A term that means something similar to theory of mind but something dissimilar to how you are using the term here (and how the term is most often used):
Theory of mind, mentalization, cognitive empathy, and perspective taking are, of course, not actually ārareā but are what almost all people are doing almost all the time. The interesting question is what kinds of failures you think are common. The more opinionated you are about this, and the more you diverge from consensus opinions of experts such as psychologists and researchers in social work, the more likely you are to be wrong.
Whether people are correctly mentalizing or perspective taking or engaging in accurate cognitive empathy is often a controversial and contested question. These disagreements canāt be resolved simply by invoking the concept of theory of mind (or a similar term or concept).
For example, is misogyny or sexism a form of hatred? And if a person or group is taken to have misogynist or sexist views, is it accurate to say that person or group hates women? Are people who make such claims mentalizing incorrectly by misdiagnosing misogyny as hatred of women, or are you mentalizing incorrectly by misdiagnosing their diagnosis as incorrect mentalization? I donāt think disputes like this can be resolved by just making uncontroversial assertions about what theory of mind is. And if youāre using contested examples like this as the paradigmatic examples upon which the rest of your exploration is built, then your treatment of the topic is probably going to end up assuming its conclusions ā and failing to persuade anybody who didnāt already accept those conclusions from the outset.
Iām not sure the concept of net present value meaningfully tells us anything new about world hunger or global poverty. The connection between the concepts of net present value and world hunger is very loose. It is true that there are lots of people (including random pseudonymous people on Twitter) who donāt understand important concepts in accounting, finance, and economics. Failure to understand these concepts may lead to bad analysis. But development economists obviously understand these concepts, so if the point is to understand world hunger or global poverty, it would be a better idea to just read an introductory text on international development than to think further about how the concept of net present value might or might not shed new light on global poverty.
I personally donāt find any value in Griceās maxims. There is a danger in being too general, too abstract, and too vague in the advice you give, such as that it comes close to boiling down to ādo good things and donāt do bad thingsā. Or in saying things that are so obvious, such as āsay true things and donāt say untrue thingsā, that the advice is pointless, since everybody already knows that.
I find the slogan āideas matterā to be unremarkable in a similar way as āsay true things and donāt say untrue thingsā. I donāt think anybody disagrees that ideas matter. I would say everyone agrees with that.
If someone were presenting to me the thesis āideas matterā and it were a somewhat novel or interesting thesis, I would expect it to be something along the lines of looking at ideas in history that had a surprisingly large impact. For comparison, I recently watched a fascinating interview about the historical importance of textiles. I was surprised by so many things in that interview, I learned a lot. That video definitely made me think textiles matter a lot more than I realized. It supported the thesis āideas in textile innovation matterā. What would a case for the thesis āideas matterā look like? Maybe something like that, but more general. However, I think itās so intuitive and widely believed that science, technology, politics, religion, and scholarship are important, it would be hard to present a case that is surprising or novel enough to make most people think that āideas matterā non-trivially more than they already did.
Overall theme of this comment:
Itās hard to innovate beyond the state of the art, and itās easy to overstate how novel oneās own insights are, or to overstate how well-supported oneās controversial opinions are.
That isnāt a reason not to explore or celebrate interesting ideas, of course. But it is a reason to change certain aspects of the presentation, such as acknowledging that theory of mind is ubiquitous, not ārareā, and acknowledging that your own personal ideas about what failures of theory of mind are common might be either completely non-novel or wrong (or, if not wrong, at least highly controversial and beyond just an exposition of the concept of theory of mind).
Iām not trying to dampen your enthusiasm, but trying to forestall some combination of a) presenting old hat as novel or revelatory in a way that verges on plagiarism and b) presenting controversial and unsupported (or minimally supported) ideas, including some ideas original to you, as being as well-supported as the old hat. Iām not sure either (a) or (b) is where you were going with this post, but I sort of got that feeling from it. To be a science communicator (or economics communicator, etc.) and to be a theorist are different roles, and we donāt want to get them mixed up such that our communication of old, established ideas is mistaken for original theory or that our original theory, which is not yet supported and may be false, is mistaken for old, established ideas.
I think your comment largely addresses a version of the post that doesnāt exist.
In brief:
I donāt think I claimed novelty; the post is explicitly about existing concepts that seem obvious once you have them. I even used specific commonly known terms for them.
Theory of mind, mentalization, cognitive empathy, and perspective taking are, of course, not actually ārareā but are what almost all people are doing almost all the time. The interesting question is what kinds of failures you think are common. The more opinionated you are about this, and the more you diverge from consensus opinions of experts such as psychologists and researchers in social work, the more likely you are to be wrong.
The post gave specific examples of people with the capacity for ToM nonetheless failing to consistently apply it to political outgroups, foreign adversaries, story characters etc. Also the specific wording I wrote was:
The core idea is very simple: treat other agents as real. It sounds banal, until you realize how rare it can be, and how frequently people mess up.ā
You harp on the word ārareā but miss the surrounding context. You consistently make technically true but irrelevant points.
so if the point is to understand world hunger or global poverty, it would be a better idea to just read an introductory text on international development than to think further about how the concept of net present value might or might not shed new light on global poverty.
Are you seriously implying that it takes less effort to read an entire textbook on developmental economics than it is to write a paragraph on a related question? Besides, that wasnāt the point of the post anyway, which was more like āhereās a specific conceptual error people make, NPV dissolves it.ā
I donāt think anybody disagrees that ideas matter. I would say everyone agrees with that.
This blog post initially grew out of a conversation with a popular blogger about whether ideas actually matter. Itās also commonly believed in Silicon Valley that ideas are almost irrelevant compared to execution.
I personally donāt find any value in Griceās maxims.
I would like to respectfully request that you not engage with me in the future due to your violation of civility norms, and Iāll likewise not engage with you in the future. Take care.
Other useful terms that mean the same or similar things to theory of mind:
Mentalization
Cognitive empathy
Perspective taking
A term that means something similar to theory of mind but something dissimilar to how you are using the term here (and how the term is most often used):
The intentional stance
Theory of mind, mentalization, cognitive empathy, and perspective taking are, of course, not actually ārareā but are what almost all people are doing almost all the time. The interesting question is what kinds of failures you think are common. The more opinionated you are about this, and the more you diverge from consensus opinions of experts such as psychologists and researchers in social work, the more likely you are to be wrong.
Whether people are correctly mentalizing or perspective taking or engaging in accurate cognitive empathy is often a controversial and contested question. These disagreements canāt be resolved simply by invoking the concept of theory of mind (or a similar term or concept).
For example, is misogyny or sexism a form of hatred? And if a person or group is taken to have misogynist or sexist views, is it accurate to say that person or group hates women? Are people who make such claims mentalizing incorrectly by misdiagnosing misogyny as hatred of women, or are you mentalizing incorrectly by misdiagnosing their diagnosis as incorrect mentalization? I donāt think disputes like this can be resolved by just making uncontroversial assertions about what theory of mind is. And if youāre using contested examples like this as the paradigmatic examples upon which the rest of your exploration is built, then your treatment of the topic is probably going to end up assuming its conclusions ā and failing to persuade anybody who didnāt already accept those conclusions from the outset.
Iām not sure the concept of net present value meaningfully tells us anything new about world hunger or global poverty. The connection between the concepts of net present value and world hunger is very loose. It is true that there are lots of people (including random pseudonymous people on Twitter) who donāt understand important concepts in accounting, finance, and economics. Failure to understand these concepts may lead to bad analysis. But development economists obviously understand these concepts, so if the point is to understand world hunger or global poverty, it would be a better idea to just read an introductory text on international development than to think further about how the concept of net present value might or might not shed new light on global poverty.
I personally donāt find any value in Griceās maxims. There is a danger in being too general, too abstract, and too vague in the advice you give, such as that it comes close to boiling down to ādo good things and donāt do bad thingsā. Or in saying things that are so obvious, such as āsay true things and donāt say untrue thingsā, that the advice is pointless, since everybody already knows that.
I find the slogan āideas matterā to be unremarkable in a similar way as āsay true things and donāt say untrue thingsā. I donāt think anybody disagrees that ideas matter. I would say everyone agrees with that.
If someone were presenting to me the thesis āideas matterā and it were a somewhat novel or interesting thesis, I would expect it to be something along the lines of looking at ideas in history that had a surprisingly large impact. For comparison, I recently watched a fascinating interview about the historical importance of textiles. I was surprised by so many things in that interview, I learned a lot. That video definitely made me think textiles matter a lot more than I realized. It supported the thesis āideas in textile innovation matterā. What would a case for the thesis āideas matterā look like? Maybe something like that, but more general. However, I think itās so intuitive and widely believed that science, technology, politics, religion, and scholarship are important, it would be hard to present a case that is surprising or novel enough to make most people think that āideas matterā non-trivially more than they already did.
Overall theme of this comment:
Itās hard to innovate beyond the state of the art, and itās easy to overstate how novel oneās own insights are, or to overstate how well-supported oneās controversial opinions are.
That isnāt a reason not to explore or celebrate interesting ideas, of course. But it is a reason to change certain aspects of the presentation, such as acknowledging that theory of mind is ubiquitous, not ārareā, and acknowledging that your own personal ideas about what failures of theory of mind are common might be either completely non-novel or wrong (or, if not wrong, at least highly controversial and beyond just an exposition of the concept of theory of mind).
Iām not trying to dampen your enthusiasm, but trying to forestall some combination of a) presenting old hat as novel or revelatory in a way that verges on plagiarism and b) presenting controversial and unsupported (or minimally supported) ideas, including some ideas original to you, as being as well-supported as the old hat. Iām not sure either (a) or (b) is where you were going with this post, but I sort of got that feeling from it. To be a science communicator (or economics communicator, etc.) and to be a theorist are different roles, and we donāt want to get them mixed up such that our communication of old, established ideas is mistaken for original theory or that our original theory, which is not yet supported and may be false, is mistaken for old, established ideas.
Happy holidays.
Happy holidays to you too.
I think your comment largely addresses a version of the post that doesnāt exist.
In brief:
I donāt think I claimed novelty; the post is explicitly about existing concepts that seem obvious once you have them. I even used specific commonly known terms for them.
The post gave specific examples of people with the capacity for ToM nonetheless failing to consistently apply it to political outgroups, foreign adversaries, story characters etc. Also the specific wording I wrote was:
You harp on the word ārareā but miss the surrounding context. You consistently make technically true but irrelevant points.
Are you seriously implying that it takes less effort to read an entire textbook on developmental economics than it is to write a paragraph on a related question? Besides, that wasnāt the point of the post anyway, which was more like āhereās a specific conceptual error people make, NPV dissolves it.ā
This blog post initially grew out of a conversation with a popular blogger about whether ideas actually matter. Itās also commonly believed in Silicon Valley that ideas are almost irrelevant compared to execution.
Clearly.
I would like to respectfully request that you not engage with me in the future due to your violation of civility norms, and Iāll likewise not engage with you in the future. Take care.
Thanks, the feeling is mutual.