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GabrielDuquette comments on Rationality Quotes February 2013 - Less Wrong
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thefolksong
The first response that comes to my mind is "because if the butterfly were trying that hard to escape the kid, it would fly above the kid's reach, and the kid would give up." When I look at the scene, I see a kid chasing a butterfly, and a butterfly too stupid to realize it should flee instead of simply dodging.
Animals on the intelligence levels of butterflies (which, keep in mind, have specific mating flight patterns they use to tell other members of their species apart from things like ribbons and stray flower petals,) don't seem to even have retreat instincts, just avoidance instincts. They can't recognize persistent pursuit. A fly won't hesitate to land on a person who has been trying to swat it for minutes on end.
Because you're a human, not a butterfly. It seems like an animal that used a cognitive filter that defaulted to the latter case would take a pretty severe fitness hit.
Three things, in no particular order:
I seem to recall that, in some obscure language, each noun has an agency level and in a sentence the most agenty noun is the subject by default, unless the verb is specially inflected to show otherwise: for example, “[dog] [bite] [man]” would mean ‘a man bit a dog’, regardless of word order, because the noun “[man]” has higher agency than “[dog]”.
Would you sooner see a tiger chasing a man, or a man running away from a tiger? If the former, it's not just the fact that butterflies are not human, it's the fact that the butterflies are small.
I think that, at least in the case of the lion, it would also depend on whether the two of them are moving towards the left side or the right side of my visual field. I heard that in The Great Wave off Kanagawa the boats are intended to look more agenty than the wave, but for Western people it will typically look like the other way round (due to Western languages being written from left to right), and for a Westerner to get the right effect they'd have to look at the picture in a mirror. (It works for me, at least.)
Is this visual field orientation issue really Western vs Eastern? If so, has it evaporated lately?
One of the media that most lends itself to testing this notion is video games, since there is almost always an agent, and often a preferred direction to gameplay. In some cases, there is a lot of free movement but when you enter a new zone/approach a boss, it generally goes one way rather than the other.
Eastern games favoring left-to-right over right-to-left: Super Mario Brothers, Ninja Gaiden, Megaman, Ghosts and Goblins, Double Dragon, TMNT, River City Ransom, Sonic the Hedgehog, Gradius/Lifeforce, UN Squadron, Rygar, Contra, Codename: Viper, Faxanadu (at least, the beginning, which is all I saw), Excitebike, Zelda 2, Act Raiser, Wizards and Warriors, and Cave Story.
On the other side, Final Fantasy combat generally puts the party on to right side, facing left. That's pretty leftward-oriented for sure. And very slightly - more slightly than any of the above - Metroid. Whenever you find a major powerup, you approach it from the right. You enter Tourian (the last area) from the right, and approach all 3 full bosses from the right. Those two are all I can think of with any sort of leftward bias at all.
In the west, the only games I can think of that favor right-to-left over left-to-right are Choplifter and Solaris; also, we get slightly-leftward readings on the Atari game of The Empire Strikes Back (you go left to meet the attack, but the primary agents are the attacking walkers, which are going right, and you need to keep up with them) and Pitfall (it seems mainly designed for players going right... which meant it was easier to turn around and go left; however, I'm sure the designer did this intentionally).
In absolute terms and even more at a fractional level, that's more than the eastern games.
... Now my head hurts. And man, going to a boarding school at a young age really exposed me to a lot of games.
Huh, I just tried that, and it works for me too. When you mirror it, it looks like they're going into the wave instead of fleeing from it. The effect is really strong; I wondered if it would still work when I knew about it, but it does.
BTW, does anyone get different effects from the emoticons :-/ and :-\ or it's just me?
V erpragyl qvfpbirerq gung, juvyr gurl fhccbfrq gb or flabalzbhf (ba Snprobbx gurl eraqre gb gur fnzr cvp), gb zr gur sbezre srryf zber yvxr “crecyrkvgl, pbashfvba” (naq gung'f ubj V trarenyyl hfr vg), jurernf gur ynggre srryf zber yvxr “qvfnccebiny” (naq V bayl fnj gung orpnhfr zl cubar unf :-\ ohg abg :-/ nzbat gur cer-pbzcbfrq rzbgvpbaf, fb V cvpxrq gur sbezre ohg vg qvqa'g ybbx evtug gb zr).
[Edited to move the question to the front and rot-13 the rest as per Nesov's suggestion.]
You shouldn't prime the audience before asking a question like that.
Good point. Fixed.
For me, the default orientation of the picture makes it seem like the boats are moving into it, while the flipped version makes it seem like the wave is agent-ly 'attacking' the boats. The difference in agentiness is more pronounced in the flipped version, though. (I'm Asian-American.)
Did you grow up in America? Would this be consistent with a genetic basis, or have you been exposed to RTL language previously?
Born and raised in the US, so English is my primary language. I had some long-term exposure to Chinese growing up as a kid (generally written up-to-down then right-to-left in our workbooks). Speaking and understanding (rudimentary) Chinese has stuck with me; the writing and reading of, has not.
Interesting. In the normal version, it looks to me like the waves are lifting the boats, and mirror-reversed it looks like the boats are driving against it.
Actually, my normal way to look at it is to focus on the wave, then the mountain, and scarcely notice the boats.
On my first look at the mirror version, the wave looked like a giant claw attacking the mountain.
Yeah, I spent a while looking for the boats in the image... I thought one of them was a beach. I think the question of which is more "agenty" was contaminated for me, though, since I read the comments before following the link to look at the image. I can make myself see either the wave as 'chasing' the boats, or the boats as fleeing the wave, or the boats sailing into the wave...
Don't good hunters have good mental models of their prey? I mean I get that you're thinking that it wouldn't help to feel sympathy for animals of other species. But it would help in many cases to have empathy, and to see things from the other animal's perspective.
Butterflies are not, and to my knowledge have never been, a major prey item for H. Sapiens.