I'm glad to see someone bringing up the topic of seduction, and how it relates to rationality, and how attitudes inside and towards the seduction community relate to rationality and biases.
I'm going to give a big warning to everyone on this topic. The seduction community is an expansive and heterogenous phenomenon. Unless someone has some experience of the community (say 30+ hours of reading of multiple gurus with different philosophies, and they have gone out and tried the approaches the community advocates or seen real pickup artists in action), then it is virtually impossible to understand what it involves and describe it in a way that isn't skewed.
Elana Clift's honors thesis is a good place to start.
Yvain, you are right to take the mass perceptions of people of each sex as evidence (though evidence of what is unclear, so far). Let me unpack a few things:
There are a lot of not-particularly-complimentary things about women that many men tend to believe. Some guys say that women will never have romantic relationships with their actually-decent-people male friends because they prefer alpha-male jerks who treat them poorly. Other guys say women want to be lied to and tricked.
The...
Interesting illustration of mental imagery (from Dennett):
Picture a 3 by 3 grid. Then picture the words "gas", "oil", and "dry" spelled downwards in the columns left to right in that order. Looking at the picture in your mind, read the words across on the grid.
I can figure out what the words are of course, but it is very hard for me to read them off the grid. I should be able to if I could actually picture it. It was fascinating for me to think that this isn't true for everyone.
Picture a 3 by 3 grid. Then picture the words "gas", "oil", and "dry" spelled downwards in the columns left to right in that order. Looking at the picture in your mind, read the words across on the grid.
Interestingly, I find the task much easier if I do it the other way: visualizing the words spelled across, and then reading off the words going down the grid.
If mental images consist of replayed saccades, this makes perfect sense. To generate the downward images of words and then read across would reasonably be harder than simply replaying the stored "across" patterns, and then reading them down. IOW, visualization is more like vectors and sprites than it is like pixels -- which reflects how sight itself works.
I can't either, but I wonder if I might have been able to as a child. My spacial reasoning skills have always been terrible (which is probably responsible for my absolutely appalling sense of direction; I have literally gotten lost in a straight line on multiple occasions,) but my perception is that I had a much more powerful visual imagination as a child. I could actually visually "see" fabricated images overlaid over real scenery if I so chose (but not indefinitely, I needed cooldown time between images.) I haven't had any such ability since at least the time I became a teenager, probably earlier.
That's not the only mental faculty I've lost in the process of growing up either. I remember in kindergarten my teacher complained that I needed to pay attention to the lesson, while I was clearly diverting my attention to something else, and I told her I was quite capable of paying attention to both. She understandably didn't believe me, until I proved to her that I could listen to two separate audio recordings simultaneously, one in each ear, and afterwards, recite the content of both. Today, my ability to split my attention is terrible, and it boggles my mind that I was ever capable of this.
Maybe I'm just cynical but I think people vastly overestimate their own goodness. Often "goodness" is just a way to dress up powerlessness. Like an overweight man might say he's "stocky" or an overweight woman might say she's "curvy," so an undesirable or shy man or woman might emphasize the upside: "I would never cheat." There's a version of the typical mind fallacy in there: a person might genuinely think they would never cheat but be extrapolating from a position where the opportunity rarely presents itself. We can all talk about how, if we were in a position of political power, we'd never succumb to bribes or cronyism because we don't have any political power. It both makes us look good and, as far as we know, it's true. I think testimony, especially when it comes to ones moral worth, is the least valuable form of data available.
When I've taught ethics in the past, we always discuss the Nazi era. Not because the Nazis acted unethically, but because of how everyone else acted.
For example, we read about the vans that carried Jewish prisoners that had the exhaust system designed to empty into the van. The point is not how awful that is, but that there must have been an engineer somewhere who figured out the best way to design and build such a thing. And that engineer wasn't a Nazi soldier, he or she was probably no different from anyone else at that time, with kids and a family and friends and so on. Not an evil scientist in a lab, but just a design engineer in a corporation.
One point of the discussion is that "normal" people have acted quite unethically in the past, and how can we prevent that happening to us.
I'd like to say I've never cheated on a test. As a general principle, I prefer to avoid doing so. I've never copied answers from another person, but I have stored notes in my calculator for tests in which doing so was explicitly forbidden - we were told to memorize various formulas that we would have to use on the test, and not to store them in our calculators. Also, on one of those "fill in the bubble" standardized tests which are Really Important, I used extra time on one section to go back and finish a previous section, although we weren't supposed to.
So, have I cheated on a test? Well...
I take advantage of opportunities. You bend the rules. He's a dirty cheater. ;)
That may apply to shoplifting, but not when you're predicting your behaviour in different situations - "I would be good even if given more power".
From Why Does Power Corrupt?:
The young revolutionary's belief is honest. There will be no betraying catch in his throat, as he explains why the tribe is doomed at the hands of the old and corrupt, unless he is given power to set things right. Not even subconsciously does he think, "And then, once I obtain power, I will strangely begin to resemble that old corrupt guard, abusing my power to increase my inclusive genetic fitness."
Did you have a reason to cheat? Did your friends have a reason to cheat? (Alternatively, did they have a reason not to tell you they did? Would it have made them look especially bad compared to you?) If you're good at taking tests you'll probably never cheat, associate with people who are similarly academically gifted, and make people who aren't academically gifted embarrassed to admit their struggles. This obviously isn't a case of powerlessness though.
Imagine you are particularly bad at taking tests though. It's not obvious that cheating would be easy. I went to a particularly awful school and while I was good at taking tests, none of my friends were, and after finishing the test I would openly hand my paper to them and they'd all quickly copy down the answers. They were all fortunate to have an amoral friend and disinterested teachers. In college I knew a girl who would write notes on her thighs before going into an exam. She claimed she could get away with it because she's attractive. (She also claimed to have cheated on every exam.) To cheat on a test, you need access to answers, the ability to get away with it, etc. If these conditions aren't forthcoming, but you're not academically gifted, you might be tempted to say "I may be a C student but at least I've never cheated on a test." Should your situation change, you'd probably start peeking at the answers. (At which point you might start saying, "these sorts of tests are meaningless anyway.")
Very interesting post. Perhaps I should mention that there's a possibility to go to the other extreme; assuming you're different to everyone else. A lot of very bad pretentious teenage poetry stands as testament to this.
Very true. A typical reaction when reading advice or something about the typical flaws of people (biases, planning), is "Yeah but that doesn't apply to me". It often takes a deliberate effort to override the inside view and stop finding excuses.
Note that in both cases the mistake makes us look better:
Indeed, it's one of the interesting paradoxes about people. We think that everyone is the same as us (shown in examples like this), while simultaneously thinking that we're unique and special (for things like narcissism, the narrative fallacy, and even religion.)
It's actually a wonder we manage to accomplish anything at all, given the messy state of our brains...
Now that the two extremes have been discounted, I have a disturbing compulsive need to know exactly how many other people there are out there who are like me.
Regarding differences in mental imagery: only this winter did I really understand that good musicians have vivid aural imagination, while I couldn't hear any sounds in my head, period. Immediately after this realization I started exercising. By now I can hear complete monophonic melodies, and (on good days) imagine two notes sounding at the same time. Classically trained conductors can imagine a complete orchestral sound while reading sheet music. I don't see any reason why visual imagination can't be similarly trained.
Even after reading the article, this comment completely blew my mind. I knew intellectually that some people might have eidetic imagery, but didn't emotionally believe that people's visual imagination could really feel as vivid as life.
Unlike sounds, which obviously can be imagined as exactly as when you hear them.
Does this Futurama joke work for you? Do you get songs stuck in your head? I'm expecting a "yes", but am prepared to be shocked.
At any given time, I always have some song or another playing in my head, and I can recall songs I've memorized and "play them back" at will. Usually it's just the melody, though; the harmony usually doesn't seem to get captured as easily. (I've taken piano lessons for most of my life and I'm told I'm rather talented, although I'm nowhere near as good as professional musicians.)
Sometimes, an earworm gets attached to the point where I can't tell the difference between what's in my head and what I'm hearing with my ears. This usually happens when I've been playing a video game with MIDI-like music for a long period of time. (On a side note, I must have no taste, because I find I prefer the MIDI-like sounds of the NES and SNES-era to the more elaborate music of today's video games. The FF6 soundtrack is my favorite music, ever.)
There's a lot of great music that's gotten into videogames. Anything that people can listen to for hours on end and not get sick of must have some merit.
(Anyhow, the only true measure of taste is what people like years hence. And even supposedly great musicians can be unreliable predictors.)
I think a lack of aural imagination explains a lot of mediocre musicians who are beginners, and who stay beginners, in traditional music. They are only trying to waggle their fingers in the right magical sequence to get the tune to somewhat come out. They're not hearing the tune in their head and letting it come out.
I'd argue that music nowadays is regressing to the lowest common denominator of rhythm and losing all the melodic complexity I like. And melodic complexity is perfectly achievable using only 8-bit instruments.
I've also read that restrictions of the systems in those days are probably why there were so many games with memorable melodies; melodic complexity was the only kind of complexity possible, so that's what we ended up with. (I agree with this theory.)
My experience in my non-academic work life, is that many programmers can't visualize verbal descriptions of subsystems, but they learn how to make convincing "I got it" noises to mollify their coworkers. It's not just programmers, it's all sorts of coworkers. I have no idea how an adult can avoid this pitfall.
My ex-girfriend's exceptional ability to draw realistic, well-proportioned humans in detailed scenes tipped me off to this phenomenon in much the same way.
I have very little ability to visualize a scene the way that must be required in order to do this. If I were attempting to draw (a pursuit I've long given up on, though I commend your attempt at overcoming the gap in your own abilities with music), I would have to draw an outline of the scene, and then come back and gradually fill in details, relying on my previous low-resolution version of the drawing for input as to how to draw the next iteration.
She was perfectly capable of starting on one end of the scene and filling it in at near full resolution. The proportion would be right in the end, requiring only minor touch-ups and modifications. She must have some very vivid image in her head.
The Typical Psyche Fallacy says my methods won't necessarily work for everyone, but anyway...
The hardest part for me was the beginning, getting a toehold at any inner sound. Pick a note on the guitar - I started with D on the second string. Play it at a steady rhythm with rests, slowly fading away into nothing. (Might not be possible on the piano or other instruments.) At some moment the brain will start to "complete" the sound, even though by that point you're playing too softly to hear. Catch that feeling, expand on it. When you can "do" several different notes, try playing a simple melody and hearing it afterwards. After you're comfortable with that, try to hear a simple major scale without playing it immediately beforehand. Then work from unfamiliar sheet music without playing it - solfege-sing in your mind - by now I can do this quite easily. And so on.
As a trained musician with a vivid aural imagination, I find this idea to be hilarious. Totally. Risky? Really? What could possibly be risky about practicing a skill that others possess in much greater quantities, due to the same sort of practice?
Is your example with curing hallucinations supposed to impart the idea that getting hallucinations is OK, since they can be cured or worked around anyway? That's bullshit.
No, it was intended to impart the idea that the primary difference between imagination and hallucination is whether you can tell the difference between the two. NLP latched on to this distinction from Erickson's example, and have since noted that skill in a wide variety of achievements (music, baseball, golf, interior design) rely on various forms of visual or auditory hallucination, and that these hallucinations are behaviorarlly indistinguishable from the hallucinations of crazy people. (Same eye movements/focal changes, same breathing/posture/ shifts, etc.)
The only difference they've been able to find is that the crazy people don't know when they're hallucinating, but they can be taught to do so.
IOW, distinguishing imagination from reality appears to be a learned skill, just like learning to imagine things on purpose.
No, it was intended to impart the idea that the primary difference between imagination and hallucination is whether you can tell the difference between the two.
Yes, very yes! Talking to oneself is considered to be a sign of madness in folk psychology, but in actuality everyone talks to themselves constantly and merely represses the exterior component of this discussion to an incomplete degree. (The nerves of the larynx still react, making it theoretically possible to 'read someone's mind' by examining the electrical activity of the throat.)
People who hear voices aren't fundamentally different from normal people, except that they attribute their own internal thoughts to other entities instead of perceiving them to be self-generated. There's actually very little reason to think that the auditory system of such people acts differently.
"As soon as I notice it, it will go away."
Wow, you are blessed. When I hear sounds in my head, whether remembered or imagined, I feel as though I literally hear them. They are not merely background noise... on some days all of the music in my head gets so loud I just can't think straight and I have to find a way to silence my inner world. When I hear a melody, even in isolation, I hear full harmonization in my mind, which is why if I start singing along with a friend I have to work at sticking to the melody and not expressing the accompanying harmonies I hear in my mind. Because hearing them so vividly while knowing the sensory sells in my choclea are not vibrating accordingly is sometimes frustrating, thus by creating phsyical expressions of the sounds I hear in my mind, I reconcile my external reality and my internal reality. All this, too, is anecdotal evidence, and evidence of perhaps nothing more than my own strangeness.
I wonder if the typical mind fallacy explains some of the varying philosophical views on personal identity.
I personally have a very strong sense of personal identity. On introspection I can definitely see that I possess certain characteristics that I consider my personal identity. I definitely think there is a "me" that persists in time.
Of course, introspection isn't very reliable, so I examined old home videos of me as a child, and things I had written when I was little. It wasn't hard at all to notice many characteristics that I still possess today. The child version of me had a similar personality, quirks, interests, values, and so on. He was obviously a "younger me," not a different person.
However, I've heard other people argue that personal identity is obviously an illusion, that you aren't the same person you were in the past. Such views seemed obviously insane to me at first, but it occurred to me that maybe other people lack the same sense of connectedness to their past self that I did. Maybe the philosophers who have argued against, or partially against personal identity (Hume, Parfit, and Giles for instance), have very weak senses of self. ...
I think clever people are especially susceptible to the belief that their perceptions are typical. Let's say you can't visualize images in your mind, but your coworker insists that he can. Since you're not a brain scientist, you can't verify whether he's right or whether he's just misinterpreted the question. However, the last few times you had a disagreement with him on a verifiable subject, you were vindicated by the facts, so you can only assume that you are right this time as well. Add to that the fact that people's stated perceptions and preferences are frequently dishonest (because of signaling), and it's very easy to mistrust them.
One useful first step to overcoming this bias is to compare one's results on a test like UVA's Moral Foundations Questionnaire here to other segments of the population.
However, it's not enough to just learn the facts about how other people perceive the world; sometimes one has to experience them firsthand. I have always been an ambitious high achiever and used to get frustrated and confused by people who were not able to follow through with their goals. However, a few years back I had an adverse reaction to a medication, and experienced for a few h...
This reminds me of some of the literature on fallibility of introspection. (If you have time only for one essay, read "The Unreliability of Naïve Introspection" and try the experiment with the playing card.)
As far as generalizing about an entire gender: It's extremely likely that I know a wildly unrepresentative sample of women, but why would you assume that the pickup artists don't? I imagine they meet vast numbers of women, but if they find them all at parties and clubs and bars, they're going to meet the kinds of women who go to parties and clubs and bars, not the ones who spend their time gardening at home or who go to all-women gyms to avoid being hit on or the ones who play D&D with their brothers in the basement. Even if their statements are accurate about that sort of woman (which I am not yet prepared to believe), that doesn't make them applicable to the entire gender, and the stereotype remains wildly inappropriate and offensive. If you're hearing things about men as a group that don't apply to you or any men you know, then chances are you're not hearing from someone who has a really ideal sample. If a female friend of mine complains about her sixth boyfriend in a row being a jerk, I don't conclude that men are jerks, I conclude that she has terrible taste.
...which I am not yet prepared to believe...
...wildly inappropriate and offensive...
Alicorn, are you applying the virtue of evenness, and searching equally for evidence for and against your conclusions? I mean, is your aim solely to get an accurate answer?
For myself, I find that phrases like “not yet prepared to believe” are a tip-off, when I notice them in my own thinking, that... I’m looking for permission to keep believing a pleasant, socially useful, or otherwise convenient belief, rather than really trying to figure out what’s true. I’m thinking “but the evidence doesn’t yet force me to change my mind, or at least I can see it that way!” instead of asking “what’s most likely to be true? what clues can I draw from the evidence? what models are most likely to help me make accurate predictions in the future?”.
Ditto for terms like “offensive”, if applied to peoples’ anticipations about the world (matters of truth and falsity) rather than to peoples’ non-belief actions. If what you mean by “offensive” is that you suspect folks’ beliefs here are stemming from emotional biases, it is okay to say that, and to explain the causes of your beliefs about their biases. If what y...
They don't find them all at parties and clubs and bars. There's a whole raft of material on 'day game' - approaches in non-obvious places like bookshops, grocery stores, museums, the high street, etc. which are designed in part to reach women who are unlikely to be encountered in clubs and bars.
One of the reasons the seduction community has been a topic on less wrong is the application of rationality to success in everyday life. If there is any significant subset of desirable women who are not easily approached then someone in the seduction community will have tried to figure out a way to engineer an approach opportunity. If there are a lot of attractive single gardeners in the world then there is probably a blog somewhere that extols the virtues of garden centres as potentially fruitful pickup venues.
You can argue that the consensus judgement of the community as to what constitutes an attractive/desirable woman is flawed but to the extent that the 'hard to reach' women you describe are considered desirable, the likelihood is that someone will have tried to figure out how to reach them effectively.
You're right.
The success of pickup artist techniques only prove that there are enough women who are vulnerable to them to keep pickup artists in business. Same with any stereotypes about males. If my post implied there was strong evidence that such people were in a majority, that was an error. Although I think if these women were too small of a minority, the PUAs would alter their techniques to ones that worked on a more representative sample of women (assuming they're rational; I don't know any, but people in this community seem to have a high opinion of them.)
I think the general point that we're too unwilling to believe there are significant groups of people who think differently from ourselves still stands, though, whether it's closer to 20% or 60%.
It struck me that I think you can still see the imagination debate playing out today. Consider the following conversation, which most people will have encountered a variant of at least once+:
-- Mr. Highbrow: It is better to read books than watch movies based on them. The movies limit you to someone else's perspective on the material, but the book gives maximum reign to your imagination.
-- Mr. Lowbrow: What are you smoking? The movie is an immersive experience that makes me feel like I'm really in the story. The book is just somebody else's description of the story.
Having thought about it, my highest-probability hypothesis is now that Mr. HB has more vivid mental imagery than does Mr. LB. Further introspection led me to realize that when I read fiction, I often have very specific images of places and scenery, but usually only vague impressions of faces. When I watch film adaptions, I'm often struck that the setting is "wrong," but rarely have that feeling about the appearance of people (unless the actors are grossly divergent from the description of them in the book).++
++ I considered putting this in the "How is your mind different" thread, but I don't know how typical or atypical I am. Which is, I suppose, the point.
The response I hear from most of the women I know is that this is complete balderdash and women aren't like that at all. So what's going on?
I think asking people directly is the wrong approach. Both men and women are good at rationalizing and you never hear someone admitting: "Yes, I'm an asshole." You really have to observe how people actually behave and the more I open my eyes I see that there is a lot of wisdom in the seduction community.
I'm an asshole. That's one of the unpleasant truths about myself that I've had to face because of OB/LW. How I long for the days of blissful ignorance when I thought I was a friend to mankind!
Of course, now that I realize it, I can try to effect some changes, so the rest of the world benefits. Everything is moving according to Eliezer's plan...
The women I ask about this are not even remotely close to being a representative sample of all women. They're the kind of women whom a shy and somewhat geeky guy knows and talks about psychology with.
This is why I find pickup theory so incomprehensible. It all seems to be aimed at people looking for sex in bars. I don't know anyone who does this (at least to my knowledge), so I have no mental model for how it works. I'm pretty sure the methods advocated would not work on me or most people I know, but I trust pickup artists to be right about how it works on people who hang out in bars.
You are mistaking all pickup theory for a subset of pickup theory that happens to be very effective at picking up at bars. Due to the nature of the beast (picking up in bars) it also tends to be the pickup theory that is the least politically correct... and therefore receives the most attention outside of the pickup community.
If you don't go to clubs you are probably right that the routines in the Mystery Method probably wouldn't work on you... they make sense in the club where they don't seem out of place and are congruent with the general atmosphere. Those same methods attempted in some situations would seem incongruent... like the guy has no social awareness. A lack of social awareness being unattractive is as close to a universal rule of attraction as you can get.
Read pickup theory related to social situations that you generally find yourself in - You'll probably find that guys that you have found yourself attracted to in the past acted at least partly in accordance with that theory.
John T. Molloy once paid actors to go into bars and try to get women's phone numbers. One group of actors he asked to act confident. A second group of actors he asked to act arrogant. The actors asked to act arrogant were more successful. (Described in Molloy's 1975 book Dress for Success.)
Of course, as Alicorn says, the population of women who go to bars and talk to strange men might not be representative of all single women.
2. According to Galton, people incapable of forming images were overrepresented in math and science. I've since heard that this idea has been challenged, but I can't access the study.
The challenging paper: Brewer and Schommer-Aikins (2006)
Abstract:
...In 1880, Galton carried out an investigation of imagery in a sample of distinguished men and a sample of nonscientists (adolescent male students). He concluded that scientists were either totally lacking in visual imagery or had “feeble” powers of mental imagery. This finding has been widely accepted in the secondary literature in psychology. A replication of Galton’s study with modern scientists and modern university undergraduates found no scientists totally lacking in visual imagery and very few with feeble visual imagery. Examination of Galton’s published data shows that his own published data do not support his claims about deficient visual imagery in scientists. The modern data for scientists and nonscientists and the 1880 data for scientists and nonscientists are in agreement in showing that all groups report substantial imagery on recollective memory tasks such as Galton’s breakfast questionnaire. We conclude that Galton’s co
This post completely takes the wind out of the sails of a post I was planning to make on 'Self-Induced Biases' where one mistakes the environment one has chosen for themselves as being, in some sense, 'typical' and then derives lots of bad mental statistics from this. Thus, chess fanatics will tend to think that chess is much more popular than it is, since all their friends like chess, disregarding the fact that they chose those friends (at least partly) based on a commonality of interests.
A worse case is when the police start to think that everyone is a criminal because that's all they ever seem to meet.
"There was a wide spectrum of imaging ability, from about five percent of people with perfect eidetic imagery to three percent of people completely unable to form mental images."
Yesterday I was surprised to learn that my wife can barely see afterimages. I was watching a lecture where the green, yellow & black American flag appears, you stare at it, and then it goes away and an afterimage of the real red white & blue one appears. She couldn't see it after 4 tries. Then I told her to stare at a lightbulb for several seconds and look away. She still didn't see anything. Staring at it even longer produced a weak afterimage that she could only just barely see if she closed her eyes.
It's great that Less Wrong is getting so many PUAs, but why oh why must we have so many PUAs and so few salesmen?
Not only would the latter be more female friendly, it would be useful to a larger set of readers.
so many PUAs and so few salesmen?
That's an unnatural comparison. It's obvious why there are more men-who-date than salesmen, here, or anywhere. PUA is an approach to dating for people who are highly analytic. Such people probably avoid sales in the first place, leading to the lack of an analytic approach to sales. But, as Sailer always asks: why don't introverted analytic people, once they've learned to think about psychology in dating move on to do the same thing in sales?
There are people who study sales, such as in business schools. But they are probably much more like the typical salesmen than the people here and there are probably serious barriers to communication, just as many men who become PUA were unable to understand the usual descriptions of dating. I think that analytic people ought to be able to do better, but it may take a lot of work to reach the state of the art.
The implication of your last sentence is that everyone has to do some sales. That's true, but most people don't want to admit it. Intelligent people, especially verbal ones are too easily distracted from how the world actually works by verbal descriptions thereof. I think that the main point of PUA is to replace conventional verbal descriptions with other verbal descriptions. But denying convention is highly offensive.
Maybe it's a result of the bias towards computer programmers here, a group that generally has little trouble finding people willing to pay them good money for their professional services but more trouble finding women willing to talk to them.
"Lives without imagery - Congenital aphantasia", Zeman et al 2015
...In 2010 we reported a particularly 'pure' case of imagery generation disorder, in a 65 year old man who became unable to summon images to the mind's eye after coronary angioplasty (Zeman et al., 2010). Following a popular description of our paper (Zimmer, 2010), we were contacted by over twenty individuals who recognised themselves in the article's account of 'blind imagination', with the important difference that their imagery impairment had been lifelong. Here we describe the f
Good post; as another example, I read recently that many people never experience an emotion that some other people conceptualize as romantic love. Don't know if it's true though.
ETA: changed "the" to "an" after Phil's reply.
I wonder if there is any correlation to be found between (1) people having strong eidetic imagery and (2) people reporting seeing ghosts, UFOs, being abducted by aliens...
Isn't there an equally well-known bias toward thinking we'll react differently to future events (or behave differently) than most people? That is, we observe that most people don't become happier when they become rich, but we convince ourselves that we're "different" enough that we nonetheless will? I think Dan Gilbert wrote pretty extensively on this in of those recent "happiness studies" books. Anyway, it seems like there's an obvious tension between the two tendencies.
I have no ability to create images in a "mind's eye". I read of a Neuro-Linguistic Programming technique, which suggested that one try to imagine a very simple image, such as a cloudless sky, the sea (no ships or other coastline) and a beach. So, two lines, the shore and the horizon. I tried this without success.
The response I hear from most of the women I know is that this is complete balderdash and women aren't like that at all. So what's going on?
While your point about your unrepresentitive sample is an interesting one, my suspicion is that that effect may be overshadowed by another. My general policy for dealing with people is that I always trust what people do, not what they say. This is particularly true when it comes to people with power and the execution of power plays in general. Sexual instincts and the drives for power and status are closely linked a...
This is indeed a cached thought, but it's mostly wrong.
Men who are introverted, sensitive, and Agreeable often make this complaint, yet they tend to perceive men without those qualities as "jerks." So, "women only like jerks" really means something like "women like men with personalities different from mine."
The observation that "women only like jerks," while untrue, is unsurprising given a well documented female preference for masculine traits in the psychological literature (cites upon request). Feminists may find this notion politically difficult, and feminists themselves might atypically dislike masculine traits in men and project their preferences onto other women via the Typical Psyche Fallacy.
Men who are introverted, sensitive, and Agreeable often make this complaint, yet they tend to perceive men without those qualities as "jerks."
The PUA community also notes that many of the men who make this complaint are in fact passive-aggressively misogynistic and/or fearful of women, and that they need to get over it.
That is, some men who have "nice" behaviors towards women do so because they are enacting a one-sided bargain, expecting to trade these behaviors in exchange for being accepted and not rejected, then become angry when the "bargain" isn't kept.
IOW, being "nice" can be just as manipulative for the typical AFC, as anything the PUAs are going to teach him. And many of the things they'll teach him will be far less manipulative and deceitful than what he was already doing, despite being less socially acceptable than being "nice".
Could you please reference this. "There was a wide spectrum of imaging ability, from about five percent of people with perfect eidetic imagery1 to three percent of people completely unable to form mental images." The footnotes contain no references, and in my mind is the most extraordinary claim of the article.
As a teenager dealing with the already weighty bias against arguments originating in youth, the typical mind fallacy has proved a constant and grating annoyance. Nothing in my (admittedly short) life is quite as frustrating as trying to explain a concept to someone who doesn't understand how it is that I understand the concept in the first place. In future I intend to refer my friends and instructors to this and other articles with the hope of clarification, so for that I thank you.
My theory is that the women in this case are committing a Typical Psyche Fallacy. The women I ask about this are not even remotely close to being a representative sample of all women. They're the kind of women whom a shy and somewhat geeky guy knows and talks about psychology with. Likewise, the type of women who publish strong opinions about this on the Internet aren't close to a representative sample. They're well-educated women who have strong opinions about gender issues and post about them on blogs.
What statistical evidence do you have for this cla...
This explains the poor luck of "nice guys," but if Yvain knows the acquaintances in question to be actual nice guys, then it resolves nothing.
When people think about "Nice guys who can't get a date," they tend to recall self proclaimed nice guys publicly railing against the unfairness, rather than thinking of all the legitimately nice people they know, and thinking if they've ever known them to go on dates. This doesn't mean that "nice guys" actually outnumber genuinely nice dateless guys.
Relating to the quotation: bearing in mind that the character and author are not the same, it might be more accurate to write (judging by my secret sources, and following the TV Tropes quoting convention):
Vlad Taltos: "I'm generalizing from one example, here, but everyone generalizes from one example. At least, I do."
-- Stephen Brust, Issola
Edit: It seems that one or two people agree - I'm PMing Yvain now.
Does anyone know if those incapable of forming mental images are also unable to have dreams while sleeping? Do they not hallucinate under sensory deprivation? It seems like anyone capable of vision, should have no problem stimulating those same neurons in reverse (thinking about the neocortex as presented by Hawkins). I recognize I'm exhibiting the very bias presented here, but find it hard to believe this isn't a learnable skill that can be developed through practice.
I feel similarly about noise tolerance. I spent many afternoons reading in a busy cof...
I can't consciously form mental images, but I have no problem daydreaming images which seem to come to my mind randomly, and I do sometimes have vivid dreams.
I have something like this experience. I can visualize schematic or geometrical images pretty well. But when it comes to textural detail, one thing slips away when I try to visualize the next. I can visualize a wagon wheel spinning in space, but if I try to add the grain of the wood or gradients in the lighting, it doesn't work. I can visualize a green lawn as seen from high above, but if I try to visualize the different blades of grass as they'd appear at standing height, I can't hold onto the details.
But all this changes when I'm dreaming or about to fall asleep. In fact, one way I can tell that I'm about to fall asleep is that I find myself able to visualize that lawn, or many pebbles at the bottom of a clear brook, or other such texture-rich visual tableaux.
ETA: In the couple nights since I wrote this comment, I decided to try inducing sleep by forcing myself to visualize things like grass and pebbles in detail. It seems to work remarkably well. I've stopped taking the melatonin pills that I'd been relying on.
Playing a game in the head doesn't guarantee visual modality.
Right. In fact, chess is the perfect example here.
Many chess grandmasters are famous for being able to recall perfectly games and board positions from years or decades ago, but there are also (somewhat) famous studies to the effect that their recall drops to normal when given random board positions. If their recall is due to a 'mental image', the mental image is certainly not a 64x64 pixelized grid but something quite different.
I think the problem with mental imagery is that the concept is poorly formed. "I don't experience images" and "I experience vivid images" would apply about equally to my own experience of mental imagery. On the one hand my only way of talking about them, thanks to the long standing and highly flawed theory vision that portrays it as "pictures in the head," is as "images." On the other hand it's nothing at all like picture viewing. I can easily get "lost" in mental imagery while reading a book but at the sam...
See also http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/17/what-universal-human-experiences-are-you-missing-without-realizing-it/ Claimed negative examples include forms of colorblindness, foods tasting good, anosmia, dyspraxia, prosopagnosia, lust, rape, art, mouth-breathing (rather than being able to breath through a nose), various kinds of social dysfunctionality/theory-of-mind failure; and positive ones: bodily awareness, autobiographical memory, perfect pitch, inner monologues or choruses, and mostly kinds of synaesthesia.
These differences of thought-process are fascinating, suggesting some attributes of a person's mental landscape can be completely different from our own. Unfortunately this makes it very difficult to properly empathise with people in very different mental states. I know someone who is anorexic and it is incredibly easy to fail to grasp the difficulties and think "just eat something" because their problem is entirely removed from my experiences. This happens despite the fact I know driven, productive people would say the same about my extreme akra...
Yvain:
Some points.
The typical mind fallacy sounds just like the "Mind Projection Fallacy," or the empathy gap. It's a fascinating issue.
You sound like you have Asperger tendencies: introverted, geeky, cerebral, sensitivity to loud noise. Interestingly, people with Asperger's are famously bad at empathizing; i.e. more likely to commit the Mind Projection Fallacy. This may be one reason why we find the fallacy so fascinating: we've been burned by it before (as you relate in your post), and seem uniquely vulnerable to it.
A classic example of the typical mind fallacy: everyone has an internal monologue.
Actually, no, they don't: https://irisreading.com/how-do-i-know-if-i-have-an-inner-monologue/
I'd expect nearly every LW'er talks to themselves, likely constantly. I certainly believed everyone had an inner monologue for most of my life, until the idea that people don't started spreading around the internet a few years ago. Both parties were shocked that the other existed (myself included).
It makes me wonder just how many other things are out there like this.
Having considered this, I'm going to take a more evidence based approach to my political positions. I suppose some of my libertarian leanings come from the belief that I can better manage myself than the government, but this may not be true for all people. Thanks.
My theory is that the women in this case are committing a Typical Psyche Fallacy. The women I ask about this are not even remotely close to being a representative sample of all women. They're the kind of women whom a shy and somewhat geeky guy knows and talks about psychology with. Likewise, the type of women who publish strong opinions about this on the Internet aren't close to a representative sample. They're well-educated women who have strong opinions about gender issues and post about them on blogs.
This might apply to all "writer phenotypes" in general. Perhaps there are other romanticized ideas about human nature that stem from a bias of this sort?
Synchronicity: this is one of the best things I have ever read in life, yet my life had to come to this point in order to appreciate what I was reading. Thanks muchly. :)
Interesting.
How did the surveys work, though? ie, just wondering what sorts of questions were asked that actually helped Galton figure out to what extent they had visual imagination. (as opposed to whether they just thought they did)
Re footnote 3: My guesses were 95% and 50%. I accept the figure for shop-lifting but I'm still completely sure one third of students never cheating is untrue.
My automatic assumption is actually the opposite. Assume other people do not think the same way I do and that I cannot model them by tweaking a self-model. I then sometimes need to weaken this assumption if my other models aren't up to the task.
Which, oddly enough, makes the Typical Mind Fallacy an instance of itself.
Great post. This might be the one thing that I'd wish more people would realize.
(Out of curiosity, what were the creative versus ordinary teaching methods you tried? Just wanting to see if I'm a similiar outlier as you.)
Hey Yvain,
I'm enjoying your posts very much - so please don't be shy to digress from Rationalistic subjects.
About women and dating, I just wanted to add that you can't really trust stated preferences. (This is known as attitude-behavior gap.) Let me quote a study:
"Do women c hoos e nic e g uys? When given the choice between John, an inexperienced, nice, but somewhat shy man, and Mike, an attractive, fun man who had had sex with 10 women, 54% of the women reported that they would prefer John as a date. Twent y-eight percent reported they would equ...
What strikes me is the complete lack of reference to studies with falsifiable measurements in the bazillion responses. I would have thought that with all the compulsive analyzers on the list, someone would know about more serious studies. Is it possible that such studies really haven't been done?
Galton asked people what they saw, but reading the paper briefly, it seemed that he relied on self reported descriptions of scenes, but didn't require any evidence that the descriptions were true. Experiments would seem straightforward enough. Show a picture. Test ...
Hi, I am new here. Great find. Mental differences interest me greatly. As does variety in emotional experience and processing- since we relate not only as mental beings. Much personal reflection for the last while on interpersonal dynamics, and POV and understanding others. It seems to me that the psychological equivilant of this "one example is all" mentality is the current pop psych fashion of "projection"- express pretty much any relational difficulty and someone will offer the brilliant insight that projection is at play.
Fantastic post. I think this one may be something of an instant classic. And, perhaps most importantly, a guide post we can point ourselves to when writing posts for LW and say "hey, now let's make sure I didn't do that".
Or to summarize, as one blogger aptly put it, "your model of the individual is very likely based on you." Her extrapolation is that people should be very up front in their arguments about how they model other people. Unfortunately for the philosophers, this is harder to do the more nuanced the debate.
We are secrets to each other Each one's life a novel no-one else has read
http://www.kovideo.net/lyrics/r/Rush/Entre-Nous.html
Excellent post.
I didn't find the results about cheating and shoplifting surprising, but that tracks with my friend group at the time. That said, I was curious about whether there's a gender discrepancy in shoplifting (there's not), and found a large 2002 survey which gives 11% as the lifetime incidence of shoplifting in the U.S.
Isn't there an example on Less Wrong? Yudkowsky assumed that, given a few clues, people would come by their own efforts to his "solution" to Free Will, a form of compatibilism. But they didn't and he was "forced to write it out in full". Presumably they didn't match his expectation because they had whatever values and intutiions that regularly make people choose other "solutions" such as scepticism and incompatibilist indeterminism. He assumed they would think similarly and they didn't.
When I read the percentage who had cheated on an exam, I started to call BS in my mind, knowing that if I, being among the smartest in my class back in high school, had cheated, surely the rest of the bell curve had too (After all, the only way of getting this data is unreliable self-report surveys.), but then I realized what a perfect example of this fallacy I was making.
"Who as far as I can tell are with few exceptions the sort of people who are extreme outliers on every psychometric test ever invented."
I perform at the SD 1 level on IQ tests, and I enjoy this website very much. An example of the "typical less-wronger" fallacy, perhaps? Edit: "with few exceptions" is a caveat, but likely not a large enough one. There are surely many people like me lurking here, because are many more SD 1 performers in the population than there are outliers.
When I close my eyes, even if I happen to be in ...
"three percent of people completely unable to form mental images" I don't have photographic memory or anything, but I find it hard to believe some people don't actually have immaginations. How could they even go through every day life? Somethings got to be wrong here. Kind of reminds me of those people that can't dream in color. Weird.
Hi, new here.
I am utterly incapable of forming voluntary mental images, and experience very faint involuntary ones only occasionally, during the hypnagogic state when falling asleep. (I used to practice at manipulating these, but made no headway.) I do experience afterimages, and I must be encoding information in a 'visual format' somewhere, because I can rotate molecular models (for example) in my mind with no problem, and get a very faint disturbance in my visual field when I do so.
Yet I do dream, sometimes quite vividly. Dreams are pretty much the only time I see something purely in my mind. I once experienced bizarre visual hallucinations due to a side-effect of medication, and they struck me as being quite dreamlike.
I suspect that my incapacity for mental imagery was strongly influenced by the fact I was born blind, and had no usable vision until the age of three. However, so far as I know, that doesn't explain my incapacity for other kinds of sensory imagination.
I am a fairly skilled singer, with a good pitch sense, yet I would not say I can 'hear a tune in my head'. Rather my experience is that I 'just know' what intervals sound like, how the tune flows. I can hum or ...
I am 100% bereft of mental imagery in a waking state of consciousness (I have fully sensory dreams when I sleep). It is dark and quiet in my mind all the time. Thoughts take the form of silently talking to myself. There are only words. No visual memory, no imagination -- I don't know what these things are, they are only words. Seeing things in the mind, hearing things, re-experiencing, exploring non-physical possibilities via imagination: these all sound like paranormal or supernatural experiences to me, literally, because what is normal and natural for me is the dark and quiet mind.
I find it fascinating how the Typical Mind Fallacy works both ways here: many mentally blind people say that they had no idea that other people could actually see pictures in the mind -- this sounds so preposterous to us that, until some point when we break through our denial, we believe that people are speaking metaphorically about the "mind's eye" or "picturing" something... because obviously it's impossible! And the scientific community is largely unaware of the existence of non-imagers, because whenever they show up as research subjects, their self-reports of mental blin...
That's the really sad part: no mental imagery with hallucinogens! Peyote, ayahuasca: nada, my hopes were dashed. The only effects with peyote, in meetings of the Native American Church, were a sense of connection and surrender, but there was nothing in terms of enhanced cognition. With ayahuasca, with a Huni Kuin shaman in Brazil, my mind dissolved into a state of bliss, but there was no imagery whatsoever -- my mind was as dark as always.
My first ayahuasca ceremony was a personal healing for me, to rewire my brain and activate the missing part of my mind. I felt like there were psychedelic shapes coming into my head but I couldn't see them; it was like knowing that something is there in the dark. It reminds me of when I gave a massage to a deaf client, who told me that she could feel the music during the massage and almost thought she was hearing it, but she couldn't actually hear it. It gave my brain something to work with, it was the start of the rewiring process. I could feel the brain working hard to learn how to see, but it didn't happen. No sense of journeying, just sitting in a state of nothingness.
My second ayahuasca experience, the following day with the same s...
Hi Christina, I learn by memorizing words about things: verbal descriptions, procedures, narratives. There are a lot of things that I don't try to learn because my mind can't accommodate them effectively in words, e.g. abstract subjects like biochemistry and physics. There are a lot of things that I have to relearn from scratch again and again, such as medicinal properties of herbs, or the names and locations and characteristics of acupressure points. If a procedure is very complicated or hard to describe in words (too many words to memorize), I just don't have a way to learn it. I am much more effective at learning hands-on things than learning about things that I can't see (which is why I am a massage therapist and not a physicist!)
There is some motor memory, but only when I have performed an action often enough for it to become automatic, e.g. riding a bike. As a massage therapist, I studied Esalen massage, where the therapist is not working in a premeditated way -- there is no sequence of moves like Swedish massage, rather exploring and listening and responding to the body in a fairly ad hoc way. There is one Esalen massage procedure that I would love to do but could neve...
I find it interesting that some folks have mental imagery and others don't, because this possibility had never occurred to me despite having varying ability with this at different times. My mental imagery is far more vivid and detailed when I'm asleep than when I'm awake, which I've often wondered about.
Surely eidetic imagery isn't absolute. Who can imagine a sine curve and then zoom in on the least positive root in order to calculate pi? Less than five percent of people, I would think.
I have cheated on tests.
Not very successfully.
The problem is sometimes you actually learn more by cheating, because making strategies on how to cheat actually makes you remember more.
Its actually creative activity.
Also sometimes cheating actually made me able to remember the stuff more as it gave me a chance.
On other hand the long term benefits of cheating are tiny.
Obviously the best strategy is to learn, cheating or not.
The key important thing is whether cheating is viable strategy in real life.
On other hand cheating is kind of ambiguous conce...
Hi, I am new here. Great find. Mental differences interest me greatly. As does variety in emotional experience and processing- since we relate not only as mental beings. Much personal reflection for the last while on interpersonal dynamics, and POV and understanding others. It seems to me that the psychological equivilant of this "one example is all" mentality is the current pop psych fashion of "projection"- express pretty much any relational difficulty and someone will offer the brilliant insight that projection is at play.
Is there any research about changing minds? My visualization detail has improved over the last few months--any known and documented cases of that happening?
And on the note of cheating and shoplifting, my guess was 3/4 and 1/4. I never stole, but was aware of others who did. There seemed to be much overlap between the two groups...and of course I never cheated...in classes that matter...
Never knew that this is an actual phenomena. I just made up a fictitious world to put my point in my blog below: http://ponderingsofanidlephilosopher.blogspot.com/2010/01/your-red-my-green.html
After reading this last week I myself have a typical mind fallacy problem. I hadn't realized that other people really didn't do everything the way that I did, but after becoming aware that they might I realized that, indeed, I was much more different than others.
I don't think there are any implications about qualia; the concept there is incoherent, whereas 'mental images' aren't.
Even so, I don't think the concept is very useful. What's the difference between forming a mental image, and forming the concept of what properties an image would have in great detail?
With the tiger example: are the 'eidetic imagers' really generating a picture (or the neurological equivalent of such), or is it just that their minds fill out the properties of what they're asked to imagine in far more detail than was requested?
If I ask yo...
Haha, I just had a funny thought about how we can accidently generalize this fallacy from itself and try applying it to everything. The only example I could think of was noticing that I am different from you and jumping to the conclusion that my surprise was because I was falling for the Typical Psyche Fallacy when all I have is one example. So, I guess, there will be cases where there you are smack in the middle-average of things?
Anyway, I thought it was interesting. Can anyone come up with a better example? Am I just babbling to myself?
Good post and important issues: How similar are other human minds to my own? How can I discuss academically what other minds should/should not do/believe if they are so different from my own? It is much like trying to argue over aesthetics of a colored art piece to a person born blind.
It would be constructive to be able to deduce which attributes a person has and which they're lacking, and in what proportions.
Hi, I am new here. Great find. Mental differences interest me greatly. As does variety in emotional experience and processing- since we relate not only as mental beings. Much personal reflection for the last while on interpersonal dynamics, and POV and understanding others. It seems to me that the psychological equivilant of this "one example is all" mentality is the current pop psych fashion of "projection"- express pretty much any relational difficulty and someone will offer the brilliant insight that projection is at play.
Probably from being born twin I've long entertained a strong intuition that may be written down as "suppose is typical your choice together with what determines it, and take responsibility for the result". There is a temptation to relate it to Kant's imperative, but there are problems (typically) illustrated by the fact that is obvious the relationship of my version to the topic of this page, while not Kant's.
"The response I hear from most of the women I know is that this is complete balderdash and women aren't like that at all. So what's going on?"
How many times have you had women tell you that all men are jerks or are stupid and then observe them seek out ONLY men who are jerks or are stupid and avoid men who are "nice" or "smart".
Revealed preference beats opinion polls every time.
P.S. There is currently a comment on my Facebook feed claiming that men are stupid. What is your prior probability distribution that she seeks out men who are stupid while avoiding smart men?
Regarding differences in mental imagery: only this winter did I really understand that good musicians have vivid aural imagination, while I couldn't hear any sounds in my head, period. Immediately after this realization I started exercising. By now I can hear complete monophonic melodies, and (on good days) imagine two notes sounding at the same time. Classically trained conductors can imagine a complete orchestral sound while reading sheet music. I don't see any reason why visual imagination can't be similarly trained.
Wow, thanks for sharing! I had been taking my ability to imagine sounds completely for granted and now I find myself appreciating this ability.
Related to: The Psychological Unity of Humankind, Instrumental vs. Epistemic: A Bardic Perspective
"Everyone generalizes from one example. At least, I do."
-- Vlad Taltos (Issola, Steven Brust)
My old professor, David Berman, liked to talk about what he called the "typical mind fallacy", which he illustrated through the following example:
There was a debate, in the late 1800s, about whether "imagination" was simply a turn of phrase or a real phenomenon. That is, can people actually create images in their minds which they see vividly, or do they simply say "I saw it in my mind" as a metaphor for considering what it looked like?
Upon hearing this, my response was "How the stars was this actually a real debate? Of course we have mental imagery. Anyone who doesn't think we have mental imagery is either such a fanatical Behaviorist that she doubts the evidence of her own senses, or simply insane." Unfortunately, the professor was able to parade a long list of famous people who denied mental imagery, including some leading scientists of the era. And this was all before Behaviorism even existed.
The debate was resolved by Francis Galton, a fascinating man who among other achievements invented eugenics, the "wisdom of crowds", and standard deviation. Galton gave people some very detailed surveys, and found that some people did have mental imagery and others didn't. The ones who did had simply assumed everyone did, and the ones who didn't had simply assumed everyone didn't, to the point of coming up with absurd justifications for why they were lying or misunderstanding the question. There was a wide spectrum of imaging ability, from about five percent of people with perfect eidetic imagery1 to three percent of people completely unable to form mental images2.
Dr. Berman dubbed this the Typical Mind Fallacy: the human tendency to believe that one's own mental structure can be generalized to apply to everyone else's.
He kind of took this idea and ran with it. He interpreted certain passages in George Berkeley's biography to mean that Berkeley was an eidetic imager, and that this was why the idea of the universe as sense-perception held such interest to him. He also suggested that experience of consciousness and qualia were as variable as imaging, and that philosophers who deny their existence (Ryle? Dennett? Behaviorists?) were simply people whose mind lacked the ability to easily experience qualia. In general, he believed philosophy of mind was littered with examples of philosophers taking their own mental experiences and building theories on them, and other philosophers with different mental experiences critiquing them and wondering why they disagreed.
The formal typical mind fallacy is about serious matters of mental structure. But I've also run into something similar with something more like the psyche than the mind: a tendency to generalize from our personalities and behaviors.
For example, I'm about as introverted a person as you're ever likely to meet - anyone more introverted than I am doesn't communicate with anyone. All through elementary and middle school, I suspected that the other children were out to get me. They kept on grabbing me when I was busy with something and trying to drag me off to do some rough activity with them and their friends. When I protested, they counter-protested and told me I really needed to stop whatever I was doing and come join them. I figured they were bullies who were trying to annoy me, and found ways to hide from them and scare them off.
Eventually I realized that it was a double misunderstanding. They figured I must be like them, and the only thing keeping me from playing their fun games was that I was too shy. I figured they must be like me, and that the only reason they would interrupt a person who was obviously busy reading was that they wanted to annoy him.
Likewise: I can't deal with noise. If someone's being loud, I can't sleep, I can't study, I can't concentrate, I can't do anything except bang my head against the wall and hope they stop. I once had a noisy housemate. Whenever I asked her to keep it down, she told me I was being oversensitive and should just mellow out. I can't claim total victory here, because she was very neat and kept yelling at me for leaving things out of place, and I told her she needed to just mellow out and you couldn't even tell that there was dust on that dresser anyway. It didn't occur to me then that neatness to her might be as necessary and uncompromisable as quiet was to me, and that this was an actual feature of how our minds processed information rather than just some weird quirk on her part.
"Just some weird quirk on her part" and "just being oversensitive" are representative of the problem with the typical psyche fallacy, which is that it's invisible. We tend to neglect the role of differently-built minds in disagreements, and attribute the problems to the other side being deliberately perverse or confused. I happen to know that loud noise seriously pains and debilitates me, but when I say this to other people they think I'm just expressing some weird personal preference for quiet. Think about all those poor non-imagers who thought everyone else was just taking a metaphor about seeing mental images way too far and refusing to give it up.
And the reason I'm posting this here is because it's rationality that helps us deal with these problems.
There's some evidence that the usual method of interacting with people involves something sorta like emulating them within our own brain. We think about how we would react, adjust for the other person's differences, and then assume the other person would react that way. This method of interaction is very tempting, and it always feels like it ought to work.
But when statistics tell you that the method that would work on you doesn't work on anyone else, then continuing to follow that gut feeling is a Typical Psyche Fallacy. You've got to be a good rationalist, reject your gut feeling, and follow the data.
I only really discovered this in my last job as a school teacher. There's a lot of data on teaching methods that students enjoy and learn from. I had some of these methods...inflicted...on me during my school days, and I had no intention of abusing my own students in the same way. And when I tried the sorts of really creative stuff I would have loved as a student...it fell completely flat. What ended up working? Something pretty close to the teaching methods I'd hated as a kid. Oh. Well. Now I know why people use them so much. And here I'd gone through life thinking my teachers were just inexplicably bad at what they did, never figuring out that I was just the odd outlier who couldn't be reached by this sort of stuff.
The other reason I'm posting this here is because I think it relates to some of the discussions of seduction that are going on in MBlume's Bardic thread. There are a lot of not-particularly-complimentary things about women that many men tend to believe. Some guys say that women will never have romantic relationships with their actually-decent-people male friends because they prefer alpha-male jerks who treat them poorly. Other guys say women want to be lied to and tricked. I could go on, but I think most of them are covered in that thread anyway.
The response I hear from most of the women I know is that this is complete balderdash and women aren't like that at all. So what's going on?
Well, I'm afraid I kind of trust the seduction people. They've put a lot of work into their "art" and at least according to their self-report are pretty successful. And unhappy romantically frustrated nice guys everywhere can't be completely wrong.
My theory is that the women in this case are committing a Typical Psyche Fallacy. The women I ask about this are not even remotely close to being a representative sample of all women. They're the kind of women whom a shy and somewhat geeky guy knows and talks about psychology with. Likewise, the type of women who publish strong opinions about this on the Internet aren't close to a representative sample. They're well-educated women who have strong opinions about gender issues and post about them on blogs.
And lest I sound chauvinistic, the same is certainly true of men. I hear a lot of bad things said about men (especially with reference to what they want romantically) that I wouldn't dream of applying to myself, my close friends, or to any man I know. But they're so common and so well-supported that I have excellent reason to believe they're true.
This post has gradually been getting less rigorous and less connected to the formal Typical Mind Fallacy. First I changed it to a Typical Psyche Fallacy so I could talk about things that were more psychological and social than mental. And now it's expanding to cover the related fallacy of believing your own social circle is at least a little representative of society at large, which it very rarely is3.
It was originally titled "The Typical Mind Fallacy", but I'm taking a hint fromt the quote and changing it to "Generalizing From One Example", because that seems to be the link between all of these errors. We only have direct first-person knowledge one one mind, one psyche, and one social circle, and we find it tempting to treat it as typical even in the face of contrary evidence.
This, I think, is especially important for the sort of people who enjoy Less Wrong, who as far as I can tell are with few exceptions the sort of people who are extreme outliers on every psychometric test ever invented.
Footnotes
1. Eidetic imagery, vaguely related to the idea of a "photographic memory", is the ability to visualize something and have it be exactly as clear, vivid and obvious as actually seeing it. My professor's example (which Michael Howard somehow remembers even though I only mentioned it once a few years ago) is that although many people can imagine a picture of a tiger, only an eidetic imager would be able to count the number of stripes.
2. According to Galton, people incapable of forming images were overrepresented in math and science. I've since heard that this idea has been challenged, but I can't access the study.
3. The example that really drove this home to me: what percent of high school students do you think cheat on tests? What percent have shoplifted? Someone did a survey on this recently and found that the answer was nobhg gjb guveqf unir purngrq naq nobhg bar guveq unir fubcyvsgrq (rot13ed so you have to actually take a guess first). This shocked me and everyone I knew, because we didn't cheat or steal during high school and we didn't know anyone who did. I spent an afternoon trying to find some proof that the study was wrong or unrepresentative and coming up with nothing.
