“Different Worlds”, 2017-10-02 (; backlinks; similar):
[Psychiatrist muses about individual differences: how do people perceive & experience such extremely different ‘worlds’, such that some lurch from drama to trauma while others experience few problems, a large fraction of Americans are Young Earth Creationists while he knows none personally, some constantly experience ‘sexism’ and ‘racism’ while others never experience it, some psychiatrists get patients who melt down regularly while others (like him) never do, and so on? (See also: the Dodo Bird Verdict/therapist-specific effects, heritability, reactive gene-environment interaction, typical mind fallacy, cognitive biases, ‘everything is correlated’, the Metallic Laws.)]
People self-select into bubbles along all sorts of axes. Some of these bubbles are obvious and easy to explain, like rich people mostly meeting other rich people at the country club. Others are more mysterious, like how some non-programmer ends up with mostly programmer friends. Still others are horrible and completely outside comprehension, like someone who tries very hard to avoid abusers but ends up in multiple abusive relationships anyway. Even for two people living in the same country, city, and neighborhood, they can have a “society” made up of very different types of people. People vary widely on the way they perceive social interaction. A paranoid schizophrenic will view every interaction as hostile; a Williams Syndrome kid will view every interaction as friendly. In between, there will be a whole range of healthy people without any psychiatric disorder who tend toward one side or the other. Only the most blatant data can be interpreted absent the priors that these dispositions provide; everything else will only get processed through preexisting assumptions about how people tend to act. Since things like racism rarely take the form of someone going up to you and saying “Hello, I am a racist and because of your skin color I plan to discriminate against you in the following ways…”, they’ll end up as ambiguous stimuli that everyone will interpret differently. Finally, some people have personalities or styles of social interaction that unconsciously compel a certain response from their listeners. Call these “niceness fields” or “meanness fields” or whatever: some people are the sort who—if they became psychotherapists—would have patients who constantly suffered dramatic emotional meltdowns, and others’ patients would calmly discuss their problems.
The old question goes: are people basically good or basically evil? Different philosophers give different answers. But so do different random people I know who aren’t thinking philosophically at all. Some people describe a world of backstabbing Machiavellians, where everybody’s a shallow social climber who will kick down anyone it takes to get to the top. Other people describe a world where everyone is basically on the same page, trying to be nice to everyone else but getting stuck in communication difficulties and honest disagreements over values.
I think both groups are right. Some people experience worlds of basically-good people who treat them nicely. Other people experience worlds of awful hypocritical backstabbers. This can be true even if they live in the same area as each other, work the same job as each other, et cetera.
To return to a common theme: nothing makes sense except in light of inter-individual variation. Variation in people’s internal experience. Variation in people’s basic beliefs and assumptions. Variation in level of abstract thought. And to all of this I would add a variation in our experience of other people.
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