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PhilGoetz comments on Open Thread August 31 - September 6 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Nancy Leibowitz was quoting this. Having spent the weekend reading 20th century French philosophers, this was refreshing. From the paper:
It's not a loose analogy. It's a literal description of an example of the sort of thing that should happen in the reality underlying the theory.
There is another aspect to nuance that I don't yet see mentioned in the paper. In French philosophy, the nuance is nuance of interpretation, not an attempt to handle more cases. Many theories are presented without having any cases at all that they handle! Jacques Lacan, for instance, only described one case history during his entire career; he presented detailed theories of personality development with no citations or data.
This happens with many who descend academically from Hegel: Marx, Lacan, Derrida. The model is not "nuanced" in the sense of handling many cases; it is never demonstrated to handle any data at all, or at best one over-simplified case (a general claim, or a particular sentence which the philosopher made up to illustrate the model). The nuance is all in the interpretation. It complexifies the theory without enabling it to handle any more cases--the worst of both worlds.
Thanks for mentioning that I'd already brought up the paper. I've got three quotes here.
My last name is Lebovitz.
I think of the way people tend to get it wrong as a rationality warning. I know about those errors because I have an interest in my name, but the commonness of the errors suggests that people get a tremendous amount wrong. How much of it matters? How could we even start to find out?
Sorry for misspelling your name. I don't think memory errors are rationality errors.
Memory errors have a bearing on rationality because you need accurate data to think about, and one of the primary causes of not remembering something is not having noticed it.
I can say my name twice, spell it, and show people a business card, and still have them get it wrong.
If you want more about how little people perceive, I recommend Sleight of Mind, a book about neurology and stage magic.
Judging by the particular way you mis-spelled the name, I'd guess your memory is more auditory in nature?
It's not a memory error, it's a hasty pattern-match error.
Excellent point. These errors are fairly common. When I use this username, I somewhat frequently see people write it as brettel. I guess that means that they interpret it as brett-el, when in reality it's b-trettel. I can understand this.
Eh, you're lucky. I always read 'malcolmocean' as 'macromole - wait'.
I think it's a strong-prior error. There are many different spellings, one or two letters apart, and I pick the one I've seen most often.
I agree that it's a pattern-match error, but I think I'd classify that as a type of memory error.
I think of memory errors as retrieving something other than what was stored. In this case I doubt people "stored" your name correctly -- most likely they interpreted it wrong to start with. It's a perception error, then.