As school ends for the summer vacation in Finland, people typically sing a particular song (“suvivirsi” ~ “summer psalm”). The song is religious, which makes many people oppose the practice, but it’s also a nostalgic tradition, which makes many people support the practice. And so, as one might expect, it’s discussed every once in a while in e.g. mainstream newspapers with no end in sight.
As another opinion piece came out recently, a friend talked to me about it. He said something along the lines: “The people who write opinion pieces against the summer psalm are adults. Children see it differently”. And what I interpreted was the subtext there was “You don’t see children being against the summer psalm, but it’s always the adults. Weird, huh?”
I thought this was obviously invalid: surely one shouldn’t expect the opinion pieces to be written by children!
(I didn’t say this out loud, though. I was pretty frustrated by what I thought was bizarre argumentation, but couldn’t articulate my position in a snappy one-liner in the heat of the moment. So I instead resorted to the snappier—but still true—argument “when I was a kid I found singing the summer psalm uncomfortable”.)
This is a situation where it would have been nice to have the concepts “kodo” and “din” be common knowledge. If the two different worlds are “adults dislike the summer psalm, but children don’t mind it” and “both adults and children dislike the summer psalm”, then you’d expect the opinion pieces to be written by adults in either case. It’s not kodo, it’s din.
I don’t think this example is captured by the words “signal” and “noise” or the concept of signal-to-noise ratio. Even if I try to squint at it, describing my friend as focusing on noise seems confusing and counter-productive.
As school ends for the summer vacation in Finland, people typically sing a particular song (“suvivirsi” ~ “summer psalm”). The song is religious, which makes many people oppose the practice, but it’s also a nostalgic tradition, which makes many people support the practice. And so, as one might expect, it’s discussed every once in a while in e.g. mainstream newspapers with no end in sight.
As another opinion piece came out recently, a friend talked to me about it. He said something along the lines: “The people who write opinion pieces against the summer psalm are adults. Children see it differently”. And what I interpreted was the subtext there was “You don’t see children being against the summer psalm, but it’s always the adults. Weird, huh?”
I thought this was obviously invalid: surely one shouldn’t expect the opinion pieces to be written by children!
(I didn’t say this out loud, though. I was pretty frustrated by what I thought was bizarre argumentation, but couldn’t articulate my position in a snappy one-liner in the heat of the moment. So I instead resorted to the snappier—but still true—argument “when I was a kid I found singing the summer psalm uncomfortable”.)
This is a situation where it would have been nice to have the concepts “kodo” and “din” be common knowledge. If the two different worlds are “adults dislike the summer psalm, but children don’t mind it” and “both adults and children dislike the summer psalm”, then you’d expect the opinion pieces to be written by adults in either case. It’s not kodo, it’s din.
I don’t think this example is captured by the words “signal” and “noise” or the concept of signal-to-noise ratio. Even if I try to squint at it, describing my friend as focusing on noise seems confusing and counter-productive.