It’s kind of funny.
I was trying to figure out which Taltos book you were quoting in the “Talk to Trump Supporters” topic:
And, came across this, which is entirely relevant to this discussion:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/dr/generalizing_from_one_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 imagery to three percent of people completely unable to form mental images.
It’s an interesting post, and it talks a lot about the fact that we try to fit other people into our own mental models of what “normal” is.
A warning: It takes a weird segue into whether or not pick-up artistry would work (not its morality, just its effectiveness). By linking, I am not endorsing the conclusions on PUAs, and, in fact, disagree with them.
