(Epistemic status: I spoke simply / without “appears to” hedges, but I’m not sure of this at all.)
I’m confused why we keep getting scissorsstatements as our Presidential candidates, but we do. (That is: the candidates seem to break many minds/communities.)
Take two capacities, A and B. Ideally anti-correlated.
Craft two candidates:
Candidate X, who seems acceptable if you’re A-blind (if you have a major gap in your situation awareness near A).
Candidate Y, who seems acceptable if you’re B-blind (if you have a major gap in your situation awareness near B).
Now let voters talk.
“How can you possibly vote for X, given how it’ll make a disaster on axis A?”, asks Susan. (She is B-blind, which is part of why she is so confused/irate/loud here.) Susan inquires in detail. She (accurately) determines the staunchest X-voters don’t understand A, and (understandably, but incorrectly) concludes that this explains their X-voting, that they have nothing to teach her, and that she should despair of working well with anyone who voted for Candidate X.
““How can you possibly vote for Y, given how it’ll make a disaster on axis B?”, asks Robert. He, too, inquires in detail. And he (accurately) determines the staunchest Y-voters have a key basic blind spot where he and his friends/neighbors have sense… feels a sense of closure (“okay, it’s not that they know something I don’t know”), and despairs of working well with anyone who voted for Y.
The thing that annoys me about this process is that, in the wake, it is harder for both sets of voters to heal their own blind spots. “Being able to see A accurately” is now linked up socially and verbally with “being one of the people who refuse to acknowledge B” (and vice versa). (This happens because the ontology has been seized by the scissors-statement crafters – there is a common, salient, short word that means both “A matters” and “B is fake,” and people end up using it in their own head, and, while verifying a real truth they can see, locking in a blind spot they can’t see.)
This is a toy model for how the “scissors-ness” works, not for why some process is crafting us candidates like that. I don’t have a guess about that part. Though I likethesearticles.
Scissors Statements for President?
(Epistemic status: I spoke simply / without “appears to” hedges, but I’m not sure of this at all.)
I’m confused why we keep getting scissors statements as our Presidential candidates, but we do. (That is: the candidates seem to break many minds/communities.)
A toy model:[1]
Take two capacities, A and B. Ideally anti-correlated.
Craft two candidates:
Candidate X, who seems acceptable if you’re A-blind (if you have a major gap in your situation awareness near A).
Candidate Y, who seems acceptable if you’re B-blind (if you have a major gap in your situation awareness near B).
Now let voters talk.
“How can you possibly vote for X, given how it’ll make a disaster on axis A?”, asks Susan. (She is B-blind, which is part of why she is so confused/irate/loud here.) Susan inquires in detail. She (accurately) determines the staunchest X-voters don’t understand A, and (understandably, but incorrectly) concludes that this explains their X-voting, that they have nothing to teach her, and that she should despair of working well with anyone who voted for Candidate X.
““How can you possibly vote for Y, given how it’ll make a disaster on axis B?”, asks Robert. He, too, inquires in detail. And he (accurately) determines the staunchest Y-voters have a key basic blind spot where he and his friends/neighbors have sense… feels a sense of closure (“okay, it’s not that they know something I don’t know”), and despairs of working well with anyone who voted for Y.
The thing that annoys me about this process is that, in the wake, it is harder for both sets of voters to heal their own blind spots. “Being able to see A accurately” is now linked up socially and verbally with “being one of the people who refuse to acknowledge B” (and vice versa). (This happens because the ontology has been seized by the scissors-statement crafters – there is a common, salient, short word that means both “A matters” and “B is fake,” and people end up using it in their own head, and, while verifying a real truth they can see, locking in a blind spot they can’t see.)
This is a toy model for how the “scissors-ness” works, not for why some process is crafting us candidates like that. I don’t have a guess about that part. Though I like these articles.