Notes from the Salon

ETA: This is a write-up of some interesting points raised at an in-person rationalist meetup on October 6th, 2019. It is not intended to be a comprehensive overview of the topic. It is conventional for attendees to do all the suggested readings before salon starts, so some parts of the write-up might not make sense without that context.

Assigned readings: Siderea on Class, Thoughts on the "STEM" class

Economic Class vs. Social Class

Economic class and social class are not the same thing. The two are decoupled, but only partly. You can be wealthy but lower class (e.g. a skilled tradesman making 6 figures) or poor but upper class (e.g. an adjunct professor at a prestigious university). Everyone at the salon was in the same social class: the class that attends semi-ironic and entirely sober literary salons, likely G2 on Church's ladder. But there's a much broader distribution of economic classes represented in the room.

Performing upper-(middle)-classness grants you privilege. It costs some amount of money, but not as much as you would think, to perform professional-classness. The harder part by far is knowing what to buy in the first place. A clean-ish hoodie emblazoned with your university seal does the job. A blazer with a loud animal print pattern does not.

Most people want to make more money, but few people are interested in climbing the social ladder. When you find the class that you belong to and join it, you tend to go “ew” at the people in the classes below you, and “yikes”* at the people in the classes above you.

*Or the equivalent of “yikes”, if you’re in a class that doesn’t say “yikes”

Everyone is "Middle-Class"

The middle class is the only virtuous class - both "lower class" and "upper class" are insults. This results in basically everyone except billionaires and the homeless identifying as middle class. Premium mediocrity is what middle-classness could look like for millennials.

Class is a culture and a performance. For example, someone who makes six figures may choose to get their morning coffee at Tim Horton's instead of Starbucks or an indie coffee shop. They might make this decision even if they like their coffee not terrible, because it's more important to them to be seen as a salt-of-the-earth sort.

A more extreme example of this was outlined in this piece, where a Yale student who was actually broke didn't realize that all of he...

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