There’s a thought I’ve had in my head recently posted by Scott Sumner helped bring focus. He said that sometimes there can be a failure to understand and appreciate how people can think in ways that are very different from yours, and how this can lead to political divisions. As he puts it:
People who cannot accept that other people like modern art suffer from a failure of imagination, an inability to understand that other people process visual information differently than they do. People who view opposition voters as bad often fail to understand that not everyone sees political issues the way they do.
This is similar to what Jeffrey Friedman calls “rational heterogeneity” – the idea that different minds process information in different ways. As Friedman explains,
The ideal heterogeneity between my web of beliefs and yours will keep me from knowing how you will interpret your situation, and how you will respond to it. Even if I know what your situation is, then – in itself it is a difficult matter, if you are not known to me, like many professional agents who try to predict their behavior – I do not know how you will interpret it independently, and thus how you will explain. you will act in response to it, if you and I are not the same.
While Friedman talked about the differences in how we process information that lead to differences in interpretation and action, a common case I had in mind that was highlighted in Scott Sumner’s post is the anonymity of other people. experience, not just their thought processes. If you see contemporary art and find nothing worthwhile about the experience but don’t think that different people have different mystical experiences that are beyond your reach, you may be tempted to think anyone who says they enjoy the experience of looking at contemporary art. just role playing. Call this phenomenon “experiential heterogeneity” – citing Friedman’s definition, it can be described as follows:
The heterogeneity of experience between my experience and yours can keep me from knowing how you experience your situation, and thus how you will react to it. Even if I know what your situation is, then, – in itself it is a difficult matter, if you are unknown to me, like many professional agents who try to predict their behavior – I do not know how you will deal with yourself, and thus you will react to it, if you and I have different personalities .
Outside of contemporary art, here are two other situations where diversity of experience can come into play. The first is from my own experience, the second is from someone else.
I used to smoke a lot. Towards the end of my time in the Marine Corps, I worked in the gunnery field, and in my last year I was a Range Safety Officer and lead Combat Marksmanship Trainer for annual gunnery training and pre-deployment combat training. This was a job that took me out all day, for obvious reasons, which meant I didn’t have to go outside for a smoke. I could light up at any time – and I was easily going through three packs a day at the time. I finally decided to quit – I knew that after leaving the Marines and being a college student my income would decrease, so I needed to cut back on my spending. (Also, there were several other very good reasons to quit smoking – you can probably think of a few yourself!) The difficulties of quitting smoking are well known enough to be a cultural meme, and after being a heavy smoker for so many years. , I knew I was in for a rough ride. Besides, what I “knew” turned out not to be true. I had no real difficulty in quitting – it was actually very easy for me. What should I take from this? Here are two possibilities:
- Quitting smoking is actually not that difficult. Every smoker who has cried about the struggle to quit is a big kid.
- Quitting smoking is actually really difficult, but I have such a Herculean level of effort that I can easily accomplish things that are very difficult for the plebeians.
Although both of these interpretations give me the upper hand, I don’t think they are true. I know people who have struggled to quit smoking who weren’t just weak-hearted kids – I knew too many difficult things in their lives to dismiss them as people who lacked strength or discipline. And, if I’m being honest, I can’t say that I have a particular hard work level. There are many things in my life that I have found to be a struggle that may not seem difficult to most people.
So what is the third option? My experience of quitting smoking was different from many other people. So, it’s not that I was super strong compared to my friends who have found it hard to quit. It is more likely that it simply requires much less energy from me than from them. Although it may be tempting for me to just say “Quitting cigarettes is not that hard – I know from personal experience! You’re just lazy!”, that would be unforgivable. The truth is I don’t know what the process of quitting feels like for anyone else – and neither do you.
The second case comes from Ben Carpenter, one of YouTube’s many online fitness personalities. As long as you don’t have any profanity, I would recommend taking a few minutes to watch video, but the short version is this. While Ben himself has lost a lot of weight (being a fitness model and training coach), his sister has struggled with her weight all her life. She talks about the time she would diet down to a low body fat level for a photoshoot, and the crazy struggle she felt with her hunger while trying to maintain that level of leanness. His sister asked how he was feeling and he explained in detail how severe his hunger was, that nothing he ate would satisfy his hunger, he just finished eating all he could think of when he would come. eat again. His response was, “You explained how I feel every day.” Carpenter explains what this realization gave him:
This level of dependence is the single hardest thing I’ve ever done. If you had given me a hundred grand to take care of this for a whole year, I don’t think I could have endured it, and I am not a rich man. Almost anyone who eats six percent body fat or less without drugs will tell you that their appetite was incredibly insatiable. But I had to fight my eating symptoms for a few weeks. He has been doing it for you years…My sister has to put more effort and energy into fighting her hunger symptoms for the rest of her life, basically, than I do. always be.
Ben Carpenter describes his sister as an “incredibly hard worker,” so he knows her well enough to know that her weight control struggles aren’t just her being a lazy glutton. But if you just assume that other people’s experiences are the same as yours, you might also think that people like Emily Carpenter are lazy and weak-willed – despite the amazing work and effort she shows in other aspects of her life. But you don’t know what other person’s hunger is like for him. You won’t know that.
Now where am I going with all this? Well, I think that in situations like I described above, about addiction or weight management, my views on the former and Ben Carpenter in the end tend to be seen as a kind person, a compassionate view, and the view that everything is just down. power and voluntary choice is considered a hard-hearted idea. On the other hand, libertarian and classical liberal views of letting certain matters be handled by the “market” are often seen as a hard-hearted view. To some, it sounds silly and uninteresting say “While having a secure job is good, money is also good. Unusually dangerous jobs—in the United States at that time primarily fishing, logging, and trucking—paid more than other working-class jobs precisely because people were reluctant to risk death or disability on the job. And in a free society it’s good that different people can make different decisions about dangerous leaks.” But I think that this takes, far from being callous and indifferent, is actually what shows real respect and even compassion for people.
Libertarians and classical liberals are more likely to be willing to accept that “it’s good that different people can make different choices on the risk-reward spectrum.” But modernists and progressives reject this – they see those kinds of choices as suspicious, and feel that they should be abolished by the state. There is often disbelief expressed that anyone would make such a choice – certainly no one would sincerely they believed that the high risk of getting a high salary was a good trade. Such choices must inevitably be made under duress or perhaps out of ignorance, making their choices vulnerable to being blocked by third parties.
Scott Sumner closed his blog by saying “Don’t think you know what’s going on in other people’s minds. You don’t say. Don’t believe your neighbor needs a pain reliever? How did you know? We need free markets precisely because we don’t know what other people see, feel and taste.” I wholeheartedly agree. Modern liberals see others making choices that seem wrong or unfair and think that this shows that those choices are not genuine, or not worthy of respect, and therefore can be denied. The ancient liberal leaders saw the same thing and understood that although these decisions may seem strange to us, they deserve to be respected and should not be subject to external interference, because we cannot really know the thoughts of another person or his experience, so we cannot truly know. what value that arrangement gives them. If I see someone making a high-risk trade for a high payout that seems crazy to me, that’s pretty good evidence that such a trade isn’t worth it to me – but damning evidence that such a trade isn’t really worth it to them. As is often the case, Adam Smith said it best:
A government that should attempt to direct the people how they ought to use their officers, would not only burden themselves with unnecessary attention, but assume an authority that could be safely trusted, not to one person only, but to the whole council. or a senate of anything, and which would not be so dangerous as in the hands of one who is foolish and presumptuous enough to love himself so as not to be able to use it.
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