I don’t think it’s a paradox, it’s just that the perfect is sometimes the enemy of the good. Your brain has a lot of different components. With a lot of effort, you can change the way some of them think. Some of them will always be irrational no matter what either because they are impossible to change much or because there just isn’t enough time in your life to do it.
Given that some components are irretrievably irrational, you may be better off in terms of accomplishing your goals if other components—which you might be able to change—stay somewhat irrational.
Thing is I can’t consciously chose to be irrational. I’d first have to entirely reject a huge network of ideals that are the only thing making me even attempt to be slightly rational ever.
I challenge this assumption. I have a very well functioning, blissfully optimistic mindset that I can load when my rationality suggests that this ignorance is indeed my best defense. I wish I had the skill to understand how I reconcile this with the rational compartment in my mind, but the two do seem to co-exist quite happily, and I enjoy many of the perks of a positive outlook.
About Williams syndrome, I have read in several places that language skills are not sub-normal despite having brain abnormalities in those areas because there is much less than normal development in generally spacial and math/logic type areas. Having less raw brainpower to devote to language, they make up for it by being more subconsciously “focused”, though that isn’t quite the right word. They can be above or below average with language, depending on how it balances out, “normal” abilities are something like an average.
Also, such people are not naturally racist, unlike “normal” people. This is relevant for the aspie-leaning population here—non-neurotypial isn’t inherently normative.
I wonder what severity of Asperger’s syndrome is required to be non-racist? I strongly suspect there is a level that would be sufficient.
People with Williams tend to lack not just social fear but also social savvy. Lost on them are many meanings, machinations, ideas and intentions that most of us infer from facial expression, body language, context and stock phrasings. If you’re talking with someone with Williams syndrome and look at your watch and say: “Oh, my, look at the time! Well it’s been awfully nice talking with you . . . ,” your conversational partner may well smile brightly, agree that “this is nice” and ask if you’ve ever gone to Disney World. Because of this — and because many of us feel uneasy with people with cognitive disorders, or for that matter with anyone profoundly unlike us — people with Williams can have trouble deepening relationships. This saddens and frustrates them. They know no strangers but can claim few friends....Like most people with Williams, Nicki loves to talk but has trouble getting past a cocktail-party-level chatter. Nicki, however, has fashioned at least a partial solution. “Ever since she was tiny,” Verna Hornbaker told me, “Nicki has always especially loved to talk to men. And in the last few years, by chance, she figured out how to do it. She reads the sports section in the paper, and she watches baseball and football on TV, and she has learned enough about this stuff that she can talk to any man about what the 49ers or the Giants are up to. My husband gets annoyed when I say this, but I don’t mean it badly: men typically have that superficial kind of conversation, you know — weather and sports. And Nicki can do it. She knows what team won last night and where the standings are. It’s only so deep. But she can do it. And she can talk a good long while with most men about it.”...In Williams the imbalance is profound. The brains of people with Williams are on average 15 percent smaller than normal, and almost all this size reduction comes from underdeveloped dorsal regions. Ventral regions, meanwhile, are close to normal and in some areas — auditory processing, for example — are unusually rich in synaptic connections. The genetic deletion predisposes a person not just to weakness in some functions but also to relative (and possibly absolute) strengths in others. The Williams newborn thus arrives facing distinct challenges regarding space and other abstractions but primed to process emotion, sound and language....This window is longer than that for most infants, as Williams children, oddly, start talking a year or so later than most children...Cognitive scientists argue over whether people with Williams have theory of mind. Williams people pass some theory-of-mind tests and fail others. They get many jokes, for instance, but don’t understand irony. They make small talk but tend not to discuss the subtler dynamics of interpersonal relationships. Theory of mind is a slippery, multilayered concept, so the debate becomes arcane. But it’s clear that Williamses do not generally sniff out the sorts of hidden meanings and intentions that lie behind so much human behavior....“And the most important abnormalities in Williams,” he says, “are circuits that have to do with basic regulation of emotions.” The most significant such finding is a dead connection between the orbitofrontal cortex, an area above the eye sockets and the amygdala, the brain’s fear center. The orbitofrontal cortex (or OFC) is associated with (among other things) prioritizing behavior in social contexts, and earlier studies found that damage to the OFC reduces inhibitions and makes it harder to detect faux pas. The Berman team detected a new contribution to social behavior: They found that while in most people the OFC communicated with the amygdala when viewing threatening faces, the OFC in people with Williams did not. This OFC-amygdala connection worked normally, however, when people with Williams viewed nonsocial threats, like pictures of snakes, sharks or car crashes.
In re “natural racism”: Has it been determined whether it’s always about the same distinctions?
In some places—for example, Protestant vs. Catholic in Northern Ireland—the groups look very similar to outsiders. Does “natural racism” kick in as young as American white-black racism?
Why wouldn’t it be about whatever distinctions the kids can perceive cleanly dividing the group? I don’t really know. Here are some Discover articles that are relevant and have different implications:
Why wouldn’t it be about whatever distinctions the kids can perceive cleanly dividing the group? I don’t really know. Here are some Discover articles that are relevant and have different implications:
My hypothesis is that which distinctions the kids find important are the result of adults’ involuntary reactions to people from the various groups.
It’s possible it is the result of multiple factors.
Inexposure leading to less ability to determine facial differences is a good guess. Glomming on to any difference regardless of culture is a good guess. Modeling adults is a good guess.
After the fact, many changes in the brain would be justified by various possible resultant persons. This is a weakness of CEV, at least, I do not know the solution to the problem. Were you to become the most fundamentalist Christian alive from futuristic brain implants and lobotomies, you would say something like “I am grateful for the surgery because otherwise I never would have known Jesus,” and you would be grateful.
My layman’s understanding of CEV is that the preceding brain should approve of the results of the improvement. So I would have to fervently desire to know Jesus and somehow be incapable of doing so, for CEV to allow me being turned into a fundamentalist.
The other side of the coin is that if we require such approval, where does that leave most of humanity? The most vicious 10% of humanity? How do we account for the most fundamentalist Christian alive in forming CEV? How do we account for people who think that beating their children for not believing in god is OK, and would even want their community to do the same to them if they didn’t believe?
I think the way you phrased it, “allow me being turned,” was very good. Humans see a difference between causing and allowing to happen, so it must be reflected somehow in the first stages of CEV.
I don’t think it’s a paradox, it’s just that the perfect is sometimes the enemy of the good. Your brain has a lot of different components. With a lot of effort, you can change the way some of them think. Some of them will always be irrational no matter what either because they are impossible to change much or because there just isn’t enough time in your life to do it.
Given that some components are irretrievably irrational, you may be better off in terms of accomplishing your goals if other components—which you might be able to change—stay somewhat irrational.
Thing is I can’t consciously chose to be irrational. I’d first have to entirely reject a huge network of ideals that are the only thing making me even attempt to be slightly rational ever.
I challenge this assumption. I have a very well functioning, blissfully optimistic mindset that I can load when my rationality suggests that this ignorance is indeed my best defense. I wish I had the skill to understand how I reconcile this with the rational compartment in my mind, but the two do seem to co-exist quite happily, and I enjoy many of the perks of a positive outlook.
Well, I don’t and I can’t. And I strongly doubt I could ever learn anything like that no matter what.
Given that a human brain can do it, you are perhaps too confident. A proof of concept would be to edit your brain with neurosurgery.
I don’t really count lobotomy as “learn”.
About Williams syndrome, I have read in several places that language skills are not sub-normal despite having brain abnormalities in those areas because there is much less than normal development in generally spacial and math/logic type areas. Having less raw brainpower to devote to language, they make up for it by being more subconsciously “focused”, though that isn’t quite the right word. They can be above or below average with language, depending on how it balances out, “normal” abilities are something like an average.
Also, such people are not naturally racist, unlike “normal” people. This is relevant for the aspie-leaning population here—non-neurotypial isn’t inherently normative.
I wonder what severity of Asperger’s syndrome is required to be non-racist? I strongly suspect there is a level that would be sufficient.
Language-wise, it’s kind of a mixed bag. How much do social things like sarcasm matter for ‘language skills’? And how Williams syndrome leads to sociability and lack of racism is very interesting; following extract dump from https://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/08/magazine/08sociability-t.html?reddit
In re “natural racism”: Has it been determined whether it’s always about the same distinctions?
In some places—for example, Protestant vs. Catholic in Northern Ireland—the groups look very similar to outsiders. Does “natural racism” kick in as young as American white-black racism?
Why wouldn’t it be about whatever distinctions the kids can perceive cleanly dividing the group? I don’t really know. Here are some Discover articles that are relevant and have different implications:
Williams syndrome children show no racial stereotypes or racial fear
They don’t all look the same
Racial bias weakens our ability to feel someone else’s pain
Probably using those one could backtrack and find the actual research and the citations from it, etc. From the first article:
Well, it was a good hypothesis. Not really sure what “signs of” means exactly.
My hypothesis is that which distinctions the kids find important are the result of adults’ involuntary reactions to people from the various groups.
It’s possible it is the result of multiple factors.
Inexposure leading to less ability to determine facial differences is a good guess. Glomming on to any difference regardless of culture is a good guess. Modeling adults is a good guess.
I strongly doubt that no matter what I couldn’t ever produce a lobotomy procedure anything like something you would mistake for learning.
After the fact, many changes in the brain would be justified by various possible resultant persons. This is a weakness of CEV, at least, I do not know the solution to the problem. Were you to become the most fundamentalist Christian alive from futuristic brain implants and lobotomies, you would say something like “I am grateful for the surgery because otherwise I never would have known Jesus,” and you would be grateful.
My layman’s understanding of CEV is that the preceding brain should approve of the results of the improvement. So I would have to fervently desire to know Jesus and somehow be incapable of doing so, for CEV to allow me being turned into a fundamentalist.
The other side of the coin is that if we require such approval, where does that leave most of humanity? The most vicious 10% of humanity? How do we account for the most fundamentalist Christian alive in forming CEV? How do we account for people who think that beating their children for not believing in god is OK, and would even want their community to do the same to them if they didn’t believe?
I think the way you phrased it, “allow me being turned,” was very good. Humans see a difference between causing and allowing to happen, so it must be reflected somehow in the first stages of CEV.
Which was exactly my point.