tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8304928500646903522.post3753759248906362702..comments2024-03-28T18:32:05.933-04:00Comments on bensozia: Scott Alexander's New BlogJohnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01037215533094998996noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8304928500646903522.post-42933262595026044112021-01-28T10:33:44.693-05:002021-01-28T10:33:44.693-05:00Speaking as an artist, I think it is disingenuous ...Speaking as an artist, I think it is disingenuous to murk up the perceptions of the eye/brain and the intellect. <br /><br />My father taught a basic drawing class at Harvard for decades, dealing with the amusingly visually ignorant and their egos. The human brain has MANY, MANY shortcuts for dealing with the wealth of inputted visual information. <br /><br />For example, if you ask someone to draw the human eye, most will draw a pair of sideways parenthetical marks with a circle with a dot in the center to represent an iris and pupil. But that is an idea of an eye, not what an eye looks like (the iris is almost never seen as a circle, the human eyelids occlude circle segments, as if cut off by a pair of chords).<br /><br />"Failings" or "simplifications" by the human eye/brain and its perceptions are not directly analogous to moral or factual ambiguities. Katyanoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8304928500646903522.post-59666701666813723702021-01-27T10:51:00.670-05:002021-01-27T10:51:00.670-05:00@Verloren
"The very act of "pointing ou...@Verloren<br /><br />"The very act of "pointing out the illusion" is often itself an illusion - a way to manipulate people into distrusting themselves, and instead trusting in the sage advice of the person ever so "benevolently" revealing an illusion they themselves crafted."<br /><br />I don't share your super-dark view of the fundamentals of our society, but I think your sentence I've quoted expresses well what I was thinking about Scott Alexander's post.<br /><br />Some of our divisions are based on illusion, presumption, and fantasy. Yes, there is indeed an element of Michael Anton-like delusion. But there's also some real enmity about real issues, many of them so fundamental that hostility is a not unreasonable response to division over them.<br /><br />Here, I think, is a clear-eyed antidote to Alexander's mushy just-change-your-perspectivism: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/27/opinion/how-to-defeat-americas-homegrown-insurgency.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=HomepageDavidhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14456987412710878404noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8304928500646903522.post-77796092158195667322021-01-26T18:52:00.001-05:002021-01-26T18:52:00.001-05:00@David
We unintentionally deceive ourselves to so...@David<br /><br />We unintentionally deceive ourselves to some degree through bias and expectation, but other people also purposefully work to distort our perceptions.<br /><br />Our society fundamentally is built upon predation - we incentivize deception; we incentivize manipulation; we incentivize exploiting other people's biases and expectation to achieve a desired outcome. We're not getting rid of our cognitive failings any time soon, because they're the tool that unscrupulous parties use to enrich themselves at the expense of others. Our economy's most basic day to day interactions depend overwhelmingly on cheap tricks and immoral tactics that are so common and pervasive as to be blindly accepted as "normal" and "necessary".<br /><br />Your comment gets at the edges of this issue - no one looking at an actual chess set with both sides painted the same shade of gray is realistically going to confuse the two for being black and white. It's only when someone goes to the effort of obfuscating the truth through trickery that such things happen.<br /><br />The very act of "pointing out the illusion" is often itself an illusion - a way to manipulate people into distrusting themselves, and instead trusting in the sage advice of the person ever so "benevolently" revealing an illusion they themselves crafted. <i>"I tricked you, so don't trust yourself and instead trust me!"</i><br /><br />I'm far less afraid of my own biases, and far more afraid of bad actors who pay an inordinate amount of attention to my biases because they want to exploit them.G. Verlorennoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8304928500646903522.post-15962454617479536132021-01-26T18:18:35.452-05:002021-01-26T18:18:35.452-05:00I wonder if the tromp d'oeil in the picture re...I wonder if the tromp d'oeil in the picture really has to do with our learned biases and expectations, or if it's subtler than that and has to do more with skilled use of how we look at pictures. After all, if I was sitting at a table, and there was a chess set laid out with both sides painted gray, I think that's what I'd see--my brain wouldn't turn them into white and black.Davidhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14456987412710878404noreply@blogger.com