(no subject)

[psocoptera]

More Teresa Nielsen Hayden quote that probably won't paste but is a brilliant and fascinating observation:

It's a funny thing. People who can't do advanced math, or play classical piano concertos, or pitch a no-hitter in the major leagues, generally know they can't do it. People who don't have an intimate relationship with language are far less aware of their condition, and for them the written world can be a very frustrating place. Near as we can make out, they literally can't tell that their rejected writing isn't like the writing that does get published.

Those of you who've hung out in Usenet newsgroups for any length of time will have seen the phenomenon of a tone-deaf poster exploding in fury and frustration because all he can tell is that he's somehow being left out of some part of the conversation, and that for no reason that he can see, his posts don't get the same reactions that other people's do.

I wonder if the "literally can't tell" thing has something to do with reading being such a mental experience (okay, yes, that did say "such an interior experience" until I went back and changed it, I still have *some* shame), that people can confuse the stream of consciousness they had while reading a book with what the book actually was, and so a stream of consciousness looks like "a book".

I feel like this must happen all over in fandom, people wondering why their stories get the reactions they get, and don't get the reactions they don't get. I wonder how deliberately some of the "big" stories go about being "big" stories - like whether authors consider the optimum length of time between posting chapters (not too fast, because you want to let anticipation build, but not too slow, or people will fear that you're not still working on it, and you won't acquire as many new readers). How actively they think about fandom presence as a publicity campaign. (Which, disclaim disclaim, I have absolutely no problem with - I'm their fan, after all ::grin::.)

Comments

[jezrax.livejournal.com]

"They literally can't tell"--I don't think that's strange, I think it's a direct consequence of the nature of insight. How is it possible to tell what you're good at, to know how much you know about a subject? Sometimes there is a yardstick: If you are playing a game, how often do you win? Sometimes there is cultural support: "Everybody knows" that you have to practice a lot, and so on, to be a top musician (and in going through the business of having a teacher or a coach, a social process tells people where they stand). But in most subjects, there is no way to know how much you know. If other people show superior skills, and you yourself don't have the skill to see that, then you are in the dark. Ignorance by its nature cannot recognize itself. That's the normal case.

Add that to normal human overconfidence, and many oddities of human behavior are explained. That is why all drivers are above average, and why so many are convinced that their bosses are idiots. People can see the mistakes of others that they themselves would have avoided, but often they can't see the smart ideas that they would not have had, because they don't recognize them as smart ideas, and they can't see their own mistakes for the same reason.

[tirerim.livejournal.com]

I think someone posted an article about this phenomenon in general to chat a year or two ago -- somebody actually went and did a study, and found that in several areas, low levels of competency were very strongly correlated with an inability to detect that, such that people who actually ranked in the lowest quartile on the tasks that they tested tended to believe themselves to be in the third quartile instead.