We're Not So Similar, You And I

Or, On the Narcissism of Small Differences

Author’s note I: Sorry for the dearth of essays in the past few weeks; it’s been a turbulent time. I expect to be more regular in the near future, and hopefully will start publishing my Civilization & Cooperation sequence.

Author’s note II: This essay is something like a case study; it is a deep dive into a specific example of a thing that serves to illustrate the points made in essays like Split and Commit, White Chocolate Is Not Chocolate, and The metaphor you want is “color blindness,” not “blind spot.” Some of those essays were pretty light on concrete, real-world examples, and I think spending time down in the dirt will help make [the overall philosophical stance I’m trying to persuade you to adopt] make more sense. Be warned, then: the vibe of this piece is extended, patient observation (including nonzero meandering), not snappy insights. It’s a little bit like four separate essays glued together.

(I think this essay is really good. I’m quite pleased with it, and I gained a lot from going through the process of writing it. But it is longer and more atmospheric than many of my other pieces and that’s worth knowing when you’re choosing if and when to try tackling it.)

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Thesis: Sometimes it is indeed the narcissism of small differences, and other times it’s that you are blind to (or willfully ignoring) the crucial axis.

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I. Horseshoe theory

On at least four memorable occasions (and possibly more that I’m not recalling), someone has dropped a sort of “we’re not so different, you and I” sentiment into a conversation with me. On at least two of those occasions, there was a clear undertone of something like a bid for fraternity—an implication that we were in it together, cut from the same cloth, two instances of the same type of Pokémon enacting similar strategies in pursuit of similar goals. Come on, man, empathize with me, work with me, help me out, I want the same thing you want.

Each time, it was difficult to imagine disagreeing much harder than I did. I do think that I am similar to many people, in many ways; I wouldn’t always disagree with such a claim.

But these particular people seemed so crucially different from me that I genuinely found the assertion shocking, and almost felt … embarrassed on their behalf?

Embarrassed that they were so wrong, embarrassed that they had missed themselves (and me) so thoroughly, embarrassed at their something-not-exactly-but-close-to-arrogance, the presumptuousness of claiming a kinship they had not earned, their blindness to what mattered and their fixation on superficial surface characteristics.

This rhymes with an experience I have from time to time, in which [someone whose actions I find objectionable] asserts that they and I are doing exactly the same thing, actually. That their actions are mirror images of mine, symmetrical and complementary.

It also rhymes with the (rather disorienting) experience of coming across some third party speaking of me and Person X in the same breath, lumping us both into the same bucket, when Person X is someone I find especially intolerable and unusually morally or ethically or intellectually bankrupt.

I have a prediction about your response, as a reader, to the above.

I predict that most readers will be feeling some non-trivial amount of scoff and skepticism, at the above. It may be small, and it may be quite large, but I think pretty few people encounter claims like the ones I just made and don’t feel any amount of … derision? Contempt? …these words are far too strong, but I think there’s a pattern that goes something like:

1. Hear someone strongly protest against a characterization

2. Assume that the characterization must have some merit

…and I think that pattern is pretty quick to auto-complete. As soon as someone shouts that they’re definitely not X, people tend to go “pshhhh, sure. Roll to disbelieve.”

Or, to use the standard quote: “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”

If my model here is correct, you either felt some degree of “I bet Duncan is like those people, actually,” or you’re some kind of rare and unusual person who lacks what is actually a fairly common reflex.

(Fairly common psychosocial immune response?)

One of the unfinished essays in my pile of things-to-write is titled Stopping At Sufficiency, which talks about capping your hypotheses at the point that a given effect is fully explained. For example, we tend to feel suspicious of the testimony of someone who was paid to give it, because the money might have been enough to elicit the testimony all on its own, without the words themselves needing to be true.

In similar fashion, I think that at least part of the skepticism toward people’s claims of meaningful difference comes from sufficiency: if claiming to be different (regardless of whether you actually are) serves the ego, and helps you get away with things you might otherwise be sanctioned for, and strengthens tribal associations and makes it easier to conveniently outgroup people—

(More on all this later.)

—well, if it does all that, then why wouldn’t a person claim to be different, even if they aren’t? Since there’s already sufficient motive to focus on and exaggerate one’s differences regardless of whether they’re actually real or relevant, then the mere fact of claiming to be different feels like weak evidence, at best.

If you’d say X if X were true, and you’d say X if X were false, then you-saying-X means little, and if you act as if the mere act of asserting X should mean a lot (as if you don’t already understand this very principle and the corresponding need to back your words up with compelling evidence) then you-saying-X starts to smell of shenanigans, skullduggery, ill-intent, and now the shields are definitely going up.

For what it’s worth: I think that the whole pattern described above is real, and commonplace; I think it is not at all silly to have, as one of your primary hypotheses, Oh, what I’m observing is the narcissism of small differences.

But I think there’s a whole other pattern, that is also fairly frequent, and I think it gets overlooked and ignored because “the narcissism of small differences” is a concept with so much gravity that it drags everything toward it.

It’s easy, when you make some observation that is typical of [the narcissism of small differences] to just … leap to that conclusion. To see a lady who doth protest, and go “ah, okay, I know what this is,” and fail to investigate any further.

In fact, I think this will be right more often than it will be wrong. I think that if you were required to make the same simple bet every time, “this mountain is actually just a molehill” is the correct bet to make. I think that’s part of why people go there so easily—it’s a heuristic that is wrong, some of the time, but in most cases the knee-jerk scoff protects you from being taken in by bullshit.

(This is what I meant, above, with the phrase “psychosocial immune response.”)

But you don’t have to make the same simple bet every time. You don’t have to place a single bet at all. You can split and commit.

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0. On the narcissism of small differences

(That’s right, we started with I and now we’re at 0. It’s like a Tarantino movie.)

In previous essays, I’ve warned against going “Oh, I get it, this is just _________,” where the blank can be filled by words like:

• Selfishness

• Autism

• Gaslighting

• Trump Derangement Syndrome

• Lossy compression

• Buddhism

• Supply and demand

… or any other grand, simplifying concept. Labels exist in a separate magisterium from reality; the label points towards and is a lasso around the real stuff out there in the territory, but the stuff was there first, and it’s real in a way that the organizing concept we paste over top of it isn’t. It’s pretty rare for something to be “just” a neat and tidy instance of the class, with nothing else going on, and collapsing everything down to type means throwing away Most Of The Stuff (and often introducing Stuff that isn’t actually there at the same time).

It’s often counterproductive to spend lots of time and energy on whether something is an instance of a category—instead, I think it’s usually more valuable to focus on what you can get out of noticing that the category has perked its head up and is looking over your shoulder.

e.g. it’s less useful to fret over “but am I autistic, or not?” than it is to ask “hmmm, now that ‘autism’ has been promoted to my attention for whatever reason, what can I do with it? What knowledge, what resources, what strategies does having the search term ‘autism’ unlock, and do any of those things feel useful or promising?”

The sudden appearance of a label is often a clue as to which parts of the library might be disproportionately worth visiting—even in the cases where doing so ultimately shows that the label doesn’t really fit, there’s often value in having poked around its habitat and sampled some of the local food and tried out some associated customs and rituals and so on and so forth.

So before diving into my complaint about (the way people use the concept of) the narcissism of small differences, I want to take a moment to make sure we’re in touch with what it gets us. The term was coined for a reason, and became popular for a reason—it really does gesture at something real. If we want to make sure we’re not using it in the wrong places, it helps to understand roughly what the right places are.

(Sometimes it might seem like my pushback against the misuse of labels and categories is rooted in some sort of general antipathy toward them, but it isn’t. Labels and categories are rad—it’s just that they’re rad like knives, in that they can be wielded appropriately and skillfully, or they can do great harm.)

What, in practice, do people think is happening when they say “oh, this is just the narcissism of small differences”?

Working backwards from the conclusion, I think people are saying:

• The disagreement I’m witnessing may be dismissed, ignored, and maybe even a little bit mocked. This distinction does not matter; there is nothing here that I need to validate, pay attention to, or care about.

• That’s because the issue at hand is being blown out of proportion; these people are making mountains out of molehills and they are very, very wrong about how big of a deal this difference is.

• They’re blowing things out of proportion because of something like narcissism—they want to think that their way is right, and/or special, and/or crucial, and therefore the other, slightly different way is wrong and/or crazy and/or evil.

If one person looks at a feud and says “pshhh, this is just the narcissism of small differences” and a second observer nods in agreement, I think that second observer is agreeing to something like the three bullets above.

Freud, who coined the term (using the word “minor”) in 1918, largely agrees:

[Ernest] Crawley, in language which differs only slightly from the current terminology of psychoanalysis, declares that each individual is separated from the others by a 'taboo of personal isolation,' and that it is precisely the minor differences in people who are otherwise alike that form the basis of feelings of strangeness and hostility between them. It would be tempting to pursue this idea and to derive from this 'narcissism of minor differences' the hostility which in every human relation we see fighting successfully against feelings of fellowship and overpowering the commandment that all men should love one another.

In 1921, he elaborated:

Every time two families become connected by a marriage, each of them thinks itself superior to or of better birth than the other. Of two neighbouring towns each is the other's most jealous rival; every little canton looks down upon the others with contempt. Closely related races keep one another at arm's length; the South German cannot endure the North German, the Englishman casts every kind of aspersion upon the Scotchman, the Spaniard despises the Portuguese.

…

In the undisguised antipathies and aversions which people feel towards strangers-with-whom-they-have-to-do we may recognize the expression of self-love—of narcissism. This self-love works for the preservation of the individual, and behaves as though the occurrence of any divergence from his own particular lines of development involved a criticism of them and a demand for their alteration. We do not know why such sensitiveness should have been directed to just these details of differentiation.

…although by 1929, he had an inkling that he knew why:

It is clearly not easy for men to give up the satisfaction of this inclination to aggression. They do not feel comfortable without it. The advantage which a comparatively small cultural group offers (of allowing this instinct an outlet in the form of hostility against intruders) is not to be despised. It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness.

I once discussed the phenomenon that it is precisely communities with adjoining territories, and related to each other in other ways as well, who are engaged in constant feuds and in ridiculing each other—like the Spaniards and Portuguese, for instance, the North Germans and South Germans, the English and Scotch, and so on. I gave this phenomenon the name of ‘the narcissism of minor differences’, a name which does not do much to explain it. We can now see that it is a convenient and relatively harmless satisfaction of the inclination to aggression, by means of which cohesion between the members of the community is made easier.

And so an expansion on the third bullet in our previous theory emerges. Putting it all in chronological order:

1. People have a preexisting quantity of anger and aggression that they need to deal with somehow.

2. They don’t want to vent it upon their family, their friends, their neighbors, their tribe.

3. The village across the river is a little bit different, though, and that can be twisted into a pretext for aggression. They find some tiny clause by which they can justify those neighbors being outside of the circle of concern (and thus a legal target) and voilà—now it’s okay to attack them, verbally or otherwise.

4. You, an outside observer, can correctly assess that they are making mountains out of molehills, and exaggerating the importance of differences that don’t actually matter.

5. You, an outside observer, can therefore stop caring about the object-level disagreement, identify both sides as being ridiculous or silly, and conclude that the whole thing is a pile of unjustified, pointless waste.

Scott Alexander, writing somewhat later, is largely on the same page:

Compare the Nazis to the German Jews and to the Japanese. The Nazis were very similar to the German Jews: they looked the same, spoke the same language, came from a similar culture. The Nazis were totally different from the Japanese: different race, different language, vast cultural gap. But the Nazis and Japanese mostly got along pretty well. Heck, the Nazis were actually moderately positively disposed to the Chinese, even when they were technically at war. Meanwhile, the conflict between the Nazis and the German Jews—some of whom didn’t even realize they were anything other than German until they checked their grandparents’ birth certificate—is the stuff of history and nightmares. Any theory of outgroupishness that naively assumes the Nazis’ natural outgroup is Japanese or Chinese people will be totally inadequate.

And this isn’t a weird exception. Freud spoke of the narcissism of small differences, saying that “it is precisely communities with adjoining territories, and related to each other in other ways as well, who are engaged in constant feuds and ridiculing each other”. Nazis and German Jews. Northern Irish Protestants and Northern Irish Catholics. Hutus and Tutsis. South African whites and South African blacks. Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs. Anyone in the former Yugoslavia and anyone else in the former Yugoslavia.

So what makes an outgroup? Proximity plus small differences. If you want to know who someone in former Yugoslavia hates, don’t look at the Indonesians or the Zulus or the Tibetans or anyone else distant and exotic. Find the Yugoslavian ethnicity that lives closely intermingled with them and is most conspicuously similar to them, and chances are you’ll find the one who they have eight hundred years of seething hatred toward.

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How do you feel about this story? Scott and Sigmund have observed the phenomenon of [people who seem very similar being very angry at one another], and have generated a model that seems to explain the observations. What do you think about their proposed explanation?

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I feel uneasy. Both Scott and Sigmund seem to presuppose that this … reflex? Pattern? Tendency? … exists primarily in order to do something like increase intragroup cohesion, and starkly define the boundaries between groups.

I agree that it often has that effect, in practice. But I am nervous about something like the … sneering? The inherent dismissiveness of the explanation. The “oh, I get it, this exists in order to achieve its effect,” as opposed to maybe “this thing, which has this effect, might be for something else.”

(Why else, besides inflated ego and pent-up frustration, might an individual or group vigorously and proactively try to distinguish themselves from those who they are highly likely to be erroneously mistaken for, and whose memes and genes are most likely to infect and dilute and erode their own culture?)

There’s a “just” built into the very frame of the argument that Scott and Sigmund present. “This is just the narcissism of small differences” feels available, somehow. Invited. Solicited. The concept itself seems to want to structure your interpretations such that they are marginally more belittling.

(I do think that the “mere” version of TNoSD is very real! I think that the strawman actually exists! But I’m wary of strawmen that are installed at the bottom of a steep and slippery basin, such that nearby stuff rolls down and gets rounded off to straw even when it isn’t.)

I am reminded of some words written by Gabor Mate, on the subject of people digging in their heels and pushing back against authority and outside pressure:

Counterwill is an automatic resistance put up by a human being with an incompletely developed sense of self, a reflexive and unthinking going-against the will of the other. It is a natural but immature resistance arising from the fear of being controlled.

Counterwill arises in anyone who has not yet developed a mature and conscious will of their own. Although it can remain active throughout life, normally it makes its most dramatic appearance during the toddler phase, and again in adolescence.

In many people, and in the vast majority of children with ADD, it becomes entrenched as an ever-present force and may remain powerfully active well into adulthood. It immensely complicates personal relationships, school performance, and job or career success.

I haven’t read the context that these words were embedded in, so perhaps I am being a little unfair to Gabor, but taken at face value, this model seems fundamentally disdainful, in a similar fashion. There doesn’t seem to be a way to use the word “counterwill” that doesn’t come along with sneering condescension, which makes me wonder what parts of the picture Gabor is glossing over, and what the counterwillers would say for themselves, if asked in a spirit of genuine curiosity.

(I just wrote a piece dignifying a pretty similar set of behaviors, so I’m primed to feel somewhat defensive of the so-called incompletely developed.)

Part of my unease regarding the framing of TNoSD comes from the obviousness of the mistake (in the frame in which TNoSD is indeed a mistake). In a very different sort of piece, Scott once wrote:

If I were an actor in an improv show, and my prompt was “annoying person who’s never read any economics, criticizing economists”, I think I could nail it. I’d say something like:

Economists think that they can figure out everything by sitting in their armchairs and coming up with ‘models’ based on ideas like ‘the only motivation is greed’ or ‘everyone behaves perfectly rationally’. But they didn’t predict the housing bubble, they didn’t predict the subprime mortgage crisis, and they didn’t predict Lehman Brothers. All they ever do is talk about how capitalism is perfect and government regulation never works, then act shocked when the real world doesn’t conform to their theories.

This criticism’s very clichedness should make it suspect. It would be very strange if there were a standard set of criticisms of economists, which practically everyone knew about and agreed with, and the only people who hadn’t gotten the message yet were economists themselves. If any moron on a street corner could correctly point out the errors being made by bigshot PhDs, why would the PhDs never consider changing?

It is sadly the case that people do engage in very silly and self-serving and ultimately destructive behavior, both as individuals and en masse. Certainly it’s not crazy to imagine that all of the people labeled small-difference-narcissists by Scott and Sigmund are in fact just being dumb.

But like.

…really?

Is our explanation really going to be “yeah, these people are just deceiving themselves, in the service of deeper pressures in their psyche, which we can comprehend in full from the outside, because they’re obvious, but which these people are just oblivious to and unable to correct for, from the inside”?

It would be very strange if there were a standard set of criticisms of [people engaging in costly conflict over what seem to be pretty minor differences], which practically everyone knew about and agreed with, and the only people who hadn’t gotten the message yet were the people who were spending a lot of time and energy caring about those very differences, which everyone else can see are, in fact, irrelevant.

(Or at least, I think it would be very strange. I think the S&S model is leaving out something big. I think it is a complete explanation for only some of the instances of what gets labeled TNoSD.)

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II. Being blind to an axis of variance

Consider the following image.

Those trees look quite close to each other, and quite similar in size.  But they aren't.

(Er, “aren’t.” Sorry, I know it’s kind of weird to talk about what’s “really” true in this artistic representation of two trees set in a fake landscape. But work with me.)

One of the trees in the image is the silhouette of a redwood. The other is the silhouette of a much smaller conifer. Given that they look to be about the same size, one of them must be a lot farther away.

“Duh,” you might say, given that you are familiar with both a) the concept of redwoods, and also b) the concept of a forward-backward dimension.

But imagine that you are in some kind of Plato’s cave allegory, where you’ve never had cause to notice or care about the forward-backward axis, and all you’ve ever taken into account is where things are left-to-right and top-to-bottom.

(I mean, they are close, left-to-right, in the visual field! In the image, they actually are right next to each other! It makes sense to refer to them using language like that—if I were a graphic designer and you were asking me to edit this image to put a little more space between the trees, I would slide them apart from each other horizontally, because no other axis makes sense.)

When I look at the above picture, it’s pretty easy for me to feel my way into the kind of confusion one would experience, if one were unaware of, or blind to, or did not consider important, the forward-backward axis. If it does not even occur to you that things can be nearer or farther away (and thus appear larger or smaller in your visual field) then statements like “actually, the tree on the right is almost five times as tall” don’t just sound wrong, they sound crazy.

(Sort of like how a person who is colorblind, but not aware of being colorblind, might feel like everyone is conspiring to gaslight them as they insist that these two nearly-identical shirts are actually radically different colors.)

But in fact, taking a different perspective can lead to a radically different perception…

…and there are many metaphorical “places to stand” that people are completely unaware of. It’s very easy to be so stuck in a particular perspective that you literally cannot perceive (and sometimes can’t even conceive of the possibility of) certain kinds of variance. Of whole axes of variance, along which two points might be shockingly far apart—while still appearing side-by-side in the photo.

The Episcopal Church considers itself to be Catholic (as well as Protestant).

(The Catholic Church disagrees.)

Episcopalians have bishops, and the bishops play the same role within the Episcopal Church that Catholic bishops play within the Catholic Church. Similarly, Episcopalians have priests, deacons, monks, and nuns. Episcopalians and Catholics share the same list of saints, and perform many of the same sacraments—both groups take weekly communion and baptize their members with water in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Both groups celebrate the same church seasons (such as Lent) and celebrate many of the same holidays.

There are differences. Priests and bishops in the Episcopal Church can be female, or queer, and they can marry and have children. Married Episcopal couples can use birth control without falling afoul of church doctrine, and they may divorce. Confession is optional rather than required. Perhaps most importantly, Episcopalians do not acknowledge the Pope as the ultimate authority within their church, as Catholics do (or at least are supposed to).

All in all, though, there are few denominations of Christianity that are more similar than Episcopalianism and Catholicism. It would take an observer unfamiliar with either quite a while to notice the differences, if they simply showed up to watch and take notes.

And from the perspective of a Muslim, or a Hindu, or an atheist, the two churches are overwhelmingly similar. Muslims and Hindus and atheists stand in the position of the blue figure, in the image above—the two trees look like they’re right next to each other, and of similar size.

But.

What if it mattered whether the Pope was an agent invested with holy power? Like, what if papal supremacy wasn’t an idle question, but one upon which souls were either saved or damned?

What if god (who, in this hypothetical, exists) actually cares about divorce, or homosexuality? What if the sacrament of confession is actually crucial, and an Episcopalian who eschews it is causing themselves to fail to receive salvation?

To be clear: speaking as Duncan Sabien, the author of this piece, there is absolutely not sufficient and adequate reason to believe in either the Catholic or the Episcopalian doctrines, nor any Abrahamic doctrines, nor any religion that posits specific supernatural occurrences that we can’t observe (or supernatural intervention whose absence we do observe). The axis along which [papal supremacy] and [papal irrelevancy] are opposites is not a real axis—it is entirely fabricated.

But I can quite easily see how, if that were not true, this would be a very important question.

It’s easy, from the position of a rational skeptic, to look at all of the religious disputes and dismiss them as various forms of small-difference narcissism. But that’s only because we can be justifiably and extremely confident that the axis doesn’t matter, in a metaphysical sense.

(It still matters quite a lot in a social and political sense, as various ongoing wars and pogroms show.)

From the inside, these are not small differences at all. They are crucial, essential, central. Whether the Pope is imbued with divine authority. Whether Jesus is the son of god, or merely a prophet. Whether karma accrues to us during our lifetime, and influences the circumstances of our reincarnation. Whether the spirits of our ancestors are in torment because strangers are trespassing on holy Uluru. Whether the soul attaches to the flesh at the moment of conception, and thus abortion is the snuffing-out of what was indeed already a human life.

When someone asserts “oh, this is just the narcissism of small differences,” they usually believe themselves to be making a claim about reality—it usually feels, to them, that they are directly perceiving the smallness and irrelevance of the difference that they’re dismissing.

But in fact, what is actually occurring is that they are revealing something about their personal relationship to the axis of variance in question.

(And that personal relationship might end up being right/true/justified, or instead grounded in prejudice or bias or confusion.)

Just as “that’s crazy” is a meaningfully stronger and fundamentally different statement than “that sounds crazy to me,” so too is there a real and important distinction between “there isn’t any real difference to care about, here,” and “I don’t care about this difference.”

(Here I pause to note that a lot of people disagree about the axis of variance that I’m pointing at right now, and claim that there isn’t a difference that’s worth tracking between those phrases; that they are straightforwardly synonymous (even though they clearly aren’t, if you look at their usage and impact). More on this in III.)

People often say “there isn’t any real difference to care about, here,” when what they really meant (if you press them) is “okay, fine, I think that it’s stupid to care about this difference. I think this difference is trivial and unimportant.”

People also often say “there isn’t any real difference to care about, here,” and genuinely mean it, when they’re incorrect—when they are blind to the dimension in which the difference can be perceived, or simply uninformed about its relevance.

And people sometimes say “there isn’t any real difference to care about, here,” when there really in fact is not. When they have fully comprehended and correctly diagnosed the situation.

All three of those cases look like the narcissism of small differences. All three of those will trip many people’s TNoSD detectors (which of course can’t behave any differently in response to properties they are incapable of detecting, such as the metaphorical forward-backward axis in the tree picture).

But only the last one “is” the narcissism of small differences. Only sometimes is the actual story of what’s going on that people are blowing small differences out of proportion, to inflate their own egos or justify the venting of their aggression upon their neighbors.

It’s not enough to say “this looks like the narcissism of small differences, to me, and therefore I am done; the mystery is solved.” At least, not if you care about truth.

(Which is an axis that is, sadly, at least partially invisible and partially unavailable to many people, and dismissed or ignored by many others.)

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III. Tom blocks me in the end

At the time that I first began drafting this essay, I was in the middle of a seemed-like-it-might-plausibly-be-productive disagreement with someone I’ll call Tom. They called a pause, but I was still full of thoughts so I began jotting them down—it seemed to me to be a pretty central example of a mistaken “we’re not so different” claim, grounded in one party’s inability or unwillingness to track the axis that the other party thought was crucial.

A rough paraphrase of the last few steps of the conflict, for context (we were already definitely in the “heated” phase of the disagreement, and had been for some time, i.e. I do not necessarily endorse any of these words as tactically wise or likely to deescalate the situation):

Tom: I didn't appreciate the demanding tone [when you said X].

Duncan: What you interpreted as a demanding tone. As opposed to, there's a spread of reasonable interpretations (of which, sure, "demanding" is definitely one of them, I'm not saying that was an unjustified hypothesis).

Tom: Something something, “you can’t control how your readers interpret things,” like you were saying above in response to me. I think if you reliably want to be interpreted as not-demanding, you need to phrase those sorts of comments differently.

Duncan: Hang on, I think this is important. I think, based on some similar disagreements in the past, that you really think there was a demanding tone, in some fundamental sense.

Tom: I'm not an idiot; I don't think words have fundamental meanings. You just think I do, because I don't write out all the small-print disclaimers every fucking time, because people know what I mean.  You lectured me about how my comment needed rephrasing, because it implied something wrong. I’m telling you that you need to work on your phrasing too, because your comments imply demandingness. We are doing the same thing.  If I'm making a mistake, you are, too.  The difference between us is just that you write out all the small-print disclaimers, and I don’t. I don’t feel the need to.

That was basically where the conversation went on pause, and unfortunately it never really resolved and Tom and I no longer have a line of communication, so I have to lean on my shoulder Tom for a lot of the rest (I’ll flag that each time).

My first imagined response to that last message goes something like:

Wait, it seems pretty weird to claim that people know what you mean when we are right now debriefing an interaction where you and I each just destructively misinterpreted the other. Like, you said something and I was wrong about what you intended, and then I said something and you were wrong about what I intended, and now we’re arguing relatively heatedly; that literally just happened.

(It was, as near as I can tell, at precisely the moment that Tom heard a note of demand that I hadn’t intended to put there (and, incidentally, still mostly claim wasn’t there, in the sense that I’d bet ten bucks that more than half of readers wouldn’t have thought I was being demanding) that emotions flared and the conversation went south and never really returned to mutual good faith.)

But perhaps Tom would say that I’m the weird one, and that it’s largely only with me that such misunderstandings crop up, and everyone else knows what they mean. Then we would still have a coherent, concise explanation: Duncan has a bad model, so he misinterpreted Tom’s words and produced words that would, themselves, inevitably be misinterpreted. I don’t think this is super likely, but it’s not a possibility I want to dismiss out of hand, either.

(After all, my top hypothesis is that Tom is double wrong, in symmetrical fashion—first having said words that would reliably lead readers to think they meant X when they later clarified that they meant Y, and then having projected demandingness onto my words when it wasn’t there.)

My second imagined response is something like:

Okay, but there’s a difference between someone being willing to explicitly acknowledge, when prompted, that of course words don’t intrinsically carry meaning and of course demandingness is just one possible interpretation among several, and possibly not the standard or obvious one…

…and someone consistently acting as if they are aware, on a deep level, that different people communicate differently and double illusions of transparency happen all the time and “demandingness” is a layer of interpretation imposed over one’s observations and not something you observe directly.

There are a lot of people who will successfully pass the true/false test, when their attention is drawn to the question, who will nevertheless have been behaving as if their own personal interpretation is obviously and objectively correct and would of course be shared by the vast majority of readers. It’s one thing to say “hey, hang on—it feels like you’re making a demand of me, and you’re in no position to,” and it’s another thing to just fire back, reflexively, in precisely the way you would if someone were, absolutely, definitely, making an unfair demand.

(This is certainly what the interaction with Tom felt like, to me, though I am keenly aware of the possibility that something else was going on.)

My third response, though, is that Tom and I are absolutely not doing the same thing, and that the key giveaway is the phrase “small-print disclaimers.”

To expand on a point I made near the end of section II: I would argue that saying "I didn't appreciate the demanding tone" is not functionally equivalent to "I didn't appreciate what I took to be a demanding tone."

Like, my shoulder Tom (which is obviously not sufficiently detailed or accurate, or we wouldn’t have ended up in the conflict to begin with, so again, idk about the real Tom) says something along the lines of "yeah, those are essentially the same sentence; the latter one is just more tediously nitpicky and pedantic; everybody knows that the first version is a shorthand for the latter version." The real Tom at least wrote multiple sentences that I remember as saying something like that, in the original disagreement.

Two points, though:

First, it's emphatically not the case that everybody knows. It's never the case that everybody knows. There are children and there are people with autism and there are people who learned English as a second language and there are people who were raised two or three generations ago who have a very different baseline and there are people from cultures that are wildly different in their tone and register and familiarity and politeness and that’s without even taking into account the layers upon layers of idiosyncratic personal context and interpretation; one is lucky if one makes a statement whose plain meaning is clear and agreed-upon by seventy percent of the population, let alone everyone.

(For example, here I am, disagreeing with Tom about what it takes to make the statement “people know what I mean” register as true or not!)

Saying "I didn't appreciate the demanding tone" is a meaningfully stronger than saying "I didn't appreciate what I took to be a demanding tone"; it reifies and reinforces a frame in which there was, in fact, an unambiguous "tone" property to the written sentence and that tone was, in fact, demanding.  

If you ran two different versions of the conversation in front of two separate, similar audiences, and afterward you asked the audiences questions like "Do you think the tone was demanding?" and "Do you think that the person objecting thinks there's a decent chance they misinterpreted what the other guy was saying?" I strongly suspect you'd see meaningful, measurable, statistically significant differences in the answers. 

(I also suspect, though I'm less confident and this is a ruder thought, that people know this, and that if you could measure their reluctance to switch from one phrasing to the other, you would find that it is larger than can be explained by the mere headache of having to take the time to compose and include extra fiddly disclaimer-words. I think people would also, separately, additionally be reluctant because they know on some level that the latter sentence makes it harder for them to win. I think that it's strategic (whether consciously or unconsciously) to pretend that the two sentences are more similar than they are, so that one can justify using the conveniently stronger one, and fend off any objections by saying "but everybody knows X just means Y!")

Second, I think the difference between them just isn't small.  I believe they are saying actually substantially different things, such that if you were to e.g. try to represent each of them in symbolic logic, you would need to use very different symbols.

The first version, "I didn't appreciate the demanding tone," contains basically three objects.  There's the speaker, [I].  There's the [demanding tone] object, taken as given. And there's the speaker's relationship to the [demanding tone], the [¬appreciate].

The sentence [I] [¬appreciate] [demanding tone] takes for granted the existence of a tone that is demanding; it's baked in and not flagged up front as up-for-debate (even if the speaker will readily debate it if challenged).  It implies it in the same way that "The sky is blue" implies that there is definitely a [sky] object and there is definitely a [blue] attribute.

Compare to "I didn't appreciate what I took to be a demanding tone."  Here, we have [I], just like before.  We also have [¬appreciate].  

But then there's an entire additional layer.  The thing that is not appreciated is substantially more complex, in a way that more accurately reflects the actual complexity of reality.

[I] [¬appreciate] ([I] [interpret] ([tone] = [demanding]))

This is a fundamentally different sentence!  This is not just a small-disclaimer of a difference—the UI may look superficially simlar, but the OS has been totally rebuilt. We have two distinct actions by [I]: an inner action in which they evaluate [tone] as [demanding], and then an outer action in which they form a response to that. There's a more strongly implied internal locus of control, an acknowledgement of the fact that an evaluation actively occurred (as opposed to the tone just passively being demanding), two instances of decisionmaking rather than one, etc.

My (model of) Tom thinks that their and my positions are essentially the same, and I think that that very assertion is itself evidence of how different our positions are.  Someone who looks at the picture of the two trees and says “they’re right next to each other” or “they’re the same size” is revealing that they have a very impoverished understanding of what they’re looking at.

In my world, choosing the first version of the sentence is similarly diagnostic. The space between the two claims is large, and is not merely a small-print disclaimer that can be left out or glossed over for convenience.

(The model of) Tom (that lives in my head) thinks that our positions are the same because Tom is something-equivalent-to-blind to the very property that meaningfully distinguishes them. In my shoes, (my model of) Tom would have left out all of these parentheticals, claiming that they are extraneous window-dressing, tediously unnecessary hedges, things-that-go-without-saying—that the sentences are equally true with or without them, because their presence is strongly implied.

But (my memory of) Tom doesn’t act like they’re strongly implied. (In my recollection of our disagreement, which I admit may not be perfect,) Tom didn’t act like I had said a thing that seemed inappropriately demanding, and thus deserved a raised eyebrow and a double-check and perhaps a one-degree escalation in temperature. Tom acted like I had made a demand, and responded with (what seemed to me to be) swift and intense indignation, bordering on outrage.

It’s sort of like the difference between tit-for-tat and generous/forgiving tit-for-tat. It’s having there be at least one single check between receiving what sure as heck looks like provocation, and concluding that your partner sought to provoke.

Tom thinks that I was engaging in the narcissism of small differences, and I think this is a thing that does, in fact, happen, and that I probably do it about as often as the next fellow. I think it is indeed sometimes the case that two individuals or two groups that are very similar along all of the relevant axes will get inordinately up in arms about some tiny, cosmetic, inconsequential difference, and lose track of how really very similar they actually are.

But I think it’s also the case that a different thing frequently happens, where there’s really a rather fundamental and meaningful difference between the two, but someone who can’t perceive that difference, and who has the misfortune to have the curiosity-stopping conceptual handle [the narcissism of small differences] lying in their toolkit, just begging to be used dismissively, just … leaps straight to the conclusion oh, I get it, these people are making mountains out of molehills.

There’s a popular meme format featuring Giancarlo Esposito as Gus Fring, saying “You do X for reason Y; I do X for reason Z. We are not the same.” I couldn’t find a great example of it, but this one at least made me blow a little air through my nose:

This meme is popular at least in part because the experience of having someone declare that the differences between you and them are small, when they are in fact large, because the other person doesn't even clock the axis on which you differ, is fairly common!

(Or the differences between you and a third party.  I tend to think of karate and tae kwon do as being pretty much the same, but I’m pretty sure a lot of Korean and Japanese people would have thoughts and feelings about that, and I can acknowledge that there’s a dimension I’m not-validating; if the ravages of World War II had echoed down through my family then I, too, might find it pretty hard to think of those two different martial arts as belonging in the same bucket.)

And again: having recognized that real differences can be misdiagnosed as the narcissism of small differences doesn’t mean that the solution is to run in the other direction. Reversed stupidity is not intelligence. TNoSD is a label for a real thing that definitely happens, the beef between the Catholics and the Episcopalians being an easy and justified example. It wouldn’t be wise to pendulum-swing to a knee-jerk rejection any time someone claims “this is the narcissism of small differences.”

(Nor would it be good to e.g. demand so much data before being willing to acknowledge the appropriateness of the label that you might as well not have the label to begin with. You don’t need to point at every single tree before you’re allowed to call something a forest.)

No, the recommendation is just to split and commit. To practice the skill of noticing when you've only got one hypothesis running, and build the reflex of booting up at least one other, and then acting as you would act if there were in fact genuine uncertainty. Making at least one attempt to falsify your primary hypothesis before taking action that simply assumes it is true.

Or, in other words: to notice that there are a lot of situations in which the sentence "I didn't appreciate the demanding tone" is not an adequate substitute for, and does not at all mean the same thing as, "I didn't appreciate what I took to be a demanding tone."

One of them is accurate, and defensible, and not handwaving away one of the most relevant dynamics of interpersonal disagreement (that people project their interpretations onto other people’s words, especially when those words come in text and don’t have verbal or facial cues to help narrow down the intended meaning). The other ignores that entire game and, by implication, refuses to acknowledge the relevance and importance of that other game. It’s like looking at the differences between humans and chimpanzees and saying “guys, guys, guys, come on—you’re genetically 98.8% identical. Stop acting like that last 1.2% is a big deal. Lighten up and let it go.”

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IV. Conclusion

To reiterate the thesis:

Sometimes, what’s going on is indeed the narcissism of small differences, and other times what’s happening is that someone is blind to (or willfully ignoring or dismissing) the crucial axis.

Sometimes, people are just blowing very small disagreements out of proportion, for the sake of their ego or tribal politics or just to create a pretext for venting some of their pent-up anger. But other times, they see something you don’t, or they care about something you devalue, and in fact it is their response that is correct and proportionate, and yours that is miscalibrated.

And you can’t tell the difference just by checking to see whether your observations tick the boxes for the stereotype of TNoSD. Both situations share a superficial resemblance. They both have the same surface properties. You have to run some other test, to distinguish them.

And that’s what it’s like, to be maybe-blind to a maybe-important axis of variation. It feels like the answer to the question “what’s going on here?” is obvious. It feels like other people are getting weirdly intense about extremely irrelevant and almost imperceptible distinctions. It feels like the hero and the villain really aren’t any different, and like you should walk up to Duncan Sabien and just tell him, right to his face, that he’s confused, that actually you and he are cut from the same cloth, you’re very much alike, you clearly want the same things, why doesn’t he seem to see it? You should team up! You belong together! It’s so very obvious!

(Please don’t actually do this.)

Secretly, there’s nothing new, here. Fully a third of my essays are circling around this point, trying to shine light on it from various directions, and the solution is still just plain old everyday boring bog-standard split and commit. Asking yourself “okay, but if this isn’t what it looks like—if it turns out that it’s not an appropriate target for the readily-available dismissive conceptual weapon that I’ve got right here in my hand—then what?”

But hopefully you can feel it a little bit better, now. Like having spent half an hour in a café in a foreign country, immersing yourself in the rhythm and flow of another language.

Because—you see—the thing is—this mistake doesn’t happen when you notice it. This is a mistake made of not noticing. Of (sometimes) not even being capable of noticing, of not even having [the thing you can’t perceive] in your hypothesis space, because how could you, even?

Building the skill of being able to see color, when you are colorblind, is not easy. But it starts with appreciating the magnitude of the problem, and what it feels like to be caught in the grip of it:

It feels just like you’re not caught in the grip of it.

Good luck.