Discrimination

I was going out the stairwell door in Duke hospital the other day and stopped to hold the door for a nicely dressed white middle aged southern woman behind me. She was far enough back that I had to wait several seconds for her to catch up. I don't usually wait holding doors that long but I did this time without thinking about it. As I kept walking I wondered why I held the door for this woman when I wouldn't normally wait for someone so far back. I realized later I wouldn't wait that long to hold a door for (1) a man (2) a younger woman (3) a woman dressed in business attire (4) someone poorly dressed (5) someone ethnically Asian or Latina or (6) a woman who seemed to not be originally from the American south for another reason (since I think I associate chivalry to some extent with traditional southern culture). I may have picked out some of the various rationales for each of these distinctions in my subconscious - some seem good and useful and I want to keep them while at least one is bad and useless and so want to get rid of it - but I won't go into it now. Suffice it to say that in one seemingly innocent gesture I simultaneously discriminated based on gender, age, class, and race.

The American Dream

Here is the beginning of a front page Wall Street Journal article from a couple days ago: "Detroit's money troubles are starting to put a key part of the American dream - a pricey new car - out of reach for many people". I was never a fan of the American dream when I thought it was just about comfort - having a decent house, yard, car, furniture. Those things could facilitate an interesting and meaningful life, but as dreams go you couldn't get much more boring or empty. Is extravagance really part of the dream now? Does your car really have to be new and pricey? I wonder if that kind of standard is the American dream for people who accomplished the first dream and needed a new one but didn't take the time or energy to look for one that would matter.

Knowing how to think

I've always valued accurate information and have sometimes, to a fault, thought poorly of sources of information that was less then accurate. In high school for example, I would regularly tune out of sermons in church if I was able to pick out one fact that was wrong. We had a lot of guest preachers so everybody got a fresh shot. If he said Paul wrote something to Timothy, then quoted a verse from Titus, I didn't care if a similar thought had been expressed to Timothy too, I was gone. If he said Pippin's troops stopped the Moors in the battle of Tours I didn't care if his point was just to give a quick overview of relevant history before what I was later told was an excellent sermon. I was busy thinking about how great I was for knowing that Pippin had died 18 years earlier. I guess I was an arrogant little snot. I think my problem was that I didn't have to do much myself so I could critique other people without a point of reference.
Now that I have more things to do I'm learning to appreciate having the right way of thinking even when the details aren't spot on. The other day, I was looking into using a tool called an infrared spectrometer on a sample of mine at school and needed to know about how deep the rays would go into my sample. I asked a contact at a local university, we'll call it the University of North Dakota, who had used that instrument before.
"hmm so infrared is shorter wavelength..." they responded
"I think it's longer"
"ok so that shouldn't penetrate as far.."
"I think it should go deeper"
My question was answered as completely as I needed it to be with two incorrect facts and a correct way of thinking. Without me, they could have found the answer online in a few seconds but without them I would have been lost.