nostalgebraist: bambamramfan: nostalgebraist: ...

nostalgebraist:

bambamramfan:
nostalgebraist:
Just had this feeling but I’m not sure if it’s true or how to develop it:
if you notice that your perceptions of the world have particular biases*, and you can correct for the bias somewhat, it’s dangerous to talk as though the “corrected” perception is just what you’re seeing pre-correction
because it’s really important for people to be able to say to one another: “okay, take off all the glasses, what are you ‘naively’ seeing here”
A and B are waiting at the station, and A has read a book saying that all trains are much smaller than they appear, so when an ordinary train pulls up, A says “ah, a train the size of a mouse.” B is confused and wants to say something like
“okay, A, I know you read a lot of books and get a lot of strange ideas, but you’re confusing me – could you just say what you’re actually seeing, like right there, before the books come in to the picture”
not because the naive “what do you see” perspective is necessarily better in any way than A’s, it might be totally wrong, but at least A and B share it, so they can coordinate their impressions
later, B has really gotten on board with what A read – there are lots of clever experiments showing that trains are actually the size of mice and one can hit you and do no damage, when you get inside they shrink you to mouse size too, this is all usually hidden by tricks of optics but careful physicists have discerned the limitations of those tricks … but even this is only the latest science, perhaps to be overturned tomorrow. B would still like to be able to say to A, “so you do see a train there, I mean the bigger than a mouse sort of train, the thing we called a train before we knew anything about trains”
and A may scold B with “we both know trains aren’t that big, don’t be naive,” but that’s not the point here, the point is to have this erroneous but shared concept they can refer to, and make sure they’re talking about the same thing. A may sneer at this lowest-common-denominator understanding of a train, but it’s valuable precisely because it’s the lowest common denominator.
everyone’s got their own set of They Live glasses telling them “what’s really going on,” and I don’t know my glasses are the same as yours, so it’s useful to be able to say “tell me what you see without the glasses.” even though we both know this is an illusion, it’s the same illusion for both of us. “the bias is pervasive,” we may say in dismay, but if we are all capable of taking the same biased perspective then we can compare notes there
this floated into my head as i was thinking about personal stuff, individual past conversations, not politics or anything – when i came up with it, i wasn’t thinking about ideological biases, i was thinking about stuff like “you have to describe everything in a smart original way and never use cliches” and how it’s useful to be able to say “no, tell me the cliches you are seeing.” human misery is repetitive and a lot of bad events are cliches.
*(whether it’s visual illusions, Kahneman and Tversky, the trash can of ideology, whatever)
This is all pretty sensible. The key thing is at the end with cliches. When you naively see, it is still intermediated by something, it’s just spontaneous intermediation. A cliche isn’t what you see, it’s an automatic interpretation. I agree with you it’s worthwhile to share that naive immediate interpretation, but it is not direct exposure to the Real you are relating.
Sure – the point is not getting to the Real, it’s having a (relatively) shared language.
When I wrote the OP, I was unsatisfied with the last paragraph, because I felt I hadn’t clearly expressed what I meant by “ a lot of bad events are cliches” in this connection. Now that I think about it, there are some more concepts that need to be in the picture before I can say what I was trying to say there. I’ll try to fill in the gap now.
These “debiasing” operations take in concrete experiences, and spit out … what, exactly? Not other, “better” concrete experiences; you don’t stop seeing a visual illusion just because you know it’s there. They produce abstract ideas, or at least things “more abstract, less concrete” than the input.
There’s that famous illusion where the two lines are the same length, but the vertical one looks longer:
Now, if you show this to someone who’s seen it before, and you ask what they are seeing, they might cleverly reply “I see two lines of the same length.” But the concrete image in their mind is the same as the one you or I see; they haven’t replaced the experience of seeing unequal lines with that of seeing equal lines. This person’s speech has become detached from their immediate experience; its referents are in abstract concepts derived from that experience.
Now extend this to cases with an emotional or good/bad dimension. Not all joy/pain/etc. is on the concrete level, but much of it does, and anyway the concrete kind is different from the abstract kind. Someone at the gym may push themselves through tough exercises by saying (and believing) “pain is weakness leaving the body.” But on the concrete level, pain just is pain, and it cannot be replaced by some concrete experience called “weakness leaving the body” (whatever that would feel like); instead, the same concrete pain has been made more tolerable (and/or more ignorable) by adding the pleasurable abstraction “weakness leaving the body.”
The point is that we have feelings hooked up to the naive perceptual apparatus, and much as we would like to, we can’t unplug those feelings from the naive perceptual apparatus and plug them into something more accurate. Someone who feels pain (or pleasure) every time they saw lines of unequal length will still feel pain (or pleasure) upon seeing the above image, even if they know the lines “aren’t really” unequal.
The upshot here is a wariness I have toward two distinct norms – which are related, but which I still ought to distinguish: “we should speak about everything in the most accurate way we can, using the best ‘debiasing filters’ we have,” and “we should speak of everything in novel and interesting ways, never uttering a cliche.” The reason I group these two together in my head is that they both lead to a lot of speech that doesn’t have any clear referents in “naive perceptual apparatus” experience.
You can always try to “invert the transformation” and figure out what direct experiences the person is talking about, but this isn’t always easy (especially with the “avoid cliche” norm, which encourages the continual invention of novel phrasings for the same ground-level things) – and, more importantly, it doesn’t remove the emotional distance from the direct experiences, or remove the uncertainty about whether you and the other person are talking about the same direct experiences.
I wish I could provide concrete examples, but all the ones I have in mind are either too personal to get into, or likely to be object-level controversial. Basically I just feel that there is this thing where people (sometimes with deliberate malicious intent, sometimes inadvertently) shove Obviously Bad Shit under the rug by speaking about in terms which, even if they technically describe it well, are sufficiently abstract that the gut-level “wow, this Shit is Obviously Bad” feeling doesn’t happen. And yes, those “ground level” responses are themselves interpretations, not direct access to reality. But a lot of the goodness/badness of our lives are determined on that level, and there is something especially scary to me about feeling unable to do the thing where I say “let me level with you: what I’m seeing is This Shit, which is Bad (or perhaps Good).”
Cults represent a possibly illuminating extreme case of this (as they do for so many things). The drudgery, boredom, squalor, and/or abuse of the typical cultist’s life is Obviously Bad if you describe it on the boring ground level; people are made to tolerate it by attaching lofty interpretations to it, analogues of “pain is weakness leaving the body.” If the claims of a given cult were true, this might be fine: it’s right for people to endure drudgery, boredom, squalor, and/or abuse if that’s just what it takes to be ready when the UFOs arrive (or whatever). But a belief system that is honest should be able to withstand a ground-level description. Not “it’s only drudgery (etc) if you don’t grok what we’re about,” but “yes it is drudgery, but the ends justify the means.” It seems noteworthy how rarely this actually happens: IME, people tend to hate being given ground-level descriptions of their beliefs/ideologies in practice, as if someone who would say such things is missing the point, “not grokking it.” This does not sit well with me. If the ends really do justify the means, then I should be able to bitch and moan about every gritty detail of the means without doing damage to their justification.
(I know these negative reactions do make sense on some correlational basis: someone who keeps harping on the ground-level badness of something is, all else being equal, probably not a fan of that thing, and proponents of the thing are likely to make that inference. But these correlational inferences should only be our last resort in the absence of other information. Someone who stresses that your lifestyle is painful may be an enemy of that lifestyle, but then they may not be – and anyway, an instinctive revulsion to talk of all the ground-level grit and grime is dangerous. You need a grounding in the ground level, always, alongside everything else; people who help ground you are a valuable resource.)
Incidentally, for all that Marxism can get abstract (and thereby perhaps fall prey to this danger), there is something that makes my heart leap with joy whenever Marxists say the phrase “material conditions,” because that usually means talking about Obviously Bad Shit in a way that gives its Obvious Badness gut-level impact.