(This was written in Grade 12, on 2023-10-02.)
(Relevant Manifold market: https://manifold.markets/12c498e/which-of-these-universities-will-ac)

October 2nd, 2023
Each day, you are going to reflect on the speeches and respond to one. What was the meaning of the (chosen) speech? What would you like to say in response to it?
(This also includes the two speeches from September 29th, 2023.)

Today, I’m going to respond to Pierson’s speech. His statement was that the social and physical environments depicted in movies are not accurate to real life. My response, besides a notion of general agreement, is that I was positively amused at and appreciated his use of comedy.

However, I can provide some more detail on a specific section of Pierson’s speech that I had more disagreement with, which is when he talked about the domain of relationships. I remember him specifically mentioning the example of how in a movie, two people could “fall in love” simply by happening to sit together during a bus ride. Pierson said that instead, falling in love with somebody happens over a much longer period, with you repeatedly spending time together and making impacts on each other.

Although, of course, I am the last person whose opinion on this subject is credible, I can at least speak from a theoretical perspective. People’s common usage of the word “love” refers not to a process but to a psychological state. So, to say that love requires X prior condition, you are stating that it’s impossible for the brain of any biological human to subjectively reach the “love” state without X. I could argue against something as broad as X = “being born” depending on prenatal neuroscience, so declaring “spending Y amount of time together” or “making Z amount of impact on each other” as X is an essentially unsupportable position. It definitely seems possible for two people to reach those states just by seeing each other on a bus, although that doesn’t necessarily indicate that they will have a strong, long-term relationship. Pierson may have been arguing that the probability of such an event occurring in real life is greater than zero but less than that of the same event in a movie, which I would probably agree with, but that’s not what his phrasing implied.

Later in his speech, Pierson (I’m paraphrasing) defined “someone you love” as “someone you care about and respect”. This definition even more clearly contradicts those previous conditions. I’m sure there are some people who consciously believe that they care about and respect every human on earth, for example. Also, by this definition, I would love far more people whom I’ve only seen on the internet (and therefore have not “spent time with” or made a nontrivial impact on) than I’ve met in real life.