The Secret Shame of Middle Class Americans

[Spartan_Warrior]

@PoI: I'm up near Eldersburg, just over the Bal'mer County line. Howdy, neighbor!

[bryan]

Agreeing with what @Papers of Indenture is saying, mostly.

Rather, a determinist would recognize that every event from his own actions to the flapping of a butterfly's wings in China--regardless of the fact that these events are themselves also determined--plays a causal role in outcomes. Thus, without the ability to know all inputs (e.g. the state of all physical things at present) and all causal laws--and hence, to know the future--there can be no such thing as a necessary or fated event.

Yes, from an individual's perspective, there is plenty randomness available. It's true that if you keep zooming out, things are not so random, but there is always still some random, eventually. Until you encompass the entire Universe and then we are left wondering if our Universe is just one Universe being overwhelmed by the locality of the big bang. And of course, if you zoom in you get to quantum random.

99.999999999% probability is the opposite of a sure thing when your time scale is 10^10^56 years. (https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0410270)

Maybe it's a meaningless distinction.
...
ETA: Perhaps it comes down to this: I believe it is clear and in fact required by determinism that humans, like any other molecules, can be part of a causal chain that determines subsequent events. I just don't think free will plays any part in the process. So to me it is definitely not true that what I choose to do today has no affect on tomorrow; in fact, what I choose to do today is (part of) what causes tomorrow. It's just that I am not free in how or what I choose to do today.

The emergent complexity of "life" on Earth is already to the point where it certainly does seem a pedantic distinction. "I think therefore I am" seems apt. So what if we are not free from the tyranny of math and physics? Continued thinking on this stuff could be useful so that maybe we can rage (or not) against the heat death of the universe. Fun.

[Ego]

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.

[enigmaT120]

brute does not know what postulates are. wikipedia redirects to 'axioms'. religion = axioms?

Yes. They seem likely but you can't prove them so you work under the assumption that they are true and go on to prove all kinds of other stuff. Man I loved geometry. Sometimes you deliberately assume something that you don't think is true and demonstrate how that assumption ultimately becomes self-contradictory.

[jacob]

99.999999999% probability is the opposite of a sure thing when your time scale is 10^10^56 years. (https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0410270)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almost_surely is the technical term for talking about such things. Also "almost always", "almost never", etc.

(Whenever I say "almost surely", I almost surely use it in that way.)

[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.