A big part of what I’m often doing in my head is simulating a room of 100-1000 people listening, and thinking about what a supermajority of them are thinking or concluding.
When you go from e.g. “that sounds insane to me” or “I think that’s crazy” to “that is crazy,” most of what I think is happening is that you’re tapping into something like ”...and 70+ out of 100 neutral observers would agree.”
Ditto with word usage; one can use a word weirdly and that’s fine; it doesn’t become a wrong usage until it’s a usage that would reliably confuse 70+% of people/reliably cause 70+% of people to conclude the wrong thing, hearing it.
“Wrong in the territory” in this case being “wrong in the maps of a supermajority” + “it’s a socially constructed thing in the first place.”
A big part of what I’m often doing in my head is simulating a room of 100-1000 people listening, and thinking about what a supermajority of them are thinking or concluding.
When you go from e.g. “that sounds insane to me” or “I think that’s crazy” to “that is crazy,” most of what I think is happening is that you’re tapping into something like ”...and 70+ out of 100 neutral observers would agree.”
Ditto with word usage; one can use a word weirdly and that’s fine; it doesn’t become a wrong usage until it’s a usage that would reliably confuse 70+% of people/reliably cause 70+% of people to conclude the wrong thing, hearing it.
“Wrong in the territory” in this case being “wrong in the maps of a supermajority” + “it’s a socially constructed thing in the first place.”