Abstract: This article intends to contribute to sociology by introducing the concept of despising and classifying various forms of despising, noting the social harm they produce. Not only humans can despise; social systems and AI can despise, too.
The definition
What is to despise?
Despising is somebody’s (the subject of despising) reduced desire to consider carefully or use information from a specific source (the object of despising or despisor).
Despisional discrimination is systematic despising a particular category of people or a particular person with bad media coverage. Note that non-systematic despising is usually not a security hazard (below I argue that despising can be a security hazard), because despising by some people or systems may be compensated by not despising by others. But even despising of one object may be systematic, if despisors are many.
Rational despising
Sometimes despising is rational: We rationally despise fools (however note despising to mentally impaired persons as a civilizational hazard). Businesses despise poors as poors are often irrelevant for their operations.
Danger of despising
That despising is usually harmful for the object of despising, is a well known fact. For example people die of hunger because not enough media coverage for them.
That despising is harmful for the despisor is illustrated by the famous proverb of a man who cried “Wolves!” when there was no real danger and earned (founded this time) despising, preventing despisors from safety when real wolves appeared.
Another danger of despising is caused by laws and traditions (“customs” further) preventing re-publication of something published by another person. I will call this publicational despising. Joined with such customs despising makes not enough loudly published by a despised person non-publishable loudly. So, both publications on dangers (warning “Wolves!”, like this article) and on missed advantages (like my math writings) can become non-publishable.
The laws of non-publishability are copyright laws like DCMA, that in present form I argue are security hazards. Another custom of non-publishability is scientific tradition not to publish again on someone’s other research topic or your own research that is already published. I urge to accept that this anti-plagiarism principle became a security hazard.
As I outlined above, we can classify dangers (security hazards) of publicational despising to not publishing dangers and not publishing missed advantages. That not publishing dangers is dangerous is obvious. Not publishing an advantage may be a security hazard, too, if the advantageous discovery or invention is not replaceable. For example, not publishing actions of ordered semigroups is a security hazard, because they cannot be replaced and almost everything (in education, economy, military, etc.) depends on actions of ordered semigroups.
Classification of despisors
The known in vernacular form of despising is not respected of one human person to another.
The latter can be especially dangerous when the despisor is a forum moderator.
Another form of despising is despising of money: when it’s impossible to publish without spending a substantial amount of money (this is by the way the topic of Revolt of Mathematicians). Because money controls AIs such as scientific databases, AI despise poors by money.
If we consider scientific databases AIs as researchers responsible for valuing relative importance of scientific works, then AI despising constitutes scientific fraud.
Another form of despising is title despising: despising to one having no some title (kinda “PhDs speak only with PhDs”; this form of despising has its ideology “scientificism” based on the wrong premise that science is done only by PhDs).
I call scientific despising despising that deforms opinions regarding scientific facts or deforms opinions regarding importance of scientific facts.
Another kind of despising is cancel culture. It follows that cancel culture is a security hazard.
Racial and sexual despising is enough well-known not to repeat this topic here.
Mental health despising
Discriminatory despising by mental health is especially dangerous, because it is almost universal: not everybody despises blacks or Latinos, not everybody despises women, homo/transsexuals, etc., but almost everybody despises mentally impaired.
As I explain above, despising to one person can be dangerous for the entire society (e.g. break the entire science). And this is the case with mentally impaired.
Despising as a Fake
A fake can be defined as a structure similar but different to a truth.
Scientific despising is a fake as it forms social structure representing scientific importance of different facts and this structure is deformed.