What strikes me is that the straightforward (to me) interpretation never enters her mind—that he thought she was mistaken and said so.
It doesn’t seem to me like that possibility didn’t occur to her, she’s saying that it’s absurd to draw that conclusion with as little data as they have, and offensive that they try and press it when she says otherwise.
I’d use an analogy of a physicist talking to yet another person who “has a theory” about quantum mechanics or relativity or whatever, which countless people think they’re qualified to speculate on despite being fairly ignorant in physics. They explain it to the physicist, who tells them “Sorry, that’s just not right.” And their response to the physicist is “No, see, look...”
The physicist knows a hell of a lot more than they do about the subject, and it’s trivializing the gap in their amounts of knowledge to press on and explain why they think they’re right and the physicist is wrong without stopping to ask “How do you know that it’s incorrect?”
I am quite familiar with the physicist example, but the situation might be different here. People are notoriously bad at introspection, which lowers the difference between an amateur and an expert. Additionally, daenerys and the guy might be interpreting the question differently: she describes how she feels, he describes how she appears.
People do tend to be pretty bad at introspection, but if you feel that you’re in a much better position to make a judgment than someone else, and they insist that you’re wrong anyway, it’s liable to feel pretty insulting.
A difference in interpretation seems like it should have been pretty easy to recognize, if the conversation carried on long (ordinary people can hammer out a confusion for ages, but I’d expect a Less Wrong member to be better at noticing “hey, it seems like we’re talking about completely different things here.”)
I’ve thought about this a lot trying to figure out what they’re trying to do.
She doesn’t mention “he thought she was mistaken and said so” in her list of possibilities. If she thought of the obvious answer, why did she have to spend so much time pondering other motives for their actions?
Yes, she’s saying it’s absurd for others with limited knowledge of her to think they have knowledge about her that she doesn’t. And she supposes no one does absurd things?
But I think her opinion that a stranger couldn’t see something about someone else that the person themselves does not see is absurd in itself. A lot of people are not very self aware. And even people reasonably self aware are likely unaware of things a stranger would see in minutes. Some business school taped classroom interactions to show the students how they looked in the third person. The general take was that the class was both appalling and transformative, bringing things about themselves to their awareness that they had no clue about. Is there anyone who likes listening to their own message on their answering machine?
It doesn’t seem to me like that possibility didn’t occur to her, she’s saying that it’s absurd to draw that conclusion with as little data as they have, and offensive that they try and press it when she says otherwise.
I’d use an analogy of a physicist talking to yet another person who “has a theory” about quantum mechanics or relativity or whatever, which countless people think they’re qualified to speculate on despite being fairly ignorant in physics. They explain it to the physicist, who tells them “Sorry, that’s just not right.” And their response to the physicist is “No, see, look...”
The physicist knows a hell of a lot more than they do about the subject, and it’s trivializing the gap in their amounts of knowledge to press on and explain why they think they’re right and the physicist is wrong without stopping to ask “How do you know that it’s incorrect?”
I am quite familiar with the physicist example, but the situation might be different here. People are notoriously bad at introspection, which lowers the difference between an amateur and an expert. Additionally, daenerys and the guy might be interpreting the question differently: she describes how she feels, he describes how she appears.
People do tend to be pretty bad at introspection, but if you feel that you’re in a much better position to make a judgment than someone else, and they insist that you’re wrong anyway, it’s liable to feel pretty insulting.
A difference in interpretation seems like it should have been pretty easy to recognize, if the conversation carried on long (ordinary people can hammer out a confusion for ages, but I’d expect a Less Wrong member to be better at noticing “hey, it seems like we’re talking about completely different things here.”)
She said:
She doesn’t mention “he thought she was mistaken and said so” in her list of possibilities. If she thought of the obvious answer, why did she have to spend so much time pondering other motives for their actions?
Yes, she’s saying it’s absurd for others with limited knowledge of her to think they have knowledge about her that she doesn’t. And she supposes no one does absurd things?
But I think her opinion that a stranger couldn’t see something about someone else that the person themselves does not see is absurd in itself. A lot of people are not very self aware. And even people reasonably self aware are likely unaware of things a stranger would see in minutes. Some business school taped classroom interactions to show the students how they looked in the third person. The general take was that the class was both appalling and transformative, bringing things about themselves to their awareness that they had no clue about. Is there anyone who likes listening to their own message on their answering machine?