I’ve just explained a problem to a friend / family member and they offer advice that feels plain wrong.
Normally this leaves me either:
trying to somehow make the advice fit (it doesn’t)
or deciding maybe this person is not as great as I thought they were (They’re pretty great so I’m not crazy keen to do this either)
Here’s hopefully, pointing at a third alternative.
What might be going on:
When I hear another persons problem. What this brain tends to do is run a simulation of my friend in that situation. Yet, the complexity of my human friend is much greater than my simulation of them. There’s bound to be a bit of compression.
I’ve heard, how humans store faces is that we have a default face template. And then to minimise storage cost a new friend’s face is stored as lots of “deviations” from that default [1].
I’d be pretty surprised if something similar isn’t going on with my models of other people. When I imagine a friend, they’re basically me but with a few tweaks. Oh yeah, Sally doesn’t like noise or John’s real tidy.
Here instead are some intuitions behind other people being super weird:
People may take anywhere between five minutes and forty minutes to shower. They may wash their hair daily, once a week, or not at all. They may wash their bodies thoroughly, only clean the parts that look dirty, only clean certain parts (such as the armpits or genitals), or just stand under the water. They may use a loofah, a sponge, or nothing. They may bring in a comb to comb out the conditioner. They may sing. They may zone out. They may jerk off. They may bathe instead, and bathing may involve reading a book or bath bombs or lighting candles and drinking a nice bottle of wine or bubble bath or none of those things at all. The one thing that is consistent is that everyone thinks the way they shower is the way normal people shower.
what common universals are you missing?
Synesthetics often don’t realise everyone else isn’t seeing the colours too. People don’t realise they’re colour blind until they see (or don’t see) one of those number patters.
When you move in with friends, you find all of these funny rules. Oh you put the salad dressing in the fridge, “you recycle that?” etc.
Turns out that most people’s typing strategies vary wildly [2]
If you have a sample size n = 1, comparisons are tricky. It doesn’t seem too absurd that we’ve learned to process / navigate the world through many custom concepts, rules, experiences & strategies.[3][4]
Basically other people are aliens sometimes.
Coming back to the problem above, this appreciation of other folks strangeness allows me to not discredit this other person who is trying to help me :) or discard their advice, losing useful info in the process.
“Take the person with the comment”.
As to how to do that. more research needed, suggestions welcome.
[3] I’m told Circling gives you insight into how other peoples internal experience is weirdly emotionally different from yours. “This other person has a whole world behind their eyes, wonder what it’s like to live in their ontology”
other people are occasionally rather weird
So here’s a dynamic I find myself in sometimes:
I’ve just explained a problem to a friend / family member and they offer advice that feels plain wrong.
Normally this leaves me either:
trying to somehow make the advice fit (it doesn’t)
or deciding maybe this person is not as great as I thought they were (They’re pretty great so I’m not crazy keen to do this either)
Here’s hopefully, pointing at a third alternative.
What might be going on: When I hear another persons problem. What this brain tends to do is run a simulation of my friend in that situation. Yet, the complexity of my human friend is much greater than my simulation of them. There’s bound to be a bit of compression.
I’ve heard, how humans store faces is that we have a default face template. And then to minimise storage cost a new friend’s face is stored as lots of “deviations” from that default [1].
I’d be pretty surprised if something similar isn’t going on with my models of other people. When I imagine a friend, they’re basically me but with a few tweaks. Oh yeah, Sally doesn’t like noise or John’s real tidy.
Here instead are some intuitions behind other people being super weird:
Many folks showering habits are super strange. From The Typical Sex Life Fallacy, Thing of Things:
what common universals are you missing? Synesthetics often don’t realise everyone else isn’t seeing the colours too. People don’t realise they’re colour blind until they see (or don’t see) one of those number patters.
When you move in with friends, you find all of these funny rules. Oh you put the salad dressing in the fridge, “you recycle that?” etc.
Turns out that most people’s typing strategies vary wildly [2]
If you have a sample size n = 1, comparisons are tricky. It doesn’t seem too absurd that we’ve learned to process / navigate the world through many custom concepts, rules, experiences & strategies.[3][4]
Basically other people are aliens sometimes.
Coming back to the problem above, this appreciation of other folks strangeness allows me to not discredit this other person who is trying to help me :) or discard their advice, losing useful info in the process.
“Take the person with the comment”. As to how to do that. more research needed, suggestions welcome.
If you’re trying to assist another alien, reporting the evidence and not the theory may prove useful.
...
[1] This is also how some encodings work.
[2] typing article here.
[3] I’m told Circling gives you insight into how other peoples internal experience is weirdly emotionally different from yours. “This other person has a whole world behind their eyes, wonder what it’s like to live in their ontology”
[4] See brienne’s explanations of living within autism. https://autistech.tumblr.com/post/172279960459/original-seeing/