I suspect everyone can relate in that everyone has felt this at some point, or even at a few memorable points.
Duncan did you just deny my existence? (Don’t worry, I don’t mind a bit. :-) )
I’m a grade A weirdo, my own family and friends affirm this, only the other day someone on Less Wrong (!) called me a rambling madman. My nickname in my favourite cricket club/drinking society was Space Cadet.
And I’m rather smug about this. Everyone else just doesn’t seem very good at thinking. Even if they’re right they’re usually right by accident. Even the clever ones seem to have some sort of blinders on. They don’t even take their own ideas seriously.
Why would I be upset by being able to see things they can’t see, think thoughts they can’t think? That doesn’t seem to be the sort of thing that could hurt me.
For most of your essay I was thinking: “Is he just mistaking metaphorical ‘everyone’ for literal ‘everyone’?”. But in the comments you say that’s not what you meant at all. And I don’t even understand that. Surely, if you replace ‘everyone’ with ‘most people’ throughout, your existence is not being denied?
And if your existence was being denied, why would that be a problem? If someone came straight up to me and said “You don’t exist”, I’d just think they were mad, it wouldn’t hurt.
I read that you’re in pain and it puzzles me. I’ve always wondered if the bit of my brain that is supposed to feel pressure-to-conform is malformed. I notice it, but it doesn’t seem powerful. Maybe yours is in perfect working order? Is it that you really really want to fit in, but in order to do so you’d have to be someone else, and that hurts?
Or have I failed to extract from your essay the meaning you were trying to put into it?
I’m with you on this one; I like feeling like an outlier. It makes me feel special :P
There are some examples there that did grind my gears though, like the pillow-throwing example and the ‘that didn’t hurt’ example. They felt more like ‘I’m going to insist your inner experience isn’t real, to the point where I won’t believe you (even if only in a joking way) if you told me’.
Whereas the ‘no-one does that’ example and the ‘we all love Tom Hanks too much’ example felt more like a metaphorical ‘everyone’ and if you actually said ‘no, I’m not like that’, the response would be ‘oh okay not ~everyone’s~ like that’.
I’d personally feel hurt by the former class of experiences but not the latter, because for me, it’s more about invalidation. It’s less ‘you don’t exist’, but rather ‘you exist in this particular way (that’s contrary to my own experiences and completely alien to what I perceive myself as), AND if you say otherwise you’re lying’.
Similarly, I’d feel hurt by an implication that someone else doesn’t exist, if it’s contrary to my own experiences. For instance, if I’ve argued about X with a lot of people and some of them gave a counterargument Y, and then someone has the counterargument Z. They think I’m strawmanning Z as Y, and they tell me: ‘no-one said Y’. It’s like … someone definitely said Y. I distinctly remember a nonzero number of people explicitly saying Y to my face, and I even made sure they actually meant Y and I wasn’t misinterpreting them.
Even if I know it’s a metaphorical ‘no-one’ and they actually just meant ‘most people who appear to be saying Y actually mean Z’, it still hurts :\
Duncan did you just deny my existence? (Don’t worry, I don’t mind a bit. :-) )
I’m a grade A weirdo, my own family and friends affirm this, only the other day someone on Less Wrong (!) called me a rambling madman. My nickname in my favourite cricket club/drinking society was Space Cadet.
And I’m rather smug about this. Everyone else just doesn’t seem very good at thinking. Even if they’re right they’re usually right by accident. Even the clever ones seem to have some sort of blinders on. They don’t even take their own ideas seriously.
Why would I be upset by being able to see things they can’t see, think thoughts they can’t think? That doesn’t seem to be the sort of thing that could hurt me.
For most of your essay I was thinking: “Is he just mistaking metaphorical ‘everyone’ for literal ‘everyone’?”. But in the comments you say that’s not what you meant at all. And I don’t even understand that. Surely, if you replace ‘everyone’ with ‘most people’ throughout, your existence is not being denied?
And if your existence was being denied, why would that be a problem? If someone came straight up to me and said “You don’t exist”, I’d just think they were mad, it wouldn’t hurt.
I read that you’re in pain and it puzzles me. I’ve always wondered if the bit of my brain that is supposed to feel pressure-to-conform is malformed. I notice it, but it doesn’t seem powerful. Maybe yours is in perfect working order? Is it that you really really want to fit in, but in order to do so you’d have to be someone else, and that hurts?
Or have I failed to extract from your essay the meaning you were trying to put into it?
I’m with you on this one; I like feeling like an outlier. It makes me feel special :P
There are some examples there that did grind my gears though, like the pillow-throwing example and the ‘that didn’t hurt’ example. They felt more like ‘I’m going to insist your inner experience isn’t real, to the point where I won’t believe you (even if only in a joking way) if you told me’.
Whereas the ‘no-one does that’ example and the ‘we all love Tom Hanks too much’ example felt more like a metaphorical ‘everyone’ and if you actually said ‘no, I’m not like that’, the response would be ‘oh okay not ~everyone’s~ like that’.
I’d personally feel hurt by the former class of experiences but not the latter, because for me, it’s more about invalidation. It’s less ‘you don’t exist’, but rather ‘you exist in this particular way (that’s contrary to my own experiences and completely alien to what I perceive myself as), AND if you say otherwise you’re lying’.
Similarly, I’d feel hurt by an implication that someone else doesn’t exist, if it’s contrary to my own experiences. For instance, if I’ve argued about X with a lot of people and some of them gave a counterargument Y, and then someone has the counterargument Z. They think I’m strawmanning Z as Y, and they tell me: ‘no-one said Y’. It’s like … someone definitely said Y. I distinctly remember a nonzero number of people explicitly saying Y to my face, and I even made sure they actually meant Y and I wasn’t misinterpreting them.
Even if I know it’s a metaphorical ‘no-one’ and they actually just meant ‘most people who appear to be saying Y actually mean Z’, it still hurts :\