C.I.T.O.K.A.T.E.

 

The following is a ~2,400-word AI re-write (lightly edited) of Duncan Sabien's 10,000+ word essay "Truth Or Dare". It was originally written as intentionally meandering, so if this synopsis interests you, you might wish to read the whole thing for the numerous examples and metaphors. I'd like more people to have access to these concepts without committing to something novelette-length.

 

 

 

People who share roughly the same socioeconomic circumstances, geography, and educational background often experience the social world in fundamentally incompatible ways. Some people move through life with a baseline expectation that others are basically trustworthy, that things will generally work out, and that openness and vulnerability are reasonable bets to take. Others move through the same world with persistent wariness, a strong prior that people have hidden malicious agendas, and a felt sense that extending trust is naive at best and dangerous at worst.

 

What makes this interesting is that neither group is wrong about their own experience. When you investigate the specific history of someone who believes the world is cold and threatening, you find a world that really was cold and threatening. Their worldview is well-calibrated to the data they've actually collected. The same is true in reverse.

 

What makes it stranger is that the distribution doesn't look like a bell curve. You'd expect most people to be in the middle, with a few outliers at each end. Instead, the distribution appears bimodal — people cluster toward the poles. Something is driving people out of the middle and into one camp or the other.

 

(c.f. the excellent Scott Alexander essay Different Worlds.)