I believe the same applies to stupid. Yes, you will occasionally run into stupid people (or as the OP states "people being stupid"). But if it happens more often than not, look in the mirror.
For example if you are a young black man or a gay person living in Utah you might encounter pretty much assholes all day, depending on what you are trying to do that day and depending on if you are unlucky. If you are a good Mormon person in Utah you will probably meet nothing but good people when you go out, even if you meet people who are not good Mormons.
If you are living in Denmark and taking care of a severely autistic child of about 6 years old with learning disabilities, if you meet nothing but unknown Danes during the day you are probably meeting nothing but assholes.
This really clever quote, like most really clever quotes, is somewhat insulting when it reaches its limitations.
Most communities we left we're for the external reasons of my Dad's job moving us around.
The only time staying is a net benefit is if your take on reality is aligned with the primary leadership.
If a situation is setup democratically and with term limits there is more leeway, so muster your arguments and vote on it early if you can, bounce if the Overton shifts further away from you after, don't have assets tied up with the group.
Decades on, every single person who stayed and fought has lost most of their ability to garden and grow beautiful things.
Are you speaking from experience? As a “brown guy with a beard,” Utah was like heaven compared to Maryland or New York. I’m so fucking sick of the mid-Atlantic “we’re not racist, we’re assholes to everybody” shtick.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50100397
I knew a good number of gay people, and I don't think they had it particularly easy.
As a punk rocker I was always having to fight because of how I looked, but I guess that is just for being an asshole who did not look enough like other people. Again, if you fit into Utah, it is probably a really nice place. This is probably the case about almost anywhere though.
on edit: obviously I might have had the same experiences and noticed the same experiences somewhere else. I was in Eugene Oregon from 13 to 15, Utah from 15 to mid twenties, San Francisco a couple of years, Utah, and then returned to Denmark. The only place I ever experienced assholes every time I went out was Utah, until Denmark and having a disabled child that didn't "look" disabled.
But maybe if I had lived on the East coast I would have the same observation, that you can go out all the time and meet assholes and it isn't your fault , and the implication that it is your fault is really implying that you need to change your skin color or gender preferences and you'll stop being "the asshole", which is a pretty fucked up opinion to be conveying in the nice pithy aphorism.
Yes, but I don't think skin color standing alone prevents you from "fitting into Utah." I think of people in Utah as being warmer and nicer than people in Astoria, Oregon, where my mother-in-law lives. My brother-in-law grew up in Astoria and he’s black presenting (more Samoan and asian but with the textured hair) and he fit in really well and was popular in school, despite having all white friends. When I go to Astoria, nobody is mean or racist, but my experience in Utah was definitely that people were warmer. (Note that Astoria is politically similar to Salt Lake County, that is blue leaning, but not liberal by any means.)
> he had big dreadlocks and I guess looked alternative
How does he know that it was because he was black and not because he "looked alternative?" I look like brown Ned Flanders and the only time I've ever gotten stares (in the US) is from other brown people in southern towns where I'm like the only other one. And I'm not oblivious to it--I'm certainly aware of the airport people in Japan following me around like a potential terrorist.
I trust your friend had the experience he had. But I also think it’s important to be precise about the standard you’re applying when you accuse places of being racist. If you assume people have an obligation to disregard differences not only in skin color, but how they express themselves or present their identity, then fine, but be explicit about that assumption. Because not everyone agrees that’s the standard.
> This really clever quote, like most really clever quotes, is somewhat insulting when it reaches its limitations.
The point of quotes like that are just to get people to examine their own behavior, which they often conveniently leave unexamined. This type can have more impact because it ties into the persons own observations and experience.
It's not some kind of proposition to be absolutely true or absolutely false.
It's probably axiomatic that a high trust society and a fully liberal one where everyone does whatever they feel like are incompatible. But we've got endless places for the latter and SLC is one of the few of the former.
However, my views on it of late are informed by seeing the local police being at the beck and call of a dodgy businessman and making up shit to try and scare off an investigative Youtuber: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxZPfj8AlmY
The police were also so stupid, they accidentally released all their unredacted bodycam footage in their own press release, which revealed a pile of damning evidence against them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ih2XwNN0aVY
It's only one incident, but it doesn't scream "high-trust society". It makes me think of other corrupt small-town police forces with a bias towards residents over outsiders.
(Oh, and I also remember another Utah resident, the guy in the Cybertruck: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0Dl0TnnK0E - he has deep-seated issues and that is such a goofy vehicle. He should sell it and spend the money on therapy)
But I think it's a good argument against GP's point. You may find the area you live is high-trust, kindly to neighbours, etc. But you can find stupid police and people everywhere, likely including your area. How can you be sure that visitors, neighbours, etc. agree with your experience?
> or a gay person living in Utah you might encounter pretty much assholes all day, depending on what you are trying to do that day and depending on if you are unlucky.
Yes, everyone around you could very well be more stupid or the bigger asshole. This is a perception issue void of evidence either way. The people most prone to poor perception analysis are those least capable of perceiving, which is the foundation of Dunning-Kruger.
For everyone else there are things like measures and accomplishments.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-dunning-kruge...
> The worst test-takers would also overestimate their performance the most because they are simply the furthest from getting a perfect score.
No. Earlier the article correctly states that all result quadrants more or less guess their raw performance with a similar degree of precision, but fail to guess their performance relative to each other with the same level of precision. These are two entirely unrelated measures that the article attempts to correlate in an invented relationship. The actual Dunning-Kruger results also indicate the highest scoring quadrant tend to underestimate their performance relative to their testing peers, but they are off by much less than the lowest score quadrant.
I am not saying Dunning-Kruger is necessarily correct or valid, and it has been challenged repeatedly. Still it is necessary to know what Dunning-Kruger actually concludes before challenging it.
Secondly, regardless of agreement on the conclusions provided by Dunning-Kruger it does identify something more important than relative bias. People are generally better at guessing from a known, or at least determinable, objective measure than they are at guessing from perceptive qualities that includes themselves as a data point. This is the basis of social intelligence. Social intelligence is the ability to perceive the communications of other people and to introspect. Both introspection and perception of others are required for the definition of social intelligence. Social intelligence has a weak correlation to academic intelligence as it is primarily a perceptive skill (conscientiousness) but it also requires the proper motivation (openness). People with low general intelligence are more likely to score lower in social intelligence and people with lower perceptive skills in any regard are less motivated/capable to measure things for any reason, and that motivation discrepancy is dramatically elevated a person places themselves a data point of measure.
Meaning that it might actually be that the assholes one runs into all day are in fact assholes.
Even more so when we consider that one during a normal day does not run into a representative sample of society, but tiny tiny bubbles. We made sure to atomize everyone into that and separate the social classes from each other.
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We can of course not expect our quotes like that to serialize all the assumed preconditions into their writing, but we should remember that those exist when replicating them.
If however the baseline already moved into chaos, the quote just leads to tying your own hands and complacency.
It is the right prescription for the wrong disease, essentially. We need chemotherapy/surgery and not mild cough syrup.