Conversation

“Never seen anything like it” is rapidly climbing my list of top most annoying phrases. Why is your set of “things I’ve seen” worth anything? Without qualification of scope and earned experience, “things I’ve seen” sets are like assholes. Everyone’s got one.
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Shit you see simply by virtue of being alive is not an indicator of the unusual nature of anything. If you live 100 years and see 100 christmases, that’s only 5% of all christmases. It’s a particularly stupid phrase relative to deep time scales much bigger than human lifespans.
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I started noticing it after noticing it’s one of Trump’s favorites. His use is particularly egregious and dishonest, but it’s a common phrase with a certain subset of parochial Americans. They trot it out with an air of being super worldly types with wide-ranging experiences.
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It’s the same sort of thing as saying “X is world famous in my town” There was a store in Ann Arbor with the slogan “world’s largest selection of University of Michigan sportswear” Unironic afaict. No shit. No other town in the world cares to earn that particular distinction
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Most recent provocation was someone saying “never seen anything like it in 30y” about forest fires, and they were either a resident or ranger... A blink in natural history/climate time. 30y isn’t even an impressive fraction of forestry laws/history. Prop 13 is 42y old.
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With this kind of narrow perspective, zero chance of being oriented appropriately for Cthulucene dynamics. Humanity is now playing with forces so large in space and time, using “things I have seen” as a priors set is dangerously stupid.
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Phrases to consider: “Nobody in the village/city/state/country/world has seen anything like this”... “Not in living memory” “Not in the history of this village....country” “Not in human history” “Not in the history of life on this planet” “Not in 13.2B years”
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Only time the phrase is merited is when you’re the world’s most experienced in an area of human experience that’s younger than living memory. Like astronauts and space imaging experts can say that about photos taken from space. That’s a meaningful statement.
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The pandemic sparks this a lot. From people who haven’t yet bothered to even look up Wikipedia about the Spanish flu or Black Death, let alone try to read books or talk to historians. Particularly annoying since closest reference event is just past living memory (102 y).
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Yes people HAVE seen things like this before. They just happen to be almost all dead. Your friendly neighborhood know-it-all is not the limit of collective memory.
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Egotism is overindexing on your own experiences and imagining them to be exceptional by default. Lake Wobegon effect on steroids. A: “What’s the world’s highest waterfall?” B: “I think it’s in South Amer...” C (interrupting): “I once took a piss off the Motel 8 roof”
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There’s a version of this parochial scholars are prone to, which amounts to “if nobody’s ever talked about it in my narrow field, it’s new to the world” “Never seen anything like these forest fires in medieval military history” effectively. Different species of egotism.
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I guess maybe people's ability to think in abstractions is weak, so they tend to default to things they've concretely seen as reference points for emotional connection to an event.