[ExI] The American Doorway

[William Flynn Wallace]

Is no one going to point out that who operates the door has a position of
power?  To open or shut it.

This is one of many ways men have to demonstrate their power over women
(and children and men).  It has nothing to do with ability to open the door.

Anecdote:  I was going into Kroger and a woman just ahead of me was
approaching the door.  I stepped in front of her, put my foot on the door
opener and said "Let me get that for you."

We shared a grin.     bill w

On Fri, Feb 17, 2023 at 9:57 AM Max More via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> Interesting that you brought up "the utilitarian view", although I'm not
> sure you meant it in terms of the metaethical view rather than the everyday
> view. In reading Rafal's response, it occurred to me to think about this
> from a virtue ethics approach -- that being my preference over
> consequentialism and deontology.
>
> Holding the door open reflexively can be a good habit to have cultivated.
> It's not something you want to calculate utility for each time. Nor would
> that be practical in any accurate way. However, the expression of virtues
> should be tempered by consequences and those change with other people's
> expectations (will she be angry at me for such an old-fashioned practice?)
> with environmental changes -- such as crash bars. In some cases, unless I'm
> truly in a rush where seconds matter, I will always hold a non-crash bar
> door open for someone whose arms are full. It seems to be a winning move
> ethically -- it expresses a virtue of consideration, it has good overall
> consequences, and it's something I would appreciate being done for me.
>
> --Max
> ------------------------------
> *From:* extropy-chat <extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org> on behalf
> of spike jones via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
> *Sent:* Friday, February 17, 2023 6:53 AM
> *To:* 'ExI chat list' <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
> *Cc:* spike at rainier66.com <spike at rainier66.com>
> *Subject:* Re: [ExI] The American Doorway
>
>
> ...> On Behalf Of MB via extropy-chat
> Subject: Re: [ExI] The American Doorway
>
> >...I was taught to hold the door for old people or people who would have
> trouble with the door (crippled or carrying things).  It seemed like a
> reasonable thing to do.
>
> >...Now that I *am* an old person, I appreciate it when people hold a door
> for me - especially if it is one of those difficult doors - which we seem
> to
> have many of where I live.  Our local PO got new doors a year or so ago,
> and
> now they are "pull" to enter, not push, so Rafal, you'd bust your hand on
> the darn things.  Very annoying when trying to mail packages and the door
> is
> pull. :(  Cheaper that way, they said.  It works with "push" just great
> when
> one has mailed the packages and is leaving the PO with empty hands.
> Pffffft.  Government... ?  (Yes, it should be push to exit, for fire
> safety.)
>
> Regards,
> MB
>
>
>
>
> Ah, the utilitarian view, of course.
>
> Regarding doors opening out, from a utilitarian point of view, this has new
> significance in our times of flash mobs.  Do let us set aside the post
> office for this discussion as a special case: we have packages going in,
> but
> usually none going out.  Retail stores are the opposite.  In our fortunate
> times, fire safety has become mercifully irrelevant: we build from
> materials
> which don't readily burn now.
>
> We now could do the sensible thing: make the post office with open-in doors
> and everywhere else with open out, possibly with sensible crash-bars.  Then
> an interior door with the usual open-out configuration at the PO could be
> propped open during business hours.
>
> All of this reminds me of a marvelous book from a few years ago, the Mating
> Mind, by Geoffrey Miller, along with the surrounding commentary at the
> time.
> Miller explains the successive evolution of the human brain, the reptilian
> cortex, which controls bodily functions and instinctive survival emotions
> such as rage and fear, the mammalian, which is considered the seat of
> sexual
> desire, and up front, the primate cortices which is where our uniquely
> human
> thought and reason takes place.  This is most poetically observed by the
> mathematician Pascal, who opined: the heart knows reason that reason knows
> not.
>
> I am extrapolating way beyond or perhaps orthogonal to Miller and Pascal
> when I go off on notions such as holding a door for a possibly attractive
> person in order to perform the social equivalent of a fighter-plane doing a
> cobra maneuver to get from her attacker's 12 to his 6 (as Maverick did in
> the original Top Gun.)  But stuff like that is way down in the mammalian
> cortices where we cannot control it, or even influence it much: our sexual
> desires are just what they are, our brain's configuration.  We really are
> born with the orientation we have, no matter how much we reason around it
> or
> try to defeat it with the frontal lobes.  Result: we do stuff like holding
> a
> door for a potentially attractive person.
>
> spike
>
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> extropy-chat mailing list
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat
> _______________________________________________
> extropy-chat mailing list
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20230217/c46ae9d1/attachment.htm>