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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   4009 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 14, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Appreciate the response.

I don't remember the book as clearly as when I'd just finished listening to it, but I feel like you could reasonably view it as using the Bland case as a case study for a more general message/phenomenon. Which isn't to say that the title represents it well, or that I could make a good argument for the relevance of all the different topics/claims that the book tries to tie it to.

At times it seemed to be building toward something like "people are too complicated to perfectly understand, so don't get overconfident". But it always seemed to revert back to "this situation seems complicated, but let me explain everyone's exact thoughts and motivations". Similarly, lots of "here's the popular idea about this, but isn't it a little too neat and tidy? Let's look deeper", but then its own narratives end up exactly as reductive/simplistic/superficial.

I feel like the point about Harry Markopolos was pretty clear in the end. The "praise" was just the front half of the "but"; "you think you want a guy like this in your corner, but you don't".

I was pretty skeptical about the narrative about body language. There's probably a book's worth of material in how people are influenced by exaggerated screen acting as it forms an increasing proportion of their "social" experiences; and another's on broscience in police and intelligence training. But I have a hard time taking seriously the idea that facial and body "language" are pure social convention, and that there are no universal involuntary responses to things. Maybe I'm overgeneralizing from The Blank Slate, or being overly credulous toward it?

I feel like the book was conflating "these ways of evaluating people can produce false positives" with "evaluating people is completely impossible". In some places it almost seemed like it was leading to autistic supremacism; "the en-tees think they have these rich nonverbal communication channels and intuitive faculties, but they're all pure delusion", and so on.

I skipped the chapter on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

Overall, I may have ended up biased against the book's value instead of for it. Like Malcolm watching the arrest video, I still get angry rereading or remembering parts of it, and remembering the anxious faux-earnest tone that they were read in. That's probably not a good sign. Still, I'm starting to question the value of this kind of single-perspective book generally.

One thing I did appreciate somewhat was reading about how embarrassingly obvious Amanda Knox's innocence was, years after seeing the crowing over Less Wrong "getting it right" and how it proved the superiority of their methods.

I'm passingly curious whether you ended up making the post on policing.

At times it seemed to be building toward something like "people are too complicated to perfectly understand, so don't get overconfident". But it always seemed to revert back to "this situation seems complicated, but let me explain everyone's exact thoughts and motivations". Similarly, lots of "here's the popular idea about this, but isn't it a little too neat and tidy? Let's look deeper", but then its own narratives end up exactly as reductive/simplistic/superficial.

That's Malcolm Gladwell's standard Modus Operandi. I've read/listend to a lot of his stuff, and he's extremely hit or miss with his research. He's pretty entertaining at least, even though he sometimes lands way off base with his conclusions.

I'm passingly curious whether you ended up making the post on policing.

No, I never did.

Sometimes I wish I were better at reading things "for entertainment" without worrying about what beliefs or habits of thought I'm absorbing. Idk.

I think it just comes down to reading a lot of stuff from different points of view. If you read two books that advocate for opposite beliefs, you can't come out too badly.

Provided, presumably, that you can accurately identify the "belief(s)" that a book "advocates for", and identify an adequately entertaining book that advocates for the opposite(s), without "accidentally" picking one that argues so badly that it only reinforces your prior beliefs, or one that disputes minor points while reinforcing the underlying assumptions; and without "coincidentally" finding that you don't have the spare time to read anymore.

Yes, I don't think any of that is that difficult.

Probably just don't want it as much as I want to believe I do, then. Many such cases.

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