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This thought experiment is perhaps "overfitting to a desired conclusion," (and is certainly an unsubtle allegory) but I want to see what other people think. Where else has this comparison been drawn?
In a world where moral status (or, as you will soon see, we could call it moral stature) is defined by a person's height, what might we expect?
Well one thing is it would be very rude to point out that people have different heights. To minimize cognitive dissonance, we would notice that rulers and yardsticks are banned, or at least tabooed. The taboo of course has justification:
I think they definitely would not go around saying "tall people are morally better." And if you tried to gently tell them "Well you certainly act like they are: tall people make more money and have better life outcomes! And you don't call it unjust!" they will probably get angry and call you evil for suggesting that people have different heights. They will say, the injustice is that life outcomes are inequal among the abled and disabled; between men and women; between supposed racial groups; and so many other axes.
They seem to be making a category error. How can a fact of height differences be evil? So you smuggle a ruler into the room. And you point out that Alice is in fact taller than Bob. "It is just an empirical fact" you say. Of course the reply will be something like, "You think your words are disentangled from context, but the social function of your sentence makes a moral claim." This response is inevitable, even if you bookend your remarks with the notice: "THE SOCIAL FUNCTION OF THIS CLAIM IS TO POINT OUT EMPIRICAL FACT"
At first you think, well its society's social context that is smuggling in the moral "oughts." The problem is certainly not with reality. But then you realize they are kind of right? The social function of this claim, indeed has moral content. In this society, height simply is the gauge of moral status. Stating otherwise doesn't make it go away, just like saying 2 + 2 = 5 doesn't make it true -- that's reality for you. It's at this point you realize your neck is getting a bit strained, because you're constantly looking up -- everyone else in this room is very, very tall. These arguments evolved in Tall Clubs around the nation and are handed down from the credentialed Tall to the less-credentialed mid-statures.
It makes you wonder why all of their interventions to the low-status involve treating symptoms and correlates, instead of identifying how to change the moral valuation, which is the root cause of it all.
So by now most of you are thoroughly short on patience, having realized immediately that "height = intelligence." But the real point: the academic and intellectual authorities that are loudest about the problem are the ones stringently enforcing the taboo holding it all up! Is that a coincidence?
The problem with this reasoning is that if you looked at some situation where being tall actually made a difference for reasons having nothing to do with social or moral status, you'd still draw the same conclusions. They'd just be wrong. And I suspect there are plenty of places where intelligence makes a difference for reasons having nothing to do with social or moral status.
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Well, I'm glad that someone else is making the same argument I often make (and it's not like it's one that's original to me).
I do have a related writeup written not very long ago. I explore some other factors and observations that you didn't get into in your current post. For those who care:
https://www.themotte.org/post/3467/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/401360?context=8#context
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This is why I am strongly against the laity getting too involved in anything intelligence adjacent, be it IQ head measuring or HBD "Race Realism":
At the end of the day, 50% of the population is going to be subaverage, and 70% of the population is going to get a failing grade, and 98% of the population will be locked out of the upper echelons of anything but lifting and dropping heavy rocks.
It doesn't matter if X race produces X% more of this or that measurement Goodhartism, because You Won't Be Him.
The purpose of society is to produce a stable living arrangement where as many people as possible feel that it is not worth it for them to for example, burn your shit down and then kill you, where you is every member of society. You can achieve this through force, but that is an unstable equilibrium. It is better to do this through consent.
If you implicitly tell people "Sorry, your worth was decided by a genetic factor that was inborn and can only be changed by small percentages", what they will hear is "I am placing myself above you, and everyone like you, and your children, forever. So, what you should do is fucking kill me".
It behoves us all to preserve the fiction: most stupid people end up away from the controls (except when a populist spasm makes one president), generally only rich people get to be truly stupid and then they lose all their shit and are replaced; it's only our historically permissive state that allows the idiots of the world their power at the moment, it will pass.
Sorry this solution is no longer workable. It existed 1980-2008. But now there is no going back. The polity will look for answers on why 1% of Africans are Doctors and it will be racism.
Shittification of other things will happen. Jewish screenwriters won’t get jobs. And then TV will suck. They will create test to discriminate against white people in ATC and planes will crash. We won’t have a good argument for limiting 3rd world immigration and become a third world country. We won’t put crackheads in jail because too many of them are black and QOL in the commons will collapse.
We are just exiting this world I described. My view is either everyone believes HBD or the shittification of everything occurs. It’s an easy choice for me.
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I’ll tell you this much. There’s great utility in pretending to be an idiot. Because if you display anything that demonstrates intelligence, competence or virtue, then people beat on your ass constantly to solve their problems and you become the explanation for why things are a problem to begin with. Because you have the power to fix things and choose not to. There’s a small handful of things I know how to do that I’ve hidden from virtually everybody throughout my life because if they knew about it, everyone would be completely up my ass about it. I learned that mistake a long time ago and nobody would ever leave me alone. I just let people draw false conclusions about me all the time and I just look over at them and smirk after they have their back turned to me and leave.
A friend of mine who’s a software developer once joked with me about how the hiring manager above him was an idiot and blamed him for everything. “You’re deep in shit up to your elbows, you’re 2x over budget on the project, the product is supposed to ship in 3 months, you’re in the exact same position you were in before I got here, but now somehow it’s my fault.”
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I'm not sure I buy that we need noble lies of this kind to hold society together.
Surely, we can acknowledge that different people have different natural endowments without setting up society for the masses to tear down the great and powerful? Why isn't the message, "You're almost certainly not going to be The Guy, but if you play by the rules, and work hard, you can enjoy a standard of living that is better than a medieval king, thanks to The Guy", not a winning message?
I just feel like we could cultivate the virtues of comparing down not up, of comparing to the past instead of the present, and cultivate civic virtue and trust within society.
Honestly, civic virtue is the thing I want in my fellow citizens far more than intelligence (though I like living in the country that brain drains all the other countries.) When I read Benjamin Franklin's autobiography, the thing that struck me was just his agency and civic virtue. There's no lending library in your region? Why not create one? The streets in the neighborhood are dirty? Why not knock on your neighbors' doors and get everyone to pitch in for a street sweeper? That level of agency is almost unthinkable in today's society, partially because the low hanging fruit of civic virtue has all been picked, but partially because of a learned helplessness in much of the population.
There is an actual problem here: for the 99% of the population that isn't a weird semi-autistic high-decoupling rationalist (and I'm not sure about many of them either), arguments are soldiers, and it's guaranteed that almost anyone who talks about racial IQ is going to be a terrible person who uses the idea to promote racial supremacy.
By the same token, anyone who tries to prevent mention of racial IQ is going to be a terrible person who uses the implicit assumption that racial IQs are equal to promote disparate treatment by race.
That doesn't follow. All that follows is that they must be saying it for some policy reason, not specifically what the policy reason is. Thinking "there are a lot of racists and I need to stop them" is still a policy reason.
It doesn't follow logically any more than yours does. It's an observation -- those who suppress racial IQ are pushing for some sort of preferential treatment for a favored racial group.
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This belies the truth, though. 50% of the people in India are subaverage when it comes to India, just as 50% of the people in America are subaverage when it comes to America. That doesn't hold when you combine the two, or when you compare to the world at large.
There is, in other words, an absolute scale that exists independent of the relative scale, and the absolute scale matters more. The absolute scale is how we get machines, electricity, and medicine. The absolute scale is what separates us from the apes, and separates the stars themselves from us in their turn.
If you want to dedicate society to producing biomass, then you can make that case, but it's a choice (a bad choice, in my opinion) that you've made. It's not universal. I think it is better for society to be the vehicle for man's advancement up the absolute scale of the universe. But if you want the bread dole because everybody loves bread, then, well, that's a different case to be made.
India is likely filled with 90% subaverage because they had the caste system which caused assortive mating creating a distribution that is not a normal distribution.
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It is rude to claim that some people are stupid, or fat, or lazy, or ugly. It is perfectly fine to claim that some people are immoral or short. You can say ‘criminals are bad people(morally)’, but not ‘thieves are too lazy to work’.
If there’s a pattern there, I don’t quite see it.
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It seems I've miscommunicated what I meant by "moral status." Maybe most people call it "moral value."
I am not saying that this society thinks that smarter people are better people. I am saying it thinks smarter people are worth more as human beings. It is rude to call people stupid, because in this society it is like calling them worthless, or not-human. This is horrible, maybe even evil. Specifically, "this" is the moral valuation of society that sneaks in the ought. Other things like beauty, athletic ability, kindness -- these afford people status, and are celebrated of course. But the reason it's not very taboo to insult people along those dimensions, I think is evidence that society's actual moral valuation rule is intelligence.
(Another way you see this is in laypeoples' discussions of consciousness, in that some people start talking about moral value at all, which is quite strange. But it makes perfect sense that intelligence and consciousness are both fuzzy signs of human exceptionalism.)
Some people are pointing out specifics of the thought experiment, like that its unrealistic. Yes, its not our world. It would require height to actually be functional and useful to all domains, the way intelligence seems to be. That world would be very strange. To give an example, everything would have to be on very high shelves for inexplicable reasons. In fact the rest of the society would be completely alien indeed. I was not interested in those details -- who cares why intelligence is useful in nearly all domains in our world? I am more interested in how the taboos ironically uphold the moral valuation rule, and with a focus on who specifically upholds the taboos.
There are a couple of strange personal attacks toward me, accusing me of being racist, or that I live in a bubble. "Rationalists are weirdos who talk about IQ all the time" is a very standard attack. Of course, in this society, discussion of intelligence (not that IQ measures that exactly, although it is certainly the closest proxy we have) is like discussing who is human and who is sub-human. Attacks of these nature are once again examples of upholding the moral valuation rule. Do people get attacked for "talking about beauty" or "talking about athleticism?"
But the real evil here lies in society's arbitrary moral valuation rule, not in the facts, right?
I wasn't attacking you. I was disagreeing with you.
Whether I'm properly a rationalist or not, I am at least rat adjacent. I've read the Sequences, kept up with Scott Alexander, and I believe that IQ is largely genetic and not everyone is born with the same endowment of it. I wasn't saying "boo IQ" or "boo smartness" or anything of the sort.
I was saying what I thought to be the case: that you might have lived most of your life in a bubble. I was saying this because I believe on some level I have lived in such a bubble. I was a gifted and talented kid, took honors and AP classes, and my parents both worked in a STEM field. I know that I internalized the idea that intelligence was very important, if not the most important thing. But I try not to be an elitist or a misanthrope. At a very basic level, I like people, and there are plenty of virtues I value besides intelligence such as kindness, civic virtue, or industriousness.
I'm not offended or surprised at the idea that some people might have lower natural endowments of intelligence. I don't view discussing it as the same thing as discussing whether some people are sub-human or not. I just thought you might be living in a bubble of sorts, without any judgement. If I'm wrong, I apologize for my incorrect assessment of your situation.
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I think height is one of the factors in how we define status: generally taller people are seen as more physically attractive, and physical attractiveness is pretty strongly linked to "moral status". In a world in which height wasn't used to judge people, the entire David-vs-Goliath story is just two dudes deciding to fight and one of them winning: the story depends on the underlying assumption that of course the taller guy was going to win and the smaller guy was the literal underdog. Plenty of historically examples of tall (presumably attractive) guys ending up in leadership positions, although not exclusively so, exist.
That said, overall physical attractiveness is, like intelligence, rather multifaceted and hard to measure on a singular scale. But measuring physical attractiveness is pretty controversial too: "Hot or Not" was always a controversial site (and quite a long time ago now, launching in 2000), and making lists of "hottest" people is déclasé, especially lists of non-public-figures.
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I am going to echo what some others have said here, and say that for the vast majority of people today, intelligence isn't particularly well-regarded.
Think about famous musicians and actors/actresses. While very few of them are dumb, it is always a notable exception when one of them is actually smart like Hedy Lamarr or Mayim Bialik.
Are athletes generally known for their intellectual rigor? Even politicians are supposed to be only slightly above average intellectually, nowhere near the heights of g-loaded academic fields in most cases.
No, I think you've existed in a bubble that highly regards intelligence. It is an easy human bias: when you know you're better than everyone else along dimension X, of course you're going to want to feel superior to everyone else because of it, even if good looks, or charisma or athletic ability or a dozen other non-g-loaded traits can substitute in a pinch among the most successful people in our society.
Given the fraction of American politicians with JDs, I think they have to be more than slightly above average. (It takes an IQ of at least 110 to complete a JD and pass the bar, and the average lawyer is closer to 120). There was a study showing that Swedish politicians have dramatically above average IQs (based on the AQFT-type tests they did when drafted as 20-year-olds) - I can't find the paper any more but the press release gives a good idea of the results.
In general, I would assume that politicians are somewhat below average for the PMC, but well above average for the population as a whole.
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As other pointed out, this is flawed. In today's world it is not intellect, but other signifiers that are seen by large part of society as moral as opposed to immoral. People do not consider it rude to tell to other people that they are sexist, ableist, homophobic, transphobic, anti-vaxxers, fascist and many other things despite their intellect. Talking about intelligence points toward your racism, and it does not matter if you are an academic or construction worker on his break.
The Sailer line is "progressives don't believe in IQ but know they're smarter than conservatives". And progressives do in fact cite studies that say right wingers have lower IQ (and lower openness), the only time I've seen this permitted without comment.
A cynical person might say that how people inveigh against sexism/racism/otherism is meant to demonstrate higher learning and intelligence. Think about the increasingly arcane examples of racism, backed by scholarship inaccessible to the public.. Think about the claim that most people are basically blind because they haven't figured out the underlying structures that shape society. Think about the defense of trans activism: sex is way more complicated than you think prole - you're not qualified to have a take. And oh god, the fucking jargon, that old shortcut to appearing smart.
Intellectuals are arguably the highest status people in progressive spaces, even if we think that the fields they love are not particularly rigorous or g-loaded.
This is exactly my point, you cannot be racist towards racists. It was seen many times, like when activists called black ICE agent as nigger with hard r, or when they force a closeted conservative homosexual out of the closet with a glee, or when they are openly misogynistic etc.
I'd say that intelectuals in general were considered high status historically. I live in post Austrian Empire sphere, where not having masters degree as part of your official ID is seen as shocking and strange - you immediately gain status just by having that. Getting education, parroting correct opinions and then getting cushy government job - or at least something government adjacent is age old tradition for all systems.
High status isn’t necessarily a hallmark of importance. In industries like finance, I remember having a talk with someone who point blank told me “… we know people’s grades and degrees are bullshit. Grade inflation was a thing even at the time I was going to school…” This is a guy who manages a $1.4bn credit portfolio for a living. He didn’t mean degrees are worthless inherently but they’re effectively worthless if you haven’t been on the proving ground. They want to see your expertise in ‘applied’ knowledge, not complex mathematical formulas you can recite from some obscure paper or textbook. The best people (and indeed the most intelligent as well) are far from being those who have the most educational badges next to their name. A lot of people who stay on that side of the fence are those who can’t make their ideas work out in practice, because if you truly had some unique and differentiated idea from everyone else, why wouldn’t you go out and make something of it? And so the conversation always end up being chaired by the D team who goes around bloviating about the importance of this and that, but all they’re really doing is creating this mental landscape of “toy” environments where they hypothesize about the interactions between these toys as if they’re representative of reality and they’re not.
In truth, the proof is in the pudding. “Talk is cheap, show me the code.” - Linus Torvalds. In the end, put up or shut up.
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How far back are we going here?
If we're going very broad, I'd say the advantage intellectuals have is that their achievements are still legible today, preserved as they are by other intellectuals. The conquering noble (who may legitimately be illiterate) may have been higher status in the past but we only see him through the eyes of historians.
Modern era? Sure.
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You haven't seen the "atheists are smarter than religious people" version? This sort of thing?
That was a staple of the old religion arguments on the internet.
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I think this is not a very compelling thought experiment, because you clearly just took the present American dynamic about intelligence and imagined a world in which a completely analogous set of norms and hangups is in place involving height, without a believable story of how those dynamics would have developed over time or what internal logic makes them tick. Would height=morality world have gone through a phase where an elite of tall people was taken to have an unquestionable divine right to rule, with cautionary tales about the failures of countries where shorties called the shots? What sort of developments did it take for this phase to end? Height and intelligence are different in a great many other ways, like how your height is immediately apparent from afar, objectively measurable with little effort, doesn't change greatly based on environment or transient effects like substance consumption, and so on. Would this not make dissimulation about height much harder, and possibly (if the possible gains are sufficiently high) result in a development of a whole slew of social and physical technology to conceal height?
For a similar reason, I've been finding just about every "isekai where sociosexual behaviour of men and women is reversed" manga out there trite and disappointing. An allegory between things that are not actually similar, asking you to essentially imagine if the dissimilar thing were the same as your target subject in every way that matters for your argument but like its real self otherwise, does not add information for those who don't already agree with you - "imagine if actually pedophilia were legal and having sex with over-16s were illegal and taboo" "imagine if actually Crowleyan magick were real, and science and technology accepted to be woo" "imagine if actually communist societies were rich and successful and capitalism discredited for not being able to provide for the people's basic needs" etc.
Height is like a woman's waist or breast size, immediately apparent to everyone who sees you, and so is everyone else's to a first approximation. A woman may be insecure about her breasts or think she's fat, but she'll mostly be able to figure out her ordinal ranking from those around her.
Intelligence is like a man's penis size, secret, impossible to really display, and the ordinal ranking is totally unknown. A man can worry about having a small dick regardless of whether he has one or not. A man can worry about being dumb whether he is smart or not. The effect of repeated exposure to those at the top percentile is left as an exercise for the reader.
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I think that the ending of this allegory, where you point out that the council enforcing the taboo are all tall people, is a nice point that is helped by the allegory making it more obvious that this is about self interest rather than intelligent people simply knowing more and helpfully explaining truth to others (the way they portray themselves in real life where it's about intelligence).
However, your opening to the allegory is weak:
We would not expect this. It's an allegory because it's taking things to an absurd extreme that would not persist in the face of reality. People's heights are immediately visually obvious. They can gaslight people about intelligence because it's hidden in your brain. When you look at someone, it's not usually obvious how smart they are. People have different skills and talents which are correlated with intelligence but vary greatly. Smart people often do stupid things and stupid people often do smart things. The opacity makes it possible to thread intelligence and morality together because each person can imagine themselves to be smarter than they are, and others to not have the confidence to contradict them when they pretend to be smart. If a short person pretended to be tall, even if everyone pretended to agree with them they would know it to be false. They would know that everyone else knows, as Common Knowledge. Not even trans people pretend that they're biologically identical to the other sex pre-transition, they have to invent a separate "Gender" which exists in your head and is a platonic ideal of what a "true" man/woman is, because then it can be opaque and exploit the lack of certainty to start gaslighting.
Your allegory is an exaggerated caricature that requires us to suspend our disbelief on multiple levels and deliberately construct it as a parallel to our own society, it does not logically follow from the one single premise.
And yet, I've seen extremely charismatic short kings, where the women around him said things like "I just never noticed that he wasn't that tall. He seemed taller".
"Seen"? From what I've heard, historical accounts of short leaders and kings were often exaggerated; Napoleon, for example, was just short compared to his unusually tall elite soldiers, not in general. Even those that were genuinely short in the below-average-male-aristocrat sense usually were not so short that they got close in height to women, especially since the aristocracy already had an height advantage and could in addition use shoes and clothing to hide the differences somewhat.
Though somewhat in agreement, I remember having seen a paper showing that if a person is attracted to someone, they are more liable to ascribe to them all sorts of qualities beyond their objective merit, which included women claiming an attractive man is tall even when he was merely average. But, well, social studies and replication crisis and all that.
"Seen", as in "perceived with my own two eyes" that the short king was indeed short, and that my female friends didn't seem to notice.
Interesting. Which king, if I may ask? Since there really aren't that many left.
"Short king" is modern slang for short guys and doesn't refer to actual monarchs.
Thanks, now I feel old. I've never heard this as a slang term, not even online.
All good, it's not worth trying to keep up with the latest skibidi Ohio rizz grimace shakes.
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In a world where moral status is defined by height, I would certainly not expect it to be rude to point out that people have different heights.
In the world today, it is not rude to point out that people have different moral statures. If I say in public today "some people are morally better than other people", nobody will dispute that at all. As far as the obvious allegory goes, if I say in public today "some people are smarter than other people", nobody disputes that either.
If I lived in a world where height was thought to be either identical with or strongly correlative with moral virtue, if there were actually a guide to individual moral goodness that straightforward, I'd expect people to just say it. That's the hypothetical you've presented.
It seems to me that in the real world, the common, folk understanding is that morality and intelligence are different things, and that people differ on both scales, and that both moral goodness and intelligence are desirable qualities to possess. But I'd argue that pop culture is full of examples of very intelligent people who are evil, which seems to show that people distinguish these two axes. 'Evil genius' is a cliché! Lex Luthor is both extraordinarily intelligent and a complete monster. The likely fact that Lex has a higher IQ than Clark Kent has not made people conclude that Lex is really the good guy. Really, just as much as the evil genius is a cliché, the virtuous simpleton is just as much of a cliché. Over twenty years ago I remember Abigail Nussbaum complaining about this. Intelligence or education (which are admittedly not the same, but often correlated) make somebody effete and morally depraved, absent the simple, common-sense goodness of the less intelligent salt-of-the-earth types who built their world. The quarterback is more idolised than the nerd. Thor is morally better than Loki, his cleverer brother. Conan the barbarian is not an idiot, but he is portrayed as more vital, more morally whole, than all the necromancers and dark wizards he fights. Thulsa Doom would probably beat Conan in an IQ test; but we know who the good guy is.
I think the Freddie deBoer argument, in The Cult of Smart, that there is a strong tendency to moralise intelligence is true in certain quarters, but it's just clearly not the case that we live in a world where moral status is defined by a person's intelligence.
IME this get an immediate retort of "yes, for example people making such claims are morally inferior".
The best you can hope for is that people will "agree", but their idea of who's better and who's not will be completely out of whack. Hell, when I brought up Rotherham et al on reddit, I got people saying to me that the real problem in the UK is billionaires. If people can't bring themselves to condemn unrepentant serial rapists, and would rather use them as a prop to tear into their Favored Enemy, you can have no hope of establishing any consensus morality.
Just use an example coded in the opposite direction. Is MLK Jr. morally better than Donald Trump?
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I can tell you this with absolute certainty. As a much above average man in height, but still on the short end of my extended family, I have experienced absolutely zero in social benefits, moral stature, recognition or anything else on the basis of how tall I am. A lot of people I meet seem to go around thinking this, but it simply isn’t rooted in fact at all.
I always tried having a lot of moral consistency and integrity because I was raised that way, but it doesn’t pay off try to remain a pious and morally upright individual who was built for 1950s America, when that culture has been dead for almost 70 years. Cruel life experience has taught me that overtime, and even as of recent. “No good deed goes unpunished.” I don’t think I’ll ever understand the mentality of the mass of people I meet in today’s world. Maybe that’s for the better, because there’s definitely no logic to what they do.
One undeniable conclusion I’ve come to though is that most people are completely horrible judges of character. I’ve had people say I’m too serious. Others say I’m too immature. Others who can’t detect the most obvious red flags and other shit in people they come across, etc. In reality I’m just an ordinary person.
“It isn’t a measure of health how well adjusted someone can be to a profoundly sick society.”
Or more likely you have experienced all of those benefits, and your life would really suck if you were 5'5".
That's the problem with both privilege and discrimination, you can't know the counterfactual. The privileged can't know how bad their lives would be without their privilege, and imagine they would be about the same. The victim of discrimination imagines that their lives would be perfect were they privileged, but that's rarely the case.
If someone wants to tell me I have they’re welcome to prove it. To date I see ‘zero’ from it and nobody even willing to try. What advantages are you suggesting I experience solely on the basis of height? I’ll be honest if you’re right or not. I may not know the counterfactual but I can approximate it very well based on how others get treated. If I attain some kind of ‘benefit’ I would be treated the way X is treated. I am not treated the way X is treated, therefore I am not benefitting from it.
If you want to say I can’t know the counterfactual then you can’t know whether I’m benefitting either, because these are all relative value judgments. All I can do is compare experiences. And experience tells me I’m ‘not’ getting treated the same way others are on the basis of height. Yes I get treated very well by some groups of people, but ‘none’ of it is related to height. Zero.
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I really don't think you can be "absolutely" certain about this one. I.e. you don't and can't know how worse your life could've been if you weren't tall.
I remember reading a chart a long time ago, probably in /r/blackpillscience, from some dating page, that showed ratings of men sorted by their and the woman raters. The was a mild positive correlation, but the important part was that the ratings fell catastrophically if the woman was taller. Basically the entire half below the diagonal was red. There's some pretty demonstrable assortative mating going on, the number of couples where man is the shorter one is much smaller than what you'd expect is people paired up regardless of height.
Anecdotally, I know a guy who successfully scored himself at least one girlfriend basically by towering over near her at a concert, then bending down to ask her something face to face. He didn't even mean to hit on her :D It helps that he also has a striking face, I don't want to doxx him but he looks very much like Yuya Fungami from JoJo part 4 anime, minus the tattoos.
(Also he was a founder of /r/UNBGBBIIVCHIDCTIICBG/. Small world.)
I may not be able to tell if things would’ve been worse for me, but I can observe everyone else around me who ‘isn’t’ me. And based on what I see, there’s zero evidence to me that suggests I incur some substantial advantage over others based on 3 inches, a foot, or whatever you want to say. I’m typically not into the content you’re referencing but I think you can cherry pick experiences any way you want to have it. Considering there are people much worse than me in the height department that seem to fare just fine, if height is the only variable you’re controlling for it doesn’t prove very much to me in my own experience. Yeah if I wasn’t as tall, things would not be as good for me as they are, but the presumption is that shorter people in general aren’t doing as well. And that straight up is completely false. I see it every day. If you want to say there’s ‘other’ things going for certain people that validate why that’s the case then that’s almost certainly true. Height isn’t a defining feature of why though.
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