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Comment by JoeAltmaier | Hacker News Reader

Lots of timid, humorless folks having trouble imagining not being a sheep and always coloring inside the lines.

I for one wish there were more real people around, living life for liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Like we were intended to live.

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And I, for one, am glad that society as a whole doesn't behave this way. Imagine how obnoxious it would be if every other social interaction was somebody messing with you. Wonderful.

Instead we have someone in every other social interaction trying to sell or upsell something.

Imagine how obnoxious it would be if you were detained by a federal agent for totally legal behavior.

Is every other person you interact with is a federal agent or a TSA employee?

Very little is what it seems. Jordan Peterson makes a convincing argument that dominance hierarchies (having biologically existed longer than sex differentiation) drive significant portions of many interactions even today. So if you think of social interactions in this way, many people may (sort of) "mess with you" in the sense that they are testing your position in some hierarchy.

All of this said, I haven't seen a critical analysis of Peterson's theory, which from what I can tell, does not connect the dots, so to speak, from biological behavior to individual intentions. Still, I think it is fair to say that individual intentions are not required for Peterson's explanation. The human brain does much that is neither conscious nor intentional in the usual senses of the words.

This theory is really interesting to explore and extrapolate. I'll give an example. Let's say someone treats you with a normal level of politeness. You could argue that they are not messing with you, and not challenging your position in any dominance hierarchy. But perhaps this shows they feel confident enough to address you as a peer. Or perhaps they feel like they are in a higher position, and have no need to flaunt it. In any case, your subsequent response will provide a lot of data for the other person.

I think of the number of times that people humble brag. Or the subtle things people do to demonstrate knowledge. The more I think about it, the more I think Peterson's theory is useful in an explanatory sense.

To be clear, I'm not saying I agree with any moral philosophy that suggests such behavior is ideal from an ethical perspective.

Can you imagine being the kid behind the register at Woz’s neighborhood 7-11… Having to put up with him pulling out his pair of scissors and his sheet of $2 bills every time he drops by for a Coke?

“Haha, yes yes, Woz - You’re very funny. Got me again.”

It's easy to "live life for liberty and the pursuit of happiness" when your actions do not have meaningful consequences for yourself or your loved ones.

When said actions (paying for something with legal tender) were both (a) legal and (b) harmless, I would say the way to fix any current inequities are to ensure everyone ("with liberty and justice for all") would also fail to suffer consequences beyond missing one's daughter's athletic meet.

History with fake IDs is quite different.

The story about Wozniak tipping perforated $2 bills is about a person who breaks the pattern by behaving very suspiciously after fully satisfying the initial profiling measures. It is funny in how that puts people around him into an awkward position, but make the protagonist subtly different (e.g., say he has much darker skin, some innate attribute that reveals poor upbringing, or whatever else is used for discrimination in your place and time) and the story may not have had a happy ending. How many stories would we never read about for that reason?

When the element of comedy hinges on hero being privileged it doesn’t mean it’s not funny, but it does prompt a thought experiment as to whether a world where there’s no such profiling and everyone is treated equal base trust is possible, and if so whether such a story could be funny in that world. Taking high-trust societies I can think of as examples, I suspect either total surveillance or high value placed on following protocols sincerely with the goal of not creating awkwardness would be implied, in which case probably not.

I for one wish there were fewer people around chiding others with tired platitudes for not living their day-to-day lives like someone with $100m in their pocket.

To be fair, this is sort of a mixture of white privilege and changing times as well. I have a much less cool version of a situation where I was pulled over a few years back by state highway patrol at night. Apparently after I had stopped for gas I forgot to flick my lights on and was driving with them off. I didn’t notice because the highway section I was on had lots of lights along it and I have pretty good vision. The officer asked me if I knew I was driving with my lights off, and I told him, “my friends call me hawkeye”.

I’m 30-something white guy, I can easily imagine not feeling comfortable trying that stupid joke if I was anyone else.

”* privilege” is just non-nerd Bayesian updating.

That's not an example of "white privilege". It has neither do with being white nor privilege and everything to do with culture.

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