I think your comment largely addresses a version of the post that doesn’t exist.
In brief:
I don’t 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 “rare” 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.”
You harp on the word “rare” 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 wasn’t the point of the post anyway, which was more like “here’s a specific conceptual error people make, NPV dissolves it.”
I don’t 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. It’s also commonly believed in Silicon Valley that ideas are almost irrelevant compared to execution.
I personally don’t find any value in Grice’s maxims.
I would like to respectfully request that you not engage with me in the future due to your violation of civility norms, and I’ll likewise not engage with you in the future. Take care.
Happy holidays to you too.
I think your comment largely addresses a version of the post that doesn’t exist.
In brief:
I don’t 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 “rare” 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 wasn’t the point of the post anyway, which was more like “here’s a specific conceptual error people make, NPV dissolves it.”
This blog post initially grew out of a conversation with a popular blogger about whether ideas actually matter. It’s 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 I’ll likewise not engage with you in the future. Take care.
Thanks, the feeling is mutual.