How do we get at these ideas? By the following thought experiment. Imagine a kind of latter-day Conrad character who has worked for a time as a mercenary in Africa, for a time as a doctor in Nepal, for a time as the manager of a nightclub in Miami. The specifics don’t matter—just someone who has seen a lot. Now imagine comparing what’s inside this guy’s head with what’s inside the head of a well-behaved sixteen year old girl from the suburbs. What does he think that would shock her? He knows the world; she knows, or at least embodies, present taboos. Subtract one from the other, and the result is what we can’t say.
Maybe there is something I am missing, but I don’t understand his last sentence. How do you take two people, and “subtract one from the other” ?
I think it roughly means to subtract the teenage girl’s model for how the world works from the streetsmart guy’s model for how the world works. You expect to get the subset of experience a sheltered upbringing would shelter people from.
From Paul Graham’s essay:
Maybe there is something I am missing, but I don’t understand his last sentence. How do you take two people, and “subtract one from the other” ?
I think it roughly means to subtract the teenage girl’s model for how the world works from the streetsmart guy’s model for how the world works. You expect to get the subset of experience a sheltered upbringing would shelter people from.