Millie Bon Bon peddling more snake oil

Comments (7)

1. I will never understand the MBB hate.

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   1. Do you ever understand anybody’s hate? Really. I mean, isn’t it rather that when you agree, you sympathize?

      We’re wired to think we can walk in someone else’s shoes. But, guess what, that’s a delusion. When we guess someone’s behavior & we’re right, that’s a win. When we’re wrong, we manage. And so we remember our successes. It’s good for us, to think we can read minds. This is built into us. Our success as a species is because of it. It’s conducive to allegiance & to hate. That’s our superpower. But as an individual, it can be an advantage to be able to snap out of our delusions, too.

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      1. A) Yes, I understate people’s hate for people or groups of people who have done, or want to do, significantly bad things to them, people close to them, or groups of people like them. It actually harder for me to understand people who forgive such other people.

         B) I can understand when different people hate something for different reasons. Take the Tesla Cybertruck. Some people hate it, and that can be for esthetic reasons, or for its engineering, design, and manufacturing flaws, or because of Elon. All quite comprehensible to me. (Of course, some people think it is hideous just because Elon designed it, but that’s hair splitting: They hate it because of Elon.)

         C) I can understand when people SAY they hate celebrities, if what they mean is they dislike them to the point of revulsion. As a child, I “hated” Lucille Ball because she was so intensely embarrassing. What that hate meant was that I would go into another room whenever she was on TV, not that I “hated” her in the sense that racists hate people of other races.

         Hate is a broadly used word, and you have to say what you mean when you say “Do you ever understand anybody’s hate?”, or literal-minded people like me start pointing out things you did NOT mean. I think there is a sense in which you are right, you just need to say it properly. But Millie Bon Bon probably is not a good example of it, unless there are quite a few people with a burning desire to harm her.

         PS – There has to be a much better way to say point A). I remember George Orwell’s essay on “The Death of the English Language”, and his emphasis on using concrete illustrations, but sadly, I could not think how to do it.

         PPS – When I get started, I just go on and on. Sorry.

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         1. Thanks, Roger. That’s a bit rambling, but your overall vibe of (A), (B), (C), & your “broadly used word” paragraph do rather well spell out aspects of the idea I was trying to get across, using the example of “understand hate” & teasing apart what that example might mean.

            So if I was unclear, sorry. What seems to have not gotten across was that I was generalizing somewhat vaguely to “understanding anything” that exists in someone else’s head, as opposed to a mental model in our own head that we suppose to be more or less what’s in their head. IOW, there’s a difference between what we believe they think & how that makes sense to us, & what they really think & how it makes sense to them. The latter is our goal, & the former is how we approximate it. With experience, we can get pretty damn good at the former, our success rate can be phenomenal (literally), but the goal itself is, to be perfectionist about it for the sake of argument, it’s flat out impossible. That’s why I say we’re just deluded. Practically, we have various skill levels at it. But there’s always an uncertainty to our best guess. We can totally misjudge what they may be on about, & we can misinterpret what they say in many ways. I think this last was what you were getting at about the word hate being overbroad. It’s an unavoidable pitfall of trying to capture reality in words. Our brain is more versatile than our ability to communicate. Something gets lost in the translation.

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            1. I am embarrassed now that I wrote such a lengthy post to make such a minor point or points. Thank you for the kindness of your reply. I agree with you in essence; I just let the quibbler and nitpicker in me run wild.

   2. I’ll never understand the worship.

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      1. Exactly. Similarly, lots of people are dead set that Emma Watson is nothing special, ie plain. Me, I think she’s cute. And I’m in plenty of company. My takeaway from that & many other cases that are similar, is that such worship is a mishmash of jumping on a bandwagon together with a kind of mass hypnosis. It often doesn’t make sense, in that it seems to come out of nowhere. To those of us who aren’t on the bandwagon & who are less hypnotized.

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