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The year is 2022.
My smoke alarm chirps in the middle of the night, waking me up, because it's running low on battery.
It could have been designed with a built-in clock that, when it's first getting slightly low on battery, waits until the next morning, say 11am, and then starts emitting a soft purring noise, which only escalates to piercing loud chirps over time and if you ignore it.
And I do have a model of how this comes about; the basic smoke alarm design is made in the 1950s or 1960s or something, in a time when engineering design runs on a much more authoritarian paradigm of "yes wake them up the user-peon needs to change the battery", clock circuits aren't as cheap; and then in modern times if you propose changing anything, somebody somewhere will claim it's less safe. Of course it's much less safe if you build smoke alarms that hurt people, and the people quite reasonably remove the batteries and take them out of their bedrooms, and then you try to compensate for that by passing a law so that you can say any harm is their fault for ignoring that law. But that's the paradigm for how it is, and now if you try to design a smoke alarm that's gentler or slower-escalatin...
In case anyone finds it validating or cathartic, you can read user interaction professionals explain that, yes, things are often designed with horrible, horrible usability.[1] Bruce Tognazzini has a vast website.
Here is one list of design bugs. The first one is the F-16 fighter jet's flawed weapon controls, which caused pilots to fire its gun by mistake during training exercises (in one case shooting a school—luckily not hitting anyone) on four occasions in one year; on the first three occasions, they blamed pilot error, and on the fourth, they still blamed pilot error but also acknowledged that "poorly-designed controls" contributed to the incident.
Here is another list. Item 3 I'll quote below:
Bug Name: Automobile Self-Destruct Switch
Product: Remco Lube Pump for Lexus RX-300
Bug: The driver must accurately toggle a hidden, completely unlabelled switch inside the engine compartment in response to changing conditions. If, even once, the switch is forgotten or flipped the wrong way, it will destroy the $5000 engine and transmission within five minutes.
...Calling the company was of no help. The engineer who answered responded that nothing was wrong with the de
I resonate a lot with this, and it makes me feel slightly less alone.
I've started making some videos where I rant about products that fail to achieve the main thing they're designed to do, and get worse with successive iterations and I've found a few appreciative commenters:
Rant successful, it made someone else feel like they weren't alone
And part of my experience of the importance of ranting about it, even if nobody appreciates it, is that it keeps me from forgetting my homeland, to use your metaphor.
Man, this essay... feels like there's a mistake being made. Hard to put my finger on exactly what it is, though. (Apologies for some implicit unkindness here, I don't intend to say "you should feel bad for feeling bad", but it feels like there's an important and true thing in need of exploration which I need to be somewhat unkind in order to explore.)
One angle: someone says something, and I realize that their model of people is literally unable to account for certain properties of me. And then I'm like... duh? I am in fact an outlier. You are in fact an outlier. Obviously many peoples' world models will just totally fail to account for you and I in various ways. Obviously insofar as the world is built for in-distribution humans, you or I will will not fit it. So what's the angst about? Is the problem that, like, you wish to "be seen", and that just totally fails to happen? Or maybe it's something like... people implicitly asserting that their model, which totally fails to account for certain properties of you/me, is "supposed to be true", like it is somehow a failure on your/my part to fit that model?
I'm not quite sure where the angst is coming from, but it feels like the sort of angst where there is some true fact about the world such that, upon emotionally updating on that fact, the angst would probably mostly stop happening. Like, if you could find the true name of the angst-generator, you'd be like "oh well duh" and then it would just stop seeming significant? Or maybe you could grieve a bit and then move on?
John, I think you're onto something, at least in that you've accurately perceived "something's not right here" and also substantially narrowed down where the not-rightness is. But I'm not sure quite what the not-rightness is yet, and I also think that this response to "what should be done about it" suggests you're missing a really big piece of the puzzle somehow.
I think that Duncan's post is closely related to stuff I've been mulling over lately, and I can't tell whether my following suggestion will therefore come out of left field given the invisible-from-the-outside context of the history of my thoughts, or whether it will be obviously on point, or what. I also don't have any clear answers yet, just questions that I'm still trying to improve, but here goes.
I wonder how society should treat weird people, both in some ideal post-scarcity future world and also in this one we find ourselves in, starting from where we are with the resources we have. I also wonder how weird people should behave and think and feel when they fully understand their actual relationship with society, and I wonder about the nature of that relationship.
I expect it's helpful to think of a well defined cl...
Some thoughts I had while reading the post, which seem even more relevant to your comment: insofar as we want to think about "how to handle weird people", wheelchairs or deafness are the wrong analogy. Those are disabilities, but they're disabilities which lots of people have, and therefore which most people already know about. Society has "standard APIs" for interfacing to wheelchairs/deafness/blindness/etc. They're not really "weird" in the sense that society just doesn't have APIs for them at all (though perhaps they are "weird" enough that those APIs aren't implemented everywhere).
One of the things which makes weirdness specifically unusual/interesting is that we're in a very-high-dimensional space, so there's surprisingly many people who are very weird in ways which society simply does not have conceptual buckets for, at all. People who don't fit the standard ontology of society. And what makes that weirdness uniquely interesting from a design standpoint is that, because high-dimensions, it's plausibly not possible to build an API which will handle it all in advance.
From the perspective of a weird person, the main strategy this model suggests is: pick one of the standard APIs, whichever one works best for you, and use that. In other words, adopt a persona, something which matches some standard archetype which most people recognize, and play that role. For instance, I aim to give vague vibes of cartoon villainy, and that actually works remarkably well at getting people to interact with me the way I prefer.
I am highly sceptical of the idea that neurodivergence is rare in comparison to physical disability. Which numbers do you have in mind here? Even if we just count things like being highly gifted, autism and ADHD, the numbers are huge.
I am also sceptical of the idea that mental weirdness cannot be accommodated, because it is too individual.
People in wheelchairs are very, very different from each other. Some can walk, but the amount they can walk is unpredictable, so they are using a wheelchair to prevent a scenario where their steps for the day run out and they are stranded. Some have paralysed nerves, others malfunctioning ones, some are obese, some have joint diseases, some have muscle wasting diseases or chronic fatigue, many complex combinations of these. Wheelchairs and scooters are not the condition, which is varied, they are the measure taken for all these very different people to gain access.
Similar with people with visual impairments. You have people who are completely or partially blind in their eyes, from birth, or later in life. You can also have perfectly functioning eyes, but fascinating forms of cortical blindness, often acquired in adulthood such as through bra...
From the perspective of a weird person, the main strategy this model suggests is: pick one of the standard APIs, whichever one works best for you, and use that.
I note that you seem to be arguing from a position of "make it work as best you can within the broken system" and that there is a separate mode of "try to fix the system," and evaluating actions taken under one mode as if they are being taken under the other mode is a recipe for (wrongly) seeing someone as being silly or naive.
I do agree that your advice is pretty solid under the "make it work as best you can" strategy.
I am not quite sold on that being the right strategy.
Separately, it's quite hard to do both at once but part of what you're seeing is me trying to do both at once.
It feels like John came to the "make it work within a broken system" position because of his belief that "because high-dimensions, it's plausibly not possible to build an API which will handle it all in advance". I think I mostly believe this too, which is a bottleneck to me thinking that "try to fix the system" is a good strategy here.
But maybe having more buckets and more standard APIs is a big part of the solution. E.g. today we have buckets like "ADHD" and "autistic" with some draft APIs attached, but not that long ago those did not exist?
And the other part of it - maybe society need to be more careful not to round out the small buckets (e.g. the witness accounts example from the OP)?
Or maybe you could grieve a bit and then move on?
My guess is that grieving ‘a bit’ is underappreciating the amount/quality of grieving this’d be by quite a lot.
(We don't have split voting here, presumably because this draft is from before split voting was created, but if I could I would strong upvote and strong disagree.)
I think an important piece of "why not grieve?" is that it doesn't just come from dismissable randos, it also comes from friends and family and so forth. Something something, this bit from HPMOR:
..."I think you're taking the wrong approach by trying to defend yourself at all," Harry said. "I really do think that. You are who you are. You're friends with whoever you choose. Tell anyone who questions you to shove it."
Hermione just shook her head, and turned another page.
"Option two," Harry said. "Go to Fred and George and tell them to have a little talk with their wayward brother, those two are genuine good guys -"
"It's not just Ron," Hermione said in almost a whisper. "Lots of people are saying it, Harry. Even Mandy is giving me worried looks when she thinks I'm not looking. Isn't it funny? I keep worrying that Professor Quirrell is sucking you into the darkness, and now people are warning me just the same way I try to warn you."
"Well, yeah," said Harry. "Doesn't that reassure you a bit about me and Professor Quirrell?"
"In a
One thing worth noting is that I have an entanglement between [my defense of my self] and [my defense on behalf of all the Nevilles Longbottom out there].
Like, I have T O N S of evidence that my own "hey, HEY, you don't speak for everybody, bucko!" has been deeply nourishing for lots and lots and lots of people in lots and lots of contexts; even if I were to solve this one completely such that I had no need for self-defense along this axis I would likely still want to push back against the roundings-off on behalf of all the other people who had not yet solved this one for themselves, and are constantly taking damage.
No doubt I can do both the [self defense] and the [other defense] more effectively, but fixing my own orientation is not enough because other people have broken orientations, and I want them to be okay, and allowed to exist in their own skin under the sun.
I can't answer for Duncan, but I have had similar enough experiences that I will answer for my self. When I notice that someone is chronically typical minding (not just typical minding as a prior, but shows signs that they are unable to even to consider that others might be different in unexpected ways), then I leave as fast as I can, because such people are dangerous. Such people will violate my boundaries until I have a full melt down. They will do so in the full belief that they are helpful, and override anything I tell them with their own prior convictions.
I tired to get over the feeling of discomfort when I felt misunderstood, and it did not work. Because it's not just a reminder that the wold isn't perfect (something I can update on and get over), but an active warning signal.
Learning to interpret this warning signal, and knowing when to walk away, has helped a lot.
Different people and communities are more or less compatible with my style of weird. Keeping track of this is very useful.
Not wanting to disagree or downplay, I just want to offer a different way to think about it.
When somebody says I don't exist - and this definitely happens - to me, it all depends on what they're trying to do with it. If they're saying "you don't exist, so I don't need to worry about harming you because the category of people who would be harmed is empty", then yeah I feel hurt and offended and have the urge to speak up, probably loudly. But if they're just saying when trying to analyze reality, like, "I don't think people like that exist, because my model doesn't allow for them", the first feeling I get is delight. I get to surprise you! You get to learn a new thing! Your model is gonna break and flex and fit new things into it!
Maybe I'm overly optimistic about people.
Or maybe you're just the right amount of optimistic for the people you've run into, and I'm just less lucky. =P
Thanks for this, and thanks for the intro that reminded us that it's intentionally in a reactive rather than analytic frame. I'd call the experiment successful - this conveys and explores a different level of experience than more typical LW style.
I feel a lot of alienation and isolation, which has resonance with what you describe, but I don't assume it's the same, and I am resisting the urge to give advice or share my reactions. I'll instead say that you're right, but probably not completely right. You are alone - enough of an outlier on common social dimensions that the availability heuristic when someone says "everyone" or "nobody" does not include you. And also MOST people (unlike you; typical mind fallacy happens in both directions) don't mean it literally when they say "everyone" or "nobody". They're not denying your humanity, they're just denying your typicality. Scott Card's a well-known wierdo, and I can only assume "Nobody does that!" was meant in admiration.
Damn, I failed to avoid giving advice. Sorry.
I appreciate this essay because I have experienced a (much milder) version of this "not existing". It helps me feel seen in certain ways. I also like that it helps me understand a different kind of perspective, and that it helps me make sense of Duncan's behavior in some of the comment threads. However, I must admit that while I understand intellectually that this is how Duncan experiences things, I myself can't really imagine it; I don't understand it on the gut level. The below response is influenced by this essay and also recent discussions on other posts.
The spectrum
There seems to be a spectrum in terms of how much weight people give their own experiences compared to things other people say.
On the one end, we have people who believe so weakly in their own experiences that if someone asks them "Why didn't you lock the door?", the first instinct is to doubt themselves and ask "Oh no did I forget?", even if they know that they had locked the door and even checked it multiple times. (If they hear someone say people like them don't exist, they conclude "Maybe I don't actually exist?")
On the other end, we have people who so firmly believe in their own experiences that even if multipl...
Thank you, Duncan. I've never met you, but you seem very real and very existing to me. I don't quite share the same history as you, I think I got used to defensively ignoring what the world implied about me pretty early, but I am aiming to become a psychotherapist, and attempting to connect with how people actually are, rather than what I think they might be, seems central to my journey. Your post is an inspiration to me.
I also get annoyed at claims like "everybody does X", when I don't do X. However, some time after this post, I read statistical models & the irrelevance of rare exceptions, and found it an interesting counter-perspective:
...Yes, the general case is drawn from instances, I’m saying that we shouldn't get caught up in the details unless they really matter. And if there is a clear statistical generalization, the details matter very little.
...
Rare exceptions are irrelevant because almost all models of the real world (not physics) are statistical claims about what’s usually true, not absolute claims about what’s always true. So a rare data point that doesn’t fit is actually *not* a contradiction! Pointing such cases out is just reiterating the tautological fact that statistical models are not absolute, which seems like a total waste of time to me. (Especially if the speaker agrees with the model!)
I’ve noticed this happens more often with careful, intellectually humble thinkers, who often include caveats of the form “But here’s an exception to this strong model I’ve just presented.” I think often they're trying to proactively defend against others pointing out this case. But to me, this
I feel like I'm hearing disappointment from you directed at people who could have done better.
I don't feel that disappointment, and also I don't think they could have done better.
I have experienced something that takes a similar shape -- probably less often than you do, probably less cuttingly toward my own self-image than you experience it -- because I have met a certain category of generalizations often enough to can "I guess I'm nobody, then" as my default reply to them. Sometimes people cringe and sometimes they laugh, depending on the context and how the line is delivered.
Some people can't see some things. To most of the world, good code looks identically esoteric to bad code. To me, a poorly executed sports play looks indistinguishable from a well-executed one. A non-coder could infer the difference between good and bad code by watching an expert read each; I could infer the difference between a good play and a bad one by listening to the crowd's response.
The feelings I hear in this would make sense to me if they came from someone who imagined that others were doing some special favor for everyone else and withholding it from them. That's how the phenomenon can look, from a c...
I'm reminded of Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names, an essay on the problems with handling "weird" data inputs that are normal for the people involved.
Oh man, this one hits home. Fantastic.
Edit: I especially like the succinct meme "you don't exist". I hope it takes off.
I think "erasure" in the "<noun> erasure" construct (like "trans erasure") is meant to convey a similar concept, though I am not a native speaker so I can't say for sure.
I think there are at least two levels where you want change to happen - on an individual level, you want people to stop doing a thing they're doing that hurts you, and on a social level, you want society to be structured so that you and others don't keep having that same/similar experience.
The second thing is going to be hard, and likely impossible to do completely. But the first thing... responding to this:
...It wouldn't be so bad, if I only heard it fifty times a month. It wouldn't be so bad, if I didn't hear it from friends, family,
content warning: I initially tried to avoid the ?inflammation? of ? overconfidence? you ?seem to me? to be describing. but, I'm pretty sure I failed badly. I do not know how to confirm I understood or clearly say how I didn't, so I will just speak. if you are emotive in response to my comment, I would appreciate hearing the emotion; I currently expect it will be angry and hope to have a useful, comfort-calibrated argument, but I don't know what you need. so ...
holy crap I love this post... your rendering of pain created in me feelings that seem to be echos...
this was always a confusion between metaphorical and literal language or something
I think that does not quite make the problem go away?
Like, it's not a direct confusion between metaphorical and literal language, exactly.
If someone says "everyone loves Monty Python," it generally is clear that they don't literally mean literally everyone. There are some areas where people really are confused about the ground truth, and really are typical minding pretty hard, but there are lots of places where, if challenged, they'd immediately concede "oh, yeah, I was just talking about, like, plus-minus three sigma on the bell curve."
But that doesn't make the problem disappear, because that's sort of the point—it's not that they literally actually think I don't exist, it's that their revealed preference is to spare zero time or attention for the fact that I exist. They know it, but it's not worth the effort to carve out the exception. I literally don't matter enough to them to convince them to swap out the word "all" for the word "most." Their metaphor, or their simplified sentence, or the power they get from emphatic confidence—whatever it is, there's some property they are loath to relinquish that is more important to them than making room for my existence.
I think my approach, to my own personal version of this, is: anytime someone acts like someone like me couldn't exist, that proves they're stupid (and, in some cases, rude), and I get to feel smug and contemptuous of them. (Whether I show this is a different question.) That helps. It's overall somewhat depressing that a lot of people are in fact stupid, but that's something one has to get used to anyway.
Meanwhile, I do have to be in charge of making sure my own needs are met, since I can't trust others to handle that. (As one exampl...
Being smart doesn't make it impossible to also be a fucking idiot at times. This is a general fact. (And just because someone was a fucking idiot in some situation doesn't mean they're not also smart.)
I think it's important to be able to recognize screw-ups for what they are, even/especially in oneself or one's heroes or friends, and therefore I encourage myself to do this—internally, at least. Again, doesn't necessarily mean I call someone out on it. For minor screw-ups, often the best thing is just to notice the data point and move on. If the data points become a pattern, or if individual cases are sufficiently bad, then it may be worth doing something.
If a friend is repeatedly screwing up in a way that hurts you (which I take it may have been happening for you), then it's probably worth talking to them about it. If you can expect them to have noticed this, then probably they should have apologized about it already; if it's likely that they didn't notice the screwup, or that they didn't know it hurt you, then you'll have to explain it to them. Then there are various ways for them to respond; I'll write out some of the tree:
- "Oh, whoops, so
Reading this was a curious experience. While my memory is abysmal, rather than eidetic, even I vaguely remember hearing relatives say dumb stuff to me as a kid, e.g. "you'll change your mind about X when you're older", and being frustrated for many reasons: they thought they knew me better than I did myself (and turned out to be wrong about it; I never changed my mind about X), they made bad arguments from their supposed authority of being older than me, etc.
And I have definitely experienced complaining about absolute statements like "everyone does X". But...
I have given you an adequate explanation. If you were the kind of person who was good at math, my explanation would have been sufficient, and you would now understand. You still do not understand. Therefore...?
I felt this; I still wonder if not-prioritizing clarity (or even intentionally-being-unclear) is a useful filter for maths/logic ability, outside the costs felt by others.
My most recent published blog post had in the 2nd paragraph "I bet there’s nobody reading this who has never used a phrase like..." and this article made me think it would be kind to change it.
Then I searched your facebook posts and you have indeed used the phrase, so in this case at least you aren't nobody. But I'm still changing the post.
(The phrase is "part of me", which if any of my friends were to somehow have never once used I wouldn't have been surprised to discover it you.)
I’m new to this community, so I don’t know why you have DEACTIVATED in front of your name. I’m sad that you do, though, because maybe it means that you have given up on this community. This post is so painfully lonely. I’m sorry if you didn’t find what you needed here. You have touched me with the loneliness in your writing. I also value other posts that you have made and would welcome hearing more of your thoughts. Maybe, you won’t see this message, but I hope that, if you still have friends in this community, they are checking up on you.
Wow, this hit home in a way I wasn't expecting. I ... don't know what else to say. Thanks for writing this up, seriously.
I don't know if this helps at all, but I believe that a large number of people sometimes feel like they are "not part of everyone" and it makes them feel bad. My main piece of evidence for this is that saying "Oh, no one has asked for that before" or "I didn't think anyone would do that" is a tactic used by people who know they have messed something up to try and make the victim of their mess up feel like they are responsible for it. Such a tactic could only work in a world where a significant number of people felt an anxiety about being "not part of every...
I have given you an adequate explanation. If you were the kind of person who was good at math, my explanation would have been sufficient, and you would now understand. You still do not understand. Therefore...?
By the way, I think this is a common failure mode of amateur tutors/teachers trying to explain a novel concept to a student. Part of what you need to communicate is "how complicated the thing you need to learn is".
So sometimes you need to say "this thing I'm telling you is a bit complex, so this is going to take a while to explain", so the stud...
One of the reasons I am a stricler for possibility is that I have found it more productive to think that if a situation or a human type is not logically inconsistent it probably rather exists rather than not exists. Even if it does not yet exists thinking as if it does makes you already to have accomodiated the possibility.
If you do this by each subtype it gets combinatorily explosive. In order not to do this kind of thing via exhaustion you identify critical points where things would flip/break when certain conditions are hit. In coding it means when you ...
I am very glad that you wrote this post, and just want you to know that You Are Not Alone. Hearing over and over again that you are Not Normal, do not fit within any of the boxes, and eventually you start believing it yourself. So thank you for this reminder that It Is Okay To Be Weird.
This does seem like a lot of words to say "sometimes when people say 'everyone', they really mean 'a typical person in my mental model'". There isn't a person who conforms to everyone's mental model in this way. If there was, then they just failed to conform to mine.
It just doesn't seem to me to be a big thing to get upset about. I've known since about the age of six that I didn't conform to most people's expectations of how most people behave. It would be a much stranger world if most people did conform in such a way!
Unrelated to the post, but I'm not seeing the usual agree/disagree buttons on this post. Is there a reason for that?
Edit: looks like it's been fixed
At times I want to be different, I like being different from others but I also want others to accept and understand me while been different. It’s quite sad whereby at times I voice my opinions or act otherwise the way people expect me to, and then their response is to ostracize you or try to make you feel inferior for not being the same as them. After reading, I thought of your post as pathetic. The kind of pathetic whereby you realize that there are certain people who are unable to grasp your point of view and are unwilling to. Then you realize that it’s ...
Your text almost had me crying.
You do exist. You do matter. An account of humanity where you have been conveniently struck out of it is crucially incomplete. An approach that excludes you has lost not just something, but someone.
I do not think you are as alone as this feels. I think many of us get excluded, for many different ways of not fitting the norm. Silently, subtly disappeared.
There is an increasing appreciation that neurodiversity is a richness and opportunity, that one size fits all approaches make us lose people, valuable people with rights and f...
So most of these are things I'd try not to say myself (and would mostly succeed). But there are some where I can imagine versions that seem to me bad, and versions that seem to me innocuous.
And who does the world want to get back the most? Who's the one person that everyone in America wants to save? Tom Hanks. Everyone will pull for Tom Hanks. Nobody wants to see him die. We all love him too much.
This is the bad version. But the actual quote was
...And who does the world want to get back the most? Who does America want to save? Tom Hanks. We don't want t
The LessWrong Review runs every year to select the posts that have most stood the test of time. This post is not yet eligible for review, but will be at the end of 2024. The top fifty or so posts are featured prominently on the site throughout the year.
Hopefully, the review is better than karma at judging enduring value. If we have accurate prediction markets on the review results, maybe we can have better incentives on LessWrong today. Will this post make the top fifty?
Even though a lot of these things have never happened to me, I related to this post in a very painful way.
I have a deep-seated fear of standing out in a negative way. And it's not an inborn, instinctive fear; it's a fear born of painful experience. I always seem to be the odd one out. I always seem to be the only one who didn't understand something and embarrassed myself as a result. I always seem to be the only one who wants to do something in the only way that's ever seemed normal for me. And yes, I am often that person who asks a question no one's ever ...
This was mildly painful to read, probably because I know exactly what you're talking about. I don't think I've ever paid attention to it the way you have - I don't socialize much and I tend not to pay much attention to other people even when I do - but my "family" do this to me all the time, attempting to read my mind, being sure they're right, and completely missing the mark in such blatantly obvious ways that it's gradually (along with many, many other reasons) made me just mostly stop talking to them. So to some extent, albeit not a perfect one, I think I know how you feel.
Browsing through the comments section it seems that everyone relates to this pretty well. I do, too. But I'm wondering if this applies mostly to a LW subculture, or is it a Barnum/Forer effect where every neurotypical person would also relate to?
This is an experimental essay, not in the typical LessWrong or Duncan Sabien style.
Depending on how this goes, I might try writing a companion piece in the typical style, laying out the model clearly and explicitly and deriving concrete and specific recommendations from it.
But it seemed worth it to try communicating at a lower and more emotional/visceral level, not least because that is the level at which I actually experience The Problem. Any clear, analytical essay would be the result of me trying to make sense of the thing that I'm going to try to directly convey, below.
It is the year 1995. I am nine years old. In front of me there is a sheet of paper, upon which are written a dozen or so lines of math. The first is:
f(x)=x2+7I stare at it. I know that I can divide both sides of the equation by x, leaving me with:
f=x+7/x...but this does not seem to do any good.
I raise my hand. The afterschool volunteer comes over.
"No," he says. "That's not right. X isn't a term on the left side. F is a function."
He has explained nothing.
"F is a function, so what this is saying is to take X, and square it, and add seven."
I look up at him, confused. I am nine. I have never heard the word "function" used in this way before. No one has grounded me in the activity of the day; no one has oriented me; no one has told me today you are learning what a function is, and you will learn by looking at a bunch of examples. No one has said today, parentheses don't mean the thing you're expecting them to mean. No one has said f is a thing that eats xs, and what the right side is showing you is how it eats them—what it does to them.
"So, like, if X is three, right?" he continues. "X is three? So F of X is three squared plus seven, which is sixteen."
I say the words again in my mind, more slowly. F ... of ... (of? What?) ... X. ""F of X"" (okay, whatever, that's nonsense, but whatever) is sixteen.
I look back down at the paper. If the right side of the equation is sixteen, and X is three...
"F is five-point-three-repeating," I say, trying to inject a measure of confidence I do not feel into my tone.
"What? No. F isn't anything. F is a function. It's not part of the equation."
Not part of the equation, he says. Looking back from a distance of twenty-five years, I see (one of) his mistake(s). He doesn't tell me this isn't really an equation at all, not the way you're thinking of it. He doesn't tell me the equals sign here is more like telling you the definition of this thing, F of X—what F of X is is the thing on the other side of the equals sign. He doesn't say a function is when you set up a rule for dealing with numbers, and this rule is, whatever number you put in, you're going to square it, and add seven.
Instead, he looks at me, and says more words, and the message lurking behind the words—the message implicit in his tone and posture and air of tolerant patience—is:
I have given you an adequate explanation. If you were the kind of person who was good at math, my explanation would have been sufficient, and you would now understand. You still do not understand. Therefore...?
My heart rate quickens.
It is 1993. I am seven years old, roughhousing with my older brother and my father on the living room carpet. We clamber over top of him, laughing, pummeling him with tiny fists. He throws us both onto the couch, where we recover and launch ourselves back at him like pouncing tigers.
My father tosses my brother back into the cushions a second time, grabs me in a gentle headlock, digs his knuckles into my scalp in a painful noogie.
"Ow!" I shout, rolling away from him and clutching my head. "Ow. Ow."
The pain is bright and hot, feeling halfway between a cut and a burn. Five seconds pass, and it has not yet begun to fade.
"That didn't hurt," my father declares.
Something deep within me tightens.
It is October in 1999. I am thirteen. There is a book signing in Greensboro, North Carolina—Orson Scott Card will be there, signing copies of Ender's Shadow.
On page 242, the character Bean has written an equation, as a challenge to his teachers:
2+2=π√2+nHe snarks: "When you know the value of n, I'll finish this test."
I have scribbled –0.378861 on a scrap of paper. I'm worried Orson Scott Card will tease me for imprecision, since clearly the whole point of Bean's challenge was that n is irrational, and –0.378861 is just an approximation. But I muster my courage.
It's my turn. I step toward the table. Orson Scott Card smiles at me.
"It's –0.378861," I blurt out—awkwardly, with no preamble. "N, I mean. From—from the book."
He blinks. It takes a few more stuttered sentences to make clear what I mean.
"No one does that," he murmurs.
He says it with an undertone of awe, and I can tell he's more pleased than displeased. I've snuck peeks at what he's signing in everyone else's books ("To [whoever], a friend of Ender"), and I get a nonstandard, unique message, unlike the ten people before me.
But the "no one does that" cuts deeper than I would have predicted.
I'm someone, a part of me whispers.
But I don't say it out loud.
It is 2004. I am boycotting the graduation ceremony at my high school, the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics. I want the place to burn. I do not want to be remembered. I put forth substantial effort to ensure that the yearbook would contain absolutely zero pictures of me.
"You're going to regret not having this memory," my father warns. "Walking across the stage, being with your peers..."
"I won't," I say.
"Trust me, give it twenty years, you're going to be sorry you were petulant about this."
For nineteen years, I have waited to tell him he was wrong. There's only one more to go.
It is 2017.
"—fucking inconsiderate asshole," she is saying. "You didn't do that for me, you did that for you, you just wanted to feel useful, you wanted me to appreciate you for how thoughtful you were, you didn't actually care whether I wanted it or not—"
I shrink.
It's not that I didn't care. If I'd known she didn't want the pillow, I wouldn't have tossed it to her. I just ... didn't think it was an action with downside. I had (wordlessly) figured that she would either use the pillow, or just leave it next to her where I'd thrown it. I saw someone who looked like they could maybe use a pillow, and I had a pillow that I wasn't using, so I tossed it—it wasn't any more complicated than that. It had nothing to do with my stories about myself.
She has a story in which that isn't possible. She lives in a universe where I don't exist.
It is fall in the year 2000, my first year of high school. I am in the marching band, playing clarinet. It's time for sectionals, when the players of each instrument go off together to practice their parts in unison—trumpets in the band room, tubas in the auditorium, drums in the field out back behind the school.
The clarinet sectionals are held in the girls' locker room. They have always been held in the girls' locker room. There's never before been a reason not to hold them in the girls' locker room.
Everybody stares at me. I shift, uncomfortable.
I am pulling into the parking lot of the Four Seasons mall to go Christmas shopping in 2009. There is an NPR bit on the radio, talking about Malcolm Gladwell's books. I have a flashback to two years earlier, when I first read Blink, in which one of Gladwell's interviewees said something to the effect of:
I don't tremble for the rest of my shopping trip. Just for the short walk from the car to the doors of JC Penny. Just long enough to shake the echo, the memory of deep alienation.
We all love him too much.
I had never liked Tom Hanks, but before Blink, it had never seemed like a big deal. It wasn't until Blink that I discovered that it meant I didn't belong. That it was yet another bit in the ever-growing pile of bits all pointing toward "you, Duncan, are not a part of 'everyone'."
"Wow, I'm going to have to ask my manager—nobody's ever requested that before, I'm not sure if we can do it or not!"
"Whaaaaaat? Come on, everybody likes Monty Python."
"We all die and are reborn, over and over again. None of us are the people we were when we were children."
"That flavor was discontinued; nobody was buying it."
"You can't look at me with a straight face and claim that this wasn't a status move. That's not how humans work."
"Look, this is all hypothetical, it's not as if anybody here is actually X—"
I keep my mouth shut.
It happens over, and over, and over, and over.
"No one does that," where "that" is something I did yesterday, and the day before, and the day before.
"Everyone's familiar with the urge to X," where "X" is an urge I've literally never felt.
(I checked. I even drank eight drinks in an hour to see if there was something hiding behind inhibitions that I'd never noticed, something I was trying not to admit to myself. There wasn't. I just don't have any interest in Xing.)
Sometimes, it's a bit more indirect.
It is 2021, and my partner Logan warns me that (yet again) someone is talking about me behind my back, in a corner of the internet where I cannot see.
It doesn't seem all that bad. "Duncan thinks he's good at coordination, but he isn't," the person has said. Not a particularly cutting insult. No apparent malice.
But, like.
That is not a thing I have ever thought. Not a thing I have ever said. Not a thing I have ever attempted to imply—not in those generic terms, not absent some specific context where I have evidence (like "at a rationality workshop that I am running").
This person's behind-the-back criticism is not quite the thing; they aren't directly telling me that I don't exist.
They're merely so confident that [anybody who emits the words and behaviors I emit] must [think he's generically good at coordination]—
(while being wrong about it)
(do they think I'm just blind? That it's patently obvious to everyone but me?)
—that it does not even occur to them to flag this statement as a hypothesis. To them, it doesn't seem like a hypothesis, doesn't feel like they're making any intuitive leaps. They seem to think that they are directly perceiving ground truth. They really believe that I think this thing that I have never, ever thought.
They're looking at me, and perceiving something I am not.
The real me doesn't even occur to them as a possibility to hedge against.
When you're poked and prodded and paper-cut in the same place a thousand times, it can get a little sensitive.
"Desires don't bottom out in reasons," writes the guru. "They're unmanipulable, can't be reasoned with or argued away. If I want something FOR REASONS, and I wouldn't if the reasons were to change, then it's not a desire. It's a strategy. And if I can't tell the difference, it's because I'm avoiding feeling the REAL desire, because I'm scared—scared of the world, and maybe scared of the desire too."
I am triggered. I want to scream.
The words GET OUT OF MY HEAD occur to me. You don't know what it's like in my head, so stop making claims about it—just because your experience of desires is that they are unmanipulable doesn't mean my desires aren't manipulable. Just because you get scared of your desires and flinch away from them doesn't mean I do. You don't know me. You are typical minding, and I am a white raven, and you are wrong.
Other words occur to me, too.
But the main thing I want is to stop hearing that I don't exist.
To stop being the-thing-that-gets-rounded-off. To stop being the extraneous detail in the model, simplified away. To stop hearing people say that such-and-such is true of everyone, such-and-such is How It Is, when I am Different.
I block the guru. I probably shouldn't have. Or rather, I probably should have blocked them years ago; it's probably not particularly reasonable for this to have been the final straw. It probably doesn't make sense, from the outside, because from the outside, people don't see the through-line. They don't see the common factor. They don't see that it's the same injury, again and again and again and again and again.
It wouldn't be so bad, if I only heard it fifty times a month. It wouldn't be so bad, if I didn't hear it from friends, family, teachers, colleagues. It wouldn't be so bad, if there were breaks sometimes.
My society doesn't even say "everybody with Property A also has Property B." My society barely even perceives a distinction; the median member of my society thinks that Property A is Property B.
Here I sit, A-ful, B-less. Very few people care.
It's not your fault.
You're not doing it on purpose.
You don't mean it.
(Probably.)
But that doesn't change the impact all that much.
When you carpet-bomb the conversation with your typical mind fallacy, I don't just hear overconfident and underjustified assertions. I don't just hear someone being sloppy with their speech, or making an error of rationality.
I also hear that the people unlike you—
(People like me)
—do not exist. That we matter so little that it hasn't even occurred to you that we might exist. That we might be a factor to be accounted for at all.
("Eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable," says a person who knows, on some level, that there are people out there with eidetic memories. "The details of people's accounts cannot be trusted.")
(I went back and checked my memory of the quote from Blink against the actual text. I think I did pretty okay, given that I only read it once, fifteen years ago.)
Most of the time, I can deal. Most of the time, I can process my own reaction, not make it everyone else's problem. It's not that hard. This thing that's happening to me, it's not as bad as (say) racism, or sexism, or the kind of homophobic bigotry that's still dominant in over half the world, let alone any of the actually terrible things that happen to people all the time.
It really, really isn't that bad.
But sometimes—
Sometimes, it's just a little too much, and it all spills over.
I've been told that I don't exist almost every single day of my life. When you just did it again, five minutes ago—if the vehemence of my objection to your total lack of nuance took you by surprise—
Sorry.
Some people out there actually care about that sort of thing. To some people, those distinctions genuinely matter.
Who knew, right?