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Aside, this whole Yanny vs Laurel quarrel exposes a good example of how humans seem to approach opposing views in general. The video sparks thousands of commen

Aside, this whole Yanny vs Laurel quarrel exposes a good example of how humans seem to approach opposing views in general. The video sparks thousands of comments on Reddit and Facebook, many of them amounting to "I hear <X> and the rest of you are wrong!" -- surely in jest most of the time. You have to wonder what fraction of people have the healthy response of "I hear <X> but I want to try to hear <Y> like other people, interesting." Imagine if this was human nature, instead: "I hate Javascript, but I'd like to understand why someone would choose it on the server instead of assuming they are an amateur." HN would be much more relaxed. :) Same with that blue vs gold dress "debate." -- Why is it a debate? I don't mean to suck the fun out of it, though. But I do think it's a caricature of human nature in general.

matte_black 8y ago
Technology is very tribal I find. It seems like we have tendencies to make our technology seem as intimidating and alien as possible to signal to other tribes our superiority over them.
keithnz 8y ago
Generally our mental model of things and sounds is that they have one objective truth, the dress is either blue or gold, the voice is saying either laurel or yanny. We often don't mind things that have a subjective element such as :- do you like tofu or not. We are prepared to tolerate the differences between people Our biggest mistake is often to mistake ourselves as the golden sample of what the truth is, so normally, if this wasn't a viral thing exposing that people hear it differently, if we hear yanny, then it must be yanny, and how did these other people hear the wrong thing? So it's good when we get gentle reminders that we need to question the truth of our perceptions and that it can be tricky to establish what the truth is.
- toomanybeersies 8y ago
  To reiterate a comment I made yesterday, I used to have this viewpoint, that what we see and hear is objective, until I experimented with psychedelics, and my entire concept of reality was shattered. Reality is objective, we can measure the spectrum of this audio clip, or the RGB values on the image of the dress. But the reality we experience is subjective, whether we hear laurel or yanny, whether the dress is blue or gold. What we see, what we hear, what we taste, it all gets subconsciously pre-processed before it reaches out conscious mind. To tie into another HN article from yesterday, an expensive bottle of wine does taste better to us, even if it's exactly the same wine inside. The objective reality is that it's the same wine, but our subjective reality, from what we see, from what we taste, is that the expensive bottle is a fine wine. Plato recognised this when he penned the Allegory of the Cave (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_Cave https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_Cave) I've started to apply this realisation to life in general. If someone has a different viewpoint, I try to understand why they think that way, what has caused them to have that belief. So often in this day and age, people have a set opinion and think that if you disagree you're a bad person, or being deliberately wrong or lying. As much as I hate to wade into the Trump debate and American politics, this has been one of the failures of the left in the USA. Instead of trying to understand why somebody might support Trump, instead of trying to view the world through a different lens, they just tried to demonise Trump supporters and convince everybody that if they voted for Trump they were bad people. The political Right do exactly the same thing. Instead of trying to understand the viewpoint of the left, they accuse them of being socialists and hating America.
  - quxbar 8y ago
    I was born and raised in deep Trump country, and have agree that most people don't take the time to understand the viewpoint of his supporters. Unfortunately, I also think that the deeper you dig, the more you realize it's an embrace of human selfishness. Trump doesn't have strongly held beliefs, he believes whatever -feels- right. You'll find a lot of overlap with Jordan Peterson supporters, and I'll leave you with a quote from one: “Whenever I listen to him, it’s like he’s telling me something I already knew,” Mr. Logan says. “Learning is remembering.” ( https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/18/style/jordan-peterson-12-rules-for-life.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/18/style/jordan-peterson-12-... )
VoodooJuJu 8y ago
What makes "I hear <X> but I want to try to hear <Y> like other people, interesting." any more healthy than "I hear <X> and the rest of you are wrong!"? It's certainly reasonable and "healthy" to confidently exclaim the latter. I'm quite confident in the fact that I heard "laurel" in the same way I'm confident that 2 + 2 = 4, and I truly believe any other answer to be wrong. Now, the hearing test is presented in such a way that it would be "healthy" to assume there's more to it - that what you heard may be heard differently from others; this is an interesting yet unintuitive phenomenon. But, of course it's also healthy to assume the reverse. Maybe it's presented in a pseudo-phenomenological manner. Maybe it wants you to assume that some people hear the other word - a trick question. Maybe some people then would confidently and healthily exclaim that what they heard is correct, and no other answer is suitable. Now, between "yanny" and "laurel", if you said you heard "lemon"...well maybe that's unhealthy - get your hearing checked.
- geofft 8y ago
  2 + 2 = 4 is a pretty low-information statement: "4" has very little meaning other than "the symbol we assign to the value 2 + 2". 2 + 2 = 1 + 3 is a bit more interesting. 9 < π² < 10 is more interesting still, even though it is just as true as 2 + 2 = 4. "I heard 'Laurel'" is also a very different statement from "The recording says 'Laurel.'" If you heard "Laurel," you heard "Laurel," nobody can tell you otherwise. But you might not have heard what was actually on the recording. Someone might have overdubbed a distorted version of "Yanny." I don't know about healthy, but if my goal is the shared pursuit of knowledge and truth, someone who's able to meaningfully distinguish the ways in which they're confident of these various statements will be much more helpful to me than someone who does not. (Unless that person is a superhuman oracle who simply knows the truth of all things and does not need to reason about them, in which case, Lord, I am not worthy...)
  - quietbritishjim 8y ago
    2+2=4 is not just trivially true: Typically the symbol "4" is defined to be 3+1. (Actually it's defined as the successor of 3, but "successor" is essentially the same as "+1"). So 2+2=4 is exactly equivalent to 2+2=3+1. This is slightly different to your identity of 2+2=1+3, because 3+1=1+3 is also non trivial. More information: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peano_axioms https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peano_axioms
Razengan 8y ago
> But I do think it's a caricature of human nature in general. The Earth is, after all, an organic computer, and humans are ideas with bodies, thrown into a contest of the fittest. Maybe the planet is just a single cosmic neuron, whose output will be the surviving ideas, weighted by how many humans support them.
volgo 8y ago
I don't think you understand social interactions online very well... People don't say it with a serious tone. It's mostly a friendly jab. It's similar to how people say "Chicago has the best deep dish and anyone who says otherwise is simply WRONG". The exaggeration is meant to be a joke
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- jgtrosh 8y ago
  It's also very natural to act in this exaggerated way. Real resentment, subconscious bias and humorous exaggeration are influenced by the same mental model of us v. them. I naturally joked that I would leave my SO since we're not hearing the same thing, and therefore can't possibly communicate well together; it was only in jest but I could feel this shape of segregation comes all too naturally and appeals to a deeper brain.
- firmgently 8y ago
  Some people are jokingly exaggerating and some people are being serious. I've heard people have arguments that became fairly angry about which pizza in town is the best. I've heard rather than participated in those arguments because it's laughable (and sometimes scary) when people don't understand the difference between subjectivity and objectivity. Some really do think their way of seeing the world is correct and anybody who varies from that is wrong.
devcpp 8y ago
There's another angle to this: people are way too sensitive. If they can't take honest negative feedback we'll end up with the current trend of everyone faking being nice to everyone else. I'm happy the Internet lets us to be so honest and have a break from real life where no real argument takes place anymore because it has become bad social behavior.
jehlakj 8y ago
Its not a good example actually. Im usually understanding, or at least try to, in professional environments, but when I’m with friends on replying to strangers on social media, it’s a different story. Especially when the topic in question is so irrelevant and insignificant. Is it going to hurt anyone’s feelings? Telling everyone that it’s one of the two and making a (silly) argument out of it is all fun and games at this point.

matte_black 8y ago

Technology is very tribal I find. It seems like we have tendencies to make our technology seem as intimidating and alien as possible to signal to other tribes our superiority over them.

keithnz 8y ago

Generally our mental model of things and sounds is that they have one objective truth, the dress is either blue or gold, the voice is saying either laurel or yanny. We often don't mind things that have a subjective element such as :- do you like tofu or not. We are prepared to tolerate the differences between people Our biggest mistake is often to mistake ourselves as the golden sample of what the truth is, so normally, if this wasn't a viral thing exposing that people hear it differently, if we hear yanny, then it must be yanny, and how did these other people hear the wrong thing? So it's good when we get gentle reminders that we need to question the truth of our perceptions and that it can be tricky to establish what the truth is.

toomanybeersies 8y ago
To reiterate a comment I made yesterday, I used to have this viewpoint, that what we see and hear is objective, until I experimented with psychedelics, and my entire concept of reality was shattered. Reality is objective, we can measure the spectrum of this audio clip, or the RGB values on the image of the dress. But the reality we experience is subjective, whether we hear laurel or yanny, whether the dress is blue or gold. What we see, what we hear, what we taste, it all gets subconsciously pre-processed before it reaches out conscious mind. To tie into another HN article from yesterday, an expensive bottle of wine does taste better to us, even if it's exactly the same wine inside. The objective reality is that it's the same wine, but our subjective reality, from what we see, from what we taste, is that the expensive bottle is a fine wine. Plato recognised this when he penned the Allegory of the Cave (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_Cave https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_Cave) I've started to apply this realisation to life in general. If someone has a different viewpoint, I try to understand why they think that way, what has caused them to have that belief. So often in this day and age, people have a set opinion and think that if you disagree you're a bad person, or being deliberately wrong or lying. As much as I hate to wade into the Trump debate and American politics, this has been one of the failures of the left in the USA. Instead of trying to understand why somebody might support Trump, instead of trying to view the world through a different lens, they just tried to demonise Trump supporters and convince everybody that if they voted for Trump they were bad people. The political Right do exactly the same thing. Instead of trying to understand the viewpoint of the left, they accuse them of being socialists and hating America.
- quxbar 8y ago
  I was born and raised in deep Trump country, and have agree that most people don't take the time to understand the viewpoint of his supporters. Unfortunately, I also think that the deeper you dig, the more you realize it's an embrace of human selfishness. Trump doesn't have strongly held beliefs, he believes whatever -feels- right. You'll find a lot of overlap with Jordan Peterson supporters, and I'll leave you with a quote from one: “Whenever I listen to him, it’s like he’s telling me something I already knew,” Mr. Logan says. “Learning is remembering.” ( https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/18/style/jordan-peterson-12-rules-for-life.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/18/style/jordan-peterson-12-... )

VoodooJuJu 8y ago

What makes "I hear <X> but I want to try to hear <Y> like other people, interesting." any more healthy than "I hear <X> and the rest of you are wrong!"? It's certainly reasonable and "healthy" to confidently exclaim the latter. I'm quite confident in the fact that I heard "laurel" in the same way I'm confident that 2 + 2 = 4, and I truly believe any other answer to be wrong. Now, the hearing test is presented in such a way that it would be "healthy" to assume there's more to it - that what you heard may be heard differently from others; this is an interesting yet unintuitive phenomenon. But, of course it's also healthy to assume the reverse. Maybe it's presented in a pseudo-phenomenological manner. Maybe it wants you to assume that some people hear the other word - a trick question. Maybe some people then would confidently and healthily exclaim that what they heard is correct, and no other answer is suitable. Now, between "yanny" and "laurel", if you said you heard "lemon"...well maybe that's unhealthy - get your hearing checked.

geofft 8y ago
2 + 2 = 4 is a pretty low-information statement: "4" has very little meaning other than "the symbol we assign to the value 2 + 2". 2 + 2 = 1 + 3 is a bit more interesting. 9 < π² < 10 is more interesting still, even though it is just as true as 2 + 2 = 4. "I heard 'Laurel'" is also a very different statement from "The recording says 'Laurel.'" If you heard "Laurel," you heard "Laurel," nobody can tell you otherwise. But you might not have heard what was actually on the recording. Someone might have overdubbed a distorted version of "Yanny." I don't know about healthy, but if my goal is the shared pursuit of knowledge and truth, someone who's able to meaningfully distinguish the ways in which they're confident of these various statements will be much more helpful to me than someone who does not. (Unless that person is a superhuman oracle who simply knows the truth of all things and does not need to reason about them, in which case, Lord, I am not worthy...)
- quietbritishjim 8y ago
  2+2=4 is not just trivially true: Typically the symbol "4" is defined to be 3+1. (Actually it's defined as the successor of 3, but "successor" is essentially the same as "+1"). So 2+2=4 is exactly equivalent to 2+2=3+1. This is slightly different to your identity of 2+2=1+3, because 3+1=1+3 is also non trivial. More information: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peano_axioms https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peano_axioms

Razengan 8y ago

> But I do think it's a caricature of human nature in general. The Earth is, after all, an organic computer, and humans are ideas with bodies, thrown into a contest of the fittest. Maybe the planet is just a single cosmic neuron, whose output will be the surviving ideas, weighted by how many humans support them.

volgo 8y ago

I don't think you understand social interactions online very well... People don't say it with a serious tone. It's mostly a friendly jab. It's similar to how people say "Chicago has the best deep dish and anyone who says otherwise is simply WRONG". The exaggeration is meant to be a joke

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
jgtrosh 8y ago
It's also very natural to act in this exaggerated way. Real resentment, subconscious bias and humorous exaggeration are influenced by the same mental model of us v. them. I naturally joked that I would leave my SO since we're not hearing the same thing, and therefore can't possibly communicate well together; it was only in jest but I could feel this shape of segregation comes all too naturally and appeals to a deeper brain.
firmgently 8y ago
Some people are jokingly exaggerating and some people are being serious. I've heard people have arguments that became fairly angry about which pizza in town is the best. I've heard rather than participated in those arguments because it's laughable (and sometimes scary) when people don't understand the difference between subjectivity and objectivity. Some really do think their way of seeing the world is correct and anybody who varies from that is wrong.

devcpp 8y ago

There's another angle to this: people are way too sensitive. If they can't take honest negative feedback we'll end up with the current trend of everyone faking being nice to everyone else. I'm happy the Internet lets us to be so honest and have a break from real life where no real argument takes place anymore because it has become bad social behavior.

jehlakj 8y ago

Its not a good example actually. Im usually understanding, or at least try to, in professional environments, but when I’m with friends on replying to strangers on social media, it’s a different story. Especially when the topic in question is so irrelevant and insignificant. Is it going to hurt anyone’s feelings? Telling everyone that it’s one of the two and making a (silly) argument out of it is all fun and games at this point.