#typical mind fallacy

[imperialgrunt]

I struggle with typical mind fallacy, but it really helps that everyone else does, too.

[liskantope]

Thermonuclear take related to differences in libido: a big part of why preaching about consent hasn't had that much effect on male predation is that, not only do men not like being told no, they simply can't fathom why anyone WOULD say no to sex. Evidence: the sheer number of guys who jump into discussions of harassment and assault with "well, I wouldn't mind that kind of attention, so why do women?"

This general idea has occurred to me as well, and I do think it is a factor. There is some typical mind fallacy going on in gender relations around dating/sex, particularly on the part of men. I suspect that a lot of the reason that so many men don't see a problem with things like sending dick pics ("I'd love to see a random woman's naked pics!") and catcalling ("Aren't I just giving her a compliment?") boils down to this.

Caveat #1: as I think I've pointed out before, part of that, at least with catcalling, is probably less directly about libido differences and more about a vast difference in social experiences, where men are thirsting for sexual attention of any kind and so would love to have a sexual comment from a random stranger thrown at them once in a while but don't understand how wearing that might get after like the dozenth time, let alone the five hundredth as is the experience for some women. Caveat #2: a lot of men probably exaggerate the causes I'm describing as rationalizations to excuse their behavior to themselves.

There is probably a converse form of this typical mind fallacy as well, on the part of women who refrain from sexually complimenting or propositioning men without realizing how badly some men want to receive that treatment just for once in their lives, but this is less obvious and visible to me.

[eikotheblue]

Darkness and Silence (on Aphantasia)

(This is an effortpost about my experiences with my self-diagnosed Aphantasia. While I believe everything that I’m saying and the personal stories are all accurate, I’ve not been formally diagnosed, the condition is understudied, and introspection is hard. It’s also very long, especially past the readmore.)

For me, one of the most obvious and powerful ideas in LW-rationalism is the typical mind fallacy, or the (often mistaken) belief that other people’s internal experiences are similar to yours when presented with the same stimuli. Reading that sentence really doesn’t convey how big of a deal this is, but I don’t think more words from me can do really do it justice; consider instead reading this post and the comments for a small glimpse into how different brains and experiences can be. 

When I first read that post, the thing I thought of immediately was smell. I’ve never had a sense of smell that produces anything that looks like meaningful input, and until I was about 13 or so I just assumed that nobody could smell much of anything, or that I’d never been exposed to a strong scent. (Then I encountered Axe, and realized there was a stimuli that really was invisible to me). I could talk a lot about lack of smell, but not in this post, because while that was the first atypical mind characteristic I identified in myself, it is far less impactful than Aphantasia. 

Aphantasia is described as “a condition where one does not possess a functioning mind's eye and cannot visualize imagery”. This describes my life experiences very well: I cannot recall or construct mental imagery, even slightly. To demonstrate this, I usually ask people to close their eyes and imagine a square. (Feel free to do so now, and lock the image in your head if you wish). I then ask questions like “What color is the square?” “What color is the background?” “How big is it, relative to your field of view?”, and people generate answers based on the square they imagined. I am always fascinated by these responses; if you perform the experiment and reblog, I’d love to see (either in reblog text or tags) the details of your square.

There is no square in my head. If you ask me to imagine a square, I see no image, only the concept of a 4-sided regular polygon. If you then ask me “what color it is”, I can pick a color at random (or one of my favorites), but the true answer is “None”; there’s no square to have a color. My thoughts and memories exist only as text, with webs of association and observation attached. If I’m asked to remember what something looked like, all that I can retrieve is thoughts that describe the thing I’ve seen, or facts that I know about it, if any. 

Observant readers might notice that while the title of this post is “Darkness and Silence”, so far all that’s been discussed is the inability to visualize. Something that I hadn’t realized until very recently is that Aphantasia is more general than the name implies, at least for me (and others online by anecdote). I can’t directly recall any sensory input from memory, or create sensory input-like experiences ex nihilo. I can’t imagine or recall any sound, taste, touch, or even pain, all of which I have heard other people tell me they can do. From my point of view, it feels unbelievable and incredible that people can do this, and it is hard not to be jealous of that ability. Inside my head, it is dark, silent, still.

Aphantasia is not an inability to receive sensory input: i can still see/hear/etc, and describe what i’m experiencing. It is also not the inability to store sensory input at all, because I can recognize things that I’ve heard and seen before, and after recognizing them I can access details that I wouldn’t have been able to before (this comes up most often in music and other time-component experiences). Additionally, I can dream, and my dreams include images that I saw while awake, which means that the information is stored, just not directly retrievable. My dreams are all very visual, and have other sensory components as well. However, memory of the contents of dreams evaporate almost immediately: since I’m not awake to fully process what I’m seeing, all that gets ‘stored’ is fleeting bits of information, and the emotional state it ended in.

According to the data I’ve seen (which was of limited quality, since Aphantasia is very understudied), visualization and image recall ability vary a great deal from person to person: eidetic or “photographic” memory at the high end, and Aphantasia at the very other. The only place I’ve seen offering stats suggests that the incidence rate is around 2-5%, but the actual numbers could be very different: if I had read slightly different blogs or made slightly different friends, I never would have known!

Going through life without noticing that you have Aphantasia is incredibly easy: people have been doing it for probably longer than recorded history. There just isn’t a lot of evidence that would cause the casual observer to notice the problem: it’s really easy to excuse descriptions of a “mind’s eye” or discussions of visualization as flowery descriptions of the Aphantasia-equivalent skills that fill the gaps, and to just assume that the other variances are just weird quirks, because they don’t feel connected; without the central problem pointed out, it’s just an unlinked set of “things I appear to suck at”.

For me, the biggest observable was memory, and particularly what I called “raw memorization” growing up. I am good at remembering things I understand conceptually, but there are times when information (a chart, dates, a list of names in order, a paragraph of text) just needs to be stored for recall. I am terrible at this! I can manage, if the information is in the form of bindable text (Examples of bindable text are hard to give: a catchy phrase or good song lyrics are bindable, but a list of names and dates are not). If I need to memorize a chart or set of data I don’t get conceptual links from, I don’t really have a long-term solution. In school, I would design a compression system to convert the information into a sentence, reread the sentence over and over right before the test, and write it down as the test started. Then I’d (hopefully) remember my decompression, and manually draw out the info I need. 

I was always quick to take pride in my mental abilities, so when I realized that I was extremely bad at memorization, I tried to learn to train it. And what I found was... advice on memory palaces, a technique for mapping specific memories to specific parts of an imaginary landscape. There were a lot of variations on this, but everything I read basically boiled down to “Step 1. Unfold your wings. Step 2. Practice flapping until you’ve built up enough muscle to fly”; the basic ability required to use the technique was something that it is literally impossible for my brain to do.

And, weirdly enough, this still wasn’t enough evidence to make me figure it out. I got angry and frustrated with advice like this, and eventually quit bitterly, concluding that it was snake oil stuff, or memorization couldn’t really be taught meaningfully, but there were people who were very good at it and thought they could teach it. I gave up on improving and (for the most part) avoided classes and situations where that kind of memorization would be a necessary skill. It took me reading about the original experiment to even consider that I might have it, and over two year’s worth of idle thoughts, research, and conversations with ordinary people about their sensory recall for me to really start to understand just how different (and... diminished) my experiences are.

Aphantasia impacts my life in several ways, almost all of them negatively. I can’t conjure up stimuli to stave off boredom, or crowd out intrusive thoughts. I can’t listen to music in my head (though i can hum or sing it subvocally). I can’t compare 2 images without seeing them side by side. It takes me a lot of exposure to learn enough about a face to describe it, or tell it apart from a similar one. I won’t remember licence plates, too many different passwords, or the birthdays and ages of the people I care about. I get lost very easily, and can’t remember directions well, or make adjustments that deviate meaningfully from the path. Without GPS, I will frequently take a route that is 5 or 10 minutes longer if the alternative is something less familiar or easier to miss turns on.

Gaming is an important part of my life, and Aphantasia does not spare me there, either. It’s easy for me to get hopelessly lost in any game without a good map or obvious landmarks/anchors; I get turned around and spend a lot of time backtracking. Being attacked by something I’m not looking at is terrifying; while I do have object permanence, I can’t visualize my surroundings or keep track of positions that I can’t see. This experience is awful enough that I will almost never play games that regularly cause it. (Overwatch and other pvp shooters, but also many types of single player horror games). Being unable to recall images also poses problems in myst style adventure or puzzle games, although screenshots are a good way to cheat at this. 

To be fair to Aphantasia, there are times that being unable to recall stimulus is useful. I am extremely visually squeamish on several axes (gore, blood, disfigured people, distorted / warped visuals of people), and this would be a much bigger problem if I could recall that kind of image. Similarly, I can’t get songs stuck in my head; until a few days ago, I hadn’t really understood what it meant to have a song stuck in your head. Idle thoughts often remind me of a note progression that i then hum out or think about, but this never really bothered me that much, and I had been lowkey confused about how much it appeared to bother other people, until I learned it was a completely different experience for them. And lastly, the details of my nightmares quickly fade, which limits how upsetting they can be.

But I won’t end on that note, because it would feel like lying. I hate Aphantasia. I hate that my brain is so broken. I hate that I can’t do these things that are so basic for so many people. I hate that I’ll never be able to develop these skills or experience these things. but more than anything, i hate being trapped in my head nothing but my thoughts; i hate that all that it is to be me is a fragile flow of words on a backdrop of terrifying emptiness, of darkness and silence.

[4denthusiast]

There's a part of me that sometimes feels like people speaking other languages are just doing it for some silly reason, making a point of participating in their culture, whatever, and that English is a neutral default. Obviously this is false and silly, it's just the typical mind fallacy. For me, speaking in English is easiest and the link between the words and meaning is most obvious in English, to the point where it can feel like the words and meanings are the same thing, but that's just because it's my first language and I don't know any others so well, and to people who speak other languages it'd be those that feel obvious.

But then there are languages like Irish, where as far as I'm aware this intuition is mostly just true. There is a small number of people for whom it's their first language, but for most speakers it's not, plus the majority of people in Ireland don't even know the language, and it seems to have only survived this long at all because of a deliberate effort to promote it, out of national pride or whatever. Welsh is a similar example.

I just think it's kind of... funny I guess, that this intuition, which is based on flawed reasoning and generally incorrect, nevertheless has cases where it is actually true.

[sentedelviento-blog]

Does anyone else not have an internal monologue?

I’ve been curious about this because everyone I’ve asked thus far has described their stream of consciousness as being guided by language. (Or at least, language seems to play a fundamental role)

I don’t think in words, though. And for a while I thought this was normal: typical mind fallacy and whatnot.

I’ve always thought that the advice where people tell you to practice being kind to yourself by mentally repeating self-esteem boosting mantras to yourself was really strange. Because to me it wasn’t a matter of reframing a pre-existing linguistical narrative, but rather constructing an entirely new, unfamiliar thought structure.

[lambdaphagy]

And we do not even think of regretting the unmade works of those who lived out something like their "natural" span of threescore years and ten: we do not, for example, imagine unwritten works by Bach.

-- Bruce Fleming, Sexual Ethics: Liberal vs Conservative

Are you kidding?  Of course I do.  I have had that exact thought multiple times.

[danup]

What George Weigel, in the first FT piece I linked to above, calls “upmarket anti-Catholicism” is, in my view, simply a failure of historical imagination. Hilary Mantel could only present an admirable Thomas Cromwell by assuming, or pretending, that he’s a lot like people in her social circle: tolerant, skeptical, indulgently affectionate towards children, fond of animals, shy of violence — a typical 21st-century educated Londoner who was inexplicably born half a millennium too early. Having created Cromwell in her own image, Mantel then makes him the proxy for her own inability to make sense of someone like Thomas More.

Alan Jacobs

[lambdaphagy]

It is important to reflect that offenders may not have the same tastes as policy-makers, or as the author and readers of the present volume, perhaps especially as to noise and interpersonal conflict: a prison that resembled a Benedictine monastery rather than an urban street corner might seem more unpleasant to most actual inmates, even if in prospect it seems far less horrible to you or me.

Mark Kleiman, When Brute Force Fails