The Cost of Knowledge

Guest Post

Guest Posts are now open for any day of the week and to anyone willing to submit one. The following Guest Post was submitted by Simon Grey, who blogs at Le Cygne Gris.

One of the more popular liberal dogmas in regards to discrimination in general is that one should “get to know everyone as an individual,” or some similar sounding claptrap. Of course, this sort of injunctive sounds good, and repeating it makes one feel good, especially if one is an impressionable youth. It is highly idealistic to say that all people should be treated only as individuals, and that no one should be treated as a statistic, and being highly idealistic is an ego boost for some people. It is wonderful to say that one’s intentions and desires are universally lauded and above reproach.

Unfortunately, this sort of idealism is pure, unbridled nonsense. It is nonsense because it is not in any way founded in reality. Getting to know someone takes time and has relatively high discovery costs.

Imagine, for a moment, that you are at a party with one hundred other people who are all strangers. Will you try to talk to everyone, or will you talk to random people until you encounter someone who interesting and entertaining and then spend as much time as possible with the interesting person? Most will simply try to find someone who is engaging and then spend time with him. Why? Because most recognize that they have a limited amount of time on their hands, and it is too valuable to waste on a bore.

This mindset is the foundation of virtually all discrimination. Emo kids, for example, tend to discriminate against non-emos, mostly because it is time-consuming to discover which non-emo kids are amenable to friendship or companionship. Of course, being amenable to friendship usually implies shared interests and values, and outward appearance is a signal of values. Furthermore, outward genetic markers (race and gender, among others) are signals for genetically-motivated interests and values. Stereotypes, to a limited extent, reflect the intrinsic values that are associated with genetic markers.

As such, women tend to have a disproportionately large number of female friends, males tend to have a disproportionately large number of male friends, blacks tend to have a disproportionately large number of black friends, whites tend to have a disproportionately large number of white friends, and so on. Each of these groups have realized, whether consciously one cannot be sure, that people of the same race and gender are more likely to share their interests. Therefore, it is prudent for one to spend more time socializing with one’s own “group,” so to speak, because doing so is the most efficient way to find like-minded people with whom to associate. This isn’t to imply, of course, that one could never find someone who shares one’s interests in another “group;” rather, it is more time-consuming to find another person with similar interests in another group. For what it’s worth, the sexual divide seems greater than the racial divide. [OneSTDV: Completely disagree with this statement.] (E.g. a white man would have more difficulty finding a woman who shared his interest in Olivia Wilde than finding a black man who shared his interest in Olivia Wilde.)

In addition to being time-consuming, getting to know someone carries risk. Imagine that you are walking down a dark alley at night when you see someone coming toward you. A quick glance at the approaching figure lets you know that the person is tall and most likely male. As you get closer to the person, you confirm that he is male and white. As you get closer still, you see that he is dressed like a wigger, is wearing brass knuckles, and has tattoos all over his body. Do you then begin to talk to him in order to see if he was in the boy scouts at some point in his life? Do you ask him if he goes to church?

One doesn’t ask questions of young men dressed like thugs while walking by one’s self at night because the odds of that young male actually being a violent thug are relatively high, and the costs associated with being in close proximity to young male thugs are also relatively high. In probability theory, this is known as expected cost. To determine expected cost, one multiplies the probability of an occurrence by its likely cost. In this case, there is a high probability that the stranger approaching you is a thug, and the costs of “interacting” with him are very high.

Thus, the cost of getting to know this person individually has very high probabilistic costs, and so the rational thing to do is avoid the approaching stranger, if possible. This cost is rarely taken into account, for it is often assumed that discrimination occurs in its most blatant forms during the light of day. The reality is that discrimination is considerably more complex, and based on a host of variables. In most cases, discrimination is quite rational. There are costs associated with all interpersonal interactions, although some are more obvious than others. To ignore these costs is foolish, and so it should come as no surprise that young, idealistic liberals do so on a regular basis.

In sum, it is obvious that discrimination happens for a reason. Getting to know people individually is costly and takes time. Discriminating against others, then, is simply a distasteful feature of a finite world.

Written by Simon Grey