One way I like to think about people is on a sliding scale from an asethetic preference for System 1 (commonly called left brained or intuitive) to an aesthetic preference for System 2 commonly called right brained or logical).
Yes, but I intuitively dislike “salesy” stuff and then turn on System 2, put my revulsion aside and investigate if it still may be an objectively good product. To my System 1 it feels cheezy, dishonest and so on.
Let me propose another theory. It is all about being a spergy (Asperger) autistic misanthropic (so not only low social skills but more like disliking people) nerd geek who has fuck for social life and dislikes it in general. Social life is simply not honest. You are supposed to smile at people even though you are not always glad to see them yet you must say glad to see ya, and you must ask how are you even if you don’t care at all and when they ask the same you cannot give a true answer but must put up a smile and say great and so on. This disgusts people like me on a System 1 level, our System 1 is not wired for socialization and thus dislike the smell of untruth. It was very very hard for me to learn that people do not always mean everything literally they say. Often just saying things because it is expected to say those. And I did not like it one bit, I valued truth (not LW type super Bayesian truth, just expressing how you actually feel ) over kindness or conformity on a System 1 level.
And “salesy” stuff feels like all this socialization—but on steroids. For example salespeople in person act as as super-extroverted, and act like liking people very much. And advertisements feel like that too.
Note that “cheezy” is an entirely aesthetic term… this is what I’m talking about in terms of blind spots. Dishonest is not necessarily an aesthetic term… but in the sense you’re using it, it does seem to be more a value judgement than an evaluation that means “advertisements are lies because they tell you things that aren’t true.”
I agree with the rest of your analysis—one of the things I almost wrote about in my original answer is the relation between your aesthetic preferences and your social skills and desire for social interaction. hat you call “spergy” I call “an aesthetic preference for system 2.”
Wait, I don’t understand the relationship between system 2 preference and social interaction desire / skill. You saying social interaction is almost fully System 1? Come to think of it, I too see a correlation between them, but have not seen any sort of a theory that connects them causally.
I don’t think social interaction is fully system one—there’s a lot of political games and navigating relationships that are under the domain of system 2. But the act of socializing, in the moment, I see as largely system 1 driven.
A lot of this comes from a place where I didn’t understand social interactions at all… As I came to be able to interact more normally, one of the key things I learned is that in most cases of social interaction, the interaction is not about a logical exchange of information or ideas—it’s taking place on an emotional level.
System 1 is built for social interaction. It helps us with the tiny subcommunications that reveal things about our emotions and status, and it’s built to read other’s subcommunications that communicate the same things, and give us feelings about other people based on those subcommunications.
One of the reasons that people have “aspy” behavior is either that this part of their system 1 is not very powerful—they have trouble empathizing, reading those social cues, etc. AND/OR, they simply dislike that form of communication—they have an aesthetic preference for logical, factual conversations, instead of the empathy based emotional exchange that most “normal” interactions hinge on.
Yes, but I intuitively dislike “salesy” stuff and then turn on System 2, put my revulsion aside and investigate if it still may be an objectively good product. To my System 1 it feels cheezy, dishonest and so on.
Let me propose another theory. It is all about being a spergy (Asperger) autistic misanthropic (so not only low social skills but more like disliking people) nerd geek who has fuck for social life and dislikes it in general. Social life is simply not honest. You are supposed to smile at people even though you are not always glad to see them yet you must say glad to see ya, and you must ask how are you even if you don’t care at all and when they ask the same you cannot give a true answer but must put up a smile and say great and so on. This disgusts people like me on a System 1 level, our System 1 is not wired for socialization and thus dislike the smell of untruth. It was very very hard for me to learn that people do not always mean everything literally they say. Often just saying things because it is expected to say those. And I did not like it one bit, I valued truth (not LW type super Bayesian truth, just expressing how you actually feel ) over kindness or conformity on a System 1 level.
And “salesy” stuff feels like all this socialization—but on steroids. For example salespeople in person act as as super-extroverted, and act like liking people very much. And advertisements feel like that too.
Note that “cheezy” is an entirely aesthetic term… this is what I’m talking about in terms of blind spots. Dishonest is not necessarily an aesthetic term… but in the sense you’re using it, it does seem to be more a value judgement than an evaluation that means “advertisements are lies because they tell you things that aren’t true.”
I agree with the rest of your analysis—one of the things I almost wrote about in my original answer is the relation between your aesthetic preferences and your social skills and desire for social interaction. hat you call “spergy” I call “an aesthetic preference for system 2.”
Wait, I don’t understand the relationship between system 2 preference and social interaction desire / skill. You saying social interaction is almost fully System 1? Come to think of it, I too see a correlation between them, but have not seen any sort of a theory that connects them causally.
I don’t think social interaction is fully system one—there’s a lot of political games and navigating relationships that are under the domain of system 2. But the act of socializing, in the moment, I see as largely system 1 driven.
A lot of this comes from a place where I didn’t understand social interactions at all… As I came to be able to interact more normally, one of the key things I learned is that in most cases of social interaction, the interaction is not about a logical exchange of information or ideas—it’s taking place on an emotional level.
System 1 is built for social interaction. It helps us with the tiny subcommunications that reveal things about our emotions and status, and it’s built to read other’s subcommunications that communicate the same things, and give us feelings about other people based on those subcommunications.
One of the reasons that people have “aspy” behavior is either that this part of their system 1 is not very powerful—they have trouble empathizing, reading those social cues, etc. AND/OR, they simply dislike that form of communication—they have an aesthetic preference for logical, factual conversations, instead of the empathy based emotional exchange that most “normal” interactions hinge on.