I’ll claim that I’m decently skilled at modeling people and understanding them. It wasn’t always like this. I’m different enough from the typical person my model of myself is not a very useful predictor of what other people are like for many socially relevant things (it’s of course plenty useful if the reference class is not other human culturally like me but, say, animals). I had to put in a lot of work over decades to get to a point where other people have useful gears rather than being better modeled as black boxes to me.
The nice benefit of this is that I think I better appreciate how hard it is to understand others. Woe is the neurotypical person who is similar enough to others that they never notice they’re making good predictions about most other people because their bad model accidentally works only because they are near the center of the distribution. They, perhaps rightly from their subjective experience, draw the conclusion that there are just some weird people out there they don’t understand, rather than that their understanding of everyone is flawed even if it keeps making reasonable predictions in the situations they bother to check (sort of like Newtonian physics being fine so long as you don’t go too fast or things aren’t too big or too small).
I’ll claim that I’m decently skilled at modeling people and understanding them. It wasn’t always like this. I’m different enough from the typical person my model of myself is not a very useful predictor of what other people are like for many socially relevant things (it’s of course plenty useful if the reference class is not other human culturally like me but, say, animals). I had to put in a lot of work over decades to get to a point where other people have useful gears rather than being better modeled as black boxes to me.
The nice benefit of this is that I think I better appreciate how hard it is to understand others. Woe is the neurotypical person who is similar enough to others that they never notice they’re making good predictions about most other people because their bad model accidentally works only because they are near the center of the distribution. They, perhaps rightly from their subjective experience, draw the conclusion that there are just some weird people out there they don’t understand, rather than that their understanding of everyone is flawed even if it keeps making reasonable predictions in the situations they bother to check (sort of like Newtonian physics being fine so long as you don’t go too fast or things aren’t too big or too small).