The Secret Shame of Middle Class Americans

[bryan]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almost_surely

Didn't realize it was a somewhat formalized term.

Reminds me of the Hitchhiker's Guide infinite improbability drive.

[BRUTE]

Taking determinism one step further.

https://aeon.co/ideas/whatever-you-thin ... r-own-mind

The case starts with the claim that humans (and other primates) have a dedicated mental subsystem for understanding other people’s minds, which swiftly and unconsciously generates beliefs about what others think and feel, based on observations of their behaviour. Carruthers argues that this same system is responsible for our knowledge of our own minds. Humans did not develop a second, inward-looking mindreading system (an inner sense); rather, they gained self-knowledge by directing the outward-looking system upon themselves.

brute highly recommends Daniel Dennett's Consciousness Explained for more on this. brilliant stuff, by far the most intriguing and applicable theory of consciousness brute has ever read.

the argument is basically the same as Ego has quoted. at one point, it became useful in an evolutionary context for humans to understand other humans and their intention. this system is relatively primitive, to the point where humans anthropomorphize comic book characters, cars with "faces", animals, or really anything that seems to have 2 eyes and 1 mouth and maybe something in between that resembles a nose. this system began looking for "intent" everywhere.

now the mind blowing thing to brute was, what if that same system turned on humans themselves and humans started anthropomorphizing themselves? maybe there was never an original "brute thinks therefore he is". maybe this is just a primitive "2 eyes look scared there's probably a tiger" system that learned to observe itself.

thus brute's belief that humans are basically heaps of atoms that are overrating themselves and each other.

in the book, Dennett gives dozens of examples of how dumb and simple different parts of the human mind really are. the whole time he questions the idea that there's "something there". after looking at the evidence, it just looks like a bunch of little machines that are really good at specialized tasks, but no soul, no ego, no identity.

another mind blowing moment for brute was watching the movie The Prestige

(SPOILER ALERT FOR THE PRESTIGE).

at the end, it's revealed that a magician has used a machine to "clone" himself instead of "teleporting" himself, killing the original version of his body every time. there's hundreds of dead bodies of this magician from each time he has performed the "teleport" trick.

for days, brute was thinking "but how did he know that he would be in the new body, not the old? how could he be sure which one would be the real him?"

until it finally hit brute. there was no real one. they were all real. there is no ego in a body (no offense to Egos present), it's just a bunch of atoms. the consciousness of the magician didn't have to go either into the new or the old body. consciousness was just an effect of the machines being assembled in a human body, an illusion of simple parts that would look to an outside observer like consciousness.

[Ego]

at one point, it became useful in an evolutionary context for humans to understand other humans and their intention. this system is relatively primitive, to the point where humans anthropomorphize comic book characters, cars with "faces", animals, or really anything that seems to have 2 eyes and 1 mouth and maybe something in between that resembles a nose. this system began looking for "intent" everywhere.

now the mind blowing thing to brute was, what if that same system turned on humans themselves and humans started anthropomorphizing themselves? maybe there was never an original "brute thinks therefore he is". maybe this is just a primitive "2 eyes look scared there's probably a tiger" system that learned to observe itself.

I reserved the book at the library. Thanks!

Marketers have certainly used our compulsion to anthropomorphize against us. If we are anthropomorphizing ourselves into existence then it would follow that we could add to that "self" with products. I am my khakis. I am my three-bedroom bungalow with the manicured front lawn and the Mercedes in the driveway. If the Mercedes is dirty or the lawn unkept, then it is a reflection of me. I feel dirty and unkept.

The more we believe that 'these things are me', the more we become like the guy in the original post.

Of course, this is tied up in the conundrum that we should all try to build a healthy sense of self and good self-esteem while at the same time recognizing that the self is an illusion. Good luck with that.

[BRUTE]

Marketers have certainly used our compulsion to anthropomorphize against us. If we are anthropomorphizing ourselves into existence then it would follow that we could add to that "self" with products. I am my khakis. I am my three-bedroom bungalow with the manicured front lawn and the Mercedes in the driveway. If the Mercedes is dirty or the lawn unkept, then it is a reflection of me. I feel dirty and unkept.

brute finds this fascinating, too. there is a tendency to use the human skin as an absolute boundary. everything within a human's skin is "part of the human", everything outside is not.

but that's not a very realistic reflection about how humans think about either their bodies or external things.

looking at a human infant, brute was struck by the incompetence this tiny being expressed. it was clearly not in control of its own body in the most fundamental ways. it could not walk, sit, it could not crawl. on the other extreme, many humans use external tools with such precision that it could be argued the tools are part or extension of their bodies. brute could think of a car racer who reacts to feedback from the tires in milliseconds. or a mechanic who uses a screwdriver more skillfully than the infant uses its own legs.

it seems to brute that the "skin barrier" was chosen because it is easy, not because it is accurate. if some humans care more about their lawn and their mercedes than about their own body, is the body really "them" more than the lawn/car? only in a very technical and arbitrary way, like using the skin barrier.

what brute is in effect saying is that humans are already adding to their "selves" with products - the original augmentations being their own bodily limbs and functions. making the human skin a strict divide between "self" and "not-self" is arbitrary and often unhelpful.

[Dragline]

Contrast the story in the OP with this one -- its like these people are living in completely different countries. They certainly have completely different mindsets.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyl ... a#comments

Of course the comments are most amusing, as cognitive dissonance reigns (and devolve into critiques/preferences about home schooling, having children and belonging to a religious body). But beyond the gratuitous labeling, this is an example of people who have built and leveraged a large amount of social capital.

[cmonkey]

Wow, 13 children. I could hardly manage that many chickens....so I got rid of some. If they had gone to my school, they would have made up 1/3 of my entire graduating class. This being in north, rural Iowa.

Aldi is definitely the place to cut your grocery bill in half.

Good read!

[Ego]

But beyond the gratuitous labeling, this is an example of people who have built and leveraged a large amount of social capital.

We can argue about thirteen children somewhere else. The fact that they are accomplishing so much for so many with so little is incredible.

One of the advantages of big families is that the eldest usually learns out of necessity to hack various system (like their college hack) then the younger kids benefit from the collective institutional wisdom.

Great story.

[BRUTE]

Rob’s income never topped $50,000 until he was 40; he’s now 51 and earns just north of $100,000 as a software tester.

Sam, who is 48, home-schools the children through high school

The plan: Start in community college, don’t expect a handout from Mom and Dad, and graduate debt-free.

brute completely agrees with Dragline that there's something fundamentally different about how these 2 (extremes of the spectrum?) approach life. it doesn't even seem to be just finances, but the way they approach life in general. huge debt just seems to be a side effect of one of those approaches.

brute is unsure if this is a built-in trait or somehow taught. it seems that software people and other engineers are very prone to value things differently, and to optimize their cost of living a lot.

and there's definitely a family component. it seems that this stuff is not taught in college. it's not "learned" like a skill, more like values.

[Spartan_Warrior]

Whoa! They're locals. That makes the story even more impressive as I know what a rip-off it is to live around here. Good for them.

[Dragline]

It was also interesting to me that they were portrayed as "careful and smart", more-or-less, as opposed to "crazy/weird and probably lying", which I think is part of an ongoing cultural pendular shift towards favoring frugality more than in recent decades past.

[7Wannabe5]

One of my dorm-mates when I was at an engineering college came from a huge family that followed basically the same prescription for college costs. They all attended community colleges first and worked summers in Alaskan fisheries. Her father had 2 or 3 kids with his first wife who died, then 11 kids with her mother, then he dumped her and started having more babies with a third wife. I think he was a Mormon, or something like that. When I visited her family home, I noticed that when the smoke alarm went off, her mother did not even show one speck of reaction. It was like her adrenal glands had been permanently fried.

[Dragline]

Ah, the classic fertility debate:

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

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

[jacob]

Recently, frugality has gotten a boost thanks to hundreds of personal-finance bloggers, and no thanks at all to the Great Recession of 2007-2009. Many focus on FIRE, an acronym for financial independence/retire early.

Wow! I still remember when FIRE wasn't even a thing in the pf-blogging world and we---by which I mean mostly just me---had endless debates about what the "R"-word actually meant.

[BRUTE]

Wow! I still remember when FIRE wasn't even a thing in the pf-blogging world and we---by which I mean mostly just me---had endless debates about what the "R"-word actually meant.

Recently?

[jacob]

No, about 7 years ago.

Back when the only people talking about FIRE (for the under 50 or under $1M crowd) in the way that is widely understood today was ERE, lackingambition (mikeBOS on this forum), canadian dream, retiredsyd, ourroadtofreedom, and spartanstudent (ken ilgunas). (My apologies if I forget any.)

The big second generation FIRE blogs today (MMM, madfientist, jhcollins, gocurrycracker, bravenewworld... ) didn't exist yet.

Back then almost all pf-blogging was still mostly about clipping coupons, making your own laundry detergent, developing side-incomes, and "using the magic of compound interest" to accumulate $1M by the age of 60 or so. In those years, in order to call yourself "retired", you had to meet a host of idiosyncratic rules like having at least X amount of money, being at least Y years old, not being allowed to make any income, not being allowed to do any DIY, not being related to other people who weren't retired, etc. Reason I made up the "internet retirement police" term. They were everywhere. Some even took pride in it.

During the first gen era, our ideas/lifestyle were mildly tolerated but usually dismissed as "too extreme, but ... " or "I find it hard to believe ... " on regular pf-blogs. And when(*) we appeared on mainstream media, it was a veritable shitstorm. 99.9% negative comments. Not exaggerating here. A yahoo article could gather 1000 comments and most would imply that I was lying; that living in an RV (which I did back then) was for losers (now it's the cool thing for FIRE bloggers); ... and lots of blabla along of the lines of "I can't imagine it, therefore it doesn't work". The number of positive comments was 1 in a 1000 and it was usually someone trolling.

(*) If the article didn't get stopped at the editor-stage as being "too unrealistic".

It's actually kinda crazy how much and how fast things have shifted.

[BRUTE]

first they ridicule an idea, then, they violently oppose it... jacob knows the drill.

[Sclass]

Oh man, I went back to the Atlantic link in the OP. There are a bunch of follow up stories.

Really sad stuff. Scary too. I think I'll stay home and count my pennies today.

[IlliniDave]

At least one of the followups leans toward the hopeful side--at least the writer has applied a little common sense rather than continue doing something that wasn't working and somehow expecting the results to change.

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/arc ... fe/480612/

I've lived all but about 2.75 years of my like in flyover country, and expect to spend the rest of my life in it. It's not the answer to all of life's difficulties, but it makes the playing field easy to navigate.

At this point I'm beginning to wonder if the widespread prosperity in the US during the 50s and 60s wasn't just a case of catching lightning in a bottle that has set an expectational bar in the culture that's too high to overcome most of the time. What I anticipate for my kids and grandkids could be described as a mean reversion back to the conditions my grandparents started off in, with the big difference being that my grandparents and most of their generation had humbler material aspirations than what is preached today. The new normal is the old normal. I attribute more than a little of my "success" when it comes to having a stable financial life to values I adopted from my grandparents.

[jacob]

..., with the big difference being that my grandparents and most of their generation had humbler material aspirations than what is preached today.

The other big difference was that the grandparent-generation were much more skilled in terms of being able to manipulate their personal environment. How many people today (boomer and younger) know how to butcher a chicken? What's the fraction of people who can cook from staples? How many can pour concrete?

To illustrate: A few years ago I read a popular survivalist book. Somewhere near the end the author quotes a list of woodworking tools from an old (1920 or whatever) book and then says, and I paraphrase here, "I don't know what some of these tools are or do or where to get them, but you should figure this out". Mindblowing! Now, I'm somewhat of a woodworker and I mainly use handtools, so I did know the listed tools, how they work, and I even own them. That's not the point though. The point is that my grandfather was not a woodworker and yet he also owned these tools and occasionally worked with wood. I interpret this as us having moved from a point whether woodworking was a common knowledge skill to a point where most people don't even recognize half the tools anymore but if you do you're considered some kind of enthusiast or expert---all in a span of two generations.

To set some absolute standards, it wasn't like they had advanced skills. It's more than they have average skills but that the following generations have practically none having outsourced everything to the market place. This is evident from how common FIRE blogging now/still sees everything as a financial solution: instead of earn-buy of pre-2010, it's just become invest-buy in 2016. There's still very little doing.

[Tyler9000]

This is evident from how common FIRE blogging now/still sees everything as a financial solution: instead of earn-buy of pre-2010, it's just become invest-buy in 2016. There's still very little doing.

Very true.

And even in investing, there's very little doing these days. Between the proliferation of robo advisors and ER blogs advocating for "unlearning" investing and putting all your money in a single fund, I find it a little concerning that a decent chunk of the FIRE community today may not even know how a bond works or what asset allocation even means. (And that's really simple compared to legit stock trading skills). They rightfully ditch expensive money managers but do not bother to replace the knowledge base with their own financial education. That information is just piled in the basement with grandad's mysterious woodworking tools.