Lee looked at him and the brown eyes under their rounded upper lids seemed to open and deepen until they weren’t foreign any more, but man’s eyes, warm with understanding. Lee chuckled. “It’s more than a convenience,” he said. “It’s even more than self-protection. Mostly we have to use it to be understood at all.”
Samuel showed no sign of having observed any change. “I can understand the first two,” he said thoughtfully, “but the third escapes me.”
Lee said, “I know it’s hard to believe, but it has happened so often to me and to my friends that we take it for granted. If I should go up to a lady or a gentleman, for instance, and speak as I am doing now, I wouldn’t be understood.”
“Why not?”
“Pidgin they expect, and pidgin they’ll listen to. But English from me they don’t listen to, and so they don’t understand it.”
“Can that be possible? How do I understand you?”
“That’s why I’m talking to you. You are one of the rare people who can separate your observation from your preconception. You see what is, where most people see what they expect. ”
- East of Eden
For the most part we do not first see, and then define, we define first and then see. In the great blooming, buzzing confusion of the outer world we pick out what our culture has already defined for us, and we tend to perceive that which we have picked out in the form stereotype for us by our culture.
- Walter Lippmann
This life’s dim windows of the soul
Distorts the heavens from pole to pole
And leads you to believe a lie
When you see with, not through, the eye.
- William Blake
The world we live in is increasingly driven by attention merchants. News, newsfeeds, algorithms, noise. All fighting for your attention and your polarity.
Navigating this world of seemingly constant narratives and propaganda can feel daunting. Even someone with a meticulous index of any and all cognitive biases and logical fallacies doesn’t seem to fare much better than the average person.
How is one supposed to sense-make out of all the noise? This blog series is going to show one way - via an exploration into the field of perception. The journey will take us into the fields of math and politics. We’ll learn of forgotten psychologists, etymology, and the metallic rules of ethics among other things. And hopefullly you will come away with the sense-making tools you need to thrive in the modern world.
Buckle up. 💺