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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

"I work nights. I have arranged things so that I can sleep through the day with traffic, lawn mowers, amd all the other urban noise sources. If I can do that then there is no reason to impose on others who want to have noisy parties or whatever during the night. It’s your problem, you deal with it."

At the risk of getting bogged down in a trivial example, I'm not sure you understand the difference between background noise and life-ruining level. The reason I used this particular example was because my new neighbors, a group of Irish college students, keep me up until 4 AM with their partying, which tends to involve really loud music and getting into semiregular fights. I wear expensive, high-quality earplugs and have a white noise machine on high power, and I still can't get to bed until 4 in the morning. When I ask them to stop, they threaten to kill me, and they're obviously drunk enough to try. The police have been by a few times, but it hasn't helped. I eventually had a choice of failing all of my exams because I can't stay awake during classes or moving out to a more expensive place (I'm moving on Saturday). I'm just glad I didn't own the place, or I'd be selling it at a huge loss.

Just because you managed to deal with some traffic okay doesn't mean anyone else will ever have a legitimate complaint.

Other more powerful examples to get the point across: someone buys the property next to yours and builds a slaughterhouse on it, which smells terrible. Someone buys the property next to yours and builds a bar on it, and every morning you wake up with beer bottles and vomit all over your lawn and the occasional broken window. Someone buys the property upriver from you and dumps industrial waste in the river, turning it green and mildly radioactive.

It's very easy to tell other people "Oh, just tough it out", but it doesn't lead to very happy people or a society anyone wants to live in for very long. As Will points out, the harm principle can certainly be overused, but we can't scrap anything where we can't elegantly distinguish legitimate and illegitimate uses.

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

Let me correct my own comment... what I meant to say was that education and intelligence are the positional goods. Harvard sweatshirts and resumes are the signals of education and intelligence. Another signal of intelligence is to be smart and funny in conversation.

The reason I thought the Wilkinson quote was incorrect is because visual signals have further reach, as explained in my other comments. The research you linked to merely states that people say they would rather be relatively smart than have relative advantages in some other areas. But that is different than saying that being "smart and funny when we talk" signals as strongly as our car.

Does that make sense?

Sorry that my last comment was so sloppy on this point.

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