I learned my gut-level understanding of Transparency Illusion by watching my readers come up with brilliant misunderstandings of HPMOR, that had never occurred to me as possible alternative interpretations because I suffered from the handicap of already knowing what I meant. The key point here is that some of the alternate interpretations of my writing were blatantly respectable and smart. This is too rarely the visible case with other people misunderstanding us. In some cases, like when people asked Why does Harry assume so quickly in Ch. 23 that theres a real phenomenon to be explained with respect to intergenerational decline in magical power?, they were just plain right, and Id missed it because my own knowledge of the background answer The answer is the Interdict of Merlin is causing knowledge loss for powerful spells led me to neglect valid possibilities. (Harry does have evidence, which he thinks about---people mentioning that Hogwarts, the Sorting Hat, and the Invisibility Cloak can no longer be made, even though they continue to function---but thats not sufficiently strong evidence given the number of cultures which have falsely believed that everything was declining, and that Harry has been told the non-reproducibility only by other people who might be buying into the fallacy.) And that experience mattered a lot to my System 1 finally getting it. Usually, when youre misunderstood, theres some attempt to interpret the people not getting what you mean as cognitively disadvantaged, to think that the meaning was there but missed. But Harry not considering enough that societys magical power might not even be declining in the first place, was clearly a valid possibility *I* had missed. So it taught me that Illusion of Transparency isnt about hint-missing, its about there really actually respectably being multiple interpretations. And that was when I started to understand that my words were really actually not pinning down the meaning I had in my own mind, because I couldnt see all the possibilities I needed to exclude, because I was blinded by my own knowledge of the intended answer. And that is how writing a novel where I knew the correct answer, and other people had to figure out the clues I thought ought to pin down that answer, and their wrong answers being sometimes unexcluded and brilliant, taught me about Transparency Illusion on a very gut level.
Posted on: Fri, 08 Aug 2014 05:11:52 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015