Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

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Your second point needs more emphasis. Everybody has their own story, and it's always biased by their personal experiences and worldview. There's no such thing as a "fair and balanced" perspective, there are just people who pretend their perspective is balanced and end up introducing another sort of bias into it.

The article and some of the comments here seem to suggest that there's something more "authentic" about a piece when it comes from a subversive, low-power position. Why? What makes the perspective of someone in a position without power more authentic than the perspective of someone with it, other than the fact that it will probably resonate more with the personal experiences of many more people since power tends to be a pyramid with a much wider base than top?

The real answer is to carefully consider where the perspective of whomever is speaking is coming from, and identify how closely it aligns with where you are and want to go. The perspective of a billionaire on how hard it is to make ends meet, if you're living at the poverty threshold? Probably not that relevant. The perspective of a billionaire who started out poor on how he got to where he is? Probably pretty relevant.

>What makes the perspective of someone in a position without power more authentic than the perspective of someone with it...

General conservatism. People who have something to lose, be it money, fame, power, prestige, credibility, etc., will always weigh the benefits of their actions against the cost of losing what they have.

And they should. People with power are taken more seriously. Guys like Buffet can move the markets just by talking. But I think sometimes people don't WANT that kind of power/leverage when they write; maybe they just want to explore ideas, write for entertainment, or something else without all the hassle and baggage that status brings.

>What makes the perspective of someone in a position without power more authentic than the perspective of someone with it...

Well someone not in a position of authority or power doesn't have to worry about losing said authority. If you tell too many uncomfortable truths or offend the wrong people, you may in certain instances loose some of your power. So it makes sense that the likely hood of getting an "authentic" story seems to get less and less as the person telling it rises in stature, power, authority.

Someone who's in a position of authority or power doesn't have to worry about gaining said authority, while someone who's not very often does. Rationally, the two situations are equivalent. (Psychologically they aren't; there's a cognitive bias that causes people to weight losses higher than gains, but there's also a cognitive bias in others that makes it easier to avoid losses than enact gains, so they roughly cancel out.) You can't draw significant conclusions either way along this dimension: the willingness to sacrifice authenticity for power is a mark of the security<=>insecurity axis, not power<=>powerlessness.

I don't know that those two axes are orthogonal. It seems like there is an asymmetry between gaining power and losing power. I think we can agree empirically (if not definitionaly) that there are fewer people with power / status. There are a lot of things besides not offending those others that keeps people in a position without power. If you know that these other factors are keeping you low status, then you have less incentive to pretend to be something you are not. But a single offensive comment can sometimes dislodge someone with power.

> What makes the perspective of someone in a position without power more authentic?

The halo effect. [0]

Or to put it another way - cynical psychology.

0: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_effect

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