The BBC story says that the incidents concerned (which the alleged victim denies were predatory) occurred eight years ago, but Tyson only started transitioning last year. Are there more recent incidents that the article doesn't mention?
I have never really looked into aphantasia, so I don't believe in it at all. It's just attention hungry, literal-minded people harping on about how special they are and how tough they have it: Exactly Katie Herzog's schtick.
A few years ago I took part in a study on aphantasia (at the time through the University of Exeter, now the researcher is at Glasgow) and based on the results I have hyperphantasia (I prefer the adjectival form hyperphantastic). More here: https://www.gla.ac.uk/research/az/cspe/projects/the-eyes-mind/
"Mind's eye". It is exactly a metaphor. It is not sight at all. Aphantasiacs (-asians?) dream like everyone else. They problem solve, imagine what salad sandwiches and fictional characters will look like, they design websites and living rooms without having to resort to trial and error. They just self-report not 'seeing' anything when they do these things and are told they are special for it. It's obviously a definitional problem. It's as real as dissociative identity disorder or 'the vapours'. IT gives neuroscientists something to do, bleeds popular news stories, and gives narcissistic assholes a point of difference to add to their Wikipedia page.
...you know... that, or I'm wrong. You be the judge ; )
It's a metaphor in that you do not literally have a third eye inside your brain. But it's not a metaphor in the sense that Herzog and many other aphantasics mistakenly believe, which is something like "there is no actual image perception going on, you're just poetically talking about something more abstract".
I have aphantasia and I draw. Unless I'm drawing from life, I have no idea what my drawings will look like so I construct them from an iterative process of less and less wooly pencil lines. I just keep drawing each bit over and over till I'm happy with it. I also construct perspectives and geometrically describe shapes to myself in words. I believe my maths and physics skills are enhanced to make up for the lack of image. Ask people you know to imagine a ball rolling across the table in front of them. Then to describe it. Mist will describe its colour pattern etc, aphantasics will typically discuss how its behaving and whether it is going to fall off the edge. I dream in colour. I have no visual memory. If I'm reading a map I have to tell myself (usually out loud) 'take the next left turn in half a mile.' Before my eyes leave the map. Otherwise nothing.
‘Sight’ is the interpretation our brain makes of light signals received by the eye. The mind’s eye replays those interpretations from memory when we visualise something.
So I can remember exactly what my mother’s favourite necklace looks like. I can see the necklace in my mind because I can replay the memory of the visual image.
People with Aphantasia cannot do that. They would know facts about the necklace - that it is a silver chain with blue enamelled flowers dangling in a line from it - but they cannot see that image in their mind.
In the same way, when you recall this conversation you will be able to repeat
the description of my mother’s necklace, but not having actually seen it you won’t be able to visualise it the same way I can. You might be able to visualise the words on the screen when you recall the description, or you might just remember it as a fact.
I think you are kind of proving my point. You are totally unable to talk about it without resorting to metaphor. You say you can 'see' a necklace, Katie Herzog says she can't 'see' a necklace. The only certainty here is that neither of you actually sees a necklace.
There is no way to measure the phenomenon beyond self-report, which is necessarily arbitrary (as no one has direct access to the conscious experience of others). More than that, it confers no advantage or disadvantage on it's 'sufferers'... It is functionally meaningless. The parsimonious interpretation of it is that it does not exist. What did Spock say? "A difference without distinction is no difference at all"? It's just something that people say about themselves at dinner parties. It literally amounts to nothing more than "I imagined an apple and rated its vividness at a 2/10. When I asked my husband to do the same, he rated his imaginary apple at 9/10".
As it is clearly a definitional/linguistic problem, I wonder if people from other linguistic/cultural backgrounds are affected by it? I suppose it is really just a meme... that would explain it's apparent non-existence before 2005, and it's explosion in popularity since 2020.
It's funny, because I clearly remember Katie Herzog laughing at YouTubers who claimed they had Dissociative Personality Disorder a few years ago.
Anyway, I'm too busy for this. Feel free to have the last word, but I'm unconvinced.
Yeah, you don’t understand that ‘seeing’ with your eyes is a neurological function, the same as ‘seeing’ in your mind. That is why what people see is influenced by their neurological state and can be altered by drugs and illness.
> I stared back at him with the awestruck bafflement of a soon-to-be-dead missionary contemplating the Sentinelese: How wondrous to meet someone so untouched by modern life!
Does she have aphantasia, though? It has nothing to do with looking at the back of your eyelids. As I often do when this is discussed I'm wondering if people aren't defining their terms clearly. It's actually easier for me to visualize in my mind with my eyes open, but it is totally in my mind. "Mind's eye" is a metaphor.
Counterpoint: that's exactly the kind of misunderstanding you'd have if, and only if, you have no ability to picture things in your mind. If you can visualise things then you instinctively grasp what "mind's eye" means; if not, you might well assume it's a poetic description of some more abstract process. I've actually known aphantasics who, on being told that phantasia is a real thing, tried to argue that it couldn't possibly be and that the rest of us must be mis-describing our own experiences.
I also knew a guy who had no ability to hear sounds in his mind, and didn't realise that he was unusual until he was in his forties. Goodness knows what he thought about people complaining that they had a song stuck in their heads.
Well, possibly, but she also describes dreaming vividly about apples, and my understanding is at least some aphantasics can't/don't do that. If you are expecting to close your eyes and literally see something against your eyelids, well, that's not going to happen. But then, I knew someone who was aphantasic who said she couldn't create any mental images when she read books, and I literally can't imagine that, so there's probably a bridge of experience I simply cannot cross.
Where are the people valorising the Tradwives of families being driven into poverty by the 2 child benefit cap or otherwise poor women with 7 kids and no job with a husband earning minimum wage
I do think as a kid I benefited from never needing to go into childcare, mums hours worked out in a way she could be home by the time I finished school and didn’t leave for work until me and my brother had left in the morning, but the idea it would have been horrific if I had had to spend an hour in after school care or whatever is just insane
This particular family clearly has money to burn. But many of the people who choose the trad route are making a conscious decision to put this lifestyle ahead of finances. Some also go into debt. I believe I read somewhere that Idaho has the highest debt-to-household ratio, and that's where a lot of these Mormon influencers live.
re your comment about techbros supporting Trump I guess it's no surprise that greedy, narcissistic megalomaniacs would baulk at Democrat values of higher taxes and intervention to protect the less fortunate in society. But question from me as an ignorant European. The employees of these techbros must be deeply unhappy at how they are spending the corporate profits. Can they do anything about it or are these fabled "flat structures" just a myth and the workers are pretty powerless to affect anything?.
Oh yeah, the flat structures are a total myth. These companies are as hierarchical as a 200-year old Tier 1 bank. Probably more so, given that the bank would have at least some semblance of accountability at the top.
Do you know the phrase "the tyranny of structurelessness", from the essay of the same name? Attempts to create a flat leadership structure usually just create an informal (and therefore less accountable) hierarchy.
The Mr Beast story is touchy for media outlets as it gives evidence for male predatory sexual behaviour persisting despite transition
The BBC story says that the incidents concerned (which the alleged victim denies were predatory) occurred eight years ago, but Tyson only started transitioning last year. Are there more recent incidents that the article doesn't mention?
I have never really looked into aphantasia, so I don't believe in it at all. It's just attention hungry, literal-minded people harping on about how special they are and how tough they have it: Exactly Katie Herzog's schtick.
That conversation should have gone like this:
> “That’s just a metaphor,” I said. “Right?”
> "Yes Katie, It's just a metaphor." Mom replied.
Because it fucking is.
> I have never really looked into aphantasia, so I don't believe in it at all.
Consider the possibility that your knee-jerk reactions may not be an infallible guide to the truth ;-)
Do people really live like that? It sounds like a lot of work.
A few years ago I took part in a study on aphantasia (at the time through the University of Exeter, now the researcher is at Glasgow) and based on the results I have hyperphantasia (I prefer the adjectival form hyperphantastic). More here: https://www.gla.ac.uk/research/az/cspe/projects/the-eyes-mind/
It’s not a metaphor. Most people’s imagination can produce images ‘in their mind’s eye’. If you cannot do this, maybe you have aphantasia too.
"Mind's eye". It is exactly a metaphor. It is not sight at all. Aphantasiacs (-asians?) dream like everyone else. They problem solve, imagine what salad sandwiches and fictional characters will look like, they design websites and living rooms without having to resort to trial and error. They just self-report not 'seeing' anything when they do these things and are told they are special for it. It's obviously a definitional problem. It's as real as dissociative identity disorder or 'the vapours'. IT gives neuroscientists something to do, bleeds popular news stories, and gives narcissistic assholes a point of difference to add to their Wikipedia page.
...you know... that, or I'm wrong. You be the judge ; )
It's a metaphor in that you do not literally have a third eye inside your brain. But it's not a metaphor in the sense that Herzog and many other aphantasics mistakenly believe, which is something like "there is no actual image perception going on, you're just poetically talking about something more abstract".
I have aphantasia and I draw. Unless I'm drawing from life, I have no idea what my drawings will look like so I construct them from an iterative process of less and less wooly pencil lines. I just keep drawing each bit over and over till I'm happy with it. I also construct perspectives and geometrically describe shapes to myself in words. I believe my maths and physics skills are enhanced to make up for the lack of image. Ask people you know to imagine a ball rolling across the table in front of them. Then to describe it. Mist will describe its colour pattern etc, aphantasics will typically discuss how its behaving and whether it is going to fall off the edge. I dream in colour. I have no visual memory. If I'm reading a map I have to tell myself (usually out loud) 'take the next left turn in half a mile.' Before my eyes leave the map. Otherwise nothing.
You are wrong.
‘Sight’ is the interpretation our brain makes of light signals received by the eye. The mind’s eye replays those interpretations from memory when we visualise something.
So I can remember exactly what my mother’s favourite necklace looks like. I can see the necklace in my mind because I can replay the memory of the visual image.
People with Aphantasia cannot do that. They would know facts about the necklace - that it is a silver chain with blue enamelled flowers dangling in a line from it - but they cannot see that image in their mind.
In the same way, when you recall this conversation you will be able to repeat
the description of my mother’s necklace, but not having actually seen it you won’t be able to visualise it the same way I can. You might be able to visualise the words on the screen when you recall the description, or you might just remember it as a fact.
I think you are kind of proving my point. You are totally unable to talk about it without resorting to metaphor. You say you can 'see' a necklace, Katie Herzog says she can't 'see' a necklace. The only certainty here is that neither of you actually sees a necklace.
There is no way to measure the phenomenon beyond self-report, which is necessarily arbitrary (as no one has direct access to the conscious experience of others). More than that, it confers no advantage or disadvantage on it's 'sufferers'... It is functionally meaningless. The parsimonious interpretation of it is that it does not exist. What did Spock say? "A difference without distinction is no difference at all"? It's just something that people say about themselves at dinner parties. It literally amounts to nothing more than "I imagined an apple and rated its vividness at a 2/10. When I asked my husband to do the same, he rated his imaginary apple at 9/10".
As it is clearly a definitional/linguistic problem, I wonder if people from other linguistic/cultural backgrounds are affected by it? I suppose it is really just a meme... that would explain it's apparent non-existence before 2005, and it's explosion in popularity since 2020.
It's funny, because I clearly remember Katie Herzog laughing at YouTubers who claimed they had Dissociative Personality Disorder a few years ago.
Anyway, I'm too busy for this. Feel free to have the last word, but I'm unconvinced.
> The parsimonious interpretation of it is that it does not exist. What did Spock say? "A difference without distinction is no difference at all"?
You're talking very much like someone with undiagnosed aphantasia, FWIW.
As thinking, curious, self-conscious people, is it not incumbent on us all to wonder sometimes, “Do other people have it better than me?”?
Yeah, you don’t understand that ‘seeing’ with your eyes is a neurological function, the same as ‘seeing’ in your mind. That is why what people see is influenced by their neurological state and can be altered by drugs and illness.
With regard to the piece on Aphantasia, a (very) recent Quanta article adds some useful explanation: https://www.quantamagazine.org/what-happens-in-a-mind-that-cant-see-mental-images-20240801/
> I stared back at him with the awestruck bafflement of a soon-to-be-dead missionary contemplating the Sentinelese: How wondrous to meet someone so untouched by modern life!
Beautifully put!
As ever, there's a relevant XKCD: https://m.xkcd.com/2501/
Does she have aphantasia, though? It has nothing to do with looking at the back of your eyelids. As I often do when this is discussed I'm wondering if people aren't defining their terms clearly. It's actually easier for me to visualize in my mind with my eyes open, but it is totally in my mind. "Mind's eye" is a metaphor.
Counterpoint: that's exactly the kind of misunderstanding you'd have if, and only if, you have no ability to picture things in your mind. If you can visualise things then you instinctively grasp what "mind's eye" means; if not, you might well assume it's a poetic description of some more abstract process. I've actually known aphantasics who, on being told that phantasia is a real thing, tried to argue that it couldn't possibly be and that the rest of us must be mis-describing our own experiences.
I also knew a guy who had no ability to hear sounds in his mind, and didn't realise that he was unusual until he was in his forties. Goodness knows what he thought about people complaining that they had a song stuck in their heads.
Well, possibly, but she also describes dreaming vividly about apples, and my understanding is at least some aphantasics can't/don't do that. If you are expecting to close your eyes and literally see something against your eyelids, well, that's not going to happen. But then, I knew someone who was aphantasic who said she couldn't create any mental images when she read books, and I literally can't imagine that, so there's probably a bridge of experience I simply cannot cross.
Scott Alexander investigated the prevalence of RSD among his blog's readership, and found that while it does correlate with ADHD (whether professionally- or self-diagnosed), it correlates more strongly with other psychiatric disorders: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/08/14/ssc-survey-results-adhd-and-rejection-sensitivity/
Where are the people valorising the Tradwives of families being driven into poverty by the 2 child benefit cap or otherwise poor women with 7 kids and no job with a husband earning minimum wage
I do think as a kid I benefited from never needing to go into childcare, mums hours worked out in a way she could be home by the time I finished school and didn’t leave for work until me and my brother had left in the morning, but the idea it would have been horrific if I had had to spend an hour in after school care or whatever is just insane
This particular family clearly has money to burn. But many of the people who choose the trad route are making a conscious decision to put this lifestyle ahead of finances. Some also go into debt. I believe I read somewhere that Idaho has the highest debt-to-household ratio, and that's where a lot of these Mormon influencers live.
re your comment about techbros supporting Trump I guess it's no surprise that greedy, narcissistic megalomaniacs would baulk at Democrat values of higher taxes and intervention to protect the less fortunate in society. But question from me as an ignorant European. The employees of these techbros must be deeply unhappy at how they are spending the corporate profits. Can they do anything about it or are these fabled "flat structures" just a myth and the workers are pretty powerless to affect anything?.
I think you know the answer to that one.
The bosses are narcissistic megalomaniacs.
Oh yeah, the flat structures are a total myth. These companies are as hierarchical as a 200-year old Tier 1 bank. Probably more so, given that the bank would have at least some semblance of accountability at the top.
Do you know the phrase "the tyranny of structurelessness", from the essay of the same name? Attempts to create a flat leadership structure usually just create an informal (and therefore less accountable) hierarchy.
I didn't know that - but will definitely seek out that essay!