10 Oct
2012
10 Oct
'12
11:32 p.m.
Of course it may be demographics (how many americans I
know outside
the electronics-computers-nerdy-things world?)
Yeah, I think there's a really heavy sampling bias there, for pretty
much anyone, most certainly for anyone here.
but it may be also something that happens everywhere -
there are lots
of good people and bad people, and they tend to walk in groups of
bad, and groups of nice people...
There also may be some amount of what I might loosely term "chameleon
effect".
This arose on a list elsewhere in which somkeone observed (in an
employment context) that if you treat employees as though you expect
they're just waiting for an opportunity to screw you over and jump to
your competitor - guess what, you'll find you're usually right. But if
you treat employees as though they're reasonable and honest and
principled and will do right by you - guess what, you'll find you're
usually right.
Someone else summarized it as "whether you think people suck or rock,
you're right".
So, there may be a bunch of basically neutral people who act like the
crowd they happen to run with, thus reinforcing like-runs-with-like
without needing to assume any particular bias.
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