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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.