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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35408 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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There was a comment once, where one of the further-right people here claimed that given a sufficient intelligence gap in day-to-day interactions, "your mind contains theirs". This struck me as a fantastic example of intellectual hubris, sufficiently clear that it should be preserved as a reference sample.

From the excerpts, I think there's some interesting questions here worth exploring... but trying to describe, in first-person perspective, the internal experiences of someone with whom you seriously disagree is such a profoundly fraught exercise that it is pretty clearly a bad idea, and neither the author nor anyone here are so skilled as to be the lone exception. Your mind does not contain theirs, and pretending it does traps you in dangerous illusions.

I agree that nobody knows 100% of anybody else's knowledge, but the sentiment rings quite true to me. It kills me when people dedicate their lives to things and remain mediocre at them. This comment I wrote earlier is one example. Another is a friend of mine who has been making youtube videos for years and invested tens of thousands of hours and dollars into them, only for each to get a few dozen views at most. I have plenty of other people like that in my life. I'm sure you can think of examples too--people who are just much, much worse than they should be at things they are quite dedicated to.

Let's arbitrarily break knowledge up into two categories--emotional and logical. I don't know what it feels like to give birth, though logically I know it's probably worse than most things I've experienced. You are criticizing the OP for their lack of emotional knowledge, but I don't think that's what they were talking about at all; I think they were talking purely about logical knowledge and the different arguments you'll hear about political things in day to day life.

I disagree. I think trying to imagine the internal experience of someone who seriously disagrees with you is a great idea. The risk is that you might take your own speculations too seriously without trying to corroborate them.

imagining is one thing. Expressing it to others, speaking to third parties in the voice of a second as though it were their own, is what I'm objecting to. Particularly for a fictitious third party meant to stand in for a large group of people.

I can see how this could be deliberately misleading, but isn't what you're describing basically all of fiction? Also, I think that while any particular guess at another's internal state is likely to be wrong, simply coming up with a coherent hypothesis that explains someone or something's behavior is, imo, a good contribution if we're trying to understand that behavior without direct access to their internal states.

I can see how this could be deliberately misleading, but isn't what you're describing basically all of fiction?

Fiction, speaking generally, is fictional. Most fiction does not present itself as directly representative of real-world people. Fiction that does this, and is highly adversarial about it, is generally not held in high regard. Think Chick Tracts and "happy merchant" cartoons.

Also, I think that while any particular guess at another's internal state is likely to be wrong, simply coming up with a coherent hypothesis that explains someone or something's behavior is, imo, a good contribution if we're trying to understand that behavior without direct access to their internal states.

Attempting to model another's internal state is useful. Presenting that model as though it were their own voice makes it marginally more persuasive to third parties for entirely irrational reasons, while adding nothing to the model's accuracy and providing the modeller with temptations to bias they might not otherwise have. There's a reason that mimicking someone else's voice is one of the early tricks kids spontaneously develop to annoy each other. This is the adult version, and while it's certainly more sophisticated, it's not really any better.

Again, from the excerpts, I think there's some potentially interesting points raised here. What does the first-person framing add to them, in your view?

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