So I accidentally came across this today and although as a super cynical person i always assumed this was how the super rich often, but not always, behaved, it was pretty depressing to see solid evidence. Yet whenever events of this nature come to light, both society in general and people I know in particular never seem to change their behavior much. Maybe some people do the “post an article on facebook; pretend you contributed to society” type “activism”. Why is it that most people don’t care about this stuff? Maybe they are just already overwhelmed by bullshit?
News is entertainment (and not even particularly good entertainment; I think it’s generally a good idea to avoid it). Even news that’s supposed to inspire outrage is entertainment; people like being outraged.
Some rich people get together occasionally to eat overpriced food, make tasteless jokes, and impose humiliating initiation rituals on their slightly less wealthy aspirational juniors? That’s pretty tame, as bacchanals go. If I’m to treat Wall Street like Thulsa Doom, I expect human bones in the soup and at least one giant snake.
Was it Buffy where the rich people society fed sacrifices to a snake demon for luck? That was a great episode.
My main issue is with the Bailout King part I suppose, although the other problems annoy me also. That’s indicative of their beliefs about the poor and the government. Sort of like what Romney did in that 49% speech that was leaked.
Its clear they didn’t think it was tame, hence the violent threats and later attempted bribery to keep it quiet. Its not like they feared retaliation from above for a PR gaffe, since its all top level people. So they must have a reason for being so upset.
I was referencing Conan the Barbarian (the movie, not the short stories), but yeah, there was a Buffy episode like that too. Or maybe it was Angel, I forget which.
In any case, I absolutely agree that the activities reported were in poor taste and quite possibly reflective of some questionable attitudes. But I’m hesitant to draw strong conclusions from this sort of reporting, mainly because of base rate neglect: this doesn’t tell us what the average Wall Street honcho gets up to when they’re at home. It doesn’t even tell us the average for that party. You get what you see: a general impression and a short list of lowlights. The impression doesn’t surprise me much (one doesn’t sneak into a fraternity party with a camera if one wants to paint it in a favorable light), and the examples aren’t much better: I’ve been to plenty of parties with behavior as bad or worse. For example, there’s the one anime con I’ve been to (once and nevermore)...
Well, I’m certainly aware of actual fraternity parties with drag being used to humiliate, hell our soccer team tried to make the freshman, and sophomores because when we were freshmen there was a newly created ban, dress in traditionally female clothes. And of course general misogyny and homophobia.
But you’ve been to a lot of parties where one of the main activities was to denigrate the gullible poor/voting public wrt shady financial stuff?
As far as the average guy’s beliefs and behavior, it kinda does. In such societies the behavior of the top level says a lot about the social norms. I mean its not as good as a peer review study or a survey maybe, but fat chance getting evidence of that caliber in an legal manner.
But you’ve been to a lot of parties where one of the main activities was to denigrate the gullible poor/voting public wrt shady financial stuff?
Was it not clear from the example that I meant bad behavior in a broader sense?
I could go into details, but they’d be irrelevant; the point is that you can paint an unflattering picture of many, many subculture events if you’re so inclined, especially if there’s drinking involved. All e.g. the “Bailout King” episode tells us is that some people at this specific party interpret as an outgroup people who’re politically critical of the finance sector. Yeah, and… ? Subcultures generate us-vs.-them behavior and weird insider rituals; it’s what they do.
You keep saying paint a bad picture. That usually means unfair spin. I’m not sure that’s the case here.
As far as your assertion about the Bailout King song, I disagree. Certainly if we were looking at 100% solid objective evidence then what you suggested is all we can conclude. I don’t know about you, but I don’t make decisions only on a 100% chance of truth.
Subculture wise, I don’t give a shit what some random anime con subculture does. I care quite a bit, and I believe quite reasonably, about the behavior of a group who controls a significant portion of the US and Global economy.
Much like the supreme court, I apply strict scrutiny, although in a more colloquial sense, to issues with broader social significance.
Certainly if we were looking at 100% solid objective evidence then what you suggested is all we can conclude. I don’t know about you, but I don’t make decisions only on a 100% chance of truth.
This would be evidence for the attitudes our reporter is attributing to his subjects… if the reporting was unbiased, not in the sense of “lacking an ulterior motive” but in the sense of “proportionately likely to report each option”. (Technically individual data points are still evidence, but potentially much weaker; aggregated ones can in some circumstances be negative evidence.) Given the reporting slant and indeed the fact that we’re discussing journalism, however, I don’t believe we can rely on the provided interpretation of events. I’m willing to take the article as strong evidence that the events themselves did occur—we’re not talking tabloid journalism here—but that’s all.
More generally, I think it’s unreasonable to expect perfectly restrained private behavior—and that is what we’re talking here, if you accept that upper-echelon Wall Street social circles constitute a subculture—from people regardless of their wealth or power. Their behavior as regards the disposition of that wealth and power is socially significant, as to a lesser extent is their public facade. What they do behind closed doors doesn’t concern me.
Its not their lack of restraint that is at issue, its what belief they demonstrate themselves to hold with this particular lack of restraint. Given the events that proceeded this story, wrt the financial sector, its seems quite likely that these beliefs demonstrated in private are in fact the ones they truly hold and which they act upon. After all the original story was about the fate of newbie financial professionals post-Crash. Maybe you could discount this behavior in the time before the Crash, but we have clear and well known evidence of the results of the actions of these people, and then we see them partying and laughing about how they avoided any significant consquences.
I’m not focused so much on the misogyny or homophobia as their attitude about the bailout and the poor. That they act like fraternity people isn’t really an issue. But its a clear demonstration of their private contempt for anyone who isn’t filthy rich.
As far as viable alternatives go, America was supposed to be a viable alternative to monarchy, but really it just put a new label on it. The world’s history of making viable alternatives is pretty crappy. Most social change appears to have come from attacking the status quo.
But its a clear demonstration of their private contempt for anyone who isn’t filthy rich.
Could you be more specific about what exactly you would like to be different?
Do you think that despising outgroups is a rare behavior, and we should remove all power from those who do? Do you think it is a frequent but not universal behavior, so we should find those exceptional individuals who don’t have it, and give all power to them? Do you think the attitude is universal, but we should make sure that the powerful people are never allowed to express it, even in privacy (in other words: that the powerful people should have no privacy)? Something else?
Well, its an interesting question. I know that there are rich people who don’t behave this way. So I can conclude that its possible to have a situation where large numbers of the wealthy or powerful don’t have contempt for or outright despise the poor. My ideal would probably be a situation where people who felt/acted this way were an extreme minority. I don’t think it requires exceptional individuals.
This suggest we should research the causes of what makes people behave like they do. Then we could perhaps try to systematically increase the things that contribute to nice behavior.
(By the way, this is where I think most people with egalitarian feelings often fail. They notice that some rich people are abusive somehow, and their reaction is: “punish the rich”. The problem is, the punishment usually applies at least as much to the good ones as to the bad ones; and it may actually decrease the ratio of the prosocial people among the rich. It would be better to think about ways that could increase the ratio, but that is not compatible with the emotions created by outrage e.g. from the linked article.)
By the way, you speak about “rich”, I speak about “powerful”. It correlates in our society, but it’s not the same thing. (For example, a powerful and stupid bureaucrat may be able to harm thousands or millions of people, without putting money into their own pockets; if they truly believe in their wrong ideas and try to do the right thing.) It could be relevant to this topic: maybe power corrupts, but mere money without the feeling of power don’t.
I think it’s very naive to think that when you break down a system the thing that replaces it will be automatically better.
Failing forward is no good strategy.
Most social change appears to have come from attacking the status quo.
I don’t think that’s the case. The workers movement that lead to communism was strong because unions happened to be strong communities with strong internal loyalty.
If you want to change something focus on community building. Don’t focus on what happens on the national level but focus on providing services that help people in your local community.
The LW community isn’t really local but it’s also a community separate from the mainstream so, investing effort into making it stronger also counts as community building effort.
Don’t invest your retirement money in the stock market. Invest it into a business where you know the owner personally. That can mean Angel investment.
Buying local property is also good. Buying solar panels to put on your house also decentralizes power.
If you invest your retirement money into an index fund you are actively supporting the current system. If you do protest against the rich and have your retirement money in an index fund you are not being consistent.
I put major effort in Quantified Self community building. As part of that community building I did a lot of media interview and used some of that time to say how much the status quo fails people and that people should gather data to make self determined choices instead of listening to authorities.
I do my fair share of attacking the status quo, but in the end the things that matters isn’t destroying the status quo but replacing it with something better.
Having a QS community that’s strong enough to be a stakeholder with certain power is a worthwhile goal. Having a LW community with is powerful to be a stakeholder with certain power is a worthwhile goal.
If you invest your money into the startup that your fellow LW community member wants to start instead of investing it into an index fund, that makes the LW community strong. Less money in the stock market in turn makes big corporations weaker.
Reallocating your investments isn’t attacking the mainstream. It’s focusing your resources inside your own community.
Investing your money with fellow rationalists might be an even better return on your investment than an index fund but that isn’t the only point. Where you allocate your retirement money is a political question that more important as to how you vote in elections and whether corporatist party A or corporatist party B holds power.
I do in fact not have money in index funds, or any other Wall Street related investment. And I try not to support social structures I find abhorrent, occasionally as relatively significant personal cost.
However its my position that attacking the status quo is necessary, although what you suggest is also necessary. I don’t think its a one or the other thing.
I think that one of the core problems is that too much people watch TV to inform themselves of what’s important and have money where it empowers the SAP 500 companies.
Going around and arguing at parties that the other people who attend should stop watching TV and invest their money outside of the mainstream isn’t what most people imagine when they speak about attacking the status quo.
I think the core issue is moving from a spectator who watches TV and who hopes that the index fund over which he has no control will do well to moving to being an actor. To the extend that you yourself made that step, it’s to convince others to follow yourself. That doesn’t mean not going to parties with mainstream folks. It doesn’t mean getting angry at them. It means talking openly with them about the choices they make in a way that doesn’t get you kicked out of the party.
I think that’s a much more effective strategy than going out demonstrating.
There are times when it makes sense to interact within the system. If you care for media you might find my exchange with mbitton24 in his thread “Some Tools For Optimizing Our Media Use” interesting.
I didn’t downvote it, but I would have if I hadn’t been participating in the discussion, on grounds of being obviously unrepresentative outrage-bait. If I wanted to see that, I’ve got a Tumblr account.
That said, I wouldn’t consider a post at −2 [edit: at the time of this post] particularly heavily downvoted.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/02/i-crashed-a-wall-street-secret-society.html
So I accidentally came across this today and although as a super cynical person i always assumed this was how the super rich often, but not always, behaved, it was pretty depressing to see solid evidence. Yet whenever events of this nature come to light, both society in general and people I know in particular never seem to change their behavior much. Maybe some people do the “post an article on facebook; pretend you contributed to society” type “activism”. Why is it that most people don’t care about this stuff? Maybe they are just already overwhelmed by bullshit?
News is entertainment (and not even particularly good entertainment; I think it’s generally a good idea to avoid it). Even news that’s supposed to inspire outrage is entertainment; people like being outraged.
Some rich people get together occasionally to eat overpriced food, make tasteless jokes, and impose humiliating initiation rituals on their slightly less wealthy aspirational juniors? That’s pretty tame, as bacchanals go. If I’m to treat Wall Street like Thulsa Doom, I expect human bones in the soup and at least one giant snake.
Was it Buffy where the rich people society fed sacrifices to a snake demon for luck? That was a great episode.
My main issue is with the Bailout King part I suppose, although the other problems annoy me also. That’s indicative of their beliefs about the poor and the government. Sort of like what Romney did in that 49% speech that was leaked.
Its clear they didn’t think it was tame, hence the violent threats and later attempted bribery to keep it quiet. Its not like they feared retaliation from above for a PR gaffe, since its all top level people. So they must have a reason for being so upset.
I was referencing Conan the Barbarian (the movie, not the short stories), but yeah, there was a Buffy episode like that too. Or maybe it was Angel, I forget which.
In any case, I absolutely agree that the activities reported were in poor taste and quite possibly reflective of some questionable attitudes. But I’m hesitant to draw strong conclusions from this sort of reporting, mainly because of base rate neglect: this doesn’t tell us what the average Wall Street honcho gets up to when they’re at home. It doesn’t even tell us the average for that party. You get what you see: a general impression and a short list of lowlights. The impression doesn’t surprise me much (one doesn’t sneak into a fraternity party with a camera if one wants to paint it in a favorable light), and the examples aren’t much better: I’ve been to plenty of parties with behavior as bad or worse. For example, there’s the one anime con I’ve been to (once and nevermore)...
Well, I’m certainly aware of actual fraternity parties with drag being used to humiliate, hell our soccer team tried to make the freshman, and sophomores because when we were freshmen there was a newly created ban, dress in traditionally female clothes. And of course general misogyny and homophobia.
But you’ve been to a lot of parties where one of the main activities was to denigrate the gullible poor/voting public wrt shady financial stuff?
As far as the average guy’s beliefs and behavior, it kinda does. In such societies the behavior of the top level says a lot about the social norms. I mean its not as good as a peer review study or a survey maybe, but fat chance getting evidence of that caliber in an legal manner.
Was it not clear from the example that I meant bad behavior in a broader sense?
I could go into details, but they’d be irrelevant; the point is that you can paint an unflattering picture of many, many subculture events if you’re so inclined, especially if there’s drinking involved. All e.g. the “Bailout King” episode tells us is that some people at this specific party interpret as an outgroup people who’re politically critical of the finance sector. Yeah, and… ? Subcultures generate us-vs.-them behavior and weird insider rituals; it’s what they do.
You keep saying paint a bad picture. That usually means unfair spin. I’m not sure that’s the case here.
As far as your assertion about the Bailout King song, I disagree. Certainly if we were looking at 100% solid objective evidence then what you suggested is all we can conclude. I don’t know about you, but I don’t make decisions only on a 100% chance of truth.
Subculture wise, I don’t give a shit what some random anime con subculture does. I care quite a bit, and I believe quite reasonably, about the behavior of a group who controls a significant portion of the US and Global economy.
Much like the supreme court, I apply strict scrutiny, although in a more colloquial sense, to issues with broader social significance.
This would be evidence for the attitudes our reporter is attributing to his subjects… if the reporting was unbiased, not in the sense of “lacking an ulterior motive” but in the sense of “proportionately likely to report each option”. (Technically individual data points are still evidence, but potentially much weaker; aggregated ones can in some circumstances be negative evidence.) Given the reporting slant and indeed the fact that we’re discussing journalism, however, I don’t believe we can rely on the provided interpretation of events. I’m willing to take the article as strong evidence that the events themselves did occur—we’re not talking tabloid journalism here—but that’s all.
More generally, I think it’s unreasonable to expect perfectly restrained private behavior—and that is what we’re talking here, if you accept that upper-echelon Wall Street social circles constitute a subculture—from people regardless of their wealth or power. Their behavior as regards the disposition of that wealth and power is socially significant, as to a lesser extent is their public facade. What they do behind closed doors doesn’t concern me.
Its not their lack of restraint that is at issue, its what belief they demonstrate themselves to hold with this particular lack of restraint. Given the events that proceeded this story, wrt the financial sector, its seems quite likely that these beliefs demonstrated in private are in fact the ones they truly hold and which they act upon. After all the original story was about the fate of newbie financial professionals post-Crash. Maybe you could discount this behavior in the time before the Crash, but we have clear and well known evidence of the results of the actions of these people, and then we see them partying and laughing about how they avoided any significant consquences.
In general most people don’t think of themselves as actors. The think of themselves as the audience of whatever happens on TV or in the media.
In some sense, I even doubt whether focusing on how people misbehave on a fraternity party is very useful.
Most energy shouldn’t be focused on attacking the status quo but on building viable alternatives.
I’m not focused so much on the misogyny or homophobia as their attitude about the bailout and the poor. That they act like fraternity people isn’t really an issue. But its a clear demonstration of their private contempt for anyone who isn’t filthy rich.
As far as viable alternatives go, America was supposed to be a viable alternative to monarchy, but really it just put a new label on it. The world’s history of making viable alternatives is pretty crappy. Most social change appears to have come from attacking the status quo.
Could you be more specific about what exactly you would like to be different?
Do you think that despising outgroups is a rare behavior, and we should remove all power from those who do? Do you think it is a frequent but not universal behavior, so we should find those exceptional individuals who don’t have it, and give all power to them? Do you think the attitude is universal, but we should make sure that the powerful people are never allowed to express it, even in privacy (in other words: that the powerful people should have no privacy)? Something else?
Well, its an interesting question. I know that there are rich people who don’t behave this way. So I can conclude that its possible to have a situation where large numbers of the wealthy or powerful don’t have contempt for or outright despise the poor. My ideal would probably be a situation where people who felt/acted this way were an extreme minority. I don’t think it requires exceptional individuals.
This suggest we should research the causes of what makes people behave like they do. Then we could perhaps try to systematically increase the things that contribute to nice behavior.
(By the way, this is where I think most people with egalitarian feelings often fail. They notice that some rich people are abusive somehow, and their reaction is: “punish the rich”. The problem is, the punishment usually applies at least as much to the good ones as to the bad ones; and it may actually decrease the ratio of the prosocial people among the rich. It would be better to think about ways that could increase the ratio, but that is not compatible with the emotions created by outrage e.g. from the linked article.)
By the way, you speak about “rich”, I speak about “powerful”. It correlates in our society, but it’s not the same thing. (For example, a powerful and stupid bureaucrat may be able to harm thousands or millions of people, without putting money into their own pockets; if they truly believe in their wrong ideas and try to do the right thing.) It could be relevant to this topic: maybe power corrupts, but mere money without the feeling of power don’t.
I think it’s very naive to think that when you break down a system the thing that replaces it will be automatically better. Failing forward is no good strategy.
I don’t think that’s the case. The workers movement that lead to communism was strong because unions happened to be strong communities with strong internal loyalty.
If you want to change something focus on community building. Don’t focus on what happens on the national level but focus on providing services that help people in your local community. The LW community isn’t really local but it’s also a community separate from the mainstream so, investing effort into making it stronger also counts as community building effort.
Don’t invest your retirement money in the stock market. Invest it into a business where you know the owner personally. That can mean Angel investment.
Buying local property is also good. Buying solar panels to put on your house also decentralizes power.
If you invest your retirement money into an index fund you are actively supporting the current system. If you do protest against the rich and have your retirement money in an index fund you are not being consistent.
I put major effort in Quantified Self community building. As part of that community building I did a lot of media interview and used some of that time to say how much the status quo fails people and that people should gather data to make self determined choices instead of listening to authorities.
I do my fair share of attacking the status quo, but in the end the things that matters isn’t destroying the status quo but replacing it with something better.
Having a QS community that’s strong enough to be a stakeholder with certain power is a worthwhile goal. Having a LW community with is powerful to be a stakeholder with certain power is a worthwhile goal.
If you invest your money into the startup that your fellow LW community member wants to start instead of investing it into an index fund, that makes the LW community strong. Less money in the stock market in turn makes big corporations weaker.
Reallocating your investments isn’t attacking the mainstream. It’s focusing your resources inside your own community.
Investing your money with fellow rationalists might be an even better return on your investment than an index fund but that isn’t the only point. Where you allocate your retirement money is a political question that more important as to how you vote in elections and whether corporatist party A or corporatist party B holds power.
I do in fact not have money in index funds, or any other Wall Street related investment. And I try not to support social structures I find abhorrent, occasionally as relatively significant personal cost.
However its my position that attacking the status quo is necessary, although what you suggest is also necessary. I don’t think its a one or the other thing.
I think that one of the core problems is that too much people watch TV to inform themselves of what’s important and have money where it empowers the SAP 500 companies.
Going around and arguing at parties that the other people who attend should stop watching TV and invest their money outside of the mainstream isn’t what most people imagine when they speak about attacking the status quo.
I think the core issue is moving from a spectator who watches TV and who hopes that the index fund over which he has no control will do well to moving to being an actor. To the extend that you yourself made that step, it’s to convince others to follow yourself. That doesn’t mean not going to parties with mainstream folks. It doesn’t mean getting angry at them. It means talking openly with them about the choices they make in a way that doesn’t get you kicked out of the party.
I think that’s a much more effective strategy than going out demonstrating.
There are times when it makes sense to interact within the system. If you care for media you might find my exchange with mbitton24 in his thread “Some Tools For Optimizing Our Media Use” interesting.
Bloody hell, why is this and all their responses so heavily downvoted?
Absence of relevance.
I didn’t downvote it, but I would have if I hadn’t been participating in the discussion, on grounds of being obviously unrepresentative outrage-bait. If I wanted to see that, I’ve got a Tumblr account.
That said, I wouldn’t consider a post at −2 [edit: at the time of this post] particularly heavily downvoted.