Comment by lsc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lsc | Hacker News Reader

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> If you really do look down on your old friends and acquaintances like that (so that you see their posts as all about being poorer and less articulate than you), then you're probably the one making posts that depress them.

Sometimes, yes, and that is the cause of some negative self-reflection on my part, but I think that there's another factor at work... I think that especially the "racist memes with spelling mistakes' crowd just values different things from what I value. For many of them, they see education as a negative attribute except to the extent that it intersects with income, (this attitude is creeping into HN, I think) and even then... you have to understand that unlike most of the people I work with now, I went to a school where scholastic aptitude was something you hid, if you were smart.

>Imagine yourself as if you went to highschool in the society where you now work (so that now, the people you used to know are twice as educated and lots of them are far more wealthy)

I've wondered what this would have been like. I mean, arrogance has always been with me; and I think I am a lot more aware of my own arrogance than other people are? But a big part of that is that for so many of my friends now, I am 'normal' or maybe even below average - just because they went to really exclusive schools then worked at prestigious places. They have a completely different view of what is normal.

What if I always existed in a world where I wasn't "special"? I imagine I'd be a better person, socially. But maybe not? I dunno.

>or perhaps imagine what it would be like to have stayed in your old town while someone else went to SV!

I... did move back to my hometown for a while. It was... not an experience I care to repeat.

>I went to a school where scholastic aptitude was something you hid, if you were smart.

That's a very common experience I'm actually surprised to hear that it's ever any other way.

To go a bit historical materialist on you, I think that if you took the kids at your old school and made them ten times better at thinking and ten times worse at everything else, their values would re-adjust so that they felt valuable again. People balance their values between the need to have a target to work towards and the desire to not feel terrible all the time - if you're very bad at something you're unlikely to find it an appropriate goal or a comfortable self-measure.

>That's a very common experience I'm actually surprised to hear that it's ever any other way.

That's a western thing. In the east being smart is cool.

>That's a western thing. In the east being smart is cool.

I thought it was an exclusive school thing. The Americans I know who went to exclusive high schools seem to have had very different experiences. I even know several people (who went to a 'special' highschool for 'gifted' children) who claimed that they enjoyed high school more than college.

I went to an "elite" private high school. The handful of kids who chose to take a gap year or to gasp not go to college at all were looked upon with such scorn. But no one was more looked down-upon than the kids who only got into "safety schools."

That said -- being in an environment where your intellect was directly correlated to your social standing was pretty nourishing and really encouraged the best in (most) people.

I agree with this.

I went to a private high school. I was not a gifted student in any way. I was actually denied by the school but my parents begged the principal so they give me a chance to study there (I learned these details years later). And it was actually a very enjoyable experience. Being smart was not something you hide. The sporty guys were the most popular like many other places, but there was no bullying because of your geekness.

I did one year of public high school (which I failed) before I went to private school. And the experience was a total different world.

(from Quebec->Canada)

Nope. I was educated mostly at public (private) school in the UK, and spent a year at a private school in the US.

I was ruthlessly mocked until I learned to dissemble, to not put my hand up to answer a question, to be publicly told off by teachers for not handing in work.

The reason is simple - if you make others feel inferior, by being better at anything in any way than them, they hate and envy you.

>The reason is simple - if you make others feel inferior, by being better at anything in any way than them, they hate and envy you.

If that were true, the sports stars would not have been popular

I think the difference is that everybody believes that they too could be a sports star, in the same way as everybody believes that they too will one day be rich - whereas intellect is a rather fixed quantity - so point taken, I was overly broad.

Physical prowess is probably just as limited as intelligence, although our culture definitely associates strength with the gym and smarts with being born that way (although both traits will be equally useless if not developed by training).

I think there's a "social proximity" effect to it.

If you see someone you consider immensely superior to yourself on TV, for example, you're likely to consider yourself either disconnected (and not threatened) by them, or entertain a fantasy of "I could be that someday" (see: most Americans).

Alternatively, if you see someone you consider even slightly superior to yourself who is situated similarly in social hierarchy to you, or who you encounter as a peer or near-peer in your everyday life (e.g. a classmate, friend, or sibling), the threat response is much stronger.

I don't know why this is (maybe "this person maybe could take my food/resources/whatever, notices me, and is materially able to take from me" versus "this person definitely could take my food/resources/whatever but does not know me and is not materially able to take from me" brain-stem thinking?)

I meant 'sports stars' in the context of high school... people who certainly could and traditionally did take food resources away from more scholarly children.

Everyone loves a winner, on some level. But are sports stars generally popular with the public or among their peers, or teammates?

Michael Jordan, was/is endured to the public for his talent and work ethic, but I don’t believe he was adored quite the same by teammates or opponents.

I have no idea. the kids who were good at sports seemed to be pretty popular in high school, though, which is what I thought we were talking about.

>People balance their values between the need to have a target to work towards and the desire to not feel terrible all the time

Yes. This is something I do consciously... but also poorly. It would not surprise me at all if most people do something like that, consciously or not.

> For many of them, they see education as a negative attribute

Yes it's an unfortunate byproduct of the link between education and left wing ideology.

We often joked that people who go away to college come back dumber than when they left.

As an example when my daughter was in college she came to visit us and was talking about how I was contributing to the patriarchy and enabling the oppression of women and how women have it so much worse.

And I'm sitting there thinking what happened to my sweet girl and why am I working a stressful job with long hours to help pay for her to learn this kind of crap.

It must have been discomforting that your sweet girl had become a woman with thoughts and opinions differed to yours.

If I'm reading this correctly, it's a nasty personal attack. That's not allowed on this site regardless of how wrong you think someone else's views are, and we ban accounts that do it. Please don't do it again.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> had become a woman with thoughts and opinions differed to yours.

If your daughter came home from college a neo-nazi would you say the same?

What if lots of your neighbors sons and daughters were also coming home from college neo-nazis?

I'm not so sure you would agree that they had grown up and developed their own opinions.

Yeah but there's a difference between going to college and becoming leftist and going to a trailer park and becoming a neo-nazi.

Could you please not do generic ideological arguing on Hacker News? It's off topic here.

> Yeah but there's a difference between going to college and becoming leftist

There is a difference between becoming leftist and becoming consumed with hatred and rage towards people who disagree with you politically.

Especially when those people have worked tremendously hard to support and care for you.

"I hate oppression" and "I hate ethnicities" are still 2 very different things to bring home. That's a very false equivalency.

That's just word play.

The neo nazis believe that we are being oppressed by the Jews.

It's easy to label groups we disagree with as oppressive but that doesn't make it true.

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