Re:Pentagon Influencer Called Liberal Women 'Pestilence' Who...
by perching_aix on Saturday October 03, 2026 @10:56AM
(#49944864)
What I was referring to there has less to do with the idea of there being a "real" person under the facade(s), and more with this notion I have where in order to fully understand another person, you'd have to become them. This is predicated on another notion where everything is connected to some extent, however insignificantly. The end result of this is:
- you cannot ever fully understand another person (would require you to be two people at once)
- a person cannot ever fully understand oneself (at best it would require a complete structural periodicity of thought)
- even if an understanding appeared complete, given the right context or sufficient time, it'd decohere (would require you to live (and have lived) their life and yours simultaneously)
This does have downstream effects on the idea of there being such a thing as a real person under the hood, but on its own this is not sufficient for exploring that I'd say.
For the record, I kind of both agree and disagree with the claim. It is of course possible to extract stable internal features by empirical probing, like conversations in various contexts, and it is entirely possible that some features remain stable enough for a lifetime, and for the person to interact with them in a stable way for a lifetime. But whether these really form a person on their own, one that is consistent, I'm not so sure. It also feels a bit shaky and convenient that they'd cleanly map to high level features like racism.
To tie this back to your concrete example, are those people acting like that because they're showing their true colors, or are they acting like that because they think that's what gives them social approval? If the latter, that'd mean that rather than them showing their true colors, the colors they're showing are actually more false than normal. And I don't mean this in the sense that the racist TV show host isn't actually racist, but why he is racist, and how that came to be, and how he keeps being that way. Is he racist or a people pleaser, who then in a sense "contracted" racism?
If the same person lived a different life in in a different culture, would they still be racist? If they really do have a base personality trait that makes them so, they'd have to be, but that's not really what we're seeing. Instead, this is a lot more culturally and historically modulated.
I remember watching a short documentary on Taiwan's youth and what their academic interests are. I pretty much laughed out loud when the host described it as most students having a profound interest in semiconductor manufacturing. Well isn't that a great and specific coincidence? Place with world leading semiconductor manufacturing plants having tons of youth interested in exactly that?
- you cannot ever fully understand another person (would require you to be two people at once)
- a person cannot ever fully understand oneself (at best it would require a complete structural periodicity of thought)
- even if an understanding appeared complete, given the right context or sufficient time, it'd decohere (would require you to live (and have lived) their life and yours simultaneously)
This does have downstream effects on the idea of there being such a thing as a real person under the hood, but on its own this is not sufficient for exploring that I'd say.
For the record, I kind of both agree and disagree with the claim. It is of course possible to extract stable internal features by empirical probing, like conversations in various contexts, and it is entirely possible that some features remain stable enough for a lifetime, and for the person to interact with them in a stable way for a lifetime. But whether these really form a person on their own, one that is consistent, I'm not so sure. It also feels a bit shaky and convenient that they'd cleanly map to high level features like racism.
To tie this back to your concrete example, are those people acting like that because they're showing their true colors, or are they acting like that because they think that's what gives them social approval? If the latter, that'd mean that rather than them showing their true colors, the colors they're showing are actually more false than normal. And I don't mean this in the sense that the racist TV show host isn't actually racist, but why he is racist, and how that came to be, and how he keeps being that way. Is he racist or a people pleaser, who then in a sense "contracted" racism?
If the same person lived a different life in in a different culture, would they still be racist? If they really do have a base personality trait that makes them so, they'd have to be, but that's not really what we're seeing. Instead, this is a lot more culturally and historically modulated.
I remember watching a short documentary on Taiwan's youth and what their academic interests are. I pretty much laughed out loud when the host described it as most students having a profound interest in semiconductor manufacturing. Well isn't that a great and specific coincidence? Place with world leading semiconductor manufacturing plants having tons of youth interested in exactly that?