Comment by latexr

6 days ago

Right, that’s the toupée fallacy.

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Toupee_fallacy

You only know about the people who let you know. You have no idea how many vegans or airplane pilots you encounter regularly who never tell you. A small sample is driving the reputation of the whole.

For people with whom you talk every day, it’s no surprise that you know. It’s bound to come up but I doubt it happened on your first conversation with everyone. If it did, you were hanging out with a weird group. If they knew each other, it’s normal that they’d talk about a shared interest. Just like people who hang out on HN would be likely to discuss tech when meeting in person.

I have no doubt you found your share of asshole vegans, just like there are assholes who make it a point to make everyone know they eat meat.

Though it is important to distinguish a true asshole from someone simply sharing an experience. Saying “no, thanks, I’m vegan” when offered a bite of a meat sandwich is not bragging, it’s context. Unfortunately, too many people take it to be a judgement when it most often is not.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExEHuNrC8yU

5 comments

latexr

Reply
labster  6 days ago

I never called any vegans assholes. Personality quirks are not wrong, they actually make life fun.

I guess the thing I’m getting from you is I shouldn’t comment on my own observations because of toupee bias, and I shouldn’t comment on other people’s common observations because they are just memes an not real. Is there an acceptable threshold for situational humor short of a scientific study? If so, what is it?

  • latexr  5 days ago

    > I never called any vegans assholes.

    I know, I didn’t say you did. In my first reply I said:

    > Some people are assholes and brag about anything

    And it’s that narrow definition I’ve been using throughout.

    > I guess the thing I’m getting from you is I shouldn’t comment on my own observations

    No, of course that’s not it. We can all comment on our own observations, but it’s also important to differentiate from what we each observe as individuals and what we believe the world to be. We shouldn’t let our limited view of the world cloud our understanding of how it is.

    > Is there an acceptable threshold for situational humor short of a scientific study?

    Were you doing situational humour? I reread your comments and can’t find the joke¹. Judging from the grey colour in the original comment, it doesn’t look like I was the only one to miss it if that was the intention.

    Though I will say unambiguously that I don’t think you’re arguing in bad faith. From my perspective, this has been a cordial chat.

    ¹ I guess the newspaper comment was a joke, but calling that situational seems like a stretch.

    • labster  3 days ago

      It’s cordial here, yes, though some other things happened in my life which I shouldn’t have let intrude into this discussion.

      HN in general does not like humorous tones, or at least has a mixed reception, I notice a lot of times where my comments go back and forth between +3/-2. This one probably is a worse one. It’s observational like Seinfeld, but then I don’t really like Seinfeld’s style so I probably shouldn’t have written it in the first place.

      That said a well written joke at the right time has gotten me over +50. But as I said I probably shouldn’t have been writing here at all that day, nothing good was going to be posted.

aziaziazi  6 days ago

Very interesting thought. I didn’t know the toupée itself neither the fallacy. Looks like a cousin of the famous survivor bias and both are children of a "observational bias" category. This is only my humble layman guess.

The video was interesting too, I’ll have a look at that channel. Thanks for sharing.