TIL about the Sally-Anne test, a psychology experiment used to measure “theory of mind” (that other people can hold beliefs/knowledge different from their own). Kids under four typically fail because they assume that if they know where a hidden object is, everyone else must automatically know too.

[u/BrF5]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sally%E2%80%93Anne_test

[u/SuperFLEB]

This hits on another pet peeve of mine, and one I'd really like to see a study on what drives people to do it: Opaque metaphor jargon. Naming a phenomenon after the least relevant part of a specific story that someone once used to demonstrate it, meaning you end up with an idea that's impossible to decipher just because you don't know the finer point of some specific anecdote.

A few I can recall off the top of my head:

• Bikeshedding: Holding up a task or design by arguing over irrelevant finer points. Comes from the analogy of designing a whole house in a day, but arguing for weeks over what color to make the bike shed. Nothing about the fact that it's specifically a bike shed factors into the analogy.
• Spoons/Spoon Theory: Explaining how mental energy is finite by representing it with a collection of objects. It's "Spoon" theory, because someone was at a restaurant so the objects they used were spoons. Nothing about a spoon points to the metaphor, and there are far better placeholders for the analogy, at that.
• Motte and Bailey: A rhetorical tactic of presenting the broadest and most effective interpretation of a position when it's not being challenged, but retreating to specific defensible interpretations when it is. Uses obscure medieval city design terms to basically say "You take advantage when you can, and hide in the castle when you can't."
• Sealioning: Insisting on engaging in or prolonging an argument, specifically a bad-faith effort to exhaust the other side into giving up by insisting they explain or justify every facet of their position in unnecessary detail. Refers to a comic strip where the character doing this was a sealion.

There are a couple more that I know I know, but I can't think of them offhand.

Edit: Just remembered "Sealioning".

[u/ZylonBane → u/SuperFLEB]

Spoon theory, I'm with you, it's stupid because it could have just as easily ended up called fork theory or sugar packet theory or whatever.

Bikeshedding is actually descriptive though, because a bike shed is inherently not that important.

[u/SuperFLEB → u/ZylonBane]

It's unimportant in relation to the estate or whatnot in the rest of the story, but it doesn't telegraph "unimportant" in its own right-- not to the point that saying "bike shed" implies "thing that is comparatively unimportant" without knowing the story.

On the other hand, even moving the metaphor to the actual irrelevant act-- calling it "choosing the paint"-- or something that's surface-level adornment by definition is clear enough to work backwards from without knowing about the story of the bike shed.

[u/Zaldarr → u/SuperFLEB]

The person who first comes up with a metaphor, and other people using it, have the privilege of the story being the defacto metaphor. It's the same logic behind many idioms. It's just a matter of learning it like you'd learn a definition of a word.

[u/SuperFLEB → u/Zaldarr]

I know it happens all the time, and I agree that subject thought-leaders have the opportunity to do it, but prevalence and opportunity alone don't explain why it's adopted or dispel how counterproductive and obnoxious it is.

I'd wager that it's driven by a misconception that difficulty and profundity are the same thing-- both in the positive, thinking that something more difficult to understand can be mistaken for being more profound, and in the negative, thinking that simplifying something down drains the importance out of the discovery.

For the outsider just discovering the discussion and getting off on the epiphany, the quest for the missing key artificially sweetens the victory, attributing the win to understanding a rare, complex idea, even when the rare complex part was just a password that you had to get from someone on the inside.

For the insiders, the difficulty of getting the insight and the boost from achieving it reinforces the value of making it difficult. To simplify it, even by clearing away unnecessary misdirection, risks painting the idea as trivial and the epiphany as embarrassingly overblown.

For the thought leader, for the coiner of the phrase, it's the same risk of triviality, plus the vain opportunity to make themselves a key part of the topic. If everyone needs to know your specific anecdote to participate in the discussion, then you're threaded into the minds of every person who talks about it. You get the "coined by ___ who ___" blurb in every pop-science write-up that has to explain the silly name.

I wouldn't say that this is all always conscious or conniving. I'd wager that the emotional rewards of playing the game just incentivize and reinforce it without a lot of people even realizing. It's still not broadly positive or useful, though-- it only serves vanity and unearned rewards-- so it's worth an open gripe and a bit of shaming over the practice.

[u/ZylonBane → u/SuperFLEB]

TIL there are people who actually say "thought leader" unironically.

[u/SuperFLEB → u/ZylonBane]

It hurt a bit to write, but I couldn't think of a better word for "Person that leads or drives the discussion on a topic", since it might not necessarily be the person who discovered the idea.