(Part 2/2)
Introduction
You can find Part 1 here.
There is a very high chance you will be offended by this as I am prejudiced against a lot of people.
You have been warned. Trigger warning for depression.
My goal is to come back to this in future to see how many I still hold, as a self-accountable measure of self-improvement. If you thought my blog was low in quality from the start, this will make everything (comparatively) better.
It bears to note that all these prejudices are stereotypes, and of course don’t apply to everyone, though this point is moot because I already specified that none of this is based on any objective data.
A person’s prejudices tells you more about themselves than it does of those they’re prejudiced against. This means that this post, while ostensibly about others, really describes me more instead.
Social media sites
People who spend most of their free time on social media sites have short attention spans, tend to jump to conclusions, cannot think critically, and are easily-entertained by anything that requires their emotion before their cognition.
The News
The same goes for those who often watch the news and rely on it as their main source of information. The news, by nature of sensationalism, reports the opposite of what is normal—it doesn’t report normal events; the events have to be, by definition, abnormal enough to stand out. Without this knowledge, news-watchers often have a distorted worldview that causes them to think in extremes, or react hysterically to non-issues and non-events.
Both news-watchers and social media addicts are completely oblivious to the availability heuristic, making ludicrous probabilistic conclusions in their minds and causing mass hysteria over statistically-insignificant events that just happen to be very emotionally-salient.
As a result of everything mentioned above, both groups of people: avid news-watchers and social media fans, tend to be biased, ignorant, attention-and-drama-seeking conclusion-jumpers with no regard for cogitation or active cognition.
If they were competitive eaters, the land of news and social media would be a limitless buffet of logical fallacies and cognitive biases: each trying to prove just how wrong they can be, using erroneous reasoning techniques to bridge the gaps between their elaborate lines of reasoning to see who can build the longest chain. I presume the one with the longest chain gets to strangle everyone else, as these people can be quite violent and intolerant of others.
Dishonesty
A universal moral definition, not exactly controversial, but my definition is a bit different: it follows more closely with the idea of intellectual conscience and responsibility, making anyone who doesn’t carefully evaluate their positions dishonest, liars, and apostles of self-deceit.
Maintaining an opinion for the sake of talking
A recent example: people running foreign sentences through Google translate and pasting it in the comments, followed by a disclaimer (bonus points if in bold) that’s somehow longer than the translation itself, as if to somehow direct attention to themselves for their “efforts”.
If one runs a sentence through machine translation they need not write a paragraph explaining that they used machine translation along with a backstory of their life, as if they only wanted people to be aware of them, adding unnecessary information like how much they love the language but are too busy to learn it or emphasising just how much they don’t know the language when simply stating: “—Google Translate” would have been just as informative, instead of indirectly praising themselves for taking the tremendous effort of pasting content into and out of it.
Another more common form of “parroting” would be redundant answers for easy, well-accepted answers, often found in online chatrooms where a newcomer might ask a frequently-asked question and all of a sudden you’d have several otherwise-silent users suddenly jump into chat, all replying with “yes” or parroting the common well-accepted answer, as if they’ve been waiting for the opportunity to have something to say the whole time, despite having nothing to say otherwise, only to go off again waiting for the next opportunity to parrot the next low-effort response.
Even if what I’ve described misses the full gist of the quote, it is precisely that that aligns with the emotional nature of this post.
Selfishness
Another common moral taboo, this time with more emphasis on the reverse halo effect: selfish rule-breakers who act narrowly for their own benefit without regard for fairness are morons. These people are ugly, stupid, dirty, disease-ridden, and deserve to be assaulted in the face if not for the fact it would break the law and thus render the aggressor necessarily a hypocrite (if the law was an implicit agreement, we’ve all agreed not to punch anyone we don’t like).
Though an argument can be made for stupidity—those who outwardly display their selfishness and self-centredness in such an obvious manner are just asking to be ostracised, like playing a murder mystery game and making a kill in front of everyone, revealing your identity immediately—the rest of the negative traits are the results of irrational disgust. Queue jumpers… there were also some idiots during the mask-wearing period who couldn’t seem to comprehend basic logic:
You’d find these people walking around eating or drinking without their masks on, as if they couldn’t comprehend the impossibility of eating or drinking because they had to wear a mask. They argue that “but I can’t eat with my mask on!”; I wonder if it ever occurred to them that what they should be saying is: “I can’t eat because I need to have a mask on!”.
Just like with Asimov’s Laws of Robotics, is it really that difficult to comprehend the basic fundamental priority wearing a mask in public takes? It should be logically impossible for them to take off their masks, walking around in crowded places eating or drinking with no regard for the fact they’re putting everyone else at risk, just because they couldn’t be bothered to either go home or eat and drink in a corner instead.
Religion and cults
This ties into the dishonesty prejudice the most, as I find most religious people are extremely dishonest with themselves, never bothering to ask themselves if their memories are true; if their senses can be wholly trusted; if what they believe is necessarily true; if they really have tried to find out if there was even the slightest possibility of being wrong. It has been said that before Darwin, it might have been more irrational to not believe in God, so this isn’t about religion in itself somehow being intrinsically wrong, rather that the only way to believe in religion with our current knowledge is to be dishonest with oneself, holding loose double standards in order to maintain the conviction in something they have no sincere interest in the truthfulness of.
If they really respected their religion, they wouldn’t insult its fortitude by assuming it isn’t worth seriously contemplating about, as if tacitly admitting that their religion is so weak that their questioning—or anyone’s questioning—of it will somehow fundamentally weaken and destroy it.
Depression and low self-esteem
For the last time, just because you made a tiny insignificant mistake doesn’t mean you’re an idiot. I get easily frustrated when talking to people who seem to be capable of only thinking in extremes—people who cannot logically reason or comprehend probability and granularity.
If you’ve blundered a word of if you’ve spoken too early when it wasn’t your turn, it doesn’t mean anything. It literally doesn’t mean anything. If you’re frustrated or embarrassed just say “god damn it” or something and move on. Moving to the conclusion that you have to be an idiot because of a tiny blunder is the real idiotic move.
And those who intentionally downplay their achievements, saying that things are “easy” when they’re clearly not, infuriatingly unaware of the probabilistic impossibility of their statement. In certain games, I’ve found many with low self-esteem mock others by saying that “anyone” can achieve the “top 1%” ranking on the leaderboard “easily”. Do they not see the logical impossibility of their statement? It’s like they’re begging someone to tell them and reassure them that their achievement wasn’t easy, and that they’re genuinely talented or skilled; reassuring them that they’re not the losers unable to achieve anything that they think they are.
Solve your self-esteem problems yourself; don’t drag others into it—if you need others to tell you you’re not a loser in order to be convinced then mocking them is not a good first step.
There’s also those who constantly insult or disparage themselves, making readers and listeners feel uneasy: what is the appropriate reaction? If I disagree, you feel offended, if I agree, you also feel offended—because I’ve just insulted you. This is a very quick and effective way to lose an audience (the other is writing like me and yes I appreciate the irony).
NEETs
Highly-related to depression and low self-esteem, I attribute a lot of negative traits to these people, for example believing that they’re ugly, stupid losers with a victim complex. They tend to be addicted to various forms of escapism like computer games, anime, manga, or even social media.
Self-educated people
And worse if they spend all their time online having no formal education just reading and copying Wikipedia entries with no real understanding, never developing the skills required to actually think critically. Especially annoying, their writing style betrays their true level of knowledge, though they are as oblivious as a non-native English speaker being completely unaware of their own accent if they never leave their country (hence NEET).
A note on the last three sections + Closing
Despite what I’ve just said about depressed NEETS with low self-esteem and are sometimes self-educated bigots on the internet, it should be noted that my interpretation of this issue is astronomically far from correct—it’s wrong.
Depression is a real neurological disorder that causes people to think differently; it is fundamentally misled to believe that one can “think their way out” of depression. I will not go into the complexities of this topic here, just know that my interpretation of one of its manifestations is severely and exaggeratedly ignorant for the sake of illustration.
The same goes for low self-esteem, which can be a symptom of depression, a symptom of something else, or even just low self-esteem in itself—insecure people need not all be depressed, as much as it is a very predictable risk factor. Being prejudiced against them will do no good. Do not be like me: a little compassion goes a long way, though I am far too prejudiced to deal with them rationally due to my intolerance of irrational reasoning.
NEETs—usually depressed from what I’ve read, lead rather tragic lives. Nobody, if given the choice, would want to live a life like that. As much as their behaviour may annoy others, especially if they appear to be freeloading (you do realise the path they’re heading towards is a dead end, right? This is hardly something to be jealous about), many are suffering from mental health issues and live unhappily every day, with elevated risks of suicide. The victim complex can be annoying, but not all of them are like that, and some are genuine victims of their circumstances.
We should be asking how we can help these people, once we can get past our prejudice and instinctive hatred of these people, given the annoying way they tend to speak, their horribly selfish attitude, and their depressing self-talk that sounds like nothing but a justification to continue being lazy and useless to society.
And there’s nothing wrong with being self-educated, as much as many of them use their incomplete, scattered knowledge and poor understanding of evidence standards and citations. throwing word salads at anyone who disagrees with them, prioritising “winning” an argument over everything else, this stereotype isn’t based on any quantitative evidence and for all I know could only apply to an insignificantly-small but overwhelmingly-vocal minority of self-educated individuals.
Not to mention that self-esteem issues can also cause unhealthy debate attitudes like trying to “win” instead of trying to get to the most veridical conclusion, because they can’t stand the thought of losing—they falsely attribute losing an argument to a personal insult, as they’ve tied their self-esteem around something as superficial and unpredictable like “always winning arguments” due to not having anything else to use as an anchor, which is in itself rather pitiful, though nobody will look this far and assume they’re just contentious contrarians with nothing better to do.
I could go on all day about how none of these prejudices are actually justified, but that would defeat the purpose of this post about prejudices, right? It would have instead been titled “My prejudices and how I don’t believe them”, which makes little sense.
This is the second draft; I’ve tried not to read through this too carefully because it’s mostly prejudiced drivel, unware that this in turn causes unnecessary strain on readers as they sift through what is essentially a rough manuscript for unpleasant content.
To conclude, I hope to come back in a few years to see if I’ve improved in any way. Though I know they’re wrong, these are genuinely still prejudices I hold: I do genuinely impulsively think this way, like a gut reaction or automatic instinct, and these people do genuinely make me angry. I will know if I have improved if I no longer react as negatively as I should, though I still feel that all these prejudices are justified and do not wish to change them, being completely emotionally invested even in spite of the knowledge it leaves me hypocritical and in possession of unjustified beliefs.