Originally Posted by
wphamilton
It seems like you're judging the guy to not be enthusiastic about riding for fun, exercise and athletic challenge. Maybe peer pressure would prevent a cyclist from riding a beater to the store while wearing blue jeans, but I can't think of any other reason not to do that, even someone who shares your enthusiasms.
I'm just wondering if it came across differently than you meant it, since this part contrasts so much with your first three points, which I felt were very thoughtful.
Well, you may be right. I'm obviously generalizing and assigning the hypothetical other person to a category that may be an incomplete description of his/her interests. The thing is, in the real world I would only use this perception of the person to decide that I shouldn't try to strike up a conversation about how sweet the Bianchi Specialissima is or something of the sort. If the other person brings a topic like that up with me, I'd just be pleasantly surprised.
It's a simple fact that most (arguably all) human understanding is based on creating abstract mental models (often involving categories) and tentatively placing things we see into those models. Happily, most of us are able to revise our models based on additional information.
So I don't think your reading of what I wrote was entirely inaccurate. I would in some sense be "
judging the guy to not be enthusiastic about riding for fun, exercise and athletic challenge" but I didn't intend it as a value judgment...just a preliminary guess at characteristics that I couldn't directly perceive. I do think you're right to call me on it because the only things keeping me from riding to the store looking like that are the monster hill between me and the nearest store and the fact that I sold my craigslist beater a couple of years ago.
I guess my point was that I don't see making a distinction between someone who uses a bicycle for purely practical reasons and someone who rides a bicycle for sport necessarily involves elitism. These are two objectively different activities. The same person may do both, but seeing a person do one provides no real evidence that the person is likely to also do the other.