A common problem is that X judges Y, his actions, or similar based on a poor understanding of Y’s motivations, situation, background, whatnot. Here I discuss some illustrative cases.
(This is not to be confused with poor judgment arising from more general ignorance, e.g. when a politician makes suggestions that display ignorance of basic Economics. Also note that it does not follow that X would agree with Y, had he a better understanding—but if he still disagrees, he would do so from a more informed position.)
This page originated as a bit of an excuse to discuss the two original cases (Trump-voting speed-dater, physicist researcher) before my already faded memories faded too far, but the topic is worthwhile in its own right and further examples are likely to follow over time.
In as far as others are discussed, there is an element of own speculation. This is acceptable, however, as the point is to use them as illustration of principle—not to e.g. make statements about the individuals at hand. (If it were, I might very well be guilty the same type of error that I discuss here—and by no means do I rule out that I have erred myself in other texts. In fact, considering volume, it would be very odd if I had a perfect record.)
Entries here will also often have an aspect of “missing the point”, e.g. the point of speed dating, failing to consider “Chesterton’s fence”, or similar. Cf. parts of [1].
At some point, I read an “ask me anything” interview with someone running speed-dating sessions. Among the questions was (to some approximation) what the worst behavior/most stupid thing done by a participant had been. The answer was a man who had begun each of the speed-dates with the claim that he had voted for Trump.
Apart from the apparent anti-Trump bias of the interviewee, chances are that this goes back to a fundamental misunderstanding of priorities—and chances are that the Trump-voter had saner priorities: The point of speed-dating is not to go home with as many (real or metaphorical) telephone numbers as possible, for which keeping silent about voting Trump might indeed have been helpful, but to use the speed date to make a rapid mutual filtering as to who might be a worthwhile prospect for regular dating or other more serious investigations of romantic or sexual compatibility.
In the spirit of this text: I do not rule out that there are those who have a goal of, e.g., collecting as many telephone numbers as possible (maybe, to get an ego boost) or to play a short-term numbers game in order to get at least one of the many women into bed. (Each to his own.) But that is not the point of speed dating and someone running speed-dating sessions should have his focus more on the actual point. To boot, even if there are some with a goal of gathering telephone numbers or having a one-night stand, there is no particular reason to assume that the Trump voter was among them.
At the same time, political opinions are of great importance in today’s relationship world (at least, in countries like the U.S.), where a large portion of the population (in particular, young women) have been so brainwashed into outright loony variations of Leftism that its members (a) would be problematic long-term prospects for anyone with saner opinions, (b) might outright reject someone for having such saner opinions. (Recall that there have been cases even of brainwashed college students breaking off relationships with their parents.)
What, then, if someone successfully gets the telephone number of a loony Lefty by keeping politics off the table, spends several evenings worth of time, effort, and money on dating—and politics does become a topic? (And in anything sufficiently long term, it eventually will. Going through just a few weeks without even a mention would be hard, let alone months or years.) Chances are that the sane one is dumped because “I could never be with a Trump voter!” or himself finds the other party too hard to get along with.
This the more so as the political opinions of the loony Lefty is not all that there is to the matter—we also have to consider how they arose. For instance, a young woman who is better at critical thinking, actively gathers information for herself, tries to avoid echo chambers, whatnot, is simultaneously more likely to (a) be a worthwhile romantic prospect, (b) not fall for Leftist brainwashing, than the run-of-the-mill co-ed. That someone has not fallen for Leftist brainwashing increases the chances that she is worthwhile, while having fallen decreases them. Likewise, a woman who judges issues on their merits is more likely to be worthwhile than someone who seeks consensus-for-the-sake-of-consensus, one who stands up for her own opinions more than someone who pretends to hold a set of opinions to fit in, etc.
(Similarly, outside the brainwashing that so often takes place today, a more general (b) of not falling for political rhetoric, of actually understanding Economics and that this-and-that Leftist idea is unlikely to work, etc., applies.)
Clearly, then, it is better to be upfront about such matters early on, to save that time, effort, and money for both parties. Then: In what manner was the Trump-voting speed-dater behaving poorly or doing something stupid? On the contrary, his actions were both rational and in the best interest of both parties, while e.g. someone who had pretended to be, say, a Biden voter truly would have done something stupid and potentially harmful.
Similar remarks apply to other factors that could be of great importance. For instance, if someone has (non-adult) kids from a prior relationship, it would be wrong to not be upfront about this, let alone pretend otherwise. Ditto, if someone has a “no sex until marriage” policy. Ditto, as above, if someone is looking for a one-night stand and not a potential relationship. Etc.
However, we are talking big issues (and it is sad that political opinions currently belong to them). In contrast, if someone is a “civil” vegetarian, this is not a “must actively tell”. Yes, with a non-vegetarian counterpart, this might turn out to be an issue down the road and it is certainly a “must not lie if asked”, but is not of the same magnitude as, say, having children (be it in probability of problems arising or in the likely size of the problems), and speed dating does require some brevity. In contrast, if someone is a “meat is murder” vegetarian or, say, has a policy of “if you want to be with me, you are not allowed to eat meat”, then we have a “must actively tell”.
I once encountered a medical researcher who ranted about physicists, what the big deal about physicists would be, and that he had once employed a physicist who was useless because (approximately) “he did not even know how to perform a randomized double-blind study—and randomized double-blind studies are the single most important tool of science”.
Leaving aside the dangers of drawing conclusions about physicists in general from one single physicist:
Is there any particular reason to require that a physicist knows how to perform a randomized double-blind study? No. He might or might not have developed such knowledge, say, out of personal curiosity or through prior exposure to medical research, but such studies are of very little importance in physics. Generally, the claim that they would be the single most important tool of science is very dubious—they might (or might not) be so in medicine, but that tells us very little about their importance to other fields and to science in general. The same criticism applied to a physician might have been justified, but not when applied to a physicist. (For that matter, even the average physician does not have any real reason to perform randomized double-blind studies in his daily work, because his daily work involves treating patients and not doing medical research.)
The point with employing physicists in other fields than physics (and, m.m., others with a solid background in very “hard” sciences and/or mathematics) lies elsewhere, namely, that they are disproportionately likely to have good brains, because it is hard get through a physics curriculum (even on the undergraduate, let alone graduate, level) without a good brain—the scope to compensate for insufficient brains by legwork is simply smaller than in e.g. medicine, let alone for students of business or social work.
When it comes to thinking or, e.g., the ability to rapidly learn how to do a randomized double-blind study, a physicist might be a good choice because of a “likely to have good brains” angle—but not when prior knowledge of a foreign-to-him domain is non-negotiable. Likewise, if someones wants his plumbing fixed, a plumber is a better bet than a medical researcher, because it is unlikely that the medical researcher will have the right prior knowledge/skills/whatnot.
In a next step, my own professional experiences point very strongly to prior knowledge being less important than brains, professionalism, mentality, whatnot in the long term. Deficits in knowledge will shrink, disappear, or even reverse over time. (Outright reversals can happen when the one is keen on his “continued education” and the other is not.) In contrast, a deficit of brains is very hard to alter. Professionalism and mentality are more changeable (and, unlike brains, have no obvious connection to being a physicist), but they rarely do or only do so over prolonged times, because lacking professionalism and/or lacking the right mentality gets in the way of improving these very things.
The question, in most contexts, is not who is the better choice with an eye at the immediate now, but who will be a better choice with an eye at the long term. Already knowing how to perform a randomized double-blind study is a good sign for the immediate now—but it tells us very little about the long term.
To boot, someone with better brains but a short-term knowledge deficit can often contribute strongly even in the short term, if given the chance, through the advantages that arise from being better at solving problems, better at spotting overlooked complications, better at coming up with new ideas, whatnot.
Note that I do not at any point say that the specific physicist at hand was a better thinker. He might or might have been. The point is the big picture and what can be expected from average members of various groups.
The above claims about the short and the long term apply with reservations. It is, for instance, very possible that a physicist could have something of value to contribute to medical research in the long (maybe, even, short) term, but I do not claim e.g. that a physicist could be hired as a physician and rapidly catch-up with years of med school by “learning on the job”.
(However, it is interesting that at least the U.S. system for physicians does require very considerable on-the-job training between med school and full licensing. While med school might be a prerequisite, it does not appear to be anywhere near enough. This could go back to another case of having the right prior knowledge in the short term vs. having the right brains/professionalism/mentality/whatnot in the long term. Certainly, in any field, a degree is better seen as “has a good starting point” than as “has truly mastered the field”—contrary what to what e.g. many politicians seem to believe.)
A somewhat related and very illustrative case is a claim that I have seen repeatedly over the years: That some native speaker would be blind to the fact that he spoke a dialect, and incorrectly believe that he adhered to the national standard.
For convenience, I will use “dialect” (and its variations) in the sense of a “locally native” deviation from a (perceived) national standard in this text, compatible with typical layman’s use. To use a stricter sense, I will use “Dialect”. (The standard, it self, which is usually just a “locally native” variation that came out on top, is a Dialect but not a dialect according to this convention.)
Further variations, e.g. sociolects, are either ignored or subsumed under “[dD]ialect”.
To some approximation, “dialect” and/or my discussion can be seen as limited to matters of pronunciation—compatible with my understanding of the aforementioned claim. (If in doubt, choice of word, grammatical rules, etc., seem to vary less between Dialects today than in the past.) However, chances are that the discussion generalizes reasonably beyond pronunciation.
Note that even the idea of a legitimate “national standard” can be disputed (also see some of the below); and I use the term to match the idea of the aforementioned claim. The use of such a vague term also has the advantage of not locking the discussion to a particular language, e.g. English or Swedish, when it is likely to apply to all languages with a non-trivial number of speakers and geographic (or other) variation.
Concerning “accent”: It might apply to some parts of the discussion (notably, the British vs. U.S. juxtaposition), but is usually seen as limited to something foreign and would not apply to e.g. a juxtaposition within the same country. To boot, to my recollection, the discussed claim has always been phrased in terms of “dialect”, and accent does not generalize to matters beyond pronunciation (cf. the previous paragraph).
This, I suspect, is a fundamental misunderstanding of what goes on: The one making the claim seems to be believe that the dialectal speaker (a) agrees on what the national standard is and (b) incorrectly believes that he adheres to this (undisputed) standard. More likely, however, he disagrees with what the standard is and simply considers his way of speaking the standard and the (presumed) national standard a mere dialect.
This the more so as a national standards tends to change over time, both in that the dialect that makes up a given standard can change internally and that what dialect is considered the standard can change, e.g. based on what dialect dominates in news broadcasts. (Which, in turn, can depend on factors like where the majority of news studios happen to be located.) We might have to consider cases of someone who did adhere to the national standard in his childhood, has kept his pronunciation more-or-less the same over eighty years, and is now deemed as speaking dialect by a much younger generation.
Indeed, I strongly suspect that we all have an internal baseline and that we unconsciously tend to view what deviates from this baseline as a dialect, “weird pronunciation”, or similar. For instance, the dominant dialect on Swedish TV is the one spoken in and around Stockholm, the capital of Sweden, but when I hear it on TV or in real life during a rare visit, it sounds non-standard to me—it is clearly a Stockholm dialect, not “standard Swedish”. Likewise, in my childhood, I was much more likely to perceive someone as “talking funny” if from near-by Ställdalen than from Kopparberg, where I lived.
Chances are that Dialects have also become less granular and more geographically uniform over time, in part through the influence of TV/radio/whatnot, in part through greater individual mobility. A demonstration like the one performed by Professor Higgins at the beginning of “My Fair Lady” was more likely to have been realistic at the time in which the musical is set than at the time that it was written, and even more so compared to today. (The underlying “Pygmalion” was much closer in time to the events)
Or consider the issue of speaking with a British or a U.S. accent. A Brit has a British baseline and is unlikely to view another Brit as using a British accent (but might view him as using a more specific within-Britain Dialect), with the same, in reverse, applying to a U.S. speaker. Indeed, further subdivisions might well take place, e.g. in that an Englishman might differ between RP and Estuary within England but view Scottish dialects as simply Scottish dialects (and, of course, not see any non-English version as so standard that I should use “Dialect” over “dialect” in this sentence).
For my own part, most of my own early exposure to English was British English, be it in school (although I, with hindsight, doubt the quality of pronunciation of my early teachers) or through the many BBC and whatnot shows that aired on Swedish TV, and when I encountered something U.S. I often had that “U.S. accent” impression. In my teens and onwards, U.S. imports came to dominate among what I watched and the rarer British things gave a “British accent” impression. Recently, I have watched a few old seasons of “Top Gear”, and the odd U.S. guest comes across as having the accent, while Clarkson et co. simply speak English. The reason, of course, is that my baseline has not been constant over time.
However, with both British and U.S. English, I have over time grown much more aware of “internal variations”, and I am unlikely to mistake RP for Estuary (note that the Brits often vary on non-geographic criteria) or New York for Boston.
(Individual parts of even London or New York, in the Higgins-style, is a very different matter, but I am at least aware that there are some dialectal differences within e.g. London and New York, even today.)
Likewise, I can e.g. tell an Australian accent from a Canadian one. (But could not be more specific than “Australian” resp. “Canadian”, unlike with some U.S. and British cases.)
An interesting aside is that I sometimes hear one actor speak and note that he sounds quite a bit like another actor in a manner that points to a shared dialect, maybe, on the city level, but have so little overall exposure that I have no clue what the city might be.
In Germany, where I live, there are divisions where large blocks of the population appear to consider “their” dialect the true standard in an almost official manner, as with the Bavarians.
Crossing the German border to Switzerland, the English vs. U.S. differences are dwarfed—as might it be when going from England to Scotland. (Going from Bavaria to Austria is less drastic, to the point that the “Bavarian German” might be more similar to “Austrian German” than to other variations of “German German”.) Pronunciation-wise, the Swiss differ so strongly from the Germans that we might be closer to having two languages than two dialects. (The border between language and dialect is fleeting, but the similarity in writing might ensure that “Swiss German” and “German German” remain a single language for the foreseeable future.)
Still, both the Swiss and the Germans tend to see their German as the proper version of the language. Indeed, a German colleague once told me how he had spoken on the phone with someone in Switzerland, had assumed that she spoke another language outright (Switzerland is multilingual) and asked her to speak German instead—after which she was very insulted, because she had, apparently, spoken (Swiss-)German to begin with.
Both Bavarians (ditto, some other German groups) and the Swiss are, then, very much aware that they deviate from what many others might consider standard German—but they still tend see their own version as the true one.
In reverse, contrasting U.S. and British dialects, I cannot guarantee that I would have recognized, say, a Scottish accent as British rather than U.S., had I not been exposed to it sufficiently often with the knowledge that it was Scottish and where Scotland was located, while RP and Estuary likely are sufficiently uniformly English, even while sounding very differently, that I would have seen them as English or British, not U.S., even without such an aid.
(Wether I could correctly tell a “Scottish-American” accent from a regular Scottish one, I leave unstated, especially, as most Scottish accents in U.S. screen fiction might be fake and/or coached. I likely could tell the difference between fake and real Scottish accents in a direct comparison and most of the time, but I might not be able to do so when the fake has no comparison or is sufficiently skillful. Judging at least a thick real accent without comparison is likely easier, as in “Train Spotting”.)
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