This piece was reasonably well-appreciated (over 100 points) but I nevertheless think of it as one of my most underrated posts, given my sense of how important/crucial the insight is. For me personally, this is one of the largest epiphanies of the past decade, and I think this is easily among the top three most valuable bits of writing I did in 2022. It’s the number one essay I go out of my way to promote to the attention of people who already occasionally read my writing, given its usefulness and its relative obscurity.
If I had the chance to write this over again, I might possibly make it longer and more detailed? I’m torn/conflicted. I don’t like that short bits of writing tend to be taken less seriously than longer ones; I would prefer a world where the brief essays packed a punch commensurate with their value rather than their weight. But rather than railing against that dynamic, I think I would just … flesh this out, so as to give it more felt-sense seriousness.
I might, in such a rewrite, also focus more closely on the key point that blind spots don’t live in one spot—they tend to be pervasive, and the way in which they tend to be pervasive is an inability to distinguish between lots of different things. If you’re red-green colorblind and don’t know it, there are thousands of places where it feels like people are drawing completely meaningless and made-up distinctions that literally don’t exist; those two objects are literally the same color, what are you talking about? … and I see this same sort of blindness crop up in e.g. the writings of people who aren’t even aware that they’re typical minding, or the behavior of people who don’t even know that it’s possible to not care about monkey status games, or the update procedures of people who can’t tell the difference between a logically sound argument and rhetoric/demagoguery.
I think that increasing the general awareness of what a blind spot feels like, on the inside and what a blind spot looks like, from the outside would go a long way toward improving our ability to do collective rationality. It would improve our ability to wisely defer to one another. It would make it much easier to recognize what’s actually going on, in situations where one side thinks the other is making mountains out of molehills, and the other thinks the first is callous or disingenuous or motivated by antipathy. It’s a pattern whose shape appears all over the place, and recognizing that “blind spot” was a bad handle for it and “color blindness” was a less bad handle for it has been a huge boost for me, both in navigating my own blindnesses and in more quickly recognizing (and having more productive and constructive reactions to) the blindness of others.
I think this post was good as something like a first pass.
There’s a large and multi-armed dynamic in modern Western liberal society that is a kind of freezing-in-place, as more and more moral weight gets attached to whether or not one is consciously avoiding harm in more and more ways.
For the most part, this is a positive process (and it’s at the very least well-intentioned). But it’s not as strategic as it could be, and substantially less baby could be thrown out with the bathwater.
This was an attempt to gesture at some baby that, I think, is being thrown out with the bathwater. I think it succeeded, in that a lot of people were like “huh! Wow! Never realized that someone might like X, and I agree that if you like X it would be good if there were ways for you to get it, so long as those who don’t like X can continue avoiding X.”
But I don’t think that it did much more than make some people go “huh.” I don’t see many other people talking more about which socially-frowned-upon things are actually okay for them personally, and thus normalizing them, and thus setting up a counterpressure against boundary creep. I don’t see many people acknowledging, or doing anything with, the insight that (metaphorically) we shouldn’t ban sports just because some people have glass bones.
In particular, I would have liked to see, and hope to someday see in the future:
Theorizing as to how a society could have smarter boundaries, rather than simply making the boundaries wider and wider each time it realizes that some people are still being harmed
Direct phenomenological reports from people doing things like CoZE and exploring what happens when they tread near social boundaries vs. near personal boundaries
More concrete suggestions from the people whose personal boundaries are already being violated under social norms (or just more reports from those people in general; the ones who spoke up below all got strong upvotes from me).
I think the essay small-f failed in that it was so reasonable that it maybe didn’t spark enough controversy? Or not controversy per-se, that’s not a thing to Goodhart on. But I think it didn’t leave enough of a sense of open dangling conversation to cause people to continue talking about it and write their own nearby posts, etc.
Which maybe they wouldn’t’ve anyway; maybe this just isn’t that interesting of a problem to most people. But I suspect that this is actually quite a large problem for quite a large number of people, and what’s actually going on is that I failed to connect these thoughts to [the thing that’s draining half of the light from their lives]. Among other things, this is an essay about the epidemic of touch-starvation that is rampant in our culture, and it didn’t manage to recruit any of the people who care about that, for instance.
I’m very glad I wrote it, I just wish it were … more.