Comments on: Pretending To Be What You Are

By: Pretending To Be What You Are | Fit Forum

Pretending To Be What You Are | Fit Forum — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 00:00:30 +0000

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By: Shae

Shae — Wed, 20 May 2009 15:53:59 +0000

“The way to convince the public that you are an X is to act the way the public thinks that X folks act.”

Explains a lot about gay culture.

By: Waldheri

Waldheri — Sun, 10 May 2009 17:14:51 +0000

I get the general conclusion, but I must object to the phrasing of the question. The conclusion is: “It is easier for person with profession X to convince people that he has profession Y because he shares the same kinds of expectations of profession Y” (very loosely and generally – this may not be the case if profession X and Y are related, for example).

The question that one expects from such a conclusion is not “Which is harder: pretending to be what you are, or to pretending to be what you are not?” but rather “What is harder: convincing people to be what you are, or pretending to be what you are not?”.

By: Robin Hanson

Robin Hanson — Sat, 09 May 2009 11:57:36 +0000

Shalmanese and Doug, those are both great relevant links.

By: Doug S.

Doug S. — Sat, 09 May 2009 05:52:47 +0000

As usual, the TV Tropes Wiki knows everything:

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/YourCostumeNeedsWork

By: mariana

mariana — Sat, 09 May 2009 05:32:53 +0000

It depends on the complexity of who you wanna pretend to be, the complexity that this character presents to you. If it is too complex it is easier to be you, for example you want to pretend you are a dancer but for you it is extremely dificult to go with the beat.

On the other side pretending to be someone else is made easier by the fact that it can be seen as a game.

By: Katja Grace

Katja Grace — Sat, 09 May 2009 02:38:06 +0000

It can also be harder to persuade people that you have bad characteristics than to pretend you have good ones, especially if you have other visible good characteristics.

By: Shalmanese

Shalmanese — Fri, 08 May 2009 22:37:45 +0000

I call this effect Acting Sober: http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/oct-28th-day-16-acting-sober

By: Daniel Franke

Daniel Franke — Fri, 08 May 2009 22:01:03 +0000

I think the difficulty level of this is trivial in either case.

I’m a (non-professional) fencer. There are about as many members of the US Fencing Association as there are private investigators in the US (about 36,000 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics), and I think fencers and PIs are stereotyped and glamorized to about the same degree in the public eye. While mentioning that I fence sometimes elicits very silly reactions (perhaps the silliest being the inference that I fight actual duels on a regular basis), disbelief has never been among them — I’ve always been taken at my word. When you state a fact about yourself to someone you’ve just met and have no obvious motive for deception, I think that fact generally has to be quite implausible to be doubted.