads, but not all heads are like Scott's, so they process the shorthand in endlessly different ways.
What remains is often a dumbed-down political consensus (political in the sense that people are comfortable enough with the facile implications of nebulous naming (like "wokeness" or "cancel culture") to declare their allegiances at water coolers and polling places even though they may only possess a cartoonish understanding of their newfound commitments.
Ultimately, sloganeering is a tool of propaganda. Useful sometimes perhaps in the real world, but an inherently ugly power tool when you really think about it -- not to be celebrated or elevated. Its abuses in totalitarian cultures are obvious, but it is also central to modern capitalism.
Should I "create my own opportunities" or "go with the flow"? Obviously, life requires balance, but instead I will brand myself according to whichever cultural nook or cranny I've nestled into, making me a living concept-handle!
I think there is a big advantage in having a clear term for a concept or phenomenon. It both helps you remember the concept, and helps you describe why it applies to some situation. Catchy self-describing terms are better for this than more obscure terms. Concepts like Nash equilibrium or the Bradley Effect are useful to have in your toolkit, but the terms don't help you remember them or make them easier to understand. By contrast, steelmanning, proves-too-much, paperclip-maximizer, etc., give you at least some hint about their meaning in the terms. Similarly, you can get this from other people: hate hoax (Sailer), rational astrology (Waldman), and the Cathedral (Yarvin) are all good examples of concept that are useful to carry around in your head, and whose names help you remember what they mean.
People can get concepts wrong, yes; that means it's better to put more attention into making them accessible, not less. Just ask any decent programmer about naming conventions. A good naming convention can not only make for easier reading, but assist with debugging.
(See: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/05/11/making-wrong-code-look-wrong/ - not from our host, but a good source nonetheless)
Bad ones can be impenetrable or deceptive, and can cause bugs that are particularly nasty to track down.
They're the cool kids
Against Murderism is also a good one: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/06/21/against-murderism/
"Against Murderism" ( https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/06/21/against-murderism/ ) is probably the most relevant; other relevant posts include "I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup", "In Favor of Niceness, Community, and Civilization", "Living By the Sword", and "Kolmogorov Complicity".
"Social Justice and Words, Words, Words" ( https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/07/social-justice-and-words-words-words/ ) is the one where he first introduced the concept of the Motte-and-Bailey fallacy, one of the more common epistemic flaws in the sort of wokeness Scott seems to be against (I'm sure Scott absolutely loves us posting the entire "things I will regret writing" corpus, but that's where he explained his moral and epistemic grounds for opposing wokeness so... (plus, it's good writing, necessary and true even when it can't be kind, and he shouldn't regret it))
Radicalizing the Romanceless
It seems to help if the jargon term is not all that self-explanatory. Motte-and-bailey, for example, is opaque to most people even after it is explained to them repeatedly: "Which one are you really supposed to care about? ... Oh ... Why?" The fact that only some people can remember it makes it more appealing to some people.
As to the question of "why can't the uncool kids just declare themselves to be cool", it's because there are certain objective realities behind coolness that can't be wished away. Here's the most obvious, from a male-centric perspective: the affection of attractive women/girls (anticipating a certain response, while there is some room for subjectivity regarding what constitutes an attractive woman, there's a pretty sizeable area of agreement in practice).
No matter how much a group of high school nerds work to believe that they are cool, if the hottest girls in that grade are nonetheless all dating the jocks or the rich kids and steering very widely around the pizza-faced shut-ins playing Battletech in the halls, the nerds' self-belief will wreck upon the rocks of reality.
Which is not to say a nerd can't become cool, or isn't already cool - just that self-belief isn't what makes it so. There's a degree of social desirability that can absolutely be objectively tracked. It usually involves decent hygiene, some physical attractiveness, a lot of self-confidence, and skill at something more primally desirable to human society than a compendious knowledge of Pokémon stats.
Stereotypical "cool kids" also benefit from most media affirming that they're the cool kids. Even movies that paint the stereotypical jock in a negative light like Beauty and the Beast still shower Gaston with a mass of positive qualities like strength, virility, self-confidence and the like. Cool kids with those same qualities won't drop them even if 100% of the uncool kids effectively unionize against them.
True, but I feel like you're identifying an effect much more than a cause. The media could try very hard to make pizza-faced shut-ins who play Battletech in the halls seem cool, and I'm not sure if it would move the needle very much, because the media would in such cases be moving against mass human instinct rather than reinforcing it.
Put another way, Channing Tatum will be cool pretty much whatever he decides to spend his proverbial lunch hour doing, because Channing Tatum is incredibly handsome and therefore socially desirable. By no coincidence, though, the Channing Tatums of the world don't spend many lunch hours playing Battletech, because they have more enjoyable options open to them, like spending it making out with the homecoming queen.
That's a good point. It just helps the Cool kids coolness when they're buttressed by most media, even media that paints them as the bad guys like Gaston. Thinking about it now, Beauty and the Beast initially comes off as Jock vs Social Outcast with the Beast being the outcast, but by the end we see the Beast as a human and he looks like a conventional cool guy akin to Gaston. So it's less of jock v nerd and more jock v temporarily embarrassed jock.
That's an excellent point. Also, even when the Beast is beastly, he's still (in the animated version, at least) self-confident, nice deep voice, seven feet tall, super butch, able and willing to fight off an entire wolf-pack barehanded in defense of the heroine, mega rich, and an aristocrat. He's really cool, just uuuugly.
Tangentially, I realized on the heels of a different discussion awhile back that Disney has a favourite target when it comes to villains, and the two archetypes are (i) "traditional" alpha males and (ii) sniveling aristocrats. Every once in awhile, both at once.
The old movie Lucas had some fun with the evolutionary psych aspects of this sort of thing. Good review (mild spoilers) here:
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/lucas-1986
Around 1:11 of this copy, the hero enunciates the issue.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4HjNhfY3Dg
The Beast starts the movie with a terrible case of self-loathing (contrast with Gaston's narcissism). He only thinks he's ugly; by the time of the ballroom dancing scene, he's become very handsome, like an "ugly" girl in a movie who just needs contact lenses and a haircut to be beautiful.
I think the part where the Beast saves Belle from the wolves is the key to the whole story; it's not so much that he saves her as that he got hurt doing it. This makes him appear much less threatening and much more sympathetic. Belle didn't have to go back and take care of him, but she did, and in the process the two of them start to interact as people and they both discover that beneath the self-loathing was a person capable of kindness and empathy. (Showing Belle the castle library was certainly not something Gaston would have done!)
Not a furry, and not gay, but he also seems facially symmetrical. I think if I was going to direct an adaptation, and I wanted to make the Beast genuinely ugly. he'd look pretty different. Even if the studio didn't let me give him insectile mouthparts or gelatinous sluglike flesh or somesuch.
As it is, he seems more ✌️ugly✌️ than ugly. He's not even fat, for chrissakes.
There are a number of memes (also not by furries) pointing out that the prince he transforms back into at the end of the animated film is comparatively less desirable - generically handsome, but dull.
Although Henry Cavill is apparently a big Warhammer fan.
Is this an American thing? There is no word for nerd that has a negative connotation, in Indian languages. Someone really good at math but not sports, and not trendy dresser, if that's one definition of nerd, would be cool in the India I grew up in. Such kids have good economic prospects :). Woukd that not make them attractive to the opposite sex?
Why isnt that a thing is American culture ? I'm confused. I'm talking about the India I grew up in. Who knows if it has changed.
American culture for the longest time has had a notion of strength and intelligence being separate, and the more you have of one the less you have of another. I think in many places it's going out of style, but it's still rather pervasive.
Additionally, something we absolutely haven't gotten rid of is our cult of youth. Most American women don't seriously think long term until they're out of college at age 23 or thereabouts. Before then, thinking about the "long term" doesn't make much sense, only an old person would do that!
I was quite strange then, reading "How to age gracefully" by Bill Cosby at 25. I remember reading around the same time, Don Camillo books, where the 19 yos say they "Over 25 is practically dead" :).
The weird part about this is that most of the “jocks” in my high school were actually pretty smart. I think there is a sort of generic “good genes” set that results in reasonable athleticism, decent looks, and above average intelligence, and that was plenty to get you on both the football team and the honor roll at my relatively small school.
There were certainly a few min-maxed “dumb jocks” who could lift heavy things but not name 10 states, but they were the exception. The real dumb kids were more likely to be stoner burnouts than sports stars.
"I think there is a sort of generic “good genes” set that results in reasonable athleticism, decent looks, and above average intelligence"
I think the stereotype of the physically pathetic super genius comes from the far end of the IQ tail where that level of intelligence is gained through being generally speaking a total mutant who would be at the other side of the curve if it wasn't for some odd favorable brain boosting genes. Most "nerds" however are not tail-end geniuses, and it wouldn't be surprising if in raw mental firepower the "jocks" beat them, but just aren't interested in weird nerdy topics because they are too busy playing sports, hooking up with babes, and just generally winning at life.
It does make sense that if you are a genetic trainwreck you won't be good at anything, and assortative mating is going to add to the creation of sets of genes that flow together through generations. Still, in certain populations that valued high intelligence and scholarship somewhat exclusive of physical prowess there's going to be decoupling. Controversially, the classic Hollywood stereotype of the nerd is kind of an ethnic stereotype of an Ashkenazim as well. This is a population known both for high intelligence/scholarship, but also elevated rates of genetic disorders, and there are a lot of Jewish writers creating scripts in Hollywood*, so it could be they are projecting their childhoods into these movies. Add to that, if you're investing a whole career into writing, you probably aren't a "jock" to begin with, although if your script turns into a major movie then you're also winning at life.
*(I'm not making a da jewz control society nazi point, cinema is just a demographically loaded industry)
How high are the rates of genetic disorders among Ashkenazic Jews? I know there are some, but I haven't heard of any in my social circle. I also
How high are the rates of genetic disorders compared to other groups?
Also, the bad ones that get names are extremely debilitating and/or deadly. I don't know whether the genetic basis of moderately bad coordination has even been studied. I'm talking about the sort of bad coordination which doesn't interfere much with daily life, but makes sports not feasible or not a pleasure.
I don't know what happens to that first paragraph.
I also wonder whether genetic disorders among Ashkenazic Jews are better known because Ashkenazic Jews include more doctors and scientists.
I'm thinking more in terms of stereotyping with a small grain of truth. The rates of disorders like Tay-Sachs or Joubert Syndrome and so on are higher, but it's not like this means they are common (and since genetic screening has since helped with Tay-Sachs). Apparently, one in four Ashkenazim are carriers for the conditions on this list: https://www.uofmhealth.org/health-library/tv7879
Mildly debilitating genetic conditions are going to be more common in general than severely debilitating ones, but then something mildly debilitating enough isn't necessarily going to even get named and end up in a medical textbook. If I produce less of an irritant protection enzyme so my lungs are on the lowest end of the normal range, I can still play sports during summer, I just might suck at them.
The social message of a huge fraction of movie comedies at least since "The Graduate" is: "Hey, beautiful girl, don't fall in love with the tall, handsome, blond boy, fall in love with the short, dark-haired, funny guy."
This message of course has nothing to do with who writes and greenlights movie comedies. It's all just a coincidence.
I don't think it's a set of good genes as much as it is just the same basic skills and aptitudes being doubly rewarded here.
What does it take to get academic achievement? Well, you need a modicum of talent, a stable enough home-life to be able to devote time to studying and the discipline to work at it.
What does it take (in a small-enough school) to get athletic achievement? Well, you need a modicum of talent, a stable enough home-life to be able to devote time to studying and the discipline to work at it.
Sure, enough talent can negate the need for the other two, but you can get by far enough without it.
Well, I have all of those things but ended up short and uncoordinated, thus a good student but a poor athlete. So genes have at least a little to do with it 😆
As you say, good at math and non-trendy dresser is a proxy for [potential] wealth in India. It has been that way for a few decades now in America too, which is why "nerd" became a cooler thing over the time period, but note that, critically, the type of nerdiness that's cool is the type that also can act as a proxy for wealth and success. If you conjure into your mind a type of nerd that isn't cool by today's standards, I think you'll find that it's hard to imagine them becoming tech CEOs.
The genuinely STEM kids in US schools are uninterested in coolness; they can tell that other kids have charisma or are living a different life, but so what?
What you see on TV is basically a cool wannabe's projection onto STEM kids -- a TV scriptwriter wanted to be a celebrity in high school and cannot imagine that anybody else would feel differently. Thus the scriptwriter assumes that STEM kids must live in a state of perpetual social angst, constantly pining for the homecoming queen and wishing they could be invited to Richie MacWealthington's parties. While the STEM kids actually have zero interest in any of this...
(Sure, the STEM kids usually want to make out; they are biological humans. But sex and love are more primal than status anxiety, especially since status anxiety is easily displaced -- rather than caring about being Richie MacWealthington's 17th best friend, you care about getting the 17th best grade in the state for the Math Contest.)
Well, STEM kids frequently *do* live in a state of perpetual social angst, just not over the lack of hordes of lackeys. They live in a state of perpetual social angst because other people notice they have nobody to help them out or back up their complaints, and bully/bash the shit out of them.
I mean, until I was 25 or so I used to have dreams about murdering my many bullies, frequently in incredibly-painful ways like biting chunks out of them. I'd say that's a pretty-good indicator that I was greatly unsatisfied with the state of affairs.
Maybe so, but like Doug S’ comment on dancing, this has barely any connection to *wanting to be part of* the cool kids (except insofar as it is believed, quite possibly incorrectly, that they are not bullied).
We don’t understand concepts if they are treated emotionally, as catchphrases for all sorts of more or less tangentially related experiences.
I am pretty sure "cool" kids are immune to being held down by some children while others beat them, because they have friends to help fight the aggressors off or to seek help. I am pretty sure "cool" kids are immune to a lot of deniable pranks, because they have extra sets of eyes to identify the perpetrator.
Do "cool" kids get bullied? Quite possibly. Do they get captured and tortured for 10 minutes when they're out of sight of a teacher, or get needles attached to their chairs when they're not looking? I'm pretty sure the answer is "no".
My point is, there are *tangible benefits* to playing the ridiculous social games people play. Having status helps you retaliate against people who wrong you, which means people will wrong you less often. This is true whether or not you care about having status for its own sake.
Pretty sure it's an American thing. My guess would be that it's a relic of class resentment, from when only rich people had education.
Define "American".
I'm no expert on foreign movies, but I've definitely seen more than one Korean movie that checks all the boxes for "stereotypical nerd". Consider for example:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9759978/?ref_=ttls_li_tt
(The Dude in me)
which you can watch without subtitles, or knowledge of Korean, and know exactly what's going on...
Isn't Korean pop culture strongly influenced by the US?
Which part of 'Define "American"' did you not get?
https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/07/25/how-the-west-was-won/
I think it’s also related to pressure to conform socially. This is one reason I think the cool-uncool dichotomy is more keenly felt in smaller schools and small towns.
In a traditional sense, one measure for how well you were doing overall as a young person was how well you were fitting in. After all, it was presumed you were going to stay in this town and around these people indefinitely, and being popular as a teen was a great indicator that you’d do well in life.
Now that we’re more likely to expect both cool popular kids and smart nerdy kids to skip town after graduation, being cool in high school probably means something rather different than it once did. It’s still a thing, of course, but it isn’t quite the thing it used to be when nearly everybody stayed put their whole lives.
This is so orthogonal to my existing priors that I'd love to see an example. Can you link any depictions in modern Indian media where a schlubby smart guy is effortlessly portrayed as cool?
I admit, my knowledge of Indian culture is mostly from Bollywood and westernized depictions, but the idea that the culture has assimilated signs of future potential earnings into attraction is bonkers to me.
Thank you for saying this, I had the same reaction but I was having difficulty phrasing a response.
You are conflating a poor, survival oriented society (that had also been been dominated by a small super nerdy elite, the Brahmans forever) with the most affluent society the World has ever seen. This after the US inherited a base level of affluence from the Europe which was already at the top of the World for a couple of centuries at the least.
Nerdy elites are by no means unique to India. That's a pretty standard feature of civilization.
I can see two solutions to the lack of girls problem:
1) There also uncool girls, it makes sense for the to join the uncool-but-actually-cool coalition. It's likely that some boys and girls in the coalition will secretly want to date the people not in the coalition, but in the spirit of the coalition they ought to at least pretend otherwise.
2) Be celibate and proud of it.
3) Compete for girls. Being part of a the coalition allows you to have peers that hold you in high esteem, which I would guess helps getting dates.
Option 1 makes more sense given that there is no particular reason not to include girls in the coalition given that there are also cool girls, but maybe the natural middle school gender segregation would prevent this from happening.
I don't think you've correctly interpreted the claim being made. It's not that women wouldn't be allowed in the coalition, it's that "objectively" desirable makeout-partners are already, almost by definition, part of the cool-kids coalition and having a good time there.
If you model "cool kids" as "the set of high school students who are hot," and model hotness as a fixed and objective characteristic which all high school students desire, then it's very obvious that calling yourself "cool" won't help you get a date anymore than saying "short is the new tall" makes you better at basketball.
Is this a good model of coolness, or a good model of hotness? I'm skeptical, but I'm also skeptical one can deny this dynamic as strongly as you are trying to with broad-based success. Surely some percentage of the uncool kids really do "need" to date cool kids, and I imagine it's a large enough proportion that the uncool-coalition supporters would find their dissent to be a major hurdle. Maybe not insurmountable, but major.
Whenever I try to imagine that dating dynamics are less stupid and obvious than how they are portrayed in 20th century sitcoms, I talk to my straight friends and am reminded that some things are obvious because they're true.
1) The uncool guys to uncool girls ratio is heavily heavily not in the guys’ favor. That’s why in nerdy environments, like an MMO guild for example, the minute a girl enters the equation a mad scramble for their attention inevitably ensues with few winners and bitter losers. I would also estimate that cool guys are much less concerned about the social status of girls to make out with than cool girls are about their guys and are taking from the pool of available uncool girls.
2)Aside from “celibate and proud” being a very obvious cope to just about anyone outside the celibacy bubble, this does exist in the form of the volcel and MGTOW communities, neither of which have particularly cool reputations.
3)Once again gender ratio is a problem here. It’s better to have a bunch of male friends in your coalition than being a loner but it’s really a whole lot of competition for a small “resource”
Status confers attraction. Self-belief doesn’t make status real, but community belief does, and attraction follows.
Exactly. "Coolness" is about internally being able to reliably and effortlessly signal higher status. It's upstream of the social hierarchy and any achievements in the theory of mind. Although having a high position on the hierarchy or producing achievements increases self-confidence, which affects "coolness" in a feedback loop, you can be cool without those things, and in fact being reliably able to signal high status without those things reads as even higher "coolness", because it's costlier.
Status does indeed confer attraction, but it's a well known fact that physical attractiveness confers both status and attractiveness. There are studies that indicate physical attractiveness is a very important predictor of attraction, see e.g https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19558447/
"The strongest predictor of attraction for both sexes was partners' physical attractiveness."
Attractiveness confers attractiveness, to put it short.
"To me, Trump is not a rich man, Donald Trump is like what a hobo imagines a rich man to be." - John Mulaney- https://youtu.be/dBNBAgtjYV8?t=30
I feel like the Democratic coalition is already breaking and/or re-aligning over wokeness, in fact. I don't have time right now to delve into the specifics, but there appears to be an increasing consensus (among 'mainstream' [among regular people] but 'contrarian' [on Twitter] people like Matt Yglesias) that the Democratic party's embrace of wokeness and/or failure to message well on it (and specifically defund the police) is what led to some suggestive-of-a-possible-realignment (I wanted to say unprecedented, but I don't think that's right) swings to the GOP among black and hispanic voters. There's a lot of other stuff going on on the margins, like differential turnouts (turnout up among already-GOP hispanic voters, down among dem hispanic voters) and probably other causes.
But that's the gist of what I've been reading. Hit post too soon.
I think you're radically overreading this. Like, yeah, I think that there's something going on where the cultural wing of the Democratic coalition thought it was a little more powerful than it actually was, hoped that the 2020 election would represent their agenda in a very focused way and were disappointed to find that they didn't have the kind of ascendency that they hoped for.
But this is in the realm of "some adjustments to strength within the coalition," not a cataclysmic event. The SJW wing of the Democrats aren't going somewhere else. Blacks and Latinos might be mildly more heterodox than they have been (or might not), but they will remain dominantly Democratic.
Dominant Democratic may not be enough. If Tim Scott becomes the next black President, we could see Democrats winning 60-70 percent of those groups. A Republican party that can win 30-40 percent of blacks and hispanics would be a hegemonic one, like Democrats during the FDR years.
Biden won about 87% of the black vote. He's very, very far from "60-70%" territory, and it's by no means clear that there's a real trend towards lower black support for Democrats, much less vastly lower support.
It is frustratingly difficult to get information about Latino vote totals, but in general, people have been hyperfocusing on a small minority of counties that had very dramatic differences. Again, I believe that Biden's vote share decreased overall only a few percentage points.
The name there wasn't accidental. There are apparently rumblings that Tim Scott wants to be president. If he wins the Republican nomination, I think he brings along at least another 15% of black voters. If those gains are permanent, it's a realignment.
I see very little sign that "nominating a black Republican" is what causes macroscopic changes in black political alignment. It's not like this is a new idea.
It may not be new but it hasn't been tried. And with the Republican party running around like chickens with their heads cut off trying to keep black folks from voting, maybe it won't be and maybe if it is it won't work.
I'm worried. I think we're underreacting, and David Shor has me convinced we're about to spend a decade in the wilderness. Probably it's not as bad as all that.
There were multiple forces at play in the democratic primary that I think can be pigeonholed into three lanes:
- The "I just want to go back to brunch" types who thought everything was great under Obama and if they could just get the Obama years back or some lesser imitation they could go back to not paying attention to the news and living their lives (Biden, Buttigieg, Klobuchar, etc)
- The economic grievance people who want large and lasting change (Sanders, Warren to some extent although she attempted a crossover appeal that failed)
- The wokes (Gillibrand, Castro, Harris)
It's revelatory that group #1 won, but perhaps moreso that group #3 ended up with a VP while group #2 is caught twiddling their thumbs with a couple (not even?) diminished backbenchers even though group #3 was defeated resoundingly at the polls
This is my basic theory. I think we're in the first phase of a realignment against this stuff.
I have some disagreements with your analysis of the Democratic coalition -- and in particular about your model of it as keeping poor minorities in the coalition with cultural concessions. The demographic that is farthest to the left on cultural issues is very highly educated people -- and among Democrats, white people are substantially more culturally progressive than racial minorities. David Shor (whom I trust more than anyone with analyzing these things) thinks that Democrats' erosion in support among black and (especially) Hispanic voters in the 2020 election was in large part due to them adopting more culturally left positions, and those positions gaining salience. See https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/03/david-shor-2020-democrats-autopsy-hispanic-vote-midterms-trump-gop.html for a great interview.
This leaves open the question: why does the Democratic party take positions that are well to the left of most Americans? I think the answer -- which Julia Galef discusses with David Shor here: http://rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/show/episode-248-are-democrats-being-irrational-david-shor.html -- is that Democratic party campaigns are driven primarily be ideologues. That is, the people who get into running campaigns are people who are really excited to make a difference by promoting policies that they support, and those people tend to have mode ideologically coherent and extreme positions. The result is that Democratic campaigns end up reflecting the opinions of Democrats who are in politics rather than Democrats as a whole, and I think this ends up being to Democrats' electoral detriment.
I agree. It seems to me that the idea that poor minorities will be mollified by making white people feel guilty, rather than actually improving their lives, is to a large extent a delusion by extremely online white people who constantly get surprised that the masses aren't as woke as them and choose people like Biden over more woke candidates.
Also see Joe Biden, the least woke candidate, being the overwhelming choice of Black voters in the Democratic primary
Full agreement. I thought Scott's analysis of the Democrats was just weirdly totally wrong. Seemed more like what a terminally online socialist claims the democrats are about.
This makes some sense, but I think being able to say/believe that you're protecting the underprivileged is as important for coalition-building and coalition-defending as actually protecting them in a way they themselves endorse.
The Democrats do have most minority groups now, this has something to do with them being some combination of performatively less racist and actually less racist than the Republicans, I don't think the average minority is up on the exact differences between Democrat and Republican policy that make the Democrats less racist than the Republicans, and even if they're actually less racist the performance helps advertise that fact.
The Democrats are also in the process of passing a $1.9T package that, while not perfectly aimed at poor people, is aimed at the lower half (3/4?) of the income scale more closely than either the CARES Act or the tax bill they passed under Trump.
This looks like Democrats attempting to "placate the powerless" through legislation that is popular with the powerless, not through culture war considerations.
It's somewhat ironic that the best example of placating poor minorities with anti-racist math that could be found was a link to the website of a NYC private school with tuition of $52,195 per year. Sure sounds like anti-racist math might itself be signaling by an elite significantly more progressive than are racial minorities...
Lots of folks here referencing the Shor piece in this thread.
I guess I wonder how much of this "fracturing" matters to Democratic politicians beyond the local level. Signaling aside, is there any national-level **policy** that's even remotely related to "woke math"? Even State-level? Democratic politicians don't seem to be going in for this stuff, so are we just talking about an increase in the amount of criticism the far left dishes out at the Democratic party? Is that actually a bad thing for the Dems?
I think a lot of the Democratic appeal to blacks (and hispanics and Asians, but more so to blacks), in particular, is pointing to both real and imagined racism on the part of Republicans and their coalition.
Forgot to mention this on that post:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/06/the-birth-of-a-new-american-aristocracy/559130/
> When I was in middle school, I used to wonder - there are cool kids and uncool kids, right? But suppose all the uncool kids agreed to think of themselves as cool, and to make fun of the currently-cool kids. Then you would just have two groups of kids, each considering themselves superior and looking down on the other. And the currently-uncool-kid group would be bigger and probably win, insofar as it’s possible to win these things. So why don’t they do that?
Because if a bunch of middle-schoolers were socially adept enough to pull that off, they'd be cool enough already that they wouldn't need to try it.
This is the correct answer. The stuff below reads a lot like a group of uncool kids talking about what being cool is from a theoretical perspective.
All true EXCEPT:
the way you phrase is dismissive, it suggests that "being cool" is the prize, and "talking about the theory of coolness" is the consolation prize.
I don't think that's true. I think that most of the people interested in "theory of coolness" in fact find that vastly more appealing than actually being cool. (In the same way that people who care at the SSC level of "theory of politics" would far rather hang out with similar people than with either bona fide politicians or with political celebrities [journalists and suchlike].)
Have you ever actually spent time doing the supposedly cool things (ie loud parties where people spend the entire night saying "this one time I was so drunk")?
God it's boring!
"(In the same way that people who care at the SSC level of "theory of politics" would far rather hang out with similar people than with either bona fide politicians or with political celebrities [journalists and suchlike]."
I thought this sentence was going to be about people who like political theory not wanting to do politics rather than not wanting to hang out with politicians.
Equally true!
But less germane to the point that, while the cool kids and the wanna-be’s both imagine everyone wants to hang out with them, most people actually don’t, most of the time, the intellectual kids least of all.
I actually have, although I didn't drink and it was a cast party for an amateur theater group at college rather than the fraternity/sorority scene. It helps if you are friendly with the people and you can dance well enough to enjoy it. Also some of the "I was so drunk, crazy thing happened" anecdotes turn out to be funny.
Of course everyone wants to go behind the velvet rope once!
The point is, do you want to do it again, after you've seen what's there?
Would you want to do it more often than maybe once a year?
I mean, it's just boring, isn't it? The first time, no, you're so busy seeing everything, hearing what people are saying, paying attention. But even by the third time you should start to realize that the innovation in this particular experience has been fully mined out, that all that's left is endless repetition.
At least that's been my experience as "guy, for various reasons, provided with the opportunity to move through an above average variety of social scenes".
Eh, dancing with pretty girls is something I've always enjoyed doing. And like I said, it's more fun if you're with people that already know you - trying to find a dance or conversation partner in a room full of strangers is harder and sometimes fails completely.
I thoroughly enjoyed my opportunities to drink and dance in clubs. It being pretty similar every time you do it wasn’t really a drawback. I’m hardly a party animal and it’s far from my favorite environment or social activity, but there’s something to be said for just bouncing along with a big crowd of happy people for a couple of hours.
In terms of Greek-sounding siege engines, I offer you lithobolos (literally rock-thrower), palintonon, and gastraphetes.
Polybolos was always my favorite, but it was a sniper's weapon for killing men on the walls, not bringing them down.
See, the "-on" suffix made me think of French, but I'm at a loss to name any particular French word that fits the pattern. Any French medieval warfare buffs here?
Update: I was thinking of a mangonel!
>>This is a project that they have been *gesturing towards*, but I don't see any reason yet to take Hawley seriously in any sort of good faith when it comes to his policy goals.
>>But I honestly don't think Hawley is particularly interested in making this policy, he's just signaling his stance (and I'm honestly surprised that his aides didn't at least put more work into making that signaling a little more coherent).
I'll go a step further - this is obvious enough that the rhetorical package absent clarifying policy is pretty good evidence of either *bad* faith or political naivete. If "Republicans would be better if they spoke more like Hawley" is compelling, you either don't mind the incoherence or are unaware it exists.
In 2019 the FTC reached a $5b settlement with Facebook for violating privacy commitments it had made as part of a *previous* settlement in 2012. While they touted the topline number as setting a new record for a cash settlement, it was widely panned as a slap on the wrist given that Facebook had already told investors they expected to pay about that much, and the rest of the settlement was a cave-in (Facebook was not required to change any of its behavior, only to keep better records, and its corporate officers were granted unusally sweeping immunity which included the original 2012 conduct, the new violation, and also undisclosed violations not discussed in the complaint that we can only guess at).
This settlement was approved on a party-line vote by three Trump appointees, with the two Democrats dissenting. Senators (including Hawley) made some angry tweets about it. But FTC commissioners are all Senate-confirmed! Hawley also touted a bill that would "reform" the FTC by placing it under DOJ jurisdiction. But the DOJ approves settlements (and indeed approved this one) too!
As another example, conservative legal scholars have spent the last few decades gouging away at anti-trust law (see, e.g., Ohio v. American Express in which the Roberts majority massively raised the burden of proof to prove harm in "two-sided markets" such as payment processors, a decision with obvious benefits for Amazon should they decide to start throwing their weight around against sellers). Senators can make as many tweets as they want, but if they actually tried to break up Facebook it would get dunked on in court by the same FedSoc alums they just spent four years stacking the courts with.
What I'm gesturing at here is that Republicans are going to find it difficult to pivot against "Big Tech" beyond posting about it is their appointments are all still on auto-pilot from the Reagan era, and the bench of future appointees will probably stay that way for another few decades since that's the environment they all came up in and bureaucrats and judges aren't as sensitive to public sentiment as legislators.
There are, of course, ways around this. One is that anti-trust laws are simply statutes, and they can be amended. Another is that you could start holding these people's feet to the fire in confirmation hearings. But as long as the party coalitions are in transition, amending the law and spiking nominees would require cooperating with Democrats. I don't think that's in the cards. Hawley certainly doesn't seem interested. He was for $2,000 checks when Trump's name would've been on them and against them once Biden's name would've been on them (while Democrats enthusiastically voted for CARES even though the checks and superdole likely played a large role in Trump's electoral overperformance).
Maybe this will go beyond posting eventually. I have my doubts.
> Republicans are going to find it difficult to pivot against "Big Tech" beyond posting about it is their appointments are all still on auto-pilot from the Reagan era, and the bench of future appointees will probably stay that way for another few decades since that's the environment they all came up in and bureaucrats and judges aren't as sensitive to public sentiment as legislators.
Also (I think) judges "on autopilot from the Reagan era" are supported by the Republican voters, especially conservative Christians who oppose abortion and other Democratic culture-war issues and business leaders who support deregulation. On the other hand, many of these people would likely vote for the Republicans even if they tried to pivot, since they see the Democrats as even worse.
Regarding the cool vs uncool kids: The cool kids are getting laid, and it doesn't matter if the uncool kids change the definition of cool.
I am not sure that the cool kids are having more sex, although that fits the stereotypes. If one can use socioeconomic status as a proxy for coolness, then the opposite seems to be true. Recent reports indicate that those lower on the socioeconomic ladder tend to start having sex younger (and getting pregnant younger) than those at the top of the socioeconomic ladder (at least on a national scale). I've not seen data related to this within a single school but would be very interested in hearing such studies. Namely, do cool kids start having sex earlier and have more sex in highschool?
I think socioeconomic status is a poor proxy for coolness. I personally never thought “cool” correlated strongly with “rich”. Even hotness wasn’t all that reliable; looks didn’t make you cool if you were also shy or eccentric.
And nobody in my high school was having more sex than the marching band. Maybe some of them could have been considered cool, but I think the long hours together and frequent trips away from home were what really boosted their stats.
I said it very simplified, I'll try to expand it a little bit more. The cool kids have more status, this could be from a high socioeconomic background or not, maybe they're more athletic or charismatic. This gives them more sexual options... so it's not just "you have sex so you are cool", but you get to choose who you want to have sex with.
I think it depends on where you are. At my high school, almost all of us had the same socioeconomic status, but the one kid I knew was rich was cool, and the one kid I knew was poor was uncool. At my mother's high school, there was a bigger spread of socioeconomic status and it was very strongly correlated to coolness.
The oversimplified version is that coolness is what makes hot girls want to have sex with you even if you *don't* have money. Which isn't to say that you can't be both cool and rich, but if you poll e.g. an average rock star's groupies approximately none of them would defect to an investment banker with twice the money.
The oversimplified version of coolness for girls is given by Amy Dunne in "Gone Girl",
https://genius.com/Gillian-flynn-gone-girl-cool-girl-monologue-book-annotated ,
so maybe coolness for guys could be better stated as that which will convince an actual woman to put on the cool-girl act.
I have a remarkable non-oversimplified version of coolness for both genders, which the margins of this blog comment are too small to contain.
But there are cool and uncool kids even when they're too young to care about sex.
There are uncool girls too, with taste for uncool boys.
There is definitely some room for alternate status ladders in schools. See also: subcultures, which used to be a huge thing.
If cultural "class" is just what we buy in the marketplace then it's not really a very good indicator of class at all. A capitalist can buy the exact same goods in the marketplace as I. The only difference is that they can buy more than I can buy. A capitalist could buy a 50 million low-class items (let's says Affliction T-shirts), whereas I could only buy 50. Does this make the capitalist low-class? A capitalist can buy a Rolls Royce, and I can't, but maybe I can if I pool my money with 364 of my friends I could buy a Rolls Royce, then we can share it between us and each get it one day per year. Does this make us all high class?
The marketplace tends to flatten class distinctions in this manner. That's why Marx talks about class in the workplace, where ownership of the means of productions gives us a clear distinction in roles.
Fussell's conception of class as described here is cultural more than economic, based less on what you have enough money to buy than on what you value enough, or consider prestigious enough, to buy.
What people "value enough" comes from economic pressures - Marxism looks at the way that economic pressures influence and shape our 'culture'.
Not everything that people value comes from economic pressures. How people negotiate the limits placed on them by economic pressures varies by culture. Living within a certain set of economic pressures can lead to people developing common responses and values, and from there a community, but that is far from the most important unifying force.
Another way this is manifest is that shows of wealth top out. My example is a Rolex. A Rolex costs maybe 30k. If they wanted to, anyone with a 6 figure salary could buy one. So all the doctors, lawyers, and junior executives can wear Rolexes.
So what does someone truly rich do? If they buy a 100k watch, they run the risk of it looking like a gaudy show of wealth. It also doesn't buy them much superiority. The same people who can buy a Rolex can save up to buy the 100k watch.
How expensive does a watch have to be to gatekeep out a partner at a decent law firm or a neurosurgeon? Does anyone really wear watches that expensive?
Countersignalling can help a bit. Someone like Jeff Bezos can wear a Timex. This says that his wealth is so obvious that he doesn't need to prove anything, but it can't work for all the super rich.
Hi Scott, thanks for posting my anecdote (this is snav if my account info gets messed up)! I was hoping you could remove it, though, because the person in question occasionally reads this blog---my intent was to keep it buried in the comments section, hehe.
Thanks!
It's removed, sorry.
No need to apologize! I should have mentioned it in my comment, you had no way of knowing. All good :)
Well I cry dirty pool if you used this as an excuse to delete my comment about Snav's comment -- especially since mine stood on its own (buried safely here in the comments) without quoting Snav's work at all.
I expended untold minutes of my precious labor (living with chronic debilitating illness, no less!) to advance a particular point of view, which, I daresay, is relevant, unique, purposeful, and doesn't deserve to be "cancelled" on the basis of a technicality that I had nothing to do with.
Could you clarify if this is sarcasm or not?
I'm not seeing what would be construed as sarcasm exactly, but I did rely on my refined upper class wit -- nuanced, yet properly vague.
If Scott really did simply erase my creative labor, then yes indeed that pisses me off. And since this seems the most likely explanation for the vanishing comment I continue to speculate that he simply didn't value what I was offering -- and Snav's predicament gave him a ready excuse to hit delete while preserving his self-image of running a site opposed to "cancelling" people he disagrees with.
(I'm kidding about being upper-class. From where I come from "dirty pool" just refers to something brown in the water.)
The reason why the Democrats probably need their own essay is that their coalition is about as stable is nitroglycerine, and within a couple of elections, they're going to need a new script. Trump provided the forcing function that sculped the current coalition. His presence demanded this endless cramming strange bedfellows into the Democratic clown-car just to get rid of him. You will notice that the Democratic party has now lost all coherence and all sense of internal alignment. Everybody who currently supports the Democrats for election does so glumly and with great internal conflict.
You are, of course, exactly right that it seems downright weird how the Democrats have managed to somehow capture the rich, the middle class, the poor, and the ideological Left all at once. (Or, to be precise: to somehow capture slightly more than half of the people in those groups that vote.) But the Left and the rich are not a stable coalition, and the wokes and the middle class are not a stable coalition, all these people kind of hate each other, and something is bound to give.
Things might shift explosively, and result in a fruitful party realignment where the Republicans capture some important parts of the coalition. We would need to change our conceptions of what these parties are at a deep level. I kind of hope that happens, if only because it would be fun. Things could also undergo a controlled demolition, somehow only ejecting the powerless and useless parts of the coalition. So if I were going to write a 10,000 word essay of advice for Democrats, it would aim at getting the ball rolling on the controlled demolition process sooner rather than later, so they don't just end up with whatever coalition is left hanging together after the chaos ends.
In fact voter enthusiasm is high, Democrats and Republicans both have largely positive views of their own party, and most respondents to polls on the question said they were more enthusiastic to vote this year than in previous years. See https://news.gallup.com/poll/323210/voters-enthusiastic-anxious-2020-campaign-ends.aspx
People on social media are pretty distinct from the general population, but the glum conflicted democrats don't appear to be a majority; they're just more visible.
It seems like I don't read that article the way you do. "Enthusiasm" is not used in a way that implies enthusiasm for the Democratic Party or for its platform, generalized enthusiasm for voting probably mean Democrats really didn't want Trump to win.
It's true that Biden's favorability is surprisingly high.
If it was about not wanting Trump to win, I'd expect enthusiasm to be pretty similar to 2016 (there's a case to be made that the pandemic raised the perceived stakes of the election, but IIRC worsening pandemic numbers actually lowered enthusiasm in other polls). Satisfaction with the primary candidates was also high (https://news.gallup.com/poll/284360/democrats-viewed-divided-satisfied-candidates.aspx), as is satisfaction with Biden's cabinet picks (https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/01/15/views-of-the-incoming-biden-administration/). Admittedly, these are all imperfect proxies for satisfaction with the current coalition and platform, but I wasn't seeing any polls more specific to the discussion at hand on a quick search.
Have you ever filled in any sort of social science survey?
I strongly suspect that they are going the way of phone polls. At first only a few weirdos refused to respond to phone polls. Then the entire educated class learned about push polls and decided they weren't going to be part of that nonsense. At which point phone polls lost all connection to usefulness.
I suspect the same is coming for "surveys". Every survey I encounter now, I can see the ideological bias. Sometimes it's very obvious (surveys that rate the employee with whom you interacted, but which provide no place to criticize the company POLICIES which are the real issue that matters, not the poor shmoe who answered your email). Sometimes it's "fish in water" stuff -- the people creating the survey are so steeped in a particular analysis of the world that they literally cannot understand that the respondent does not carve reality along those joint-lines.
So I suspect that survey data is becoming less and less accurate; telling the surveyors what they want to hear, but bearing ever less resemblance to reality.
A big part of the decline of phone polls is that if you get a call from a number you don't recognize, it's almost always a spam caller of some sort; there doesn't seem to be an analogous situation with online surveys. Is there an alternative way to measure public opinion on an issue that you think is more trustworthy?
Is there an alternative? I don’t think so. The basic concept (what the public believes) is incoherent. Even when you and I agree on a concept, my rating of 3 may (in some world where we can peer inside brains) be the equivalent of your rating of 7.
But usually we don’t agree on concepts:
“Should Congress ban assault rifles?”
Well maybe I care about this as written. Or maybe I don’t like assault rifles but I think federalism is more important than getting my way on guns. Or maybe I think guns are a stupid culture war frivolity that the powerful use to keep the masses ignoring things like tax law and corporate governance? Or maybe the primary thing I care about is indicating allegiance to my team, so I’ll just tick whatever my team believes is the correct response?
Admitting the vacuity of surveys, as currently constituted, would mean admitting the vacuity of most of social science. And people with the brains for philosophy, or capable of the abstractions required for better measures of “what a multitude of people believe” tend not to go into social science. Hell, Arrow and Condorcet show how vacuous the idea is even in the most carefully constrained situation, ie voting.
So, yeah, anything survey-like is a dead-end. I think we’re better off with idea-driven social science ala early 20th C. You want to validate the predictions in various ways (unlike early 20th C) and you absolutely want to dismiss theories (and their adherents) that fail the tests (yeah, good luck with that...); but I think we’d be vastly better off with vastly fewer social scientists, all engaged in a lot more thinking and a lot less survey generation.
You're kind of overlooking the Obama years, eh? And remember Hillary handily won the popular vote even while kneecapped by Comey, the Russians, and nonstop trump lies.
Some small realignments obviously occurred in reaction to trump, but nothing fundamental -- which is why the GOP's only remaining strategy has become voter suppression.
Trump enthusiasts loved the idea of blowing everything up -- and you seem totally titillated by it still. But unless and until the GOP finds a more sophisticated bomb thrower they're going to have a tough time corralling a majority of even the electoral college again.
It would be accurate to roughly describe the two coalitions now as pro-democracy and anti-democracy, but I think trump just brought these pre-existing biases to the surface. The bullies were always emotionally prepared to throw the rules overboard, while the rest of us -- cucks and losers no doubt -- have always sought refuge in the rules, and thus are hardwired to fight hard for those rules (even when it took 100 years to reverse Dred Scott).
In the British class system you can tell what class someone is by hearing them speak for 10 seconds. Is this not true in the US too?
You definitely can't tell by accent in the US (almost all the distinctive accents are low class, but I think only a minority of people speak any of the distinctive accents). You might be able to tell on the basis of what they talk about.
It used to be more true, and its more true in some areas than others.
Southerners especially used to be able to tell a lot about where what class you were and specifically where you were from by your speech. I'm not sure that's true anymore. (And now that I've written this, I'm getting shades of "Albion's Seed"...hmm...)
And I was surprised when my husband told me the Crane brothers on the sitcom "Frasier" were supposed to be upper class Bostonians. I'd always assumed they were vaguely British, but my husband had relatives in his grandparents generation who sounded a bit like that. They weren't upper class themselves, but being a very old and extremely well-educated family, as my husband put it "the Brahmins wouldn't have been ashamed to be seen with us."
I've learned that this is a "Mid-Atlantic prestige accent" and used to be much more common and meaningful before WWII. It was indeed an amalgam of British and regional American pronunciation with its roots in Southeast English regional accents. The most elite schools in the US taught it, so it was a key class marker, similar to "received pronunciation" in Britain. It was formalized as "World English" in the 1920s and most notably became a standard for actors. So when you hear Katherine Hepburn talking in old movies, that's what posh sounded like in the 1940s. William F. Buckley was another late example. Eventually it became a caricature of itself and fell out of favor, so I'm not sure the upper class has a sound in the United States anymore.
I think most people middle class above have the "General American" accent, and most people working class and below have regional accents. With some exceptions for people who've changed class. There used to be a Southern aristocrat accent, but I don't know if anyone still speaks it.
Another point for Trump being working class: he has a New York accent.
A lot of it depends on how sensitive your ear is and what region. Southerners definitely do not speak with a "generic american accent", and doing so in the South will get you pegged as a "yankee". That is, to the Southern ear, a genericAamerican accent is "from up north", which means, "not the south." I'd guess that half of all southern accents in American TV / Movies are completely fake. Texas is not the south, and a Texas accent is quite different from a Southern accent.
The comments about generic american accents being the norm for all but the lower classes is probably true everywhere but the South.
My experience is in Atlanta, but then again, a lot of Southerners would say that Atlanta isn't really part of the South.
Ahh, fair point. I was definitely not thinking of Atlanta, which is technically the South but is now urban enough that it's lost a lot of its Southerness. Same can be said of Nashville. In either place, generic american accents probably don't raise eyebrows anymore like they did even 20 years ago. Old-money Atlanta definitely still has that aristocratic southern accent, but new-money Atlanta suburbanites may not...
"Then you would just have two groups of kids, each considering themselves superior and looking down on the other. And the currently-uncool-kid group would be bigger and probably win, insofar as it’s possible to win these things. So why don’t they do that? I have lots of partial answers, but still no satisfying one."
I think this has a lot to do with attractiveness. High school is where the early mating hierarchy is sorted out. Status confers attractiveness to some degree, but there are also some (innately or at least relatively immutably) attractive/unattractive features that go a long way toward determining status. If the uncool kids refused to acknowledge their 'inferiority', good for them, but a) this wouldn't magically make them attractive, they would still disproportionately be the relatively ugly/uncharismatic group; and b) because of a), at some level they probably wouldn't fully believe their own collective self-assessment.
to put it crudely: if a member from group A offers sex/romance to a member of group B, how likely are they to be accepted? And vice-versa? The answers will tell you which group is higher-status and has social power over the other, and they won't change much just because the uncool group decides to declare independence from the hierarchy.
While having the billionaires and the poor masses is one way to get both dollars and votes, you can also do it by just getting the people from the 70th to the 99th percentile of income. In the highest turnout election in a century, we only had 2/3 of people vote, and turnout tends to be highly correlated with income. So if you can get the 70th to 99th percentile of income on your side, then you may well have a majority of voters in any election, and you also have a majority of the wealth (it looks like 90th to 99th percentile have a bit over a third of wealth, and so do 50th to 90th, so 70th to 99th must be somewhat over half).
"and poor minorities get to have anti-racist math in school or whatever"
Do they really want that? I get the impression that they would be happy with actual math, and the anti-racist math is really there because Democratic activists want it. The actual opinions of the poor minorities are treated as being of no importance at all. This is how the Democrats drove the poor whites to the Republicans in the first place. I would not be especially surprised if the poor minorities followed them.
I think that antiracist math, defund police, etc., could very well be a group of issues that could push a lot of poorer people of all races to the Republicans. If, if, the Republicans can get on that message, polish a solid outreach effort, and squelch some of their worst adherents - instincts. Wokeism is almost (entirely) an obsession of the privileged class of whatever race. They get somethings rightish but often propose "solutions" hated by the poor person on the street who can readily see that they are more feel good then helpful.
Your description of the Democratic coalition seems wrong to me. First, support for the Democrats negatively correlates with income, although the magnitude of the income-party correlation is admittedly small (they win a lot of rich areas because they win cities and cities tend to be richer, but they win cities because they win black voters and cities have a lot of black people, not because they do particularly well among rich urbanites). Second, I don't think it makes sense to describe wokeness as being about symbolic concessions to minorities - among other things, black Democrats are usually more religious and socially conservative than white Democrats. Third, Democrats actually do push more redistributive policies than Republicans, which is the opposite of what you'd see if they were the party of powerful class interests + symbolic concessions to the lower classes.
The traditional 'Republicans are the party of rural whites, Democrats are the party of urban voters and minorities' explanation seems to do a much better job describing the coalitions than the class-based approach. If anything, wokeness is about getting college graduates (who are in general upper/upper-middle class) to support policies that are against their class interests for social reasons.
Another strike against the class-based explanation is that in general we expect members of one class to aspire to being members of the class above them (that's why it makes sense to talk about 'upper' 'middle' and 'lower' classes - there's a hierarchy, and everyone in that hierarchy agrees that it's better to be at the top of the hierarchy than the bottom), but we don't see Republicans aspiring to become Democrats or Democrats aspiring to become Republicans; instead, both parties think they're the good party and the other party's the bad party (really, this is my general objection to the idea of cultural class as a distinct thing from economic class; economic class forms a hierarchy and people at the same place in that hierarchy plausibly have shared political interests, while cultural class doesn't form a hierarchy and members of a shared cultural class only have shared political interests insofar as culture is a proxy for something else).
It should be unsurprising that conflict theory does a bad job explaining electoral coalitions; since voting is a total waste of time from a self-interested perspective, anyone who votes must have some level of altruistic motivation for doing so. You can maybe explain political platforms and donations in conflict terms since coordination on those is at least in principle possible, but it's a poor fit for the voters themselves.
"not because they do particularly well among rich urbanites)"
Wrong. Even in 2000, the income divide was largest in red states and smallest in blue states. Dems do well among rich urbanites; if they didn't, politics in Manhattan (18% Black/47% NHW) would resemble politics in Georgia.
"Second, I don't think it makes sense to describe wokeness as being about symbolic concessions to minorities"
Agree. Hillary Clinton's campaign only started using it in 2015; it hardly existed in Dem politics before that.
"Third, Democrats actually do push more redistributive policies than Republicans, which is the opposite of what you'd see if they were the party of powerful class interests + symbolic concessions to the lower classes. "
Also agree.
"Third, Democrats actually do push more redistributive policies than Republicans, which is the opposite of what you'd see if they were the party of powerful class interests + symbolic concessions to the lower classes."
This is backwards, redistributive policies are how the upper class maintains the underclass in a state of dependence and forcing the competition (upwardly mobile middle class) to pay for these policies is how they keep members of the middle class from catching up.
"Taste" is always and everywhere the way old money defends itself against new money. Sure, the new money has more of it, but they're so _gauche_.
This goes back at least to the Early Modern period, and likely to ancient Rome as well.
Archaeologists can tell whether Roman-era jewelry was made for Roman aristocrats or barbarian chiefs, because the latter is heavier and more obviously expensive. The chiefs needed to impress their followers, but the old money only worried about impressing each other.
I grew up rich and live mostly on family money. That post made me think of a small, crystallizing, pre-COVID interaction. Out to dinner with leftist 20-somethings who don't know each other that well, someone volunteered to put the check on his card, so we all started the cash pile/venmo dance, but he stopped us.
Card-holder said "guys, I know this is awkward to say, but... I have money," and explained he was coming off a highly lucrative job and it really wasn't a big deal for them to pick up a pricey dinner for his friends. (Sounds dickish in writing, but he meant it self-effacingly, maybe because of the leftist part.)
This struck me as a big social class vs. economic class divide. I can't even tell you how many times I've covered dinner or the taxi or whatever and agreed to send the other parties a venmo request and just never followed up. I was taught to do this and almost nobody calls me on it. Why would they? Card-holder felt compelled to sheepishly explain and apologize for his newfound riches. How could he know The First Rule Of Wealth Club as it pertains to Talking About Wealth Club?
In my (UK) bit of the class hierarchy, quiet competition over paying for the thing and not asking the other party to share is extremely upper middle class behaviour - you show your moral superiority by being the one to quietly pick up the check first, you never ever talk about money.
The weird branch of middle class that is the highly paid technical class tends to be sheepish about money like your anecdote.
Something I've been locked into since I entered adulthood: jockeying with parents over paying the check.
(At a restaurant with my parents. The server approaches)
Server: All finished?
Me and my father, simultaneously: Yes, could you bring *me* the check?
Server: (looks confused as the check is taken by the nearest person)
Whoever didn't get the check: (shakes head ruefully)
My girlfriend's father will actually call the restaurant in advance, arrange payment for whatever the check comes to, and tip the server upon arrival.
If both of you are so desperate to show your magnanimousness, you could both pay the full amount of the meal, and the server can take half as a tip. Everyone wins!
Ha - great idea. That would be worth doing just to see how the server reacts.
However my goal in trying to pay the check isn't to make a grand gesture; it's to *save these parents money*. I'm in my prime earning years and they're retirees on budgets!
>My girlfriend's father will actually call the restaurant in advance, arrange payment for whatever the check comes to, and tip the server upon arrival.
That is a class-ninja-master move. Doesn't get cooler than that - all you need to add is the server saying "your usual table Sir?"
Re why don't the uncool kids declare themselves cool, thereby breaking the middle-school class system:
One way you can test if this worked is for you and your new-cool friends to throw a party on the same night as an old-cool party. Which party would more people prefer to go to (assuming they were invited to both)? I'm guessing they'll prefer the old-cool party because of a mix of
-- fundamental reasons: the old-cool kids will have more alcohol, prettier girls, etc.
-- common-knowedge-type reasons: people wants to pick the same party that everyone else will pick, and it seems like this will resolve to them all picking the old-cool party.
(Not sure why, but this puzzle tickles the same part of my brain as the question "Why do stocks change price even though there's always an equal number of buyers and sellers?")
Something occurred to me while reading this on the subject of "what is upper class, actually, if it's not money or power or whatever?" / "Why would Bezos care to be in the club at all?" / "Why would they maybe not want Bezos in the club?"
In a word: History. In more words:
Imagine a $3mm+ Bugatti supercar that only someone rich could afford. It's a hand made super car, must be super classy, right? Wrong! It's a neat gadget and all, but you know what would be actually cool? The hand-made Bugatti supercar that King Aelfred the Great drove into battle against the Danes! This very car!
The one word "history" doesn't fully capture it, as demonstrated by a different example, which is that a very expensive house isn't cool until it's designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and clothing isn't cool no matter what it's made out of, unless it's designed personally for you by <someone world class famous>, and only then really if it pushes the envelope on what is possible for that kind of clothing, and not in a gauche way, but in a “now the world of this clothing item is forever different, and it all started with this particular… <smock>.”
It seems to sort of be about exclusivity, which is a word I hear in the space a lot, but it seems to me that it's really about whether something is "historical," ie. pivotally embedded in the structure of the world we know. The exclusivity seems like more a side effect compared to that. Details obfuscated for privacy, but I had a friend who owned a mansion near downtown <famous city> that had been a famous church in the past, but had been redesigned as a mansion by <world famous architect>--the coolness of it was a sort of trifecta of historic significance and cultural cache. It was a little overt for the upper uppers I think, but they have similar shit quietly going on all the time.
Anyway, taking the thesis, it's not hard for me to imagine that the decedents of JJ Astor or John Rockefeller are *themselves*, a little bit historically pivotal "artifacts." The actual sword of Napoleon, the actual heir of <your favorite robber baron>.
So for old money, there's a kind of rarefied air intrinsic to them. What of Bezos then?
Well being rich ain't it, but Bezos is historic now. He's not the rich tech CEO of bullshit app LCC, he's the historically pivotal founder of Amazon, which changed the world, and the world will be different now. Sure he’s crazy rich which doesn’t hurt, but the real thing is that in 100 years Bezos will be a name with cache, like Carnegie or something. You can tell that right now, even though he’s not yet “history,” he's obviously "historically important." So he, like the heir of a robber baron, has a rarefied air that's intrinsic to him, and so can be upper class.
The model is a little too crisp to be fully right, and I didn't talk about how something or someone falls from grace, but I think the gist is right.
I think the word for that is "provenance".
"The sort of man who buys his own furniture" -- put down.
As for the question of why the uncool kids can't just decide that they're the cool ones - in Rick Perlstein's excellent "Nixonland", he says that Richard Nixon had exactly this idea in college, and managed to make it work pretty well. He also ties this in to Nixon's future success at building a Republican "silent majority" coalition of anti-hippie reaction vs. the latte-sipping NYT-reading 70s liberal "consensus". If I may quote at length:
>As a schoolboy he hadn't a single close friend, preferring to cloister himself up in the former church's bell tower, reading, hating to ride the school bus because he thought the other children smelled bad. At Whittier, a fine Quaker college of regional reputation unknown anywhere else, he embarked upon what might have been his most humiliating job of all: learning to be a backslapping hail-fellow-well-met. ("I had the impression he would even practice his inflection when he said 'hello,'" a reporter later observed.) The seventeen-year-old blossomed when he realized himself no longer alone in his outsiderdom: the student body was run, socially, by a circle of swells who called themselves the Franklins, and the remainder of the student body, a historian noted, "seemed resigned to its exclusion." So this most unfraternal of youth organized the remnant into a fraternity of his own. Franklins were well-rounded, graceful, moved smoothly, talked slickly. Nixon's new club, the Orthogonians, was for the strivers, those not to the manner born, the commuter students like him. He persuaded his fellows that reveling in one's unpolish was a nobility of its own. Franklins were never photographed save in black tie. Orthogonians worse shirtsleeves. "Beans, brains, and brawn" was their motto. He told them *orthogonian*—basically, "at right angles"—meant "upright," "straight shooter." Also, their enemies might have added, all elbows.
>The Orthogonians' base was among Whittier's athletes. On the surface, jocks seem natural Franklins, the Big Men on Campus. But Nixon always had a gift for looking under social surfaces to see and exploit the subterranean truths that roiled underneath. It was an eminently Nixonian insight: that on every sports team there are only a couple of stars, and that if you want to win the loyalty of the team for yourself, the surest, if least glamorous, strategy is to concentrate on the nonspectacular—silent—majority. The ones who labor quietly, sometimes resentfully, in the quarterback's shadow: the linemen, the guards, the punter. Nixon himself was exemplarily nonspectacular: the 150-pounder was the team's tackle dummy, kept on squad by a loving, tough, and fatherly coach who appreciated Nixon's unceasing grit and team spirit—nursing hurt players, cheering on the listless, even organizing his own team dinners, entertaining the guests on the piano, perhaps favoring them with the Orthogonian theme song. It was his own composition.
>Nixon beat a Franklin for student body president. Looking back later, acquaintances marveled at the feat of this awkward, skinny kid the yearbook called "a rather quiet chap about campus," dour and brooding, who couldn't even win a girlfriend, who attracted enemies, who seemed, a schoolmate recalled, "the man least likely to succeed in politics." They hadn't learned what Nixon was learning. Being hated by the right people was no impediment to political success. The unpolished, after all, were everywhere in the majority.
> in the quarterback's shadow: the linemen, the guards, the punter
This line outs the author and his editors as of the conspicuously-ignorant-of-football persuasion: guard is one of the linemen positions.
For the curious:
- The offensive line is five positions, arranged from the middle out: center, two guards, two tackles.
- The defensive line is four positions, arranged from the middle out: two guards, two tackles.
These are usually the biggest and strongest players on the team. Their job is to battle each other for dominance of the line: the offense wants to prevent anyone stopping the quarterback from throwing the ball, and if possible open a hole for a running back to go through; the defense wants to stop anyone from running through the line with the ball, and if possible block a pass or tackle the quarterback.
I grew up not exactly poor, because the wolf was never at the door, but we sure didn't have any extra money, either. But in a million years we wouldn't have called attention to something we owned. That would have been unthinkably vulgar. These days I'm not what you would call spectacularly wealthy, but we're quite comfortable, and we still wouldn't dream of crowing about an expensive possession. Somehow we absorbed the lesson that you always keep a straight face and assume that any financial competence or luxury is completely normal, not worth comment. What's more, there's scarcely anything more vulgar than exhibiting anxiety over loss or damage to something fine, like a spill on a good carpet or knocking over a goblet. Wherever that comes from, it's not from ancestors in the Social Register.
The Siege engine thing is from Mitch Benn - I think it was on a live Edinburgh festival recording called "The Unnecessary Mitch Benn", which unfortunately does not appear to exist to buy any more - although anyone who finds it would have my gratitude!
In his version, he makes it sound more martial by sounding out the syllables - Rho - Do - Den - Dron!
Yeah, the democrats are on solid ground. It would have taken more vote switching to make HRC president in 2016 than Trump in 2020, after he botched literally everything about a pandemic. And now with an old white guy president they can't just scapegoat any criticism as racist, like when Obama intentionally maximised the number of foreclosures on poor people or refused to prosecute his Wall Street campaign donors for blowing up the economy. There is decidedly much less room for their usual dog and pony show. And I'm sure $2k right away that turned into $1400 for less people in 4 months and not even pretending to fight for $15min wage will really do wonders for base turn out. There has never been a ruling class more deserving of guillotines than ours.
> $2k right away that turned into $1400
Can you explain this to me? I thought argument back in December was, "$600 isn't enough, it should be $2000." So now they're plusing up the original $600 to make it to $2k total. Were people, back in December before the lame duck relief bill got passed, arguing for $2600? Or are they just trying to punish the Dem establishment for not moving far enough to the left?
I get using this as a rhetorical bludgeon if think $2000 wasn't enough to begin with, but it strikes me as completely disingenuous to act as if its some sort of broken promise.
Aside: It reminds me of the M4A debate, where the phrase "Medicare for All" got thrown around, gained wide acceptance, and then when plans started coming out, it turned into, "Nono, M4A actually means abolishing private insurance, and your universal coverage plan doesn't do that so you're a big liar" or something to that effect.
These are both intra-party conflicts with the Dems. Are there other examples I'm missing? Do Republicans do this too? (Border wall, perhaps?)
> Were people, back in December before the lame duck relief bill got passed, arguing for $2600?
Not specifically. The argument usually given is that many Democrats were apparently not interested in updating their messaging and were promising "a $2000 check" without fine print... in January, after the $600 was in the rear-view mirror.
One particularly egregious example from 1/14 had congressman Adam Schiff (D-CA) describe the plan on Twitter as "new $2k relief checks" (specifically using the word 'new') _while quoting_ a NYT reporter who correctly stated that Biden's plan contained "$1,400 checks for individuals".
https://twitter.com/RepAdamSchiff/status/1349881568429543425
Incidentally it might make more sense if you know that a common progressive ask since early in the pandemic has been _$2k checks monthly_. Even outside of the mixed messaging, that surely contributes both to a) the demand that the amount be $2K and b) the unwillingness to have a second check coming one to three months later considered part of the "same" payment.
"When I was in middle school, I used to wonder - there are cool kids and uncool kids, right? But suppose all the uncool kids agreed to think of themselves as cool, and to make fun of the currently-cool kids. ... So why don’t they do that? I have lots of partial answers, but still no satisfying one. I feel the same way about the upper class."
They don't do it because truly "cool" people have something ineffable called charisma. Charisma is totally real, and freaking amazing. I don't know quite how common it is; in my (upper class-ish) high school of about 400 boys I'd say there was one who was charismatic enough that solitary anti-social me noticed.
So I don't think the totality of cool kids at school are charismatic. But there will be one or two (the "genuinely cool") that are, and I suspect the rest get there by good looks, money and charisma's poor relative, confidence. Confidence ain't much in the real, adult, world, but it's rare enough in school that it will likely do in a pinch.
I raise these points because I suspect at least part of what counts as upper class is penumbrae around confidence and charisma. I suspect this also decays with generations. The founder of the dynasty generally has something special, some combination of extreme confidence, charisma, competence, and ruthlessness. Though he (usually he, let's get real) may be a lousy father, he still instills some sort of confidence plus above averageness in the kids. Throw in money, good tutors, good exemplars, and you have a generation that at least project confidence ala knowing how to dress, carry themselves, and talk to adults as adults. With decent wives along the way, this may even last through the grandkids.
But (generally by the grandkids, rare to even last to the 4th generation) the discipline and competence of the founder are no longer visible and we no longer see aristocracy as "the best among us", rather we see eurotrash. They have the money, they often have the undeserved confidence, they absolutely lack the charisma (or even charm), or the competence.
So I suspect the "uppermost class" is always one that is divided in two.
There's the sinking 3rd generation and later, the best of which just want to be left alone, the worst of which are constantly ranting about blood and breeding when they aren't snorting heroin.
Meanwhile there's the rising second generation or the founders (maybe considered nouveau richer, but too wealthy too ignore), people in whom there is a lot to genuinely admire, even if not the whole package.
As a single group, uncool kids don't have much in common with each other, so they can't make their own status ladder. But, as I recall, there were some groups that looked down upon each other and considered the others uncool.
For someone as smart as Scott Alexander, I am genuinely surprised he doesn't read David shor. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/03/david-shor-2020-democrats-autopsy-hispanic-vote-midterms-trump-gop.html
There is no real lower class constituency for "anti racist math"
This sort of policy is for signalling among college educated people. It's a ratchet where the in group personal costs for being against it are much higher than the outgroup political costs for being for it.
This is David shors whole thesis. The Democratic party was captured by college educated white people. College educated white people are very different from most other groups.
He writes about how when he was working for a Democratic ad company and whenever his company had an ad that the people inside just loved... They would get the actual test results back and it would be shown to slightly increase trump support. That's because the people staffing the campaigns are idealistic college educated 20 somethings while the average voter is 51 with no college degree.
Ibram kendi doesn't speak for all black people. Heck, the implications of white fragility for Democratic strategy are entirely ignored.
"White fragility" says that when white people are reminded of their own role within/ benefits from systemic racism, they tend to react sangrily and defensively. For college educated white people, thats great. "We're going to go upset the oppressors and wake up the masses and right the injustice" They happily castigate and point out injustices and collect plaudits from fellow people in their own group.
Remember, it was black voters in South Carolina that out Biden over the top in the primary.
For actual minorities in the Democratic coalition, making white people angry and increasing the share of them voting based on racial grievance isn't a costless endeavour. They don't want to lose body cameras debates because people are turned off by "defund yhe police" They would really like the woke class to tone it down. They were the ones who said, "You know what? We will choose the boring white guy, because the 2 or 3% penalty we get from choosing someone who activates white animus isn't something that we can afford to lose.
I've seen two perspectives in the comments here about De Novo Coolgenesis in Homo Nerdicus - Either something very theoretical, or just because, well, if they were that socially adept, they wouldn't need to decide they were cool. I agree with the latter, so here's my attempt to flesh it out a little bit.
Social interaction is a dance. You can be genuine and not bother about the status games! But the "cool" people are defined as those that choose to play the status games, and do well at them.
But you can learn how to salsa. You can learn how to dance. So here's how to dance. Go up to a group of "cool" kids (Read: Kids whose majors are not especially intellectually taxing, if you're not in university) and introduce yourself. Be agreeable, don't look for reasons to start arguments. Observe the injokes and social mores of the group. Don't try to use them yourself, just make note of them. Inevitably, you will be asked a question, or somehow prompted to share about yourself. You have joined the dance, and now they are seeing if you can dance with them. Be careful about what you say. Reply with an agreeable answer, but don't make it seem like you're avoiding answering - it's fine to share your honest opinion, but present it well. Do not go out of your way to share some sort of unpopular opinion. Mind your body language - be confident, but don't force your way in. You have no social cachet with these people right now, and you're only really there because nobody has a particular reason to want you to leave.
Keep up the dance. Engage when prompted. Don't try to change the dynamic. Slip in. Have a good time. You know what? You won't get kicked out or ostracized. Hell, it'll probably work - these people will think you're a pretty nice person - by that, I mean Normal, and not Weird. Note that Normal and Weird are genuinely terms used to describe frat memberships, which should tell you about how blatant these social games get!
So what's the purpose of me telling you this? Well, it's tiring. If you don't do it often, it's real tiring. You have to be on a low level of alert for the steps and the moves of the dance, while picking up what your partners are doing. Personally, my studies wear me out enough - I simply don't have the energy, nor inclination or time, to engage in it. It surely gets easier, but social skills are a muscle, like anything else. It's tiring if you know the blueprint to follow. If you don't, and you try to dance with the cool kids? You'll trip over yourself. In this way, a feedback cycle is created. If, early on, you encounter social success and stay with the social arms race as it develops through the grades, you're a Cool Kid. If you fall behind early and don't get back on the truck in time, you're not.
If the Uncool Kids tried to decide they were cool, they would be using the label without the criteria, because coolness is defined as the ability to dance the dance. And if they were socially adept enough to see the relativity of those terms, they would already be able to dance the dance. That's how you get stuff being defined as "Cringe." It's not because people are passionate about stuff. It's because they're not dancing the dance when they express it.
*If you're in university, not if you're not in university. Whoops.
Yes, that dance is tiring for anyone!
If you're on the spectrum, as most STEM nerds are, it's somewhere out on the exhausting-imposible end of the effort scale.
This is accurate, IMO.
I'd add that learning this dance will make you good at things like "networking" and "schmoozing", which my younger self was disappointed to find are actually very useful things for many careers.
> This also sparked a discussion about whether Donald Trump was “upper class”, with one person arguing in support that he owns gold toilets, and someone else responding that gold toilets are the least classy thing imaginable. Good summation of the difference between economic vs. cultural models of class!
The way I frame it is that Donald Trump appeals to some of the cultural lower class because he acts the way a cultural-lower-class person might (approvingly!) imagine themselves acting if they became a billionaire: solid gold toilets, still eating McDonalds, making big explicit fuck-yous to anyone in their way. Staying real instead of acting all hoity-toity.
I think the analysis Scott makes of the Democratic coalition is a bit off. Imo, David Shor has the correct take.
Basically, the Democratic coalition consists of two groups: (mostly?) affluent (always) educated whites that vote overwhelmingly for the left because they are genuinely left wing, at least in abstract terms, in both economic and cultural matters, and minorities that vote overwhelmingly D for historical reasons (or misconceptions, I guess, if you are a proud Republican). The minorities are usually poorer and more conservative in cultural matters, although even in economic ones they are less radical. The only way the coalition can remain competitive is if racial polarization remains very high. When minorities stop voting D overwhelmingly (when the 60s Civil Rights coalition inertia runs its course, as it seems to be happening since the last election) the game is up and they will have to become 25% less woke, maybe even slightly less wing economically, although not much because populism just polls well in general.
Corollary: anti racist math is really to please the elites in the Democratic party, it’s not a concession. The elites can afford such off-putting stuff because, as I wrote, 90% of blacks and hispanics will vote for them anyways. The Scott Hypothesis only works with the Republican party, which genuinely does culture war stuff to please its more prole base while pushing tax cuts nobody but the Kochs like.