As they say, all models are wrong, some are useful.
It's actually kind of hard to do. You try to pay attention to the words you are saying, the thoughts you are thinking, the emotions, the feelings, the body posture of yourself. But it's got to be easier than trying to understand another.
Doing this eventually lead to a better perception of others. But by then I didn't need to try to do it. I'm still no where near as perceptive as the author of this submission but I've improved. However its a bit like a muscle and needs to be exercised or made into a discipline or habit and I have atrophied over time. I do still have my memories of this though.
One thing I noticed by observing others is that most people do not understand themselves. And I include myself in this group almost all the time too.
I should get back into this, thank you for your comment.
most people love what loves them back
The first day really sucked, but they let me try again and I came with a plan. Before every call imagine my feeling of love for that person. As I read the script, think "I love you grandma".
Something magical happened. I got like 3 donations out of 5 calls for the rest of the day. The boss was joyful, I was the flavor of the day. He presented me with an alarmingly large bonus when I left.
I was nauseated and never went back. That was my last job in sales.
For example, if you could quickly intuit whether and how much the person naturally would want and be able to donate, and you connect with them on the basis of that, and they might or might not pick up on that themselves, but no mind tricks of either of you?
One appealing thing about this is that it's using some of the strongest potential for manipulation, to try to avoid manipulating.
If it's for a good cause, the person would like to donate, and can afford some amount, then there's a role for cooperation in facilitating that.
As a facilitator, you can look at it like: here's a person who wants to donate, I approve of that, and I can help with that.
If you like the person for wanting to do that, and that comes across, and that helps them get past their aversion to sales in general, all the better.
Where it can go wrong is if you play manipulation games on them and/or yourself.
(Telemarketing modality of phoning and disturbing is a different problem, though. That's a reason not to do it at all, at least not that way. But manipulation can be averted.)
"Become poorer" is the technically correct part, but imagine a person with a million dollars in their name who donates USD 100 to a cause they like.
They have technically become poorer, but it does not matter to them, neither objectively nor subjectively. On the other hand, if the donation was helpful, they may appreciate you informing them about that opportunity.
Of course that all depends on lot of variables (e.g. "the charity is not a scam, but a genuine attempt to help others), but the basic idea that giving away money is always harmful to people I cannot agree with.
I would be delighted if someone I love spent some reasonable money and/or time on worthy causes.
In our tech sphere we see this in tech hype circles where the early investors have to become believers and make new converts which turns into feedback loops of hype.
my life became a lot more fun once i realized work can literally be anything, if i know how to sell it
(this month i'm paying rent by writing mothers day poems for tech employees to mail their mom)Now that you've brought up the topic, how should one sell poems? Maybe start earlier with content marketing and link the product somewhere in the content? Apparently this blog has only been submitted twice to HN, today and three days ago, with zero mention of poetry. But it does mention weddings.
There was an old boomer named Maude,
who sold composition by fraud,
She got her kicks
from spurious clicks
but her mores were seriously flawed.Once a young techie in YC
was asked: Start-ups all why seed?
"To save the World of course
--shopping cart before horse--
for growth at scale: launch high speed!"
I’ve most often bought poems from people sitting on the sidewalk writing them out, FWIW :)
Under that I see someone whose job it is to be keenly observant and to notice these things, otherwise she wouldn't be a very good wedding painter. It probably helps that she seems to be passionate about observing people. Why have someone paint your wedding if the painter isn't able to understand and observe the nuances of human interactions going on?
I disagree. The observations start to become extremely judgmental at around #8 and following.
> Why have someone paint your wedding if the painter isn't able to understand and observe the nuances of human interactions going on?
Do you think the wedding painter is paid to reproduce the naked reality of the situation, if that happens to be contrary to what the couple wants to see and preserve on canvas forever?
A nice example of this is Masamune Shirow, of Ghost in the Shell fame. If you go through the interviews, most of his inspiration comes from early scientific research and engineering debates that he internalized and integrated into a coherent and compelling vision of the future.
This is no small feat, he is extremely influential in that he exposed whole generations of people to these ideas and cutting edge research fields, and many researchers today probably chose their fields based on the ideas exposed in his art.
But did he get there before the researchers ? I'd say no. And he doesn't need to, what he did is incredible in other ways already.
PS: too many people assume that scientists or engineers don't have imagination nor project their ideas into the future. That would be misguided.
Did he "get there before the researchers"? I'd say "that question makes no sense".
Mathematicians certainly "beat him" to the realization that orbital periods depend on distance, and could obviously range longer and shorter than 24 hours. Physicists certainly "beat him" to calculating the altitude of a 24 hour orbit of earth. Engineers almost certainly "beat him" to the idea of satellite radio communications.
This is kinda cheating though. Clark was a physicist as well as a fiction author. He even calculated the delta-v needed to launch to geosync orbit and compared it to the German V-2 rocket.
https://www.wired.com/2011/05/0525arthur-c-clarke-proposes-g...
- percentages aren't in a published paper
- isn't in a prestigious enough journal to be taken seriously
- hasn't been reproduced to be reliable
Stuff that sounds believable because it “sounded good” and was argued by charismatic people plagued medicine until shockingly recently.
It’s human nature to believe people and your snarky reply is evidence of that. Your gut reaction should be to agree with the comment or call out the author for fabricating stuff, not to dismiss intellectual rigor.
We are given no confidence interval, no error bars, not even a passing nod to the broader Veronese housing market. Two? Why not three? Why not seven?
Dignity, too, goes unmeasured. Are we talking patrician gravitas or the brittle self-importance of guys who name their swords? The line presumes a convenient symmetry where there is almost certainly chaos, over-leveraged family fortunes, and at least one uncle squatting in a basilica basement.
Frankly, I suspect "two households" is just the number Shakespeare could hold in his head without dropping his drink.
But how do you explain people who intuitively understand things? Mathematicians, for example, intuitively understand math. Psychologists and experienced authors intuitively understand people. We gain intuition through education and experience, which in turn improve our understanding and sensitivity towards the truth. Expert mathematicians, for example, _can_ have a good sense of whether a theorem is true before they prove it. And in general, people who possess scientific knowledge can intuitively know things.
I do agree with your intent, though — we need to possess humility about the accuracy of our beliefs. The author can’t factually know what other people feel and think without asking them.
But we also owe some deference to wisdom. Being wise is like being an expert darts players: you’re better able to throw darts into the bulls-eye than most people. If we develop a wisdom worth trusting, we should trust it.
People-watch at enough weddings, your observations of wedding-goers will become more accurate.
But, only if it's a hypothesis that can be validated in such a way.
From OP
> By internal architecture, what I mean is, when someone talks to me, what I notice first are the supporting beams propping up their words: the cadence and tone and desire behind them. I hear if they are bored, fascinated, wanting validation or connection. I often feel like I can hear how much they like themselves.
The last part (how much they like themselves) is an interpretation or a causal speculation, and something very prone to confirmation bias.
Like, what kind of observed behavior would you make less confident in that?
The article is a mix of very good observations and some more speculative statements, which seems to trigger us, the HN commenter crowd :-)
You look at patterns and note them. Over years you will see similar patterns, both in people you only observe once, as well as people you get to know better. The ones you get to know better are the ones where you validate your theories. I’m not explaining it very well, but it works. It’s kind of like a sort of sparse sampling or a very long-term Monte Carlo simulation in n-dimensions (that’s an allusion and not a strict explanation)
From my own experience, with things to do with social interaction some of the most successful people forge on running purely on intuition, they don't burden their minds on things like worrying if their model of wisdom acquisition is deficient of a feedback loop
For example, I invited him to a BBQ at my friend's parent's house. (He was my roommate at the time, and had met my other friend a few times so this was not a random thing)
He talked to my friend's mother for maybe 15 minutes at the BBQ. She is a cheerful and loopy sort of person, and that was exactly the sort of conversation they had. On the drive home he asked me, "that family has been through a lot of tragedy, haven't they?". Indeed, it would break your heart to hear about them.
Burying a child is tragic.
But to answer your question, I would say most families have not suffered tragedy. Mine certainly hasn't.
If your psychologist asks you if you’ve ever thought about suicide: it is not being as in touch with humanity as you think to say; “Hasn’t everyone”.
Yes. This. And much more.
Here's what I think likely happened: your friend talked to other people who went through tragedy. He noticed something common in their behavior. It can be something so subtle that it's invisible to most people, but your friend notices these kind of things. Then when he talked to the current person, he found the similar pattern.
I imagine the author of this article is describing something along the lines of my friend's cognitive capabilities.
The author here does not go through that process at all. It just feels like saying: I watch people a lot so I feel like I know what I am talking about, I feel entitled to write a piece about it. Math people have those pieces peer reviewed and experimented upon before they are actually published.
They can intuit all they want, and good for them if it makes them more efficient in their job. But at the end of the day, if you have to convince others of your intuitions you have to provide verifiable proof. Your intuition might help you overcome a hurdle when proving a theorem, but, still, prove it you must.
I interacted with at least 7 psychotherapists (one of them is a relative) and a whole bunch of other specialists in the field. It took three decades and a push from my side for someone to even figure out that something about me was kind of strange.
Yes, experts can recognize patterns. But that has limits & biases, and tends to be unreliable for outliers. And when that person doesn't even check their results all bets are off.
You lost me here. This isn’t true.
> It is easy to spot the person in the room who thinks they are better than everyone. [...] This is also painful to see, because they often cannot see their own misery, how unpleasant the world is if no one is good enough to be loved.
Honestly, where does this person get off thinking they can evaluate a whole person's psyche based on how they walk into a room and chat with a few people?
It's also easy to spot the one with the canvas and the substack.
The dictionary definition of "observe" is to notice or perceive (something) and register it as being significant.
By that definition the word observation in the title and text is completely legitimate and used correctly.
> She's very good at telling stories, but these stories feel like fiction, not hard fact.
There was no claim of objective fact. This is a Substack piece, not a peer-reviewed submission to "Nature" journal.
Are you suggesting that we can't criticize the crap people say on Substack?
I wish I (and lots of others) had just half of the ability to see people the way that the author does, it would make the world so much more rich and maybe more kind.
Like someone evaluating literature as if it's an academic paper. Hilarious. Just ego protection from things you don't wish to face. Carpe Diem! not "Scientific Blinkers" sold on amazon, $1 for a 10-pack. Wear it and you'll never be awed again!
Worship an idol of false objectivity, and demonize the subjective - to hide, when objective and subjective are both seeing and making from different points of view. But those trapped objectifying the world - an authoritarian abuse of science when science is observation - you're only harming yourself, and trying to turn your dynamic human-ness into a fixed robot!
Painting weddings presents good opportunities to observe the interactions of strangers. On the other hand, it does not present good opportunities to come to know strangers intimately, which is the only way to confirm or disconfirm your superficial observations of them. The wedding guests are unlikely to ever become the hired hand's close friend, lover, or relative. If the article author is somehow an expert at reading people, that expertise was assuredly not acquired by painting weddings. At best, preexisting expertise could be practiced there. Reading the author's list, however, I'm quite skeptical. She appears to be someone who is judgmental and jumps to unwarranted generalizations based on anecdotal evidence.
Most of us are pretty good at reading other people. That's natural, not magical. But pretty good is fallible at best, and overconfidence in our own abilities is another natural human trait. You can easily become overconfident by having a few lucky successes. The most troubling combination is overconfidence and charisma, which allows you to deceive not only yourself but many others.
People attend weddings for a lot of reasons. Sometimes it's full of your most favorite people in the world, sometimes you only know a few people in the room. Sometimes you have a lot of fun, sometimes the entire thing just feels like a massive inconvenience. Sometimes it stokes the flame of your relationship, sometimes it occurs during a time when your relationship is under some stress. Sometimes I'm dancing/partying all night, sometimes I never leave my table and leave before the cake is cut.
Anyways, I'm sure she does see a lot of these patterns and you can try to infer a lot of things about the people, with some reason, but people are fluid and this is too small of a sample of their life to really know anything other than how this group of people interacted on a single night of their lives.
I don’t think any of the things she said are deterministic or objectively descriptive. At the same time I think she does capture some essence or wisdom from her multitude of experience and her knack for noticing this and being able to put it into words.
Painting is not just capturing the pixels of light on canvas. This is what children consider painting. Great painters capture emotion and energy on canvas -- that's part of the essence that I am alluding to. That's what separates an artist who can realistically capture a scene from a master. Emotionally mature people who experienced life can recognize that emotion and energy in great paintings.
It's kind of like math. Some proofs and formulas are considered elegant or even beautiful. To the untrained eye they look like letters, symbols, and numbers.
Take Euler's identity: e^(i*π) - 1 = 0. My kids see gibberish, since they are in grade school. I see something surprising and neat but don't fully understand it. I've spoken to people who have a deeper understanding of math who can talk wonder about this simple-looking equation and use words of feeling to describe it.
No, her job depends on making the married couple happy, which is not at all the same as 100% accurate representation.
This is... IMO, a misguided criticism. It implies every study of anything should be scientific. This is the road to bad science, pseudoscience and whatnot. In fact, it's the road we already have taken.
Psychology is full of dubious scientific pretense... often because art, anthropology, philosophy and such are derided and rejected as unscientific.
Give me great art or philosophy over bad science any day.
I think it's worth poking at why you feel that social interactions should be subjected to the rigours of the scientific method in the first place?
I'd be more interesting to know which unproven-social-deductions are commonly made by the general population.
Its frankly ridiculous to critique a post not just on its lack of rigor, but on its merit in regards to a hypothesis you've pulled out of thin air.
think this is just an observational essay. The confident tone makes for better reading, even if you're questioning the accuracy while you read it. It also allows a more loving tone than a more hedged rhetoric would allow.
Could she be wrong, sure, but as we have learned over the past few years, so can more "scientific" approaches to psychology and sociology. But that doesn't really matter because what she's doing isn't failed science, but taking part in a sort of humanistic shared inquiry. It's a woman reporting her observations and thoughts, not as claimed facts, but as suggestions readers can integrate into their own developing understanding, so they can build on them to make their own observations and inferences.
The interpretation isn’t always right, but if you’re good at engaging with people (mostly by listening) you’ll improve that skill pretty quickly.
Modern video conferencing streams may contain enough information for emotion inference.
However watching others and just collecting more datapoints help in the process of learning. You are learning to read and be more observant regardless of judgements.
I found the article really good.
Sherlock Holmes (1985) Season 2 Episode 2 The Greek Interpreter
> People who don't pause exist more in their head than their body. The mind is top-down, rigid, quick, enforcing an established view. The mind is waiting for the other person to be done so they can say what’s rattling around inside. The body is slower, needs more time, and then words bubble up organically, one after another, without planning. People who exist more in their body are generally better at connecting emotionally with others.
I don't really understand this one.
Maybe there's a bit of a reductive or meaningless conflation here. A body can be fast while the mind is also fast. A body can be slow and pensive, and the mind follows. Being bodily 'in touch' does not equate to emotional sensitivity IME.
I am reminded of people whose bodies are dysfunctional or disabled or disregulated. I don't really see a correlation there where they have less emotional sensitivity. Often the opposite. I am then reminded of people who are hyperactive and always want to be moving. One might say they 'exist more their body' but they might often be impatient and inattentive in conversations..
Maybe I'm misunderstanding the author?
I'm not talking about the literal visual point of view but rather the metaphorical center point of the conscious experience.
Personally I think I am very good at reading people's internal state. But I also am aware that I can be wrong. Reading someone who is very quiet for example can be hard and more prone to error.
When I talk with someone I often do assess how much turn taking they do, particularly with a stranger. When I'm really engrossed in a conversation or I'm with a good friend I can sometimes turn off this assessment.
Final point - the article was a great read. I'd have been really interested in their views on gender differences in communication (there can be differences).
How are you evaluating that?
I suppose I also look also for how real a person is. For example in a work setting some people are much more prone to wear masks and fake emotions and some people don't do that. I do try to factor in how much games playing some people do/don't do.
This is what makes our world special. Not all is as meets the eye. Illusion is powerful.
But yeah some people can hide negative emotions (e.g. sadness) very well.
To hear Ekman, father of the Facial Action Coding System, tell it:
Unfortunately many people think they're intuitive regardless of how poor they actually are at reading others (high self-belief, but poor ability).
We all notice how it takes high skill to recognize the very highly skilled in areas we are talented in.
That was the less commonly talked about part of the Dunning Kruger Effect. While the Dunning Kruger paper has been somewhat dismissed now as due to statistical artifacts, the DK effect seems to resonate with real life so we want to believe it.
Something like "she seems sad" and 5 minutes later "yup, she's crying now"
As far as interesting efforts that reach for more objectivity, I feel like the personality psychology people circulated a bunch of “EQ” instruments like this in the ‘00s and ‘10s, rooted in Paul Ekman’s work on facial expressions:
https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/quizzes/ei_quiz/
Then again, they dealt with their replication crisis around the same time; I’m not sure how well these kinds of things held up.
FWIW, hypothesizing attributes about a person is also just what's required to begin empathetically understanding them. Judging this as judgemental seems like an unpleasant kind of state to be in, at least to my eyes.
I certainly don't know you but have just as certainly felt some aspect of you. Hoping you are well, stranger.
Of course just my interpretation.
In the same way that we perform root cause analysis via guesses and validations, I think it's natural, and perhaps unavoidable, that we also make guesses as to a person's personality.
Of course, we usually call someone judgemental for making negative assessments, but I think it's important to allow a person whatever possibilities, regardless of moral judgement.
My read of the article is that the author ascribes negative traits without judgement and just as easily as positive ones. Heck, as I see it, big part of empathizing with someone is recognizing how all their conditions and traits are natural and operate similarly inside ourselves to one degree or another.
None of us chose to be the way we are in the situation we're in. Like, 3+1 dimensions and mostly Euclidean space. Who ordered that? Modus ponens?! Glaciation periods! All these deeply affect our day to day experience, obviously or not and at the behest of no one.
> My read of the article is that the author ascribes negative traits without judgement and just as easily as positive ones
I don't think this is true at all? The 'negative traits' she assigns to people are things like desperation, self-hatred, 'hating the world (or having a very narrow understanding of it)', 'thinking they are better than everyone'. It's hard to call those categorizations anything but judgemental. She even goes as far as to say she has a 'favorite kind of person' by these categorizations. That she ascribes them as easily positive ones is meaningless. It's the ascribing that is the problem.
My take away is that the article is a small list of things that most people know (i.e. it's easy to tell if someone is actually interested in something or not) paired with a series of ways to judge someone based on some extremely surface-level traits, which slowly veers into a sort of prescriptive take on which combination of those traits makes a person identifiably good. It has a feel-good tone, but I found the article difficult to get through because it put me off so much.
> Heck, as I see it, big part of empathizing with someone is recognizing how all their conditions and traits are natural and operate similarly inside ourselves to one degree or another.
See, to me applying the 'insights' outlined in the article seems like the opposite of empathizing. It's couched in gentle phrasing, but it essentially boils down to "here's how you put someone into a box by looking at them."
Heck yeah. If we're putting people in boxes, then I agree. That said, the author's characterizations sound much less absolute to me, like they're median estimates with implied wide error bars. That's similar to how I experience people, actually.
Does your intuition change if you assume that different framing?
You could argue that one reveals much more about their personality on a blog post that's about their though process, than one does when walking in a room and behaving during a wedding reception but... I'm actually not sure it's true, considered the former is the fruit of conscious reflection and the later is mostly not filtered by consciousness.
It's not enough that the person is correct in some predictions, they have to also make few mistakes. And the predictions must be objective and not vague or horoscope-like.
Would you be impressed if I made a prediction of a coin flip and was right? What about if I predict a 50/50 choice someone is about to make?
What if I have a book of instances where I made correct predictions?
Not impressive unless the mistakes are there too.
I think it's okay to let your observations of someone guide your expectations of them so long as you are open to being wrong and do not use those expectations as justification for mistreating someone.
Also, it's impossible not to form a model of others based on all those visual and behavioral cues. Better trying to make it consciously than to let it happen unconsciously, no? I believe conscious thoughts that one tries to describe and understand have actually less agency on one's judgment.
For example, a sales person will be reading you with everything they got to find the best angle to sell you stuff.
On a first date, you can bet both people involves are trying to read each other every minute of the date, whether intentionally or unconsciously. They even often talk about how they read you afterwards with their friends.
A long-time partner probably doesn't try to read you every time you talk.
I think there's a matter of degree, and if it's excessive, then it's creepy. Maybe the purpose matters. Getting into my head in order to manipulate me is immoral.
And I never experienced a "first date." People avoid that too if their culture allows it. At least by the time something emerged that could be called a "date," I already knew her from casual interaction. She knew I was nuts.
I'm sure some people do that, although I would find it disturbing. I haven't been on a date for a while, but for my last one other factors were way more important to me.
Some delightful comments on the topic here (I found the article distubingly fascinating - maybe due to my stereotype of US female daters in 30s): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43780269
> whether intentionally or unconsciously.
I think that pondering too much about subconscious drives, is a dismal dangerous road. Not that everyone can correctly identify why they do things (or why others do).
> A long-time partner probably doesn't try to read you every time you talk.
I would guess some people do it all the time - trying to analyse the reasons behind what their partner says or does. It can be a problem for both e.g. someone who has been made hyper-self-conscious about their every action because they are frightened of the reaction of their overanalytical partner.
Personally, I intensely dislike psychlogical analysis (doing it myself, or seeing others do it) because few people like to be academically analysed.
I'm rather cynical after dealing with the dangerous opinions of acquaintances (psych students, professional acquaintances, pop-science head-readers, and a few quite frankly mentally-fucked-up people that I know that just "want to help others"). Modern day watchword: trauma (especially childhood).
Labels are dangerous. I've even made an internal rule for myself to avoid all professional psychological words and only speak about behaviours. I'm definitely breaking that rule here by trying to write down my opinions (meta: sometimes difficult to avoid analysis).
I'm unsure I could summarise what I look for during a date. I can't provide an example of what I prefer instead: too much risk of wordy overanalysis!
Most of the times situations are a complete cypher, but in more unisual cases when observing groups of people who know each other, you can tell how they feel from analyzing the behaviors.
This author is clearly in a privileged position in the wedding group. She's in the background with the specific job of looking at everyone and capturing their feelings. They don't try to hide their behavior or respond to her, and the usual western taboo against staring at strangers doesn't apply.
This was definitely a good read!
Telling a complex story in a static picture requires great attention to detail, and a solid understanding of how humans express emotion.
Before you can create art that captures these emotions, you need to be able to observe them. I am not at all surprised that countless hours painting people has helped her develop this skill!
Does she have more than a 50% succes rate?
In the wost case (null hypotesys?) that she can't tell, it's similar to the gambler falacy. She remember only the succes cases. People post online only the succes cases. Nobody remember the wrong cases.
In this case it doesn't matter, but there are evil people that use similar tricks for scams.
That being said, I think I’m willing to suspend disbelief a little. I do think there’s an art to being able to not only read people, but to express it in a way that conveys the underlying point.
… the same way a good comedian can make an audience say, “oh yeah, I always noticed that but never really realized until you said it.”
Is it true? Maybe, who knows? But it seems like it could be, and that’s enough for me to find it interesting :)
Also, if they go to Mali again in a few years, if they by chance meet again in the airport, if it's a prediction I expect the parents to say hello and show the little boy. But in the other case I expect the parents to avoid embarrassing her with the anecdote of he failure.
The point is not that she predicted the gender of the child. She predicts what gender the parents expect the child to be without being explicitly told.
She didn't tell me anything about the success rate. Instead she told what factors she used to make her guess. She can tell if she was right or wrong right away because the parents can say what they are expecting.
"She said the man looked like the type who didn't treat women that well"
Maybe she was right about this man, maybe she was wrong, but in either case that judgement came about because he reminded her of someone.
I'll go a step further. She assumed happy couple => boy, and future father seeming strained => girl...that gives me a guess about a difficulty she faced in childhood.
Of course I'm susceptible too. I jumped immediately to the "opposite sex parent had issues" narrative on reading a small anecdote about this woman. Is that the truth, or am I projecting something? Could be both?
Look at how you analyze others and you'll learn a lot about yourself.
As a result it seems to have a skew highly specific to generalizing about people's "internal architectures" when you happen to be seeing them socializing with alcohol at a wedding.
I think they call this overfitting the model in machine learning
Your otherwise calm friend who starts barfights when he gets his drink on? Probably not as calm as he seems on the surface.
Batman Begins - "It's not who I am underneath, but what I do that defines me."
So I'd amend that to something like "what I do in stressful conditions defines me". Anyone can act cool as a cucumber before the shit hits the fan
(Batman's whole existence is stressful. He specifically gets a pass on this one)
New parents often suffer from all of these! If you are a shithead when drunk, are you also going to be a shithead to your wife and newborn child when they most need you to be level-headed and calm?
Similarly for any sort of dangerous job. If I'm going to be sailing offshore for weeks alone with someone, you can be damn sure I'm testing ahead of time how they handle stress.
There is a sentence in some Stephen King's novel (and King is a recovered alcoholic to boot) about the main hero. IIRC it sounds like this:
"There was a dangerous dog in his mind. Sober, he could keep that dog on a leash. Drunk, the leash disappeared."
Maybe you are observing the leash disappearing.
I got to the end (it was a small book, only maybe 110pp) wondering what in the heck this thing was, and flipped to look at the author at the back. And it was a missionary! Instantly my attitude flipped; I was in awe that a missionary could do such good anthropology, and the inconsistencies in framing made perfect sense.
This author has good psychological insights, but her theoretical framings are somewhat mis-specified, inconsistent, sometimes out-of-date by psychological standards, to my eye. But it's very good stuff.
artist : psychologist :: missionary : anthropologist
edit: Ok that wasn't too hard, it was in a box. It's
"Fields on the Hoof: Nexus of Tibetan Nomadic Pastoralism" by Robert B. Ekvall, 1968, 1983.
Thanks for making me go find that, the notebook for the class is interesting to look at again.
The author graduated in Cultural Anthropology some 30 years before writing the book.
Do you mind sharing how you built this skill? Any books/podcasts that you followed to learn?
I've know very many (techies) that are extremely introvert and yes, bored, in such an environment, yet when you would observe them at evening drinks at a tech conference, they would be engaged, open, interested, welcoming and kind.
I fear the author overextrapolates from a specific context to people across contexts.
It does not seem to me that the author claims otherwise.
Make a model of mind, behaviour and society, such that all of these could be deduced as consequences of some fundamental theorem.
It certainly sounds uber-impressive!
However, I have seen how error-prone it is, and also read and understood a little more about the mechanisms.
For one, I have had people tell me stuff they "read" in me. It was valuable as an insight as to what vibes I might be sending out, unbeknownst to me. But it tended to be laughably wrong about me.
Now you might think that this is just me being defensive..."you can't read me".
But people do get it wrong, and a girlfriend once confessed to me, somewhat exasperated: "I can't read you". To which I said: "You should try listening to me instead".
Communication ≫ Reading
I have also gotten quite a bit better at it myself, and it can be intoxicating. Because when it works it is almost magical.
But while it can be stunningly precise, it just isn't very accurate.
So it's a useful tool that can yield information, but don't get high on your own supply. Treat it as a very sensitive but also very noisy channel of information.
Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
> Communication ≫ Reading
Mostly true, except sometimes people have a habit of saying one thing and doing another. Ultimately, actions are all that count in a relationship. Maybe that's what she was responding to?
I was and am extremely congruent between my actions and my words. This is not easy.
She ignored my words, tried and failed to "read" me instead and then was baffled when my actions were congruent with my words and not her reads.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Communication is so automatic for us that we may not even realize or understand how we communicate. So many people don't even take the time to understand their own thoughts, and understanding our own communication is many times harder because you have to inspect your own thoughts and be constantly building a model for how your communication is affecting the minds of the people around you. You had a specific idea for how communication works, just because you're both speaking the same language (e.g. English), in many ways, you might not have been speaking the same language since the ideas one person intended to transmit in good faith still did not end up in the mind of their audience.
I have since learned better. These two forms of communication definitely exist, for example Paul Watzlawick refers to them in axiom 4 of his 5 axioms of communication:
Human communication involves both digital and analog modalities: This axiom refers back to the use of non-verbals and system strategy explained in the first axiom. It is mostly related to the digital content of communication within a relationship
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Watzlawick#Five_basic_axi...
However, these are not co-equal. As I wrote, analogue communication can be very precise, you can often get very fine nuances across. But it is also always open to interpretation and hence error prone.
Precise but not accurate.
Since it is always open to interpretation, it simply cannot be used for verification, but that is exactly what some people use it for, especially women. This is understandable, but leads to catastrophe, because it is based on tuning in emotionally, so it fails horribly when the receiver is emotionally involved.
It's a common theme that otherwise really receptive and aware women fall for people who everyone else can clearly see are horrible. How? Reliance on analogue communication/"reading". It ain't reliable.
"However, analogue and digital in terms of communication have nothing to do with this physical definition of the term. When we communicate, analogue means that what is said is open to interpretation, it includes facial expressions and gestures and means non-verbal communication (e.g., rolled eyes, grimaces). Digital, on the other hand, means that what is said refers only to the factual content (e.g., the statement "the experimental report must be prepared") and leaves no room for interpretation."
https://www.iapm.net/en/blog/axioms-of-communication/#idx5
One of the areas where I learned to use analogue "communication" (receiving-side) is interpreting poems: you first leave yourself open, read the poem and let it induce feelings in you. That's the analogue part. Then you interpret those feelings the poem induced, and try to find out how the text did that.
If you just interpret poems "digitally", it probably won't work at all. If you just interpret it using your analogue receptors, your interpretation will be flat.
Combine both: that's the ticket!
But everyday communication is not poetry, and in particularly poetry is not a very good medium for verifying communication.
Anyway, I can highly recommend Watzlawick's writings.
> Precise but not accurate. Since it is always open to interpretation, it simply cannot be used for verification
Agreed - the main way I try to manage this is to have a very coarse interpretation of statements - almost like a probability distribution of semantic meaning[1]. For example, if someone says "I like spaghetti", most of the probability distribution is located somewhere between "I tolerate spaghetti, but I won't say it that way in case you're about to serve me spaghetti" to "My favorite food is spaghetti, but only if it's served in the general style of my hometown".
I might be misinterpreting what you're saying right now, but we can continue to have this conversation, and I hope you're enjoying it even as I am enjoying it!
I generally agree with the idea that it cannot be used for verification, depending on what you precisely mean (my probably distribution of _your meaning_ has significant overlap with what I would agree with, but not entirely, though to be pedantic, it never entirely overlaps since there's always a chance of misinterpretation). I think that's why it's important to establish relationships and baselines of communications. Repeatedly successfully interpreting each other's words can provide a strong baseline for future communicative success. It's important not to project one relationship onto another, which we are _very_ prone to do. E.g. we should not project how we communicate with one sex to another sex, or necessarily even one person to another person!
[1] Maybe this is the next representation of semantic meaning that LLMs will use somewhere in its internals? Instead of a single embedding, it describes some probability distribution around an embedding with the greatest probability?
And if it is someone who has been around you a lot, it means that the usual attunement through experience that adapts this multichannel communication to the quirks of particular individuals is still insufficient to resolve the incongruence.
This can be, among other things, connected to neurodivergence and lack of experience dealing with the particular form of neurodivergence beyond one individual.
That was exactly what it meant.
Nevertheless, I can still read and appreciate it from _that_ perspective because it's always interesting to me to hear how others see the world.
Then I vaped weed for the first time at 34, and I got this skill.
It makes me uncomfortable to observe how people compute their behaviours so erratically, specially when they take my own behaviours as inputs for computing theirs. I wish people would act according to a standarized protocol (etiquette).
There's "Manwatching" (1979) by Desmond Morris, a more serious study of this.[2] Good pictures and drawings.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_reading
[2] https://archive.org/details/manwatchingfield0000morr/page/n5...
A) The overconfident that self-describe as intuitive at reading people
B) people skilled at reading people
You have seen a lot of A and you are arguing that means that B doesn't exist.
I think that both exist.
For the B's it is a bit of a superpower, and I suspect they don't generally show off their superpower unless you have a very close relationship with them.
I am skilled enough to recognize the A's, but the B's are harder to recognize. To recognize the A's you have to be better at reading others than the A's are. To recognize the B's you need to be as skilled as them or better (which I believe is difficult, and uncommon).
When on the receiving end of A's or B's judgements you need to be able to read yourself better than they can plus you need to have zero self-denial: to judge if their reading is correct. Many people are just not that good at self-awareness (we often act according to childish drives).
But never once have I thought those stories were anything but fiction.
Many of the HN readers are developers. We want everything to be deterministic. If A, then B. 1+1=2. And so on. Hence the angst in some comments. The author may not be 100% correct everywhere. The examples seemed to get a little more judgmental towards the end of the list. But these are great soft skills to have, people! Next time you have a crazy user or boss, observe their body language. It might help.
polishdude20•9mo ago
the_af•9mo ago
Still, the article is insightful and a fun read.
rixed•9mo ago