Reading this was a curious experience. While my memory is abysmal, rather than eidetic, even I vaguely remember hearing relatives say dumb stuff to me as a kid, e.g. “you’ll change your mind about X when you’re older”, and being frustrated for many reasons: they thought they knew me better than I did myself (and turned out to be wrong about it; I never changed my mind about X), they made bad arguments from their supposed authority of being older than me, etc.
And I have definitely experienced complaining about absolute statements like “everyone does X”. But I don’t think I cared that they didn’t include my opinion, I just didn’t like that they made a wrong statement, which would’ve been easy to correct with some amount of hedging.
And I certainly detest the style of parenting that says “you’re not feeling X”. There’s even a technical term for it, called “emotional invalidation”.
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Some other sections of this experiential essay I can’t relate to at all, especially the desire that it’s somehow important that random people perceive me accurately. I don’t understand why that would be something to care about in the first place. But even if it was, it doesn’t seem like an attainable desire, either. Is there even a single person on this planet who is perceived accurately by everyone else? Is this even something human brains are capable of in the first place?
And even if it were somehow possible to convey language accurate enough to never mischaracterize anyone, the amount of hedging required would presumably make communication impossible. (Consider the already absurd word counts of the average LW essay and comment, including this one.)
When I read the section about the guru talking about desires, I thought, aha, this must have been the point of this essay. That the author realized that their idiosyncratic desire (to not be rounded off; or whatever the sufficiently accurate version of this statement would be) is painful and unsatisfiable, but that desires can’t be manipulated away. That would’ve made sense to me. But if the guru is wrong, why *didn’t* the author manipulate this desire away? What’s the alternative? (EDIT: Having read more of this huge comment thread, it did contain somewhat satisfying answers to that point.)
Finally, I read this post after the whole LW moderation situation. I now can’t help but think that there was no possible way for that to have ever had a satisfying outcome for all involved.
Reading this was a curious experience. While my memory is abysmal, rather than eidetic, even I vaguely remember hearing relatives say dumb stuff to me as a kid, e.g. “you’ll change your mind about X when you’re older”, and being frustrated for many reasons: they thought they knew me better than I did myself (and turned out to be wrong about it; I never changed my mind about X), they made bad arguments from their supposed authority of being older than me, etc.
And I have definitely experienced complaining about absolute statements like “everyone does X”. But I don’t think I cared that they didn’t include my opinion, I just didn’t like that they made a wrong statement, which would’ve been easy to correct with some amount of hedging.
And I certainly detest the style of parenting that says “you’re not feeling X”. There’s even a technical term for it, called “emotional invalidation”.
---
Some other sections of this experiential essay I can’t relate to at all, especially the desire that it’s somehow important that random people perceive me accurately. I don’t understand why that would be something to care about in the first place. But even if it was, it doesn’t seem like an attainable desire, either. Is there even a single person on this planet who is perceived accurately by everyone else? Is this even something human brains are capable of in the first place?
And even if it were somehow possible to convey language accurate enough to never mischaracterize anyone, the amount of hedging required would presumably make communication impossible. (Consider the already absurd word counts of the average LW essay and comment, including this one.)
When I read the section about the guru talking about desires, I thought, aha, this must have been the point of this essay. That the author realized that their idiosyncratic desire (to not be rounded off; or whatever the sufficiently accurate version of this statement would be) is painful and unsatisfiable, but that desires can’t be manipulated away. That would’ve made sense to me. But if the guru is wrong, why *didn’t* the author manipulate this desire away? What’s the alternative? (EDIT: Having read more of this huge comment thread, it did contain somewhat satisfying answers to that point.)
Finally, I read this post after the whole LW moderation situation. I now can’t help but think that there was no possible way for that to have ever had a satisfying outcome for all involved.