HA: It seems to me that you think I have changed the topic. I agree with all of the sentences of your most recent comment, except for the first, but they don’t seem to be about what I was saying.
Likewise, I agreed with Eliezer’s post, but I thought that his analogy was, well, lacking in appreciation of the difficulties involved in analogy.
Basically, I think that Douglas Hofstadter’s writings on the difficulties of natural language translation, the proper translation of literature, etc, are all in relevant to the issue of the translation of inferred emotion. Evolution provides a scaffold for our brains to develop, biasing us, strongly or weakly in certain directions,
http://compbiol.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371%2Fjournal.pcbi.0030147&ct=1&SESSID=08a65728475c8bb59fcfb7e7aff1cfde
sometimes strongly enough that translation is at least almost always possible (maybe not with the Piraha?) and we can speak of human universals, and sometimes weakly enough that we can talk about Liberal insensitivity to 3 of Haidt’s 5 domains of morality. When the biases are strong or when atypical emotional mixes emerge and propagate memetically, empathy ceases to be useful and “the other” must, in some respect or another, be understood empirically, e.g. without the benefit of our specialized social processing capabilities. In such cases, our anticipation suffers, but it suffers even more if we force bad analogies and continue to use our social processing capabilities in inappropriate circumstances.
HA: It seems to me that you think I have changed the topic. I agree with all of the sentences of your most recent comment, except for the first, but they don’t seem to be about what I was saying.
Likewise, I agreed with Eliezer’s post, but I thought that his analogy was, well, lacking in appreciation of the difficulties involved in analogy.
Basically, I think that Douglas Hofstadter’s writings on the difficulties of natural language translation, the proper translation of literature, etc, are all in relevant to the issue of the translation of inferred emotion. Evolution provides a scaffold for our brains to develop, biasing us, strongly or weakly in certain directions, http://compbiol.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371%2Fjournal.pcbi.0030147&ct=1&SESSID=08a65728475c8bb59fcfb7e7aff1cfde sometimes strongly enough that translation is at least almost always possible (maybe not with the Piraha?) and we can speak of human universals, and sometimes weakly enough that we can talk about Liberal insensitivity to 3 of Haidt’s 5 domains of morality. When the biases are strong or when atypical emotional mixes emerge and propagate memetically, empathy ceases to be useful and “the other” must, in some respect or another, be understood empirically, e.g. without the benefit of our specialized social processing capabilities. In such cases, our anticipation suffers, but it suffers even more if we force bad analogies and continue to use our social processing capabilities in inappropriate circumstances.