[badlibrarian]

How deeply your asshole puckers at dusk when you hear a loud noise is one sign. Artists, musicians, survivors of trauma are clued into such things. Also parents with children, merchants carrying sacks of cash to the bank. You know, humans.

[roenxi]

That is crime, not affluence. Poor people aren't automatically criminals.

[badlibrarian]

It is called "street smarts" for a reason and there are many aspects to it.

[roenxi]

Sure, but I'm going to put it to you that on encountering poor people the proper response isn't for your asshole to pucker and then to start reliving old traumas. That seems like a pretty wild response.

It is a reasonable response to high-crime areas, and it is unusual for the wealthiest parts of a city to be high-crime areas. But an area being less affluent doesn't make an area high-crime.

[badlibrarian]

There's a reason your original post is a very light shade of gray. If you want to continue pumping words into the ether I suggest you typeset them in TeX and submit to arxiv. A paper entitled "Walking around an area doesn't give you any information about the area" may help you find people who can commission a study. Perhaps with you as the subject.

[roenxi]

Those studies have been done, although not by me. People are really, really bad at working out how affluent other people are by inspection. That is one of the reasons I brought the topic up - the research I've seen suggests this sort of "I looked at it and it seemed ok" approach is very misleading. What people actually look at aren't things that indicate affluence.

If you look at the other comments you can see people are actually keying off how much of a sense of community and civic pride there is in an area, as well as commercial activity. Which is going to probably distinguish between upper and lower class - even that isn't certain - but that isn't actually relevant to the topic because there is always going to be an upper and lower class. It isn't going to get a great read on how affluent they are at any given moment.

> There's a reason your original post is a very light shade of gray.

In an academic sense, yes. But no-one knows what it is - some people might be in your shoes where they read "affluent", misinterpreted it and had a fear response. Or they might have other opinions as some of the other comments lay out. Or there could have been other reasons.

One of the philosophical underpinnings of HN is that downvotes don't contain a lot of information and are a poor tool for promoting discussion - it is a wonderfully mature approach to moderation.

[badlibrarian]

But it's not really discussion if one person is rambling incoherently and everyone else is rolling their eyes trying to be polite.