James_Miller has covered the ape-coalition elements of that comparison in a sibling comment. I’ll focus on the skill elements.
The way the claim is worded makes two different unintended (I suspect) claims.
The first is “developed the capacity … the way” ambiguates between “now perceive a skill, and am at the first level” and “have the same skill level.” If I say “I have developed the capacity to swim the way Michael Phelps can,” people will ask me where all my gold medals are. I could have in mind that I can swim at all, and am just using Michael Phelps as an example of what human swimming looks like for people whose only experience of swimming is what they see on TV. (This last sentence is important, and the underlying assumptions might be worth a post if I can figure out the right way to explain them.)
The second is “the way Martin Luther King” claims discernment. If I were to say “I know why Michael Phelps is as good a swimmer as he is,” that implies I am a critic of swimming with at least as much discernment as Phelps has quality as an athlete. It’s not necessarily the claim that I personally could be as good as swimming as he is—perhaps I need different genes to have arms proportioned better for swimming, and to have spent my childhood in a different way. But it is the claim that my model is strong enough that we can use it for correct counterfactual reasoning on extreme cases.
When I read that statement, I inserted qualifiers like “as I understand them.” This is how I would have worded it, with minimal content changes:
This is a tool that creates universal love and compassion; I imagine that mastery over it could turn one into someone like Martin Luther King or Gandhi.
(“one” is the weakest part of that sentence; substituting “me” runs into status issues, substituting “almost anyone” runs into challenges about inherent aptitude / the rivalrous nature of positions like those held by MLK and Gandhi, and so on.)
[edit] I just noticed JRMayne’s comment, which covers much of the same ground. Specifically, their third problem is my problem of discernment, and their first problem is similar to my “same skill level” ambiguated claim.
James_Miller has covered the ape-coalition elements of that comparison in a sibling comment. I’ll focus on the skill elements.
The way the claim is worded makes two different unintended (I suspect) claims.
The first is “developed the capacity … the way” ambiguates between “now perceive a skill, and am at the first level” and “have the same skill level.” If I say “I have developed the capacity to swim the way Michael Phelps can,” people will ask me where all my gold medals are. I could have in mind that I can swim at all, and am just using Michael Phelps as an example of what human swimming looks like for people whose only experience of swimming is what they see on TV. (This last sentence is important, and the underlying assumptions might be worth a post if I can figure out the right way to explain them.)
The second is “the way Martin Luther King” claims discernment. If I were to say “I know why Michael Phelps is as good a swimmer as he is,” that implies I am a critic of swimming with at least as much discernment as Phelps has quality as an athlete. It’s not necessarily the claim that I personally could be as good as swimming as he is—perhaps I need different genes to have arms proportioned better for swimming, and to have spent my childhood in a different way. But it is the claim that my model is strong enough that we can use it for correct counterfactual reasoning on extreme cases.
When I read that statement, I inserted qualifiers like “as I understand them.” This is how I would have worded it, with minimal content changes:
(“one” is the weakest part of that sentence; substituting “me” runs into status issues, substituting “almost anyone” runs into challenges about inherent aptitude / the rivalrous nature of positions like those held by MLK and Gandhi, and so on.)
[edit] I just noticed JRMayne’s comment, which covers much of the same ground. Specifically, their third problem is my problem of discernment, and their first problem is similar to my “same skill level” ambiguated claim.