I read this a year or two ago, tucked it in the back of my mind, and continued with life.
When I reread it today, I suddenly realized oh duh, I’ve been banging my head against this on X for months. I’d noticed there was this interpersonal dynamic that kept trying to blow up, where I kept not seeing the significance of phrasings or word choices other people said they found deeply important. I’d been using Typical Mind Fallacy and trying to figure out how to see through their eyes, and it kept not working.
Colour Blindness feels like a close cousin of Typical Mind, but I think there’s a useful difference. Typical Mind Fallacy suggests a solution of practicing empathy and perspective taking. Colour Blindness suggests asking a friend for help to see what you can’t. That can be a much better solution, especially for something you repeatedly fail to grasp.
There’s a frustrating zone where I can predict some input is the kind of thing someone else will be say I’m missing a piece of, but can’t predict which way it will fall. I assume red-green colour blind people notice the cluster of colour they keep making mistakes with.
A problem I have with execution is telling when there’s a real thing I can’t see versus when I’m being mislead. Sometimes the important quality people say you can’t perceive is like N-Rays: confirmed by others even if sometimes you have to squint, but ultimately a kind of placebo or confirmation bias. If multiple people can independantly tell me whether the quality is present or not, I’ve been leaning toward assuming it exists. Show ten people a picture of a red ball and ask if it’s red or green, and you get pretty strong agreement. Still, I’d appreciate better tools for distinguishing real things I don’t see from group bias.
I read this a year or two ago, tucked it in the back of my mind, and continued with life.
When I reread it today, I suddenly realized oh duh, I’ve been banging my head against this on X for months
This is close to my experience. Constructing a narrative from hazy memories:
First read: “Oh, some nitpicky stuff about metaphors, not really my cup of tea”. *Just skims through*
Second read: “Okay it wasn’t just metaphors. Not that I really get it; maybe the point about different people doing different amount of distinctions is good”
Third read (after reading Screwtape’s review): “Okay well I haven’t been ‘banging my head against this’, but examples of me making important-to-me distinctions that others don’t get do come to mind”. [1] (Surely that goes just one way, eh?)
Fourth read (now a few days later): “The color blindness metaphor fits so well to those thoughts I’ve had; I’m gonna use that”.
Reading this log one could think that there’s some super deep hidden insight in the text. Not really: the post is quite straightforward, but somehow it took me a couple of rounds to get it.
I read this a year or two ago, tucked it in the back of my mind, and continued with life.
When I reread it today, I suddenly realized oh duh, I’ve been banging my head against this on X for months. I’d noticed there was this interpersonal dynamic that kept trying to blow up, where I kept not seeing the significance of phrasings or word choices other people said they found deeply important. I’d been using Typical Mind Fallacy and trying to figure out how to see through their eyes, and it kept not working.
Colour Blindness feels like a close cousin of Typical Mind, but I think there’s a useful difference. Typical Mind Fallacy suggests a solution of practicing empathy and perspective taking. Colour Blindness suggests asking a friend for help to see what you can’t. That can be a much better solution, especially for something you repeatedly fail to grasp.
There’s a frustrating zone where I can predict some input is the kind of thing someone else will be say I’m missing a piece of, but can’t predict which way it will fall. I assume red-green colour blind people notice the cluster of colour they keep making mistakes with.
A problem I have with execution is telling when there’s a real thing I can’t see versus when I’m being mislead. Sometimes the important quality people say you can’t perceive is like N-Rays: confirmed by others even if sometimes you have to squint, but ultimately a kind of placebo or confirmation bias. If multiple people can independantly tell me whether the quality is present or not, I’ve been leaning toward assuming it exists. Show ten people a picture of a red ball and ask if it’s red or green, and you get pretty strong agreement. Still, I’d appreciate better tools for distinguishing real things I don’t see from group bias.
This is close to my experience. Constructing a narrative from hazy memories:
First read: “Oh, some nitpicky stuff about metaphors, not really my cup of tea”. *Just skims through*
Second read: “Okay it wasn’t just metaphors. Not that I really get it; maybe the point about different people doing different amount of distinctions is good”
Third read (after reading Screwtape’s review): “Okay well I haven’t been ‘banging my head against this’, but examples of me making important-to-me distinctions that others don’t get do come to mind”. [1] (Surely that goes just one way, eh?)
Fourth read (now a few days later): “The color blindness metaphor fits so well to those thoughts I’ve had; I’m gonna use that”.
Reading this log one could think that there’s some super deep hidden insight in the text. Not really: the post is quite straightforward, but somehow it took me a couple of rounds to get it.
If you are interested: one example I had in mind was the distinction between inferences and observations, which I found more important in the context than another party did.