My current state is that I plausibly get it enough that I’ll understand and find this useful after a week or three of practice (I plan to come back here to report on that unless things are cleared up by further discussion), but right now I feel… confused. I suspect I can’t name the true source of my confusion yet, because I don’t actually have it in focus yet. (I’m also suddenly all walk-on-eggshells about my usual collection of visual metaphors, apparently.) But if I try to narrow in on an extra bright/sharp confusion place, it’s “local” vs. “distributed/omnipresent”.
I think you’re trying to say something like “the physiological blind spot corresponds to a single point in the field of vision, so things that are temporarily in that spot become visible as soon as you shift your gaze, and this is the sense in which the blind spot is ‘local’”.
But like… I think the point of using “blind spot” as a metaphor isn’t so much that we sometimes fail to be sensitive to distinctions between things, or that we sometimes fail to see things entirely; it’s that we constantly hallucinate things all over the place (globally with respect to external reality, even though locally with respect to the field of vision) and almost never know it.
Maybe the infrequency with which I talk to other people means I just haven’t encountered very often the misuse of the phrase that caused you to write this. (Evidence against that: replacing “blind spot” with “color blind” was really useful for you.) But the way the phrase works in my head is, “Which eyeballs have the blindspot, and which muscles control their gaze?” The point is that while it may only take moving your head to see the thing clearly, it’s not always straightforward to figure out what sort of sensory apparatus is affected or how to control its movements, and in the meantime you’re constantly making up shit that isn’t there and you don’t even know which shit you’re making up when.
So for me there’s a TAP like [notice something fishy is going on with my perception that feels a bit like a combination of not being able to see stuff and making shit up to cover the blindness] --> [engage deliberate perceptual dexterity practices]. Which is a TAP that indeed should not work for color blindness, but I expect I’d be worse at figuring things out if I deleted it and added a color-blindness-appropriate one.
Probably a different topic but I have a feeling it’s related: Why are all of your TAPs about people? (Here literally, and elsewhere exageratedly.) To be clear, although I definitely do want to know the answer and understand, I’m also poking you in the ribs a little bit with this question.
Your three suggestions begin “notice that someone”, as though what happens in social space is the main thing that matters, or the place to start, or something.
I think that the social/person-centric focus is largely an artifact of “blind spots cropping up is (for me) more a social phenomenon” and “LW is a place where I’m trying to provide social tech, within a society.”
Like, the actual head-banging-against-the-wall thing for me, with so-called blind spots (both my own and others’) is where different people see or prioritize different things and are blind to different things.
I agree with what I think is your implicit claim, that blindness between people is a small subset of blindness! Certainly we are blind to far more things than we talk about in conversation, or than are relevant to our interactions with other people, and there is not an intended implicit claim in the essay above that the social/interpersonal set of TAPs is the only important one. Just that it was the most relevant set to “me, a social person, trying to change the way people socially talk about and collectively conceive of, this social dynamic whereby some people see things that others don’t.”
Which I think maybe also loops back to your larger first comment?
I think the point of using “blind spot” as a metaphor isn’t so much that we sometimes fail to be sensitive to distinctions between things, or that we sometimes fail to see things entirely; it’s that we constantly hallucinate things all over the place (globally with respect to external reality, even though locally with respect to the field of vision) and almost never know it.
This reminds me of your excellent quote “I’m not sure that’s in my vision spot.” (As a replacement for “maybe that’s in my blind spot.”)
But anyways, I think what you’re saying is “the useful thing that I, Logan, get out of the blind spot metaphor is awareness of the fact that my brain is adding information/stitching things together/deceiving me.”
Which makes sense, and I think that’s the place where the blind spot metaphor is useful and apt. I do not want us to switch away from the blind spot metaphor when we’re talking about our brains hypnotizing us into thinking that we understand.
I just think that most of the time I encounter discussions of blind spots, people are emphasizing “can’t see X,” not “my brain has tricked me into thinking that I see what’s in the place where X is.”
I think that the correct metaphor for “can’t see X” is usually color blindness.
I continue to think that the correct metaphor for “I’m hallucinating something in the space where I could plausibly instead be perceiving” is blind spots.
I think I don’t get it.
My current state is that I plausibly get it enough that I’ll understand and find this useful after a week or three of practice (I plan to come back here to report on that unless things are cleared up by further discussion), but right now I feel… confused. I suspect I can’t name the true source of my confusion yet, because I don’t actually have it in focus yet. (I’m also suddenly all walk-on-eggshells about my usual collection of visual metaphors, apparently.) But if I try to narrow in on an extra bright/sharp confusion place, it’s “local” vs. “distributed/omnipresent”.
I think you’re trying to say something like “the physiological blind spot corresponds to a single point in the field of vision, so things that are temporarily in that spot become visible as soon as you shift your gaze, and this is the sense in which the blind spot is ‘local’”.
But like… I think the point of using “blind spot” as a metaphor isn’t so much that we sometimes fail to be sensitive to distinctions between things, or that we sometimes fail to see things entirely; it’s that we constantly hallucinate things all over the place (globally with respect to external reality, even though locally with respect to the field of vision) and almost never know it.
Maybe the infrequency with which I talk to other people means I just haven’t encountered very often the misuse of the phrase that caused you to write this. (Evidence against that: replacing “blind spot” with “color blind” was really useful for you.) But the way the phrase works in my head is, “Which eyeballs have the blindspot, and which muscles control their gaze?” The point is that while it may only take moving your head to see the thing clearly, it’s not always straightforward to figure out what sort of sensory apparatus is affected or how to control its movements, and in the meantime you’re constantly making up shit that isn’t there and you don’t even know which shit you’re making up when.
So for me there’s a TAP like [notice something fishy is going on with my perception that feels a bit like a combination of not being able to see stuff and making shit up to cover the blindness] --> [engage deliberate perceptual dexterity practices]. Which is a TAP that indeed should not work for color blindness, but I expect I’d be worse at figuring things out if I deleted it and added a color-blindness-appropriate one.
Probably a different topic but I have a feeling it’s related: Why are all of your TAPs about people? (Here literally, and elsewhere exageratedly.) To be clear, although I definitely do want to know the answer and understand, I’m also poking you in the ribs a little bit with this question.
Your three suggestions begin “notice that someone”, as though what happens in social space is the main thing that matters, or the place to start, or something.
I think that the social/person-centric focus is largely an artifact of “blind spots cropping up is (for me) more a social phenomenon” and “LW is a place where I’m trying to provide social tech, within a society.”
Like, the actual head-banging-against-the-wall thing for me, with so-called blind spots (both my own and others’) is where different people see or prioritize different things and are blind to different things.
I agree with what I think is your implicit claim, that blindness between people is a small subset of blindness! Certainly we are blind to far more things than we talk about in conversation, or than are relevant to our interactions with other people, and there is not an intended implicit claim in the essay above that the social/interpersonal set of TAPs is the only important one. Just that it was the most relevant set to “me, a social person, trying to change the way people socially talk about and collectively conceive of, this social dynamic whereby some people see things that others don’t.”
Which I think maybe also loops back to your larger first comment?
This reminds me of your excellent quote “I’m not sure that’s in my vision spot.” (As a replacement for “maybe that’s in my blind spot.”)
But anyways, I think what you’re saying is “the useful thing that I, Logan, get out of the blind spot metaphor is awareness of the fact that my brain is adding information/stitching things together/deceiving me.”
Which makes sense, and I think that’s the place where the blind spot metaphor is useful and apt. I do not want us to switch away from the blind spot metaphor when we’re talking about our brains hypnotizing us into thinking that we understand.
I just think that most of the time I encounter discussions of blind spots, people are emphasizing “can’t see X,” not “my brain has tricked me into thinking that I see what’s in the place where X is.”
I think that the correct metaphor for “can’t see X” is usually color blindness.
I continue to think that the correct metaphor for “I’m hallucinating something in the space where I could plausibly instead be perceiving” is blind spots.
… does that help at all?
I think it likely does help, but I’ll need to wait to find out.