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Weâre often told that conversation on the internet are apt to go awry, because of the lack of emphasis, or intonation, or context, but I generally finger a different culprit: humans do not abstract well.
One interview with an anthropologist and his Yanomamo wife showed the interviewer asking âwhatâs your favourite part of coming to live here?â, and the man took a long time to translate the question. The anthropologist then turned back to the interviewer and explained âYanomamo do not ask these general questions, so I had to break down options for her, asking specifically about beds, and burgers, so she understood the questionâ.
As someone who worries about precise definitions, I might have struggled with the question too. I might say âthe best thing about living in Europe, as opposed to a forest with a hunter-gatherer lifestyle is soap, because it decreases your chance of death quite a lotâ, but then I might just say âsafetyâ, and then lump a whole lot more in with it. While Iâm there, could I say âexperiencesâ? Because having experiences necessitates not-dying, so maybe Iâve managed to smuggle more into my answer. And at the height, I might just say âMy favourite bits are those things which I consider good, at the times I enjoy themâ, gives us a Mathematically pure answer, and therefore relieves us of the pains of the messy, physical world.
I think the anthropologist was wrong to say we Europeans think in abstractions. I think we merely think that we think in abstractions, but in fact think in terms of decided images all the time.
Iâm going to take my own medicine, and explain entirely in examples.
The abortion debate repeatedly shows two groups of pictures: one picturing dead babies, and another picturing dead women.
Redditâs /r/aita allows people to tell a story where thought they were wrong, but now doubt themselves, and ask at the end, âam I the asshole [in this narrative]?â.
Now letâs ask:
If popular opinion says youâre the asshole, are you?
Those familiar with the subreddit will âpictureâ, or at least draw heavily from, various famous posts where awful people were instructed that they had acted awfully, and need to stop. They will then side mostly on the âyesâ side, saying that when public opinion marches against you, in all likelihood, you have erred.
But someone less familiar with the subreddit, and more familiar with history, might differ. The images (or âexamplesâ) which comes to mind might involve 1820âs women who wanted to vote, 1950âs people who wanted to be gay, 1990âs gay people who wanted their family to just chill and let their girlfriend come to Christmas dinner, and so create unending images of a faulty society, making unreasonable demands.
Iâve always found the anti-cannabis people baffling. Thinking in terms of science held no use - none of the articles successfully show damage from cannabis, and those rare articles presenting anti-cannabis âfindingsâ, show deeply flawed methodology in the abstract.
However, thinking in terms of pictures has allowed me to understand people who oppose cannabis. They donât have any plan, or facts - they have a tragic image of a young person who wastes their life being stoned, and suffers minor brain-rot, leaving behind the fulfilling career and family they might otherwise have enjoyed.
Their studies and excuses arrive long after the picture has established itself as the primary reference in their brain.
This also provides a guide to combating these views. Neurotypical people do not typically change their minds after reading scientific articles; they change their minds once their pictures find replacements. Knowing someone who perpetually smokes cannabis on the weekends, and works as a lawyer during the day can change the primary images they hold.
I donât have anything to hide
Upon hearing this, privacy advocates roll their eyes, then prepare to roll out all the standard questions:
Nobody really wants to say âI have never cared about any kind of privacyâ, so these statements probably wonât hit too hard. The privacy stuff comes up around articles on Facebook âtaking your dataâ, or Google âtracking your locationâ. We can flesh this out quite a distance without encountering bad pictures. The defender here can imagine going to Starbucks, and Google knows this, then considers sending a Starbucks advert. She considers later, when she goes home, and Google knows she goes home in the evening. On the weekend, both Google and Facebook will find out sheâs gone to the pub with her friends. Perhaps an advert about a new, local cocktail bar will show up on her Facebook feed.
This example apathetic person with ânothing to hideâ, has done a fair amount of work, and could do a lot more, without wandering into anything unpleasant. They havenât failed to generalize in any special sense - nobody can conjure every possible image which has some properties X, and Y.
The defendant here also doesnât feel moved by the âdo you have curtains?â defence. The picture has moved too quickly. Now it sounds like asking about a smartphone, camera on, directed at them while they poop, sending pictures straight off to Zuckerbergâs screen for him to publish. It feels like a change of topic - the kind of technically-correct which sounds like a legal loop-hole.
Imagery can help explain the accusing questions from the other side. This person wants privacy - why? What should we imagine, specifically? Perhaps someone who can no longer deal drugs, or someone with deviant sexual fetishes, or perhaps people who go on racist rants online, protected by their anonymity. People naturally fill in the image of someone who desperately wants privacy with reasons, and good reasons donât present themselves.
Real imagery often works better. The recent wave of women in the USA considering deleting their period-tracking app isnât because they care about privacy now but couldnât earlier. They care because of a particular image of a woman in court, with her period-tracking app-data coming out as evidence of her six-month pregnancy, a prosecutor asking if she caused her own miscarriage, a receipt showing the alcohol sheâd bought before her next period, and a jury prepared to weep over the vixen who killed a little baby with her debauchery.