optical illusion
Nov. 18th, 2014 11:03 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacAll right, this is a genuine question, that arose in comments on a post at File 770 (no link because I want you to read this first). Consider the following photo of cast members of A Clockwork Orange. (If you've seen the movie, pretend you haven't, because I don't want knowledge of the relative importance of the characters to prejudice the results.)
I don't have a paid LJ account, so I can't create a radio-button poll, so just put answers in comments. Here's the question:
If someone captions this photo identifying one of the pictured as at "far left", whom do they mean?
(1) The guy leaning forward, whose head is consequently further to the left.
(2) The guy whose head is visible over #1's shoulder, but who is seated further to the left.
(3) It could mean either one. Be more specific.
(4) The head partially visible from behind in the lower left hand corner.
Remember, the question is not how you would caption it, but your guess as to what someone else might mean in captioning it.
I answered #3, and asked Mike Glyer, who wrote the caption, for further elucidation. But his answer wasn't "It's #1; I didn't realize there was any ambiguity about it;" he claimed that only some kind of obnoxious pedant would pretend there was any ambiguity, and that "Your average person" would know automatically that you go by faces, not by bodies. (Glyer has known me for over 30 years: surely he's figured out by now that I am not an average person. But if I really were being obnoxiously pedantic, I would have gone for #4, which is why I included that as an option.)
I'm struck by the attitude of not only not realizing that other people might find ambiguity in the wording, but of declaring that anybody who does is WRONG. The idea of changing the caption to "at left, leaning forward," didn't come up, because any other interpretation of "far left", even as uncertainty of what someone else might mean by it, was just WRONG. I'm reminded of the pop. vs. soda wars, in which your belief of the right word depends on where in the U.S. you live, and that both groups are heatedly convinced that the other word is utterly WRONG. "It's 'pop'! 'Soda' means soda water!" "It's 'soda'! 'Pop' is your father!"
I'm also reminded of this article by Michael Kinsley on mental functioning. Kinsley took a subtle mental functioning test including this question: "Janet is attacked by a mugger only 10 feet from her house. Susan is attacked by a mugger a mile from her house. Who is more upset by the mugging? Your choices are (a) Janet, (b) Susan, or (c) same or can’t tell."
"To me," Kinsley writes, "the answer is obviously (c): How can you possibly answer the question of which woman was more upset without knowing more about Janet, Susan, and the circumstances of their muggings?" But it turns out that 86% of a control group said (a). The group that Kinsley was a part of gave 71% to (c), but it was a group of people who, like Kinsley, are Parkinson's victims.
The point of the test was to see if Parkinson's affects not just muscular movements, but also your higher cognitive decision-making processes on a subtle level. "You might lose your mental edge," Kinsley was told when he was diagnosed. And maybe he has: his columns on politics once seemed to me almost invariably incisive and well-argued, to the extent that he was my favorite writer of the kind - I started reading Slate because he was to be the first editor - but much of his recent work has gone wonky. His criticisms of Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald in his review of Greenwald's book seemed to me, and many others, completely fallacious nonsense.
But I entirely agree with Kinsley about Janet and Susan. Without knowing more about them, the answer has to be uncertain. Just as, without knowing more of what was intended, the answer has to be uncertain as to which of two people whose bodies cross in a photo is further left. Are 71% of Parkinsonians, and the 14% of the rest of us, just more sensitive to ambiguity than "your average person"? If so, I'd call that a plus. What if you made an assumption and it was the wrong one?
I don't have a paid LJ account, so I can't create a radio-button poll, so just put answers in comments. Here's the question:
If someone captions this photo identifying one of the pictured as at "far left", whom do they mean?
(1) The guy leaning forward, whose head is consequently further to the left.
(2) The guy whose head is visible over #1's shoulder, but who is seated further to the left.
(3) It could mean either one. Be more specific.
(4) The head partially visible from behind in the lower left hand corner.
Remember, the question is not how you would caption it, but your guess as to what someone else might mean in captioning it.
I answered #3, and asked Mike Glyer, who wrote the caption, for further elucidation. But his answer wasn't "It's #1; I didn't realize there was any ambiguity about it;" he claimed that only some kind of obnoxious pedant would pretend there was any ambiguity, and that "Your average person" would know automatically that you go by faces, not by bodies. (Glyer has known me for over 30 years: surely he's figured out by now that I am not an average person. But if I really were being obnoxiously pedantic, I would have gone for #4, which is why I included that as an option.)
I'm struck by the attitude of not only not realizing that other people might find ambiguity in the wording, but of declaring that anybody who does is WRONG. The idea of changing the caption to "at left, leaning forward," didn't come up, because any other interpretation of "far left", even as uncertainty of what someone else might mean by it, was just WRONG. I'm reminded of the pop. vs. soda wars, in which your belief of the right word depends on where in the U.S. you live, and that both groups are heatedly convinced that the other word is utterly WRONG. "It's 'pop'! 'Soda' means soda water!" "It's 'soda'! 'Pop' is your father!"
I'm also reminded of this article by Michael Kinsley on mental functioning. Kinsley took a subtle mental functioning test including this question: "Janet is attacked by a mugger only 10 feet from her house. Susan is attacked by a mugger a mile from her house. Who is more upset by the mugging? Your choices are (a) Janet, (b) Susan, or (c) same or can’t tell."
"To me," Kinsley writes, "the answer is obviously (c): How can you possibly answer the question of which woman was more upset without knowing more about Janet, Susan, and the circumstances of their muggings?" But it turns out that 86% of a control group said (a). The group that Kinsley was a part of gave 71% to (c), but it was a group of people who, like Kinsley, are Parkinson's victims.
The point of the test was to see if Parkinson's affects not just muscular movements, but also your higher cognitive decision-making processes on a subtle level. "You might lose your mental edge," Kinsley was told when he was diagnosed. And maybe he has: his columns on politics once seemed to me almost invariably incisive and well-argued, to the extent that he was my favorite writer of the kind - I started reading Slate because he was to be the first editor - but much of his recent work has gone wonky. His criticisms of Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald in his review of Greenwald's book seemed to me, and many others, completely fallacious nonsense.
But I entirely agree with Kinsley about Janet and Susan. Without knowing more about them, the answer has to be uncertain. Just as, without knowing more of what was intended, the answer has to be uncertain as to which of two people whose bodies cross in a photo is further left. Are 71% of Parkinsonians, and the 14% of the rest of us, just more sensitive to ambiguity than "your average person"? If so, I'd call that a plus. What if you made an assumption and it was the wrong one?
