I’m curious to explore this concept from the other side too. Sometimes you are (seen as) a hostile[1] telepath. How does this affect one’s place in a social dynamic? What are one’s options/strategies around that?
My sense is that on some level we are aware of this, and broadly speaking sometimes hamstring or don’t develop our own telepathic abilities in order to manage some of these dynamics. E.g. I try not to speculate too much about other people’s inner lives. I feel weird about working on the social skill of telling what other people are thinking/feeling based on their body language and facial expressions.
Being telepathic feels like a privacy violation, on some level like a defection, like participating in a race-to-the-bottom that raids the privacy commons.
That’s also its own hostile telepath problem. If I had that skill I’d be afraid of people finding out, so I’d be incentivized to exclude it from my conscious self, etc.. I have an impression that a lot of socially successful people are basically this: telepaths who are good at managing/navigating other people’s impressions of their telepathy. Perhaps by consciously hiding it, perhaps hiding-from-themselves, perhaps revealing only in certain circumstances, all of which could be operating on a conscious or a subconscious level.
But putting aside the angle of deception and self-deception around “hostile” and “telepath”, I guess one has four options:
I think pushing directly for honesty and self-honesty in one’s social circles often comes across as, and in many cases is (A). But I do think a culture that values honesty and self-honestly and looking at truths even when they hurt is a culture that does a certain amount of (A).
(B) feels like leaving knowledge on the table. However, I think there’s truth to the “privacy commons” framing. E.g. I think when people turn away from others self-deception, as in this comment, they’re doing (B) in order not to do (A). In some contexts that’s adaptive.
(C) is a matter of trust. It’s a healthy characteristic of high-trust social environments that people are a lot more willing to read each others’ minds. I think “when you find yourself doing (B), consider (C)” might be really productive in a lot of contexts. I guess the main obstacle is that it’s often hard compared to (A) or (B), perhaps prohibitively hard.
(D) is there for completeness, it seems worse than either (B) or (C) under most circumstances.
I’m curious to explore this concept from the other side too. Sometimes you are (seen as) a hostile[1] telepath. How does this affect one’s place in a social dynamic? What are one’s options/strategies around that?
My sense is that on some level we are aware of this, and broadly speaking sometimes hamstring or don’t develop our own telepathic abilities in order to manage some of these dynamics. E.g. I try not to speculate too much about other people’s inner lives. I feel weird about working on the social skill of telling what other people are thinking/feeling based on their body language and facial expressions.
Being telepathic feels like a privacy violation, on some level like a defection, like participating in a race-to-the-bottom that raids the privacy commons.
That’s also its own hostile telepath problem. If I had that skill I’d be afraid of people finding out, so I’d be incentivized to exclude it from my conscious self, etc.. I have an impression that a lot of socially successful people are basically this: telepaths who are good at managing/navigating other people’s impressions of their telepathy. Perhaps by consciously hiding it, perhaps hiding-from-themselves, perhaps revealing only in certain circumstances, all of which could be operating on a conscious or a subconscious level.
But putting aside the angle of deception and self-deception around “hostile” and “telepath”, I guess one has four options:
(A) Just be a hostile telepath.
(B) Don’t be a telepath.
(C) Don’t be hostile[1].
(D) Be neither hostile nor a telepath.
I think pushing directly for honesty and self-honesty in one’s social circles often comes across as, and in many cases is (A). But I do think a culture that values honesty and self-honestly and looking at truths even when they hurt is a culture that does a certain amount of (A).
(B) feels like leaving knowledge on the table. However, I think there’s truth to the “privacy commons” framing. E.g. I think when people turn away from others self-deception, as in this comment, they’re doing (B) in order not to do (A). In some contexts that’s adaptive.
(C) is a matter of trust. It’s a healthy characteristic of high-trust social environments that people are a lot more willing to read each others’ minds. I think “when you find yourself doing (B), consider (C)” might be really productive in a lot of contexts. I guess the main obstacle is that it’s often hard compared to (A) or (B), perhaps prohibitively hard.
(D) is there for completeness, it seems worse than either (B) or (C) under most circumstances.
alt. adversarial, misaligned.