Are they interpreting it as a question of signalling without even reaching the point of evaluating it as an ontological statement?
I identify as politically libertarian. I also find that the question “Does a dollar mean more to a poor person than it does to a rich person?” somewhat loaded semantically. Depending on which of a wide array of various interpretations of the statement I could answer—legitimately—either way.
And yet it is taken as a “given”, which progressives “got right” and libertarians “didn’t”.
I wonder what would happen to that rate of answers if the question was rephrased as follows: “A poor person will suffer more for the lack of one dollar than a rich person will suffer for the lack of one dollar.”, and as follows: “A poor person is more likely to base his self-worth on how many dollars he owns than a rich person is likely to baes his self-worth on how many dollars he owns.”
Both of these rephrasings are potential “effectively synonymous” statements to the original question, but I hope that their answers are quite obviously inverted from each other.
“A dollar means more to a poor person than it does to a rich person”
“A poor person is more likely to base his self-worth on how many dollars he owns than a rich person is likely to base his self-worth on how many dollars he owns.”
Huh? I don’t see these statements as equivalent at all. If I try to map the second sentence onto the first, I get “Dollars mean more to a poor person than they do to a rich person”. Use of the singular word dollar, to my dialect, rules out the “fraction of self-worth” interpretation.
Huh? I don’t see these statements as equivalent at all. [...] Use of the singular word dollar, to my dialect, rules out the “fraction of self-worth” interpretation.
Before I go any further I am making the prediction that if someone put a gun to your head and said, “Identify your political affiliation with a name or I will kill you now”, you would say “progressive”. (I’m putting a roughly 75% probability on that but perhaps a 60-80% threshold of confidence. Bear these numbers with salt; I believe humans are extremely poor at assigning probabilities.)
n+1 > n. Let “n” equal “the number of dollars the person owns”. If “A poor person is more likely to base his self-worth on how many dollars he owns than a rich person is likely to base his self-worth on how many dollars he owns” is true, then it stands that n+1 is a higher increase in self-worth for the ‘arbitrary’ poor person (compared to n) than is n+1 an increase compared to n for the ‘arbitrary’ rich person.
2\a. How does point #2 affect your assessment of the rephrasing being representative of the original phrase?
1\a. I am interested in knowing the accuracy of my prediction. :)
You are saying that your interpretation implies the original question. But that leaves the possibility of your question being a stronger statement than the original question. If a libertarian denies your interpretation that does not necessarily mean they deny the original question.
In other words, it is possible that if “A poor person is more likely to base his self-worth on how many dollars he owns than a rich person is likely to base his self-worth on how many dollars he owns” is false that “it stands that n+1 is a higher increase in self-worth for the ‘arbitrary’ poor person (compared to n) than is n+1 an increase compared to n for the ‘arbitrary’ rich person.” is also false.
In other words, just because poor people are not more likely to base their self-worth on dollars-owned than rich people, it does not mean that they necessarily do not value a dollar more than a rich person.
For example, a poor person may value the dollar more because it increases the amount of food they can buy to be enough to feed all their children. Perhaps they attach most of their self-worth to the ability to feed their children.
If your interpretation includes indirectly valuing dollars then the answer changes anyway.
You are saying that your interpretation implies the original question.
I’m saying it’s an interpretation of the original question, yes.
But that leaves the possibility of your question being a stronger statement than the original question.
… my question, as I have proposed it, IS the original question. Or, rather, it’s informational value is a subset of the informational value range available to the original question. Any assertions as to the potential strength of the original question, then, must include the rephrasing.
It’s definitionally impossible for “what that statement means to me” to be “a stronger statement than that statement”. It can be stronger than you intended—but communication requires two participants.
If a libertarian denies your interpretation that does not necessarily mean they deny the original question.
I in fact offered up two mutually exclusive intrepretations of the question. The fact remains that they are re-expressions of the same original question, however.
In other words, it is possible that [...] is also false.
I agree unequivocably.
In other words, just because a poor people are not more likely to base their self-worth on dollars-owned than rich people, it does not mean that they necessarily do not value a dollar more than a rich person.
Again, I agree unequivocably.
For example [...]
Sure, no problem, absolutely.
Now please explain to me why any of this is relevant to the conversation at hand. :)
You are saying that your interpretation implies the original question.
I’m saying it’s an interpretation of the original question, yes.
No. “A implies B” means either A&B, ~A&B, or ~A&~B. “A is an interpretation of B” means either A&B or ~A&~B, but excludes ~A&B. Let the statements be
(X) “A dollar means more to a poor person than it does to a rich person” (Y) “A poor person is more likely to base his self-worth on how many dollars he owns than a rich person is likely to base his self-worth on how many dollars he owns.”
You argued that Y implies X, but you didn’t do anything to argue against X&~Y. I happen to believe X&~Y, which makes these statements definitely not mere rephrasings of each other.
“A is an interpretation of B” means either A&B or ~A&~B, but excludes ~A&B
Let the statements be (X) [...] (Y)
Here’s your error. There’s a (Z).
(Z) “A poor person will suffer more for the lack of one dollar than a rich person will suffer for the lack of one dollar.”
Here’s what I originally said, broken into symbolic logic for you:
X ⊃ Z
X ⊃ Y
Y = ¬Z & Z = ¬Y
At no time did I say, however, that Y ⊃ Z. That assertion would be a direct contradiction of my last line in the comment:
Both of these rephrasings are potential “effectively synonymous” statements to the original question, but I hope that their answers are quite obviously inverted from each other.
I’m afraid I’m really going to have to ask you to explain what you mean by this. I find that there are too many potential reasons for making this statement, and of those I find to be remotely likely, I understand how they could be arrived at not at all.
This encourages readers to become mind-killed with respect to him.
I see.
You know, given what I’ve seen happening to the specific nature of the comment I make which get more than −5 score (For comparison I’m currently at about 50% of my peak ‘karma’ and am currently at ~-40 for my 30-day-interval) -- I can’t really gainsay you on the fact that your concern is legitimate.
That being said; the mere fact that I have a poltiical disagreement with someone is, in general, not sufficient grounds for me to cease evaluating his claims on their own merit. In fact; I find it more conducive to have our biases exposed from the outset, and that is why I identified myself as a libertarian from my first post in the thread; to help allow the reader to identify and if necessary correct for any political biases I may have.
That being said; the mere fact that I have a poltiical disagreement with someone is, in general, not sufficient grounds for me to cease evaluating his claims on their own merit.
How would you know that? People usually don’t think of themselves as biased, and are bad at evaluating how biased they are even if they acknowledge some bias.
People usually don’t think of themselves as biased
I have been known to go to absurd lengths to counteract the possibility of becoming biased in a given situation. Am I perfect? Of course not. But practicing excellence with compartmentalization, and with counterfactualization, as well as with maintaining comfort in the face of constant doubt, are all good tools for allowing yourself to believe you are correct while expecting yourself to be biased. (This is intentionally inducing cognitive dissonance and then adapting to the presence of said dissonance.)
and are bad at evaluating how biased they are even if they acknowledge some bias.
Very much so. And I would not even begin to pretend that I am “perfect” in this area. But experience and the observations of others have shown me that I am the least likely person I know—or have encountered—to allow political, emotional, or biological (as in sexual, dietary, etc..) investment to interfere with my ability to take the outside view. Why this is so, I am not remotely certain.
I’ve also built up, over time, a laundry list of habitual behaviors designed to mitigate biases regardless of whether I am aware of them—such as my habit of attempting to parse arguments down as far as possible, of demanding definitions for ‘fuzzy’ topics, of being able to persuasively reformulate the arguments of others in language consistent with their own positions (to demonstrate comprehension of their position as they understand it.)
n+1 > n. Let “n” equal “the number of dollars the person owns”. If “A poor person is more likely to base his self-worth on how many dollars he owns than a rich person is likely to base his self-worth on how many dollars he owns” is true, then it stands that n+1 is a higher increase in self-worth for the ‘arbitrary’ poor person (compared to n) than is n+1 an increase compared to n for the ‘arbitrary’ rich person.
The poor person and the rich person have different values of n so their marginal rate is different. That doesn’t comment on how much of their self-worth if a function of their total amount of money. This is sort of akin to how freshmen calculus students confuse a function being small with it having a small derivative.
This is sort of akin to how freshmen calculus students confuse a function being small with it having a small derivative.
See my other comment to you with example numbers. We can discuss the probability of those numbers being accurate, but they demonstrate the principle at hand, and that is sufficient to my position here. (Again; I don’t care one way or the other if the intrepretation is right—it need only be demonstrated a valid interpretation of the question).
I think a person with 10,000,000 dollars’ sense of self worth will barely fluctuate with the addition or subtraction of a dollar, whereas a person with 1,000 dollars may actually care.
I agree that the question should have been worded better, and yes, it’s loaded semantically. But I think it’s factually true that for purposes of purchasing happiness, status, lack-of-suffering, preference-satisfaction or most other metrics I can think of that matter to individual people, people are likely to value a dollar more highly if they have fewer of them.
(Yes, I realize that’s still operating within a framework, but as soon as you’re talking about “what something means to someone” as supposed to “what something is capable of purchasing” you’re inherently defining the issue in terms of “what people care about” rather than “what things can purchase,” and yes, I think that means the question has a factual answer)
But I think it’s factually true that for purposes of purchasing happiness, status, lack-of-suffering, preference-satisfaction or most other metrics I can think of that matter to individual people, people are likely to value a dollar more highly if they have fewer of them.
And you just switched back from context #2 to context #1.
This is, frankly, frustrating my hope of a dialogue here. Do you recognize, at least, that you have done this? (Changed contexts / rephrasings)?
You can’t discuss “what does this say of my value as a person” in terms of “how useful is this?”
“A poor person is more likely to base his self-worth on how many dollars he owns than a rich person is likely to baes his self-worth on how many dollars he owns.”
This is not at all equivalent. A rich person might for example still base much of his self-worth on how much money he has but each dollar will be a smaller amount of self-worth. That’s at least in the most obvious way of reading this statement to me. I don’t think your suggested wordings are any better.
Possibly something like “All else being equal, a poor person will gain more utility from a dollar than a rich person would”? Even that has problems but that seems slightly better.
Possibly something like “All else being equal, a poor person will gain more utility from a dollar than a rich person would”? Even that has problems but that seems slightly better.
Actually, that’s semantically equivalent to rephrasing #1, and as such semantically contradictory to rephrasing #2.
A rich person might for example still base much of his self-worth on how much money he has but each dollar will be a smaller amount of self-worth.
I figured someone might raise this objection. :)
Let’s define the “rich” person as owning 10,000,000 dollars, and the poor person as owning 1,000. If the rich person places a high proportion on his self-worth on how much money he owns (say, 80% of his self-worth) then 10,000,000+1 yields an increase of self-evaluation by 0.00000008. If, however, the poor person places .001% of his self-worth on how much money he owns, then 1,000+1 yields an increase of 0.00000001. So the rich person’s “self-worth score” in this scenario is increased by a factor of 8 as compared to the poor person’s.
Now, is it likely that poor people, lacking money, will place any but the weakest of weightings onto how they judge themselves as people based on the amount of money they currently possess? Is the opposite likely?
You fail to understand what rich and poor mean. While a rich person may be using dollars to keep score, a poor person is using them to stay alive.
Do you really think that someone with a million dollars could care about each one of them as much as someone who has only one dollar cares about his one dollar? That the million dollar owner could be more devastated by the loss of two of his million dollars than the one-dollar owner will be by the prospect of not eating if he loses his one dollar?
… the “Now” isn’t actually ‘saying anything’. There’s no assertions in the “Now” paragraph. It was the introduction of a new query to the dialogue: “How do the poor associate money with their estimates of self-worth?”
In other words; after my “Let’s” gave a hypothetical scenario with specific numbers in order to demonstrate that, “Yes, statement #2 could be true”, my “Now” raised the question of: “But is it actually true?”
Ok. In that case, the answer simply seems to be “yes, they will do so.” At least from personal experience, people in a very low income bracket are extremely happy to move up to a slightly higher income bracket, and the barely employed look down on the unemployed homeless while the homeless with jobs consider themselves better than the homeless without jobs. I don’t however know of any real data backing this up.
In that case, the answer simply seems to be “yes, they will do so.” [...] I don’t however know of any real data backing this up.
Would you be willing to agree with the notion that a non-trivial percentage of people might come to the conclusion that it either could go either way or that poor people “find ways to believe they are good people without money”?
This gets us back to the original topic—the 30% of libertarians who answered as 4% of progressives did and this automatically meaning that the progressives got the question “more right” than the libs. This despite any apparent effort to figure out which version of the question (and again, I only gave TWO variants) said person was answering.
At this point you are taking a strained interpretation of the sentence that is far from the natural interpretation, and then positing that people would take that strained interpretation and then might think a thought based on that interpretation that still requires a off belief based on how most poor people seem to think. This seems to be more of an attempt to make a specific tribe not as wrong as they were rather than just acknowledge that many members of the tribe are wrong.
I strongly suspect and would be willing to bet money that if one phrased the question in terms of utility or close to your other wording the numbers would look nearly identical.
At this point you are taking a strained interpretation of the sentence that is far from the natural interpretation,
You know, the funny thing is that I don’t see it as ‘strained’ at all. And I don’t think it’s even that un-exceptional a belief—though it is a “callow” one. I can rephrase it again and see if it seems more “familiar” to you.
The poor stay that way because they don’t care about money.
The rich only get that way because they’re greedy.
It’s perfectly easy to be happy without money.
interpretation that still requires a off belief based on how most poor people seem to think.
And why, pray tell, would you believe that most people don’t think they have valid notions about how other people think? How often, for example, have you heard libertarians talk about (or get denigraded for adhering to) the notion of “picking yourself up off your bootstraps”? The Google Search term poor people don’t care about money yielded 227,000,000 hits.
This seems to be more of an attempt to make a specific tribe not as wrong as they were rather than just acknowledge that many members of the tribe are wrong.
… and there’s the bias. :-) (One way or the other, someone here is biased and not thinking clearly.)
Now, I’ve given a great deal—at this point—of evidence to affirm my position.
If you really wanted to, I’d be more than happy to go through a list of events in the last few weeks where I have openly and directly disagreed with people who are “in-tribe” to me.
I strongly suspect and would be willing to bet money that if one phrased the question in terms of utility or close to your other wording the numbers would look nearly identical.
So you’re willing to bet money that context #1 would be nearly identical to the original phrasing, eh?
How about context #2? Moreover: how about if we were to ask how many people thought context #2 (absent context #1) was at least one way to read the original statement?
(I once again want to point out that context #2, by tying the concept of “value” to “this makes me a better person”, isn’t suited to questions of utilitarian evaluation. They can’t be. It’s a virtue-based statement, and it is a modal failure to require utilitarian framing for value-based norms.)
The Google Search term ‘poor people don’t care about money’ yielded 227,000,000 hits.
The Google Search term “poor people don’t care about money”, however, yields only 7 results for the exact phrase. Many of the highest-ranked results from the search withoute quote marks are indeed from conservative/libertarian sites, but not all of them (e.g., some prominent results are “Minnesota Republicans To Outlaw Poor People Having Money” and “Rush Limbaugh Says Poor Don’t Deserve Healthcare”) And the vast majority of the millions of results are from completely unrelated sites, as usually happens when you search for a phrase made of common words without using quote marks.
You’ve made some good points here, especially in regard to the fact that empirically a lot of people do seem to think that the poor don’t care about money, and could have been answering the question in that context. I have to update my estimate that the change would not be that large if phrased explicitly in a way that emphasized utility of a dollar. My previous estimate was around 70% that the numbers for both would stay within +/- 10 percent or so (so the liberal/progressive “incorrect” response would be some level below 14% and the conservative/libertarian “incorrect” response would be around 21-41%). Given your arguments I still suspect this is true but need to reduce my confidence by quite a bit, to around 55% or so. So I’d still be willing to put even money on this. But I probably need to think about this more and update further.
I identify as politically libertarian. I also find that the question “Does a dollar mean more to a poor person than it does to a rich person?” somewhat loaded semantically. Depending on which of a wide array of various interpretations of the statement I could answer—legitimately—either way.
And yet it is taken as a “given”, which progressives “got right” and libertarians “didn’t”.
I wonder what would happen to that rate of answers if the question was rephrased as follows: “A poor person will suffer more for the lack of one dollar than a rich person will suffer for the lack of one dollar.”, and as follows: “A poor person is more likely to base his self-worth on how many dollars he owns than a rich person is likely to baes his self-worth on how many dollars he owns.”
Both of these rephrasings are potential “effectively synonymous” statements to the original question, but I hope that their answers are quite obviously inverted from each other.
Huh? I don’t see these statements as equivalent at all. If I try to map the second sentence onto the first, I get “Dollars mean more to a poor person than they do to a rich person”. Use of the singular word dollar, to my dialect, rules out the “fraction of self-worth” interpretation.
For that matter, where is a marginal dollar going to make a bigger hit to self worth?
Before I go any further I am making the prediction that if someone put a gun to your head and said, “Identify your political affiliation with a name or I will kill you now”, you would say “progressive”. (I’m putting a roughly 75% probability on that but perhaps a 60-80% threshold of confidence. Bear these numbers with salt; I believe humans are extremely poor at assigning probabilities.)
n+1 > n. Let “n” equal “the number of dollars the person owns”. If “A poor person is more likely to base his self-worth on how many dollars he owns than a rich person is likely to base his self-worth on how many dollars he owns” is true, then it stands that n+1 is a higher increase in self-worth for the ‘arbitrary’ poor person (compared to n) than is n+1 an increase compared to n for the ‘arbitrary’ rich person.
2\a. How does point #2 affect your assessment of the rephrasing being representative of the original phrase?
1\a. I am interested in knowing the accuracy of my prediction. :)
You are saying that your interpretation implies the original question. But that leaves the possibility of your question being a stronger statement than the original question. If a libertarian denies your interpretation that does not necessarily mean they deny the original question.
In other words, it is possible that if “A poor person is more likely to base his self-worth on how many dollars he owns than a rich person is likely to base his self-worth on how many dollars he owns” is false that “it stands that n+1 is a higher increase in self-worth for the ‘arbitrary’ poor person (compared to n) than is n+1 an increase compared to n for the ‘arbitrary’ rich person.” is also false.
In other words, just because poor people are not more likely to base their self-worth on dollars-owned than rich people, it does not mean that they necessarily do not value a dollar more than a rich person.
For example, a poor person may value the dollar more because it increases the amount of food they can buy to be enough to feed all their children. Perhaps they attach most of their self-worth to the ability to feed their children.
If your interpretation includes indirectly valuing dollars then the answer changes anyway.
I’m saying it’s an interpretation of the original question, yes.
… my question, as I have proposed it, IS the original question. Or, rather, it’s informational value is a subset of the informational value range available to the original question. Any assertions as to the potential strength of the original question, then, must include the rephrasing.
It’s definitionally impossible for “what that statement means to me” to be “a stronger statement than that statement”. It can be stronger than you intended—but communication requires two participants.
I in fact offered up two mutually exclusive intrepretations of the question. The fact remains that they are re-expressions of the same original question, however.
I agree unequivocably.
Again, I agree unequivocably.
Sure, no problem, absolutely.
Now please explain to me why any of this is relevant to the conversation at hand. :)
No. “A implies B” means either A&B, ~A&B, or ~A&~B. “A is an interpretation of B” means either A&B or ~A&~B, but excludes ~A&B. Let the statements be
(X) “A dollar means more to a poor person than it does to a rich person”
(Y) “A poor person is more likely to base his self-worth on how many dollars he owns than a rich person is likely to base his self-worth on how many dollars he owns.”
You argued that Y implies X, but you didn’t do anything to argue against X&~Y. I happen to believe X&~Y, which makes these statements definitely not mere rephrasings of each other.
Here’s your error. There’s a (Z).
(Z) “A poor person will suffer more for the lack of one dollar than a rich person will suffer for the lack of one dollar.”
Here’s what I originally said, broken into symbolic logic for you:
X ⊃ Z
X ⊃ Y
Y = ¬Z & Z = ¬Y
At no time did I say, however, that Y ⊃ Z. That assertion would be a direct contradiction of my last line in the comment:
I hope you are not trying to poison the well.
I’m afraid I’m really going to have to ask you to explain what you mean by this. I find that there are too many potential reasons for making this statement, and of those I find to be remotely likely, I understand how they could be arrived at not at all.
You are causing us to think of him as a “progressive”. This encourages readers to become mind-killed with respect to him.
I see.
You know, given what I’ve seen happening to the specific nature of the comment I make which get more than −5 score (For comparison I’m currently at about 50% of my peak ‘karma’ and am currently at ~-40 for my 30-day-interval) -- I can’t really gainsay you on the fact that your concern is legitimate.
That being said; the mere fact that I have a poltiical disagreement with someone is, in general, not sufficient grounds for me to cease evaluating his claims on their own merit. In fact; I find it more conducive to have our biases exposed from the outset, and that is why I identified myself as a libertarian from my first post in the thread; to help allow the reader to identify and if necessary correct for any political biases I may have.
How would you know that? People usually don’t think of themselves as biased, and are bad at evaluating how biased they are even if they acknowledge some bias.
I have been known to go to absurd lengths to counteract the possibility of becoming biased in a given situation. Am I perfect? Of course not. But practicing excellence with compartmentalization, and with counterfactualization, as well as with maintaining comfort in the face of constant doubt, are all good tools for allowing yourself to believe you are correct while expecting yourself to be biased. (This is intentionally inducing cognitive dissonance and then adapting to the presence of said dissonance.)
Very much so. And I would not even begin to pretend that I am “perfect” in this area. But experience and the observations of others have shown me that I am the least likely person I know—or have encountered—to allow political, emotional, or biological (as in sexual, dietary, etc..) investment to interfere with my ability to take the outside view. Why this is so, I am not remotely certain.
I’ve also built up, over time, a laundry list of habitual behaviors designed to mitigate biases regardless of whether I am aware of them—such as my habit of attempting to parse arguments down as far as possible, of demanding definitions for ‘fuzzy’ topics, of being able to persuasively reformulate the arguments of others in language consistent with their own positions (to demonstrate comprehension of their position as they understand it.)
The poor person and the rich person have different values of n so their marginal rate is different. That doesn’t comment on how much of their self-worth if a function of their total amount of money. This is sort of akin to how freshmen calculus students confuse a function being small with it having a small derivative.
See my other comment to you with example numbers. We can discuss the probability of those numbers being accurate, but they demonstrate the principle at hand, and that is sufficient to my position here. (Again; I don’t care one way or the other if the intrepretation is right—it need only be demonstrated a valid interpretation of the question).
I think a person with 10,000,000 dollars’ sense of self worth will barely fluctuate with the addition or subtraction of a dollar, whereas a person with 1,000 dollars may actually care.
At that point you’re accepting the framework and simply deliberating over the precise terms.
I agree that the question should have been worded better, and yes, it’s loaded semantically. But I think it’s factually true that for purposes of purchasing happiness, status, lack-of-suffering, preference-satisfaction or most other metrics I can think of that matter to individual people, people are likely to value a dollar more highly if they have fewer of them.
(Yes, I realize that’s still operating within a framework, but as soon as you’re talking about “what something means to someone” as supposed to “what something is capable of purchasing” you’re inherently defining the issue in terms of “what people care about” rather than “what things can purchase,” and yes, I think that means the question has a factual answer)
And you just switched back from context #2 to context #1.
This is, frankly, frustrating my hope of a dialogue here. Do you recognize, at least, that you have done this? (Changed contexts / rephrasings)?
You can’t discuss “what does this say of my value as a person” in terms of “how useful is this?”
Value ethics are not utility ethics.
Yeah, when I read that bit, I heard a small Bill Clinton in my head, echoing the line “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.”
In popular culture we really like to deride “semanticism”. But sometimes it damn well counts.
Libertarians did get it right, actually − 70% of them. And 4% of progressives got it wrong.
70% of libertarians vs 96% of progressives, yes.
This is not at all equivalent. A rich person might for example still base much of his self-worth on how much money he has but each dollar will be a smaller amount of self-worth. That’s at least in the most obvious way of reading this statement to me. I don’t think your suggested wordings are any better.
Possibly something like “All else being equal, a poor person will gain more utility from a dollar than a rich person would”? Even that has problems but that seems slightly better.
Actually, that’s semantically equivalent to rephrasing #1, and as such semantically contradictory to rephrasing #2.
I figured someone might raise this objection. :)
Let’s define the “rich” person as owning 10,000,000 dollars, and the poor person as owning 1,000. If the rich person places a high proportion on his self-worth on how much money he owns (say, 80% of his self-worth) then 10,000,000+1 yields an increase of self-evaluation by 0.00000008. If, however, the poor person places .001% of his self-worth on how much money he owns, then 1,000+1 yields an increase of 0.00000001. So the rich person’s “self-worth score” in this scenario is increased by a factor of 8 as compared to the poor person’s.
Now, is it likely that poor people, lacking money, will place any but the weakest of weightings onto how they judge themselves as people based on the amount of money they currently possess? Is the opposite likely?
That, then, becomes the nature of the question.
You fail to understand what rich and poor mean. While a rich person may be using dollars to keep score, a poor person is using them to stay alive.
Do you really think that someone with a million dollars could care about each one of them as much as someone who has only one dollar cares about his one dollar? That the million dollar owner could be more devastated by the loss of two of his million dollars than the one-dollar owner will be by the prospect of not eating if he loses his one dollar?
I don’t follow how your paragraph starting with “Let’s” says anything along the lines of your paragraph starting with “Now”. Can you expand?
… the “Now” isn’t actually ‘saying anything’. There’s no assertions in the “Now” paragraph. It was the introduction of a new query to the dialogue: “How do the poor associate money with their estimates of self-worth?”
In other words; after my “Let’s” gave a hypothetical scenario with specific numbers in order to demonstrate that, “Yes, statement #2 could be true”, my “Now” raised the question of: “But is it actually true?”
Ok. In that case, the answer simply seems to be “yes, they will do so.” At least from personal experience, people in a very low income bracket are extremely happy to move up to a slightly higher income bracket, and the barely employed look down on the unemployed homeless while the homeless with jobs consider themselves better than the homeless without jobs. I don’t however know of any real data backing this up.
Would you be willing to agree with the notion that a non-trivial percentage of people might come to the conclusion that it either could go either way or that poor people “find ways to believe they are good people without money”?
This gets us back to the original topic—the 30% of libertarians who answered as 4% of progressives did and this automatically meaning that the progressives got the question “more right” than the libs. This despite any apparent effort to figure out which version of the question (and again, I only gave TWO variants) said person was answering.
At this point you are taking a strained interpretation of the sentence that is far from the natural interpretation, and then positing that people would take that strained interpretation and then might think a thought based on that interpretation that still requires a off belief based on how most poor people seem to think. This seems to be more of an attempt to make a specific tribe not as wrong as they were rather than just acknowledge that many members of the tribe are wrong.
I strongly suspect and would be willing to bet money that if one phrased the question in terms of utility or close to your other wording the numbers would look nearly identical.
You know, the funny thing is that I don’t see it as ‘strained’ at all. And I don’t think it’s even that un-exceptional a belief—though it is a “callow” one. I can rephrase it again and see if it seems more “familiar” to you.
The poor stay that way because they don’t care about money.
The rich only get that way because they’re greedy.
It’s perfectly easy to be happy without money.
And why, pray tell, would you believe that most people don’t think they have valid notions about how other people think? How often, for example, have you heard libertarians talk about (or get denigraded for adhering to) the notion of “picking yourself up off your bootstraps”? The Google Search term poor people don’t care about money yielded 227,000,000 hits.
… and there’s the bias. :-) (One way or the other, someone here is biased and not thinking clearly.)
Now, I’ve given a great deal—at this point—of evidence to affirm my position.
If you really wanted to, I’d be more than happy to go through a list of events in the last few weeks where I have openly and directly disagreed with people who are “in-tribe” to me.
So you’re willing to bet money that context #1 would be nearly identical to the original phrasing, eh?
How about context #2? Moreover: how about if we were to ask how many people thought context #2 (absent context #1) was at least one way to read the original statement?
(I once again want to point out that context #2, by tying the concept of “value” to “this makes me a better person”, isn’t suited to questions of utilitarian evaluation. They can’t be. It’s a virtue-based statement, and it is a modal failure to require utilitarian framing for value-based norms.)
The Google Search term “poor people don’t care about money”, however, yields only 7 results for the exact phrase. Many of the highest-ranked results from the search withoute quote marks are indeed from conservative/libertarian sites, but not all of them (e.g., some prominent results are “Minnesota Republicans To Outlaw Poor People Having Money” and “Rush Limbaugh Says Poor Don’t Deserve Healthcare”) And the vast majority of the millions of results are from completely unrelated sites, as usually happens when you search for a phrase made of common words without using quote marks.
You’ve made some good points here, especially in regard to the fact that empirically a lot of people do seem to think that the poor don’t care about money, and could have been answering the question in that context. I have to update my estimate that the change would not be that large if phrased explicitly in a way that emphasized utility of a dollar. My previous estimate was around 70% that the numbers for both would stay within +/- 10 percent or so (so the liberal/progressive “incorrect” response would be some level below 14% and the conservative/libertarian “incorrect” response would be around 21-41%). Given your arguments I still suspect this is true but need to reduce my confidence by quite a bit, to around 55% or so. So I’d still be willing to put even money on this. But I probably need to think about this more and update further.