“Least likely person to do X” is an interesting concept. People who deal with a shadow that has an attribute they despise often overcompensate to fight that shadow. That shadow might provide a substance based on which the alternative personality that acts very differently can be built.
I feel complicated about this; in a world where everyone is doing split-and-commit (or something similar) by default, this feels straightforwardly good to note.
But like. In this world, this feels like fodder for “you should interpret evidence that someone is unusually unlikely to X as evidence that they’re actually quite likely to X, given some trigger.”
And I think this is the sort of thing that is true in some very small minority of cases and an outright (and false) weapon all the other times.
I think we should be real careful about interpreting evidence against X as evidence of X, even given that the psychological structure you just described is one that exists.
I do agree that it’s not an easy subject to speak about.
There are two separate issues at hand:
What happens if you have multiple personalities
Suppressed anger and its effects
Sometimes abused children develop multiple-personality disorders where they develop new personalities to deal with situations where the characteristics.
I have one friend who has the multiple-personality disorder and is able to switch between them. According to him, he often faced situations where a person was used to dealing with one of his personalities and really surprised when he switched to another personality that has different personality characteristics.
The technique that Ziz advocates seems to intentionally created something that’s similar to multiple personality disorder and I would expect that the same pattern hold where at least one of the personalities is able to do things that are far outside of what the old unified self would do.
I think good evidence that someone is unlikely to cause harm is about observing that they have functional strategies for taking care of boundary violations. If someone’s reaction is instead to ignore their own needs, repress any anger that comes up and go out of his way to avoid causing someone else harm, that strategy is not stable.
Many people would have thought that Mother Thresa is the “least likely person to doubt in God”, but that’s what she did. Her outward presentation of extreme belief in God was not something stable.
It’s a mistake to take the fact that someone is extreme along an axis as evidence of stability.
Is this an empirical question? Like, could you gather 1000 people, measure how violent they are, then somehow summon their shadows, and measure again?
My guess would be that the shadow is on average more violent than the original person, but it is not true that less violent person = more violent shadow. (I would probably expect something like: each shadow gets a bonus +5 on violence compared to the original person; including people who already started very violent.)
That’s fair from a mental POV, but Daniel Blank physically has poor hand-eye coordination and bad reflexes, meaning that if he tried to shoot somebody he’d be extremely likely to miss at all but the shortest of ranges. (the murder in question was definitely gunshot based)
While he could be a part of the conspiracy his ability to have physically committed the actual act is questionable.
I feel complicated about this; in a world where everyone is doing split-and-commit (or something similar) by default, this feels straightforwardly good to note.
But like. In this world, this feels like fodder for “you should interpret evidence that someone is unusually unlikely to X as evidence that they’re actually quite likely to X, given some trigger.”
And I think this is the sort of thing that is true in some very small minority of cases and an outright (and false) weapon all the other times.
I think we should be real careful about interpreting evidence against X as evidence of X, even given that the psychological structure you just described is one that exists.
I do agree that it’s not an easy subject to speak about.
There are two separate issues at hand:
What happens if you have multiple personalities
Suppressed anger and its effects
Sometimes abused children develop multiple-personality disorders where they develop new personalities to deal with situations where the characteristics.
I have one friend who has the multiple-personality disorder and is able to switch between them. According to him, he often faced situations where a person was used to dealing with one of his personalities and really surprised when he switched to another personality that has different personality characteristics.
The technique that Ziz advocates seems to intentionally created something that’s similar to multiple personality disorder and I would expect that the same pattern hold where at least one of the personalities is able to do things that are far outside of what the old unified self would do.
I think good evidence that someone is unlikely to cause harm is about observing that they have functional strategies for taking care of boundary violations. If someone’s reaction is instead to ignore their own needs, repress any anger that comes up and go out of his way to avoid causing someone else harm, that strategy is not stable.
Many people would have thought that Mother Thresa is the “least likely person to doubt in God”, but that’s what she did. Her outward presentation of extreme belief in God was not something stable.
It’s a mistake to take the fact that someone is extreme along an axis as evidence of stability.
Is this an empirical question? Like, could you gather 1000 people, measure how violent they are, then somehow summon their shadows, and measure again?
My guess would be that the shadow is on average more violent than the original person, but it is not true that less violent person = more violent shadow. (I would probably expect something like: each shadow gets a bonus +5 on violence compared to the original person; including people who already started very violent.)
That’s fair from a mental POV, but Daniel Blank physically has poor hand-eye coordination and bad reflexes, meaning that if he tried to shoot somebody he’d be extremely likely to miss at all but the shortest of ranges. (the murder in question was definitely gunshot based)
While he could be a part of the conspiracy his ability to have physically committed the actual act is questionable.