Would anyone be surprised by this observation? Wealth and privilege mess up your head.
In 2011, a Berkeley grad student named Paul Piff conducted an experiment that has since become famous in the world of social psychology. Over the course of several weekends, Piff and his research team crouched behind bushes at the intersection of Interstate 80 and Lincoln Highway in Berkeley, California. When a vehicle passed, they would catalog it — “five” for a brand-new BMW, for instance; “one” for a beat-up Honda. Then the researchers would observe the behavior of the car’s driver.
For centuries, humans have studied and tried to understand our own hierarchies — how and why we arrange ourselves into tribes and nations and by what means certain groups and individuals rise to the top. But Piff had realized that we had little data on how wealth — a prime marker of power in our current times — affects the psychology of those who hold it. “In the U.S., we spend a lot of time pathologizing poverty and valorizing aspects of the rich,” he tells me. “I was really interested in the flip side of poverty: If poverty has these effects, then wealth must also, and let’s start to try to uncover what those are. There must be some pathologies there too, right?”
What Piff and his team found at that intersection is profound — and profoundly satisfying — in that it offers hard data to back up what intuition and millennia of wisdom (from Aristotle to Edith Wharton) would have us believe: Wealth tends to make people act like assholes, and the more wealth they have, the more of a jerk they tend to be.
At the intersection the researchers were monitoring, drivers of the most expensive cars were roughly four times more likely to cut others off and three times less likely to stop for pedestrians, even when controlling for factors like the driver’s perceived gender and amount of traffic at the time they were collecting data.
When someone from the research team posed as a pedestrian heading into the crosswalk, almost half of the grade-five cars failed to stop, as if they didn’t even see the person.
I’ve been doing a sloppy, half-assed version of this experiment for a while now — Morris only has two traffic lights on the main street, but all of the corners have crosswalks, and by law cars are expected to stop for pedestrians standing there. They don’t. I’ll step out into the street, not far enough that I’m in danger but far enough that drivers will have to notice my intent to cross, and then I count how many cars zip by before someone stops. Usually it’s not too many, but the ones who pretend I don’t exist are usually driving a monstrous huge shiny pickup truck, of the sort that MAGA like to buy to pretend they’re tough working class guys.
Even better is the corner with a traffic light, and a pedestrian signal to tell you when to cross. When I get the message to cross Atlantic avenue, the oncoming traffic gets a yellow light for a left turn. Many times I’ve started my legal crossing only to have someone in a big SUV decide to rush to make their left and turn right into me. A few times those drivers have been so annoyingly privileged that they honk at me to get out of their way.
You know this kind of behavior is going to have consequences…no, I take that back: it already has terrible consequences. Look at the people at the top of our government — all of them sociopaths. Not a single one I would object to seeing mowed down on main street by an oblivious Ford Super Duty F-450 driver.
…wealth-related disengagement seems to not be so great for a species for which pro-social cooperation is programmed into our hunter-gatherer DNA. Clay Cockrell, a psychotherapist who caters to ultra-high-net-worth individuals, tells me he thinks of great wealth as subtractive: It doesn’t really add to one’s happiness, but it does take away struggles that can make someone unhappy. Yet it’s subtractive in a different sense, too — contributing to isolation, paranoia, grandiosity, and risk-taking behavior, as well as a pronounced lack of empathy. “As your wealth increases, your empathy decreases. Your ability to relate to other people who are not like you decreases.… It can be very toxic.”
Then in the middle of this article they bring up Darwin, only not Darwin, the bastardized version of evolution promoted by Herbert Spencer. Spencer is high on my long list of 19th century deplorables who invented various rationalizations for treating human beings horribly, justifying Gilded Age excesses and encouraging colonialism and various other kinds of exploitation.
Some of these men found such a justification in social Darwinism and the ideas of Herbert Spencer, a 19th-century psychologist and anthropologist who coined the phrase “survival of the fittest” not to explain biological evolution but rather to legitimize social hierarchies: Rich and powerful people are rich and powerful because they have innate traits that make them superior. Never mind the effects of systemic oppression (Spencer was an unapologetic racist) or the fact that, in a functioning democracy, no billionaire is entirely “self-made” (where would Bezos be without taxpayers paving the roads his Amazon trucks clog?) — historians today see a direct line from the social Darwinism of the Gilded Age to DOGE. “[With] tech leadership nowadays, I think the arguments are a little different: They don’t make explicit appeals to survival of the fittest,” says Luke Winslow, author of Oligarchy in America. “But you get phrases like ‘make the world a better place’ and ‘move fast and break things.’ Well, that’s very Darwinian, because if you break things, if you have disruption, catastrophe, the hope is that the strong will survive. You don’t have this crutch of a government allowing the losers and the weaklings to survive; you’ll weed them out. And this idea is really big in Silicon Valley, this justification of the concentration of wealth and power based on this idea that they deserve it. How do you know they deserved it? Well, geez, look at how rich Elon Musk is.”
They aren’t worthy. They’re opportunistic parasites who have latched on to the capitalist system and are taking advantage of its weaknesses. They’re spoiled twits living in a fantasy land that panders to their delusion that they are the best, the smartest, the greatest people who deserve billions of dollars in their pockets, and that the little people are all there to serve them.
There is no clearer example of their stupid ideas than the tech broligarchy’s dream of colonizing Mars, which is not going to happen.
“Musk talks about Mars as a lifeboat for humanity, which is among the very stupidest things that someone could say,” says Adam Becker, an astrophysicist and author of the book More Everything Forever, which outlines the messianic, sci-fi fantasies of the tech oligarchs. “There are so many reasons why it’s such a bad idea, and this is not about, ‘Oh, we’ll never have the technology to live on Mars.’ That’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that Earth is always going to be a better option no matter what happens to Earth. Like, we could get hit with an asteroid the size of the one that killed off the dinosaurs, and Earth would still be more habitable. We could explode every single nuclear weapon, and Earth would still be more habitable. We could have the worst-case scenario for climate change, and Earth would still be more habitable. Any cursory examination of any of the facts about Mars makes it very clear.”
Then again, you don’t have to do a cursory examination of the facts of Mars if you believe tech is close to inventing a machine that can change the physical properties of the universe. In 2023, billionaire OpenAI CEO Sam Altman conceded that climate change was a huge problem, but brushed off its hugeness with the contention that super intelligent AI would soon be able to tell us how to make a lot of clean-energy facilities, how to amp up carbon capture, and how to do both of those things quickly and at scale. “What he said was, ‘A good way to solve global warming is to build a kind of machine without a clear definition that no one knows how to build, and then ask it for three wishes,’ ” Becker says with a sigh.
Sam Altman is notorious for his vapid echoing of the preconceptions of whoever he is talking to at the time. It would restore my faith in humanity a tiny bit if he were openly grifting, lying to get his next bolus of VC money, than that he actually believes in that nonsense about AI. I’m afraid I’m leaning more and more to the idea that these people are simply moronically stupid. And massively greedy and selfish.
The next edition of the DSM is going to have to include a long section on Billionaire Brain, the pathology of people given near unlimited access to everything they can dream of. It’s an ugly disease and it seems to be spreading to people who aren’t billionaires, but just dream of becoming billionaires.
Melinda Beck
That illustration is by Melinda Beck, and it is PERFECT.
In other words magic.
It is more likely that those super intelligent AIs would tell us we should raise the taxes on the ultra-rich oligarchies to something like they were in 2016, before the GOP tax cuts. Which were still low.
And that Sam Altman lives in a fantasy world.
“At the intersection the researchers were monitoring, drivers of the most expensive cars were roughly four times more likely to cut others off and three times less likely to stop for pedestrians”
I live in an extremely wealthy small town these days, most people drive Mercs or BMW or Audi. There are 3 Porsches in my rental house’s parking garage. I see the most outrageous driving behaviour every day, in fact on Wednesday I got nearly killed by a guy overtaking where there was no view whatsoever, had it not been for a truck driver braking to a full stop. I believe that rich guys are worse drivers, no doubt, but my little control group here seem to all be doing it, and I blame Covid frontal lobe damage.
I wish I could remember the details, but someone did an experiment with rigged Monopoly. One player, chosen at random, got to throw the dice twice each round and got double money for passing GO. In other words, they were always going to win. To begin with, the lucky player acted embarrassed as they got their perks, but when they were interviewed afterwards, they attributed their (inevitable) win to smart decisions they’d made, not to the extra dice throws or money.
[Sigh]
Since then, I’ve been thinking that if 16 people made a risky business decision, it would pay off for half of them, who would credit their own intellect rather than dumb luck. After 4 risky decisions, you’ve still got one lucky person who is now seriously convinced he’s a genius, and 15 people we don’t hear about because they’re buried in debt.
I’ve long suspected that the people who buy BMWs, Mercedes, Audis, etc. are very concerned about status and perception.
Is a BMW really a “better” car than a Toyota Corolla or Honda Civic?
Anyways, my suspicion that people who are overly concerned with their own status, are also going to judge other people’s perceived status, and someone who doesn’t even use a car (pedestrian), is so low on status as to be beneath their contempt.
I’m pretty familiar with Berkeley–having lived in or adjacent (Albany) to it for many years–and I don’t know of a “Lincoln Hwy” there. There is a Lincoln St, but it doesn’t intersect I-80. In addition, I-80 through Berkeley is a freeway (limited access), so there aren’t any “intersections”, just interchanges. So…I can’t figure out where these guys supposedly did their observations. Not disputing the conclusions, but there’s something fishy about where the data was collected.
When the last billionaire is strangled with the guts of the last “populist”?
When the Monster Truck, or $uperExpen$iveCar tries to mow you down in the crosswalk, when you have the “walk” signal, CLEARLY you need to “stand your ground” and shoot them dead.
That’ll help reduce the population of assholes.
Just like every tick you crush (slightly) reduces the population of ticks. It’s on all of us to work to reduce harmful parasites.
Astronomically false.
There will come a time when Mars is much more habitable than Earth when our Sun balloons out into a red giant star and makes Earth first similar to Venus and then a super-Mercury then a molten Mustafar-y lava world and then eventually no world at all as Earth gets – very probly – vapourised by our current daytime star.
Admittedly, thats’ many billions of years into the future – about five billion~ish memory serving with Earth becoming uninhabitable long beforehand as its oceans boil as the Cytherean ones on its now “”evil sister” planet (aka morning & evening star) once did before. If Venus ever did have oceans which seesm likely from what I’ve read oevr the years.
When Earth’s oceans are boiling away, the Martian polar ice caps will be melting, its atmosphere thickening and its surface becoming potentially at least more habitabe than ours.
It is a breif phase before Mars too becomes cooked and its atmosphere will likely lost and it becomes at least too hot for life again if not destroyed as well – apparently it won’t be – but still. That will be a very asronomically breif period where Mars and Earth still both exist and Mars is more habitable than Earth is.
Actually there was very probly a period in the Hadean aeon (pre-pre-Cambrian) when Earth was still molten from the Big Splash that gave us our moon whilst Mars, cooling quicker but with a then warner surface and thiucker atmoisphere and surface water was also more habitable and there’s even hypothesises that life actually originated on Mars and was sprad t Earth by Martian meteorites.
So at least a couple of astronomical eras in Deep Time when that claim that Earth was always more habitable than Mars is / was wrong.
@4 sheila:
That was Paul Piff at University of California, maybe in 2013. He did a TED talk that October (*sigh*, I wish that weren’t ominous) and some media coverage soon after. I can’t find a publication. His CV is here. TED talk said it involved “more than 100 pairs of strangers”. The RollingStone link in the in OP notes Piff did both the Monopoly and intersection studies.
The Piff study gives scientific evidence for the old observation about the difference between a Mercedes and a porcupine.
And then, after millions of years of computing, the output solution turns out to be “forty-two”, and you conclude you have to build an even more advanced AI in the form of a whole new biologically habitable planet to make sense of that.
@lochaber #5: Yes, at least when it comes to things like design, build quality and handling. If you’re just want to go from A to B at a reasonable cost, not so much.
#9: OK, fair enough. Let’s shut down these fantasies of Martian colonization for 5 billion years.
Or 4 billion years, giving us a billion years to figure out how to do it.
KG @7
I prefer using the entrails of the last supply side economist.
@#4 Sheila:
I’m reminded of something I once read that pointed out the odds of winning 33 consecutive coin flips is fairly infinitesimal, but if you set up a coin-flipping tournament with everyone on earth, all 8 1/2 billion or whatever the population is now, you are guaranteed to produce an individual who won 33 straight times.
I’m also reminded of the scam where you send out, say, 1024 letters to people, and in half of them you predict the market will rise and the other half the market will fall. If the market rises, you have 512 correct predictions. You send letters to them, again predicting in half of them the market will rise, the other half the market will fall. If it, say, falls, this time, now you send out 256 letters crowing about your correct prediction. Rinse & repeat.
You end up sending a letter to someone where you brag about having made nine straight consecutive predictions, and then you can sell them a service based on your obvious, demonstrated market prowess.
There was an Ellery Queen short story in which a crook did exactly that.
@6: I suspect there has been a daisy-chain distortion effect leading to misplacement. Rolling Stone is paywalled for me, but I think I found the original paper in PNAS, Feb 27 2012: “Higher social class predicts increased unethical behavior” by Piff et al. There is NO mention of Highway 80 or the Lincoln Highway, or any freeway; there is “a pedestrian crosswalk of a busy throughway in the San Francisco Bay Area.” There are some photos, which look like the East Bay but I cannot identify the exact locations.
It’s been a few years since I stumbled onto Paul Piff’s work…I think it was through a TedX talk. Following Sheila @ #4, Piff did some research on games…I think it was Monopoly…where one player had an unfair advantage. There was a bowl of nuts beside the players and the privilege person ate all the nuts and was obviously smug about their success.
Petesh @ #18 – That’s right. It was a crosswalk in Berkeley as I recall.
Here’s Piff’s TedX talk…TedXMarin specifically…from 2013 about his privilege research starting with their Monopoly research. It’s titled, “Does money make you mean?”. He also covers the studies they did at the crosswalk.
Re; petesh @ #18…
That’s much closer to plausible, absent the ‘crouching behind bushes’ there have been sidewalks on the University Ave overpass for some decades. Relatively recently two pedestrian/bicycle overpasses have been added.
Got it.
Billionaires are opportunistic parasites, and you are a biologist.
So, I checked:
Opportunistic parasites differ from other parasitic types primarily in their conditional pathogenicity:
Opportunistic parasites typically cause disease only when the host’s immune system is compromised—such as in individuals with HIV/AIDS, undergoing chemotherapy, or receiving immunosuppressive therapy. Examples include Toxoplasma gondii and Cryptosporidium.
Obligate parasites require a host to complete their life cycle and are consistently pathogenic, regardless of host immune status. Think of Plasmodium (malaria) or Schistosoma.
Facultative parasites can live freely in the environment but may become parasitic if they enter a host—Naegleria fowleri is a notorious example.
Accidental parasites infect hosts they don’t normally inhabit, often causing atypical or severe disease.
In short: opportunists exploit weakness; obligates depend on hosts; facultatives dabble; accidentals misfire.
Seems to me more of an obligate kind of parasitism.
(Oh, and Taylor Swift is a billionaire)
[OT]
feralboy12 @16, “I’m reminded of something I once read that pointed out the odds of winning 33 consecutive coin flips is fairly infinitesimal, but if you set up a coin-flipping tournament with everyone on earth, all 8 1/2 billion or whatever the population is now, you are guaranteed to produce an individual who won 33 straight times.”
Math doesn’t work out.
Odds of one person doing it is P = (½)³³ ≈ 1.164×10⁻¹⁰
All 8 1/2 billion doing it is equivalent to 8.5 billion independent trials by one person since it’s just a total number of trials at hand.
Odds any one trial doing it is then equivalent of a toss of a coin that’s P:(1-P) probability rather than ½:½.
You can see there is no guarantee, because P will never get to 1 (will never change!), even without doing the math.
One of the few things I respect about Christianity is that Jesus clearly and repeatedly told his followers that wealth is toxic to character. There is the story of the rich young man who wanted to become a disciple, and Jesus told him, “sell everything you have, give it to the poor, and then come, follow me.”
There is the parable of the rich man and Lazarus. Lazarus died and went to heaven, the rich man died and went to hell. Why did the rich man go to hell? Jesus doesn’t say. He assumes, and expects his listeners to assume, that rich people go to hell, that’s just the way it is.
There is the line in the Sermon on the Mount, “Woe to you rich! You already have your reward.”
And there is that famous line about camels and needles.
Granted, I don’t know of any churches today that teach against wealth. But the founder was wise, at least on this particular issue.
I don’t mind Taylor Swift being a billionaire. I can opt out of giving her money. It is the rentiers (who Adam Smith despised) and the oligarchs who can literally pay politicians to rewite the rules in their favor you should fear.
.
Yes, Mars is not a good place. Leave it for our AGI descendants. They might even terraform it (will require millennia and importing water-rich objects from the Kuiper belt) and if we are lucky, they might invite us ‘heritage’ biologicals.
feralboy12 @16
It is only about a 64% chance that someone will win 33 coin tosses is a row if everyone on earth tried.
chance for a person to win 33 tosses in a row is (1/2)^33, or 1.164E-10
so chance of NOT winning is 1 minus 1.164E-10 = 0.99999999988
chance first person doesn’t win 33 in a row is (0.99999999988)
chance first and second person don’t win 33 in a row is (0.99999999988) x (0.99999999988)
chance first three people don’t win is (0.99999999988) x (0.99999999988) x (0.99999999988)
therefore,
chance all 8.5 billion people don’t win 33 in a row is (0.99999999988)^8.5E9 which is about 36%.
which means that 64% of the time, some people on earth will win all tosses.
[OT]
joel, psst. Jeesus did not found Christianity.
He was and died a Jew.
(INRI stands for the Latin phrase Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum)
The “founding” was done by others decades after his death, and took centuries to formalise.
From the abstract: https://dukespace.lib.duke.edu/items/70633ed6-7d5b-479f-9fb7-15bd9a819074
John @27:
Fine. Whoever put those words in Jesus’ mouth in the Gospels – that is, the actual founder – was wise about the toxicity of wealth.
Next time I quote Jesus I’ll append to it “according to the story.”
Joel, no need to get aggrieved.
You misunderstand my objection. Nothing to do with his historicity.
I am not disputing Jesus said that (nor endorsing it, either), I am being super-specific and unambigous:
Jesus was a Jew, and Jesus most certainly did not found Christianity.
He was seen as Jewish Messiah in his day. INRI, all that stuff.
That’s a Jew saying every OT law applies and shall until all is fulfilled. Every Jewish law, that is.
The actual, real Bible is the Jewish one; the NT is basically fanfic. As is the Quran, one step removed.
“Next time I quote Jesus I’ll append to it “according to the story.””
No need, there are zero primary sources for Jesus, so every single source is a story. It’s baked in!
I don’t know if it’s an original thought, but I quite liked Robert Evans (Of Behind the Bastards pod, and much else) idea that people stop maturing when they become famous or rich. It definitely makes sense in the case of billionaires, who likely have to make a significant effort to stay connected to the world, to real problems, and to people who will give them real meaningful advice. How easy it must be to give up that effort and sink into a soft pillow of always being told you’re right, and you don’t need to stretch your mind, change your opinions or ever have another negative thought.
The parable of the Emperor’s New Clothes seems apposite. If you surround yourself with yes-men and pleasers, as one inevitably does when the only people you encounter on a daily basis are either employees or people who want to do business with you, then it probably becomes easy to come to some absurd, illogical and untrue beliefs. Look at the Cybertruck, for example, as the kind of thing that can happen to a mind that is constantly coddled and assured that every whim and idea is a good one. I have no doubt whatsoever that Elon Musk genuinely believes that he’s a manufacturing and design genius, and is endlessly perplexed that the sales numbers don’t reflect the mass public love for his creation that he’s certain exists.
Peter Kropotkin.
Siddhartha Gautama.
Both born into privilege.
You can reclaim at least part of your faith in humanity then, PZ..
https://time.com/7288387/sam-altman-orb-tools-for-humanity/
Altman’s new project is to get people to create a unique biometric identifier that they can delete from their systems, but will always remain in his system. The selling point is ‘this will let you prove it’s you online, not a bot’. Except his plan is to make it able to be embedded into AI ‘agents’ so people can have these bots doing tasks online for them.
A unique identifier, something that you can never replace and say ‘let’s make a new one’, because the algorithm will always come up with the same result… that he will have a copy of in perpetuity… as a reliable online identifier of ‘this is me, not a bot’… that he can embed in a bot.
And for this, you get a few bucks and some of his own branded crypto.
It is so a grift.
billmcd,
“A unique identifier, something that you can never replace and say ‘let’s make a new one’, because the algorithm will always come up with the same result…”
Called a fingerprint. Or a retinal print. Or a DNA sequencing. Or a voiceprint. Or a faceprint. Or… [need I elaborate?}
Grift it may be, but menacing in any way, no more so than those or many other biometrics.
(Your message and your tone are a tad incongruent)
Wealth tax at its high end should be 60% or more.
I’m sorry for our loss.
@raven, #2: You raise an excellent point.
What if the AI, when asked how to fix the world, just tells them exactly the same things we’ve already been telling them for years?
@31. John Morales : “Peter Kropotkin. Siddhartha Gautama.Both born into privilege.”
Exceptions to the usual rule.
Maybe so. Those are the famous ones, of course. Plenty of others.
But it for sure shows it’s not an universal rule, and it shows it’s not a necessary outcome.
(Correlation ain’t causation)
@raven #2 & @bluerizlagirl #36:
The problem is the data. AI is the best proof in the world right now that garbage in = garbage out, something we’ve already known for decades.
I had a personal run-in with something like this around the late 2000’s. I didn’t recognize it at the time because it happened in a small city that had rich people but not a lot of them.
I was waiting at a stoplight for what I think was a minute. Suddenly I hear screeching tires behind me and see in my rearview mirror a guy driving a convertible hotrod with a female passenger. The convertible was oddly placed in the lane consistent with coming to a screeching halt and the guy was clearly yelling at me as if I’d almost caused an accident by sitting at a stoplight.
Thinking back on it, if I hadn’t been there he might have blown the stoplight entirely.
At the time I thought his reaction was an anomaly born of surprise. But now I think he was probably just another rich asshole throwing a childish tantrum because I didn’t automatically pander to him.
[Oblique]
One query found the old joke I recalled as you just brought it to mind, lanir:
@39,
“The problem is the data. AI is the best proof in the world right now that garbage in = garbage out, something we’ve already known for decades.”
Ketamine Kid agrees, which is why he proposed today to let AI “rewrite the entire corpus of human knowledge, adding missing information and deleting errors”.
lanir @40
In this case it may have not been the money, but the go-fast mentality. With great power (the hp and torque sorts) comes great responsibility. Since the dawn of the muscle car era people have been tweaking cars and sometimes driving like assholes as a result. One can do this without tons of money. There was a subculture of modded quick VW bugs. Kids these days with their messed up camber stance cars (get off my lawn!) aren’t necessarily coming from the same degree of affluence as yuppies with high-end Bimmers or AMGs. It’s not cultural privilege so much as car culture socialization and drunkenness of horsepower. Maybe a bit of relative deprivation on the social treadmill. Or Vin Diesel movies. Grrrrr!
There are cheaper used Bimmers out there where one can flash the logo at a bargain. I was tempted, but these things are money sinks to maintain.
In some cases affluent people buy status cars to reflect their wealth. Others achieve this in a faux way as a friend of mine mocked “lifestyles of the poor with credit”. Either way that perception of status may result in treating others as serfs on the road.
In other cases people buy muscle cars or mod run of the mill grocery getters into beasts (see Carroll Shelby‘s Dodge Omni GLHS for a textbook example) and it’s not the affluent snobbery that’s the problem.
Amongst motorcycles, say what you want about Harley riders. There is often a gang mystique going on, but they typically abide by the rules of the road. Not so much with the Japanese superbike crotchrockets. Show me a Hayabusa and I will assume they are not well behaved. Harley riders may be on the way to “club” headquarters for shenanigans planning, but they are driving there safely.
Not so sure about Beemer bikes or Ducatis. Status?
The research correlating marque cars like Bimmers with asshole driving seems ok on the surface, but I argue there are subsets of asshole drivers that arrive at that behavior via differing paths. Anecdotal case in point is a good friend who loved watching NASCAR and idolized The Intimidator Dale Earnhardt (difficult as Nietzsche with the consonants). Drove like an asshole so much I recall having a gun waved at us on I-95.
There should be research into whether affluent Bimmer drivers, Fast/Furious movie cultists with modded cars, or NASCAR fans (of certain drivers?) are the worst asshole drivers. That’s a toss up.
Being rich absolutely affects one’s brain and personality, and generally for the worse There are lots of studies attesting to this Here is a brief article with some high (low) lights.
https://caldaclinic.com/the-psychology-of-wealth-and-how-it-affects-mental-health/
I suspect the term W.E.I.R.D is important to remember here. I have often noticed that people driving expensive cars are politer on OUR roads – more willing to wait on pedestrians etc.
I have thought it’s a reflection on them likely being people with more time, and concern about their expensive asset – behaviour might be a reflection of how likely wealth is to have been earned honestly through hard graft? Or social expectations that differ?
Observations of U.S citizens should not be assumed to be universal to humanity.
When I was a kid (1950s) and driving, my friends and I noticed that people who drove Cadillacs rarely used turn signals when turning or switching lanes. Back then, the Cadillac was still “the Cadillac” of automobiles; owned by rich people. Cars may have changed, but not the wealthy.
[OT + meta]
Thing is, the pricier the car, the more it costs to repair it, and after some threshold, a sufficiently cheap car costs nothing to repair.
I had a friend back in the very early 1980s who got himself an old bomb (AP5 slant 6 Chrysler) exceedingly cheap; the bodywork was all dinged and bashed, the original black paint all damaged and in multiple coloured streaks from bashing into other cars and scraping stuff, and he drove it with an insouciance born of he knowledge that he didn’t give a shit if he bashed into others or got cut off, because the car was already fucked. He was not wealthy.
(True anecdote)
John Morales @48
Thanks for the informative anecdote.
No worries.
The entitlement version of horseshoe theory, right? ;)
Since this is the most recent active thread, I wanna follow up on something.
Kagehi and StevoR, I gave an answer to some things you said in an earlier post’s comments. I don’t know if you saw them or not. So I’ll just link them here.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2025/06/11/the-mystery-is-how-anyone-falls-for-it/#comment-2268785
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2025/06/11/the-mystery-is-how-anyone-falls-for-it/#comment-2269113
I think I did that same experiment on my bicycle. I noticed one day that there seemed to be a pattern in the way cars passed me. It seemed sedans would give me a wide berth while pickup truck and larger SUVs would barely move over.
So I decided to start counting. Since I was riding my bike, I could only count 2 sets of figures and I did my experiment over a few weeks so I could collect data. On one ride, I’d count only what the sedans would do. I’d count the number of sedans and the number that gave a wide berth. The next day I’d count the sedans and also count the ones that came closer to me. I’d try to exclude the cars when someone was coming the other way, though I didn’t have to because even with a car coming the other way, sedans were clearly more careful as they passed me.
After those counts went on for awhile, and it was clear that sedans had a pretty high percentage of cars that gave me plenty of room, I would count bigger cars/trucks and SUVs.
The difference was striking. Regardless of oncoming traffic, SUVs and pick up trucks and larger cars would barely move over.
Interestingly, I found these studies kind of fun so I then did one with my rear lights flashing or off and clearly when my rear red light was flashing, I had a much higher percentage of people going far around me, and or slowing down.
But the variable that gave me the MOST protection was when I towed my kid carrier. My kids are older so I use that carrier for shopping only now. But when I’m towing that thing, everybody goes way around me and I don’t think it’s just because that trailer is wider, because when you measure my handlebars, that trailer is about the same width.
Seems nobody wants to hit a kid but cyclists are a different story.
@51. chattycat : Okay, will see – no hadn’t seen your comment(s) there. Will check.
@PZ Myers – 20th June 2025 at 12:53 pm :
Nah, why wait? Why not fantasise and think and work and try to do as much as we can whilst we can now?
Plus there’s the idea of terraforming.
Also the idea of building time machines and going back to the very earliest habitable Mars to observe and perhaps even intervene setting up a new timeline where just possibly with sufficient Technomagic we can – very, very, very carefully swap the orbits of Mars and Venus and end up with three habitable planets in our solar system. Mars closer to our Sun as the second planet out with a thin atmosphere and low mass balanced by increased heat and maybe some space mirrors, Earth being, well, Earth and then Venus where Mars now is inside the HZ with its thick carbon dioxide atmosphere keeping it warm where Mars being too small and thinly atmosphere-d couldn’t.
There’s an SF story or hundred in that. I gather you don’t like SF stories and esp. alternative universes but I and many others love them.
Why not think bold and work towards making extraordinary, visionary, ambitious and wonderful things happen?
Why even try to shut down whole fields of science and exploration and engineeering even? Let alone imagination and SF dreams and ideas?
I know your intent was rhetorical, SteroR, but “Nah, why wait? Why not fantasise and think and work and try to do as much as we can whilst we can now?” (etc) has the answer of, well, a big boom. Lotsa watsted resources.
(The conceit at hand is that resources are being traded for development time, right? Or do you not get that?)
Point is, if the goal is a fantasy, resources spent on that goal are perforce wasted in intent but perhaps garner some semblance of utility by exhausting failure modes.
Noting their merits is not trying to shut them down.
(Descending to hyperbole for rhetorical effect is not always appropriate)
@ ^ John Morales : I quoted PZ’s exact words. Which, once again, were :
I don’t know how he or anyone intends that actually be done especially on the level of “fantasising” let alone stopping people or for that matter companies and nations who wish to do so building rockets and doing the maths and trying to come up with plans for Martian landings and colonisation. It strikes me that trying to stop that is futile and counter-productive as well as utterly undesirable.
Which obvs does NOT mean people who aren’t interested in doing so be forced to be either.
I do NOT believe it’s a zero / sum thing where we necessarily miss out a lot on other things and note the previous Space Race had plenty of spin offs that the world now benefits from and that the money is spent here and provides employment here as well as inspiration and so much more. Humanity can colonise and land on Mars and also do plenty of other worthwhile things like improve inequality and tackle Global Overheating and have other artistic and scientific endeavours all going on at once.
PZ wrote about shutting down fantasies, not fields of science.
Your objection was not addressed to any claim he made.
(Unless of course you imagine those fields of science are fantasies)
@ 51. chattycat : I have now replied to your comment here :
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2025/06/11/the-mystery-is-how-anyone-falls-for-it/comment-page-1/#comment-2269734
As requested FWIW.