[FRIAM] essentialism

[uǝlƃ ↙↙↙]

I think the phrase is a virtue signal for "realism". It's an attempt at in-group signaling, saying "You and I know true versus false. So don't attempt to muddle them with me."

Gelman's distinction between social/cultural essentializing vs natural world essentializing brings up the importance of longitudinal data. I haven't looked at their data. Is it longitudinal or merely instantaneous but divided by demographic category? My guess is the latter, because longitudinal studies are notoriously difficult and expensive. Depending on the variance, of course, demo can substitute for longitudinal. (Tu quoque warning: substituting demo for development *is* a form of essentialism.)

But it's interesting to me because I feel very episodic vs diachronic. So, although I'm just as susceptible to preemptive registration (aka essentialism), I feel like I engage more often in the act of essentializing/classifying, but without the commitment others show. I forget the categorization and have to re-categorize all over again. So it would be interesting to measure, say, the exact same child from age 4 to age 10. See if they hold the same categories and how strongly they hold them. Etc. Is the age difference shown in, say College vs Small Town, an instantaneous artifact of the culture at that time? And if you went back and studied the same towns again, say, after some "tectonic" cultural shift, would the data look the same?

Of course, this would also treat "radicalization" and (e.g.) the stories of happy-go-lucky grandpa before Fox News vs grumpy racist after years of Fox News ... or even enculturation into cults, as Dave proposes with the Knowing thread.


On 3/10/21 11:35 AM, Steve Smith wrote:
> REC -
> 
> The phrase "you can't bullshit a bullshitter" always struck me as yet another phrase bullshitters use to soften you up to their bullshit.
> 
> I do like your assertion that it might be a new kind of intelligence test.
>>
>> This fits nicely into this other study via hackernews on the essence of bullshit:
>>
>> https://digest.bps.org.uk/2021/03/05/it-turns-out-you-can-bullshit-a-bullshitter-after-all/ <https://digest.bps.org.uk/2021/03/05/it-turns-out-you-can-bullshit-a-bullshitter-after-all/>
>>
>> I love that they can identify sub-groups by giving them a mixture of truly profound statements and pseudo-profound bullshit and seeing how well they sort the crap.  A new kind of intelligence test.
>>
>> -- rec --

-- 
↙↙↙ uǝlƃ