Partially to help reduce the typical mind fallacy and partially because I'm curious, I'm thinking about writing either an essay or a book with plenty of examples about ways by which human minds differ. From commonly known and ordinary, like differences in sexual orientation, to the rare and seemingly impossible, like motion blindness.
To do this, I need to start collecting examples. In what ways does your mind differ from what you think is the norm for most people?
I'm particularly interested in differences - small or large - that you didn't realize for a long time, automatically assuming that everyone was like you in that regard. It can even be something as trivial as always having conceptualized the passing of years as a visual timeline, and then finding out that not everyone does so. I'm also interested in links to blog posts where people talk about their own mental peculiarities, even if you didn't write them yourself. Also books and academic articles that you might think could be relevant.
Some of the content that I'm thinking about including are cultural differences in various things as recounted in the WEIRD article, differences in sexual and romantic orientation (such as mono/poly), differences in the ability to recover from setbacks, extroversion vs. introversion in terms of gaining/losing energy from social activity, differences in visualization ability, various cognitive differences ranging from autism to synesthesia to an inability to hear music in particular, differences in moral intuitions, differences in the way people think (visual vs. verbal vs. conceptual vs. something that I'm not aware of yet), differences in thinking styles (social/rational, reflectivity vs. impulsiveness) and various odd brain damage cases.
If you find this project interesting, consider spreading the link to this post or resharing my Google Plus update about it. Also, if you don't want to reply in public, feel free to send me a private message.
I wasn't meaning that existence of Nazis fucking the police implies absence of contradiction in that action, but rather that "fuck the police" and swastika aren't necessarily immediately perceived as symbols of opposed ideologies. I know what a swastika symbolises, but as for "fuck the police", my internal ideology analyser returned a rather generic "political contrarian" label, under which Nazis can be classified without difficulty. Needless to say, I have no knowledge of gangsta rap.
(In a sense, putting two contradictory ideologies together makes them somewhat cancel each other and makes the whole thing less inappropriate. Combining two compatible symbols would have a stronger effect, as long as inappropriateness is the main goal.)
I think a distinction needs to be drawn between "inappropriate" and "shocking". Shock is about the magnitude of anticipated response, whereas impropriety is about things being out of place. They can go hand in hand (the most inappropriate things usually have a shocking aspect), but they don't quite work in the same way.
If you want to maximise shock, you transgress the biggest taboos you have available, but if you transgress too many at once it stops being shocking and starts being farcical. If you want to maximise impropriety, you ne... (read more)