Comment by jcims
5 years ago
I'm a middle-aged, white, cis male heterosexual married father that has started and run companies, hired and managed engineers, make ok money, lean a bit right of center politically, worked for the government, large banks, healthcare and retail and lives in a rural location in the midwest.
What you've described is something I experience in almost every facet of my life. I'm so blandly stereotypical it hurts yet somehow the rampant generalizations that are used to describe me, my values and my motivations are so hilariously wrong the vast majority of time that I don't even bother to argue because there's nothing to even work with as a ground truth.
The most recent reality check I've had is this year when I finally started using Twitter. I loaded up on folks in my industry only to be blindsided with a barrage of insanity. Honestly think that 75% of the people in my feed in serious need of a wellness check. I can't imagine the damage being done to young folks observing the behavior of adults on that platform.
>The most recent reality check I've had is this year when I finally started using Twitter. I loaded up on folks in my industry only to be blindsided with a barrage of insanity.
They created a platform that optimizes for trolling, insanity and outrage porn because it's the cheapest way of inducing engagement. It's hardly a reality check.
A reality check would be going to a conference and realizing that twitter isn't a representation of the general public.
> A reality check would be going to a conference and realizing that twitter isn't a representation of the general public.
An interesting counter(? corollary? Neither?) to that is when you go to a conference and the SAME INSANE PEOPLE from Twitter are there, acting as one would consider "normal".
I don't know what to think about the immense gulf between how we as a species behave behind a screen vs face to face. And how we also react to others doing it.
I had this lesson 25 years ago. The nicest person I knew at my school was an immense asshole online. It wasn't even the anonymousness of it - it was to fellow classmates that knew who he was.
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>I don't know what to think about the immense gulf between how we as a species behave behind a screen vs face to face.
"Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth - Oscar Wilde."
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Don’t even get me started on conferences, there are a centerpiece of the controversy. I never got into the conference groove because I always had to pay my own way and never wanted to turn down an opportunity to bill some hours.
Trump rallies are sort of like a real-life depiction of Twitter
I'm so blandly stereotypical it hurts yet somehow the rampant generalizations that are used to describe me, my values and my motivations are so hilariously wrong the vast majority of time
Maybe you are not so blandly stereotypical after all? Your mini bio doesn't sound bland at all. Maybe you fit the formal criteria for group membership (in the group you describe), but aren't an average exemplar? Maybe people in general tend to think of themselves as more typical than they are? Or maybe that's true especially for guys in the group you describe? That would certainly explain political rhetoric talking to regular Joes who aren't so regular anymore.
Also probably true: the group you describe is so large that the variation within it is large, and stereotypes have little predictive predictive power for individual members.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_dimensionality
The likelyhood of being average in all dimensions plummets with an increase in dimensions.
Well yeah, as you add more ways to be different, you're more likely to be different.
Same - and although I've been able to resist it so far, it's so tempting to retort, well fuck you too. I can see why people get pulled towards the extremes. The reasonable (in my case progressive stand point) is not good enough for the extremists.
I had the same experience you described, except, in my case, it was Facebook.
People in my industry who I have known for 20+ years dedicated 100% of their online presence to spewing out and promoting such incredible hate-filled garbage that I was in shock.
Otherwise intelligent educated people got sucked into amazing resonant chambers of hatred. It was beyond belief.
I finally unfriended everyone on FB but about a dozen close family members. This was an experience I don’t care to repeat.
>the people in my feed in serious need of a wellness check.
Like, uuh, the president of the United States?
Why would he be in my feed?
> cis male heterosexual married father
How I long for the good old days when people used the word "man" to describe this.
I get what you are saying, but those "good old days" often ignored or downright humiliated men who were not cis, not heterosexual, not married, or childfree. There are all sorts of people under the sun.
to me it is more exciting that there is a whole population that can be more productive in our society just because the rest of us use a few adjective or pronouns. that's massive leverage with very low overhead, I like it.
I hope you're being sarcastic.
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>The most recent reality check I've had is this year when I finally started using Twitter. I loaded up on folks in my industry only to be blindsided with a barrage of insanity. Honestly think that 75% of the people in my feed in serious need of a wellness check. I can't imagine the damage being done to young folks observing the behavior of adults on that platform.
Twitter/Reddit are always, Always, ALWAYS wrong about everything.[1]
... and thank God for that.
As one whose political and cultural beliefs are, like yours, mostly opposite that of Twitter/Reddit's as a whole, the sites' existence (including subreddits like /r/politics, /r/news, and /r/worldnews) is gratifying and validating.
If the mass of Redditards/Twitter users agreed with my opinions I'd carefully reexamine every one of them.
As bloodraven42 wrote in response to a pretty cringe-inducing example of a Redditard (who was agreeing with an even more cringe-inducing example (http://np.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/urodq/british_guy_...)):
>Please note the fact that you've gotten this impression from "reading Reddit". I assure you, reading Reddit gives you about as accurate a portrayal of reality as reading North Korean "news". Did you know Kim Jong Il is literally a God?
As Anal_Justice_League added:
>So wait, your world view comes from reading Reddit?
>Do I even have to explain how catastrophically stupid that is?
And as 1foryes said in another thread (https://np.reddit.com/r/canada/comments/be2p5a/cbc_predicts_...): >But fortunately, reddit does not represent reality. If it did, the ice caps would have melted years ago and we'd all be fighting in WW6.
[1] Except bacon
I have no idea what you're saying or what your point is, because your post is a jumbled mess. I'm not saying this to attack you.