It would still, like the broken clock, be correct sometimes. Our ability to understand others comes from, and is limited by, the fact that our feelings and behaviors are a mix from a shared palette.
It reminds me of how psychedelics can sometimes put you in a hyper observant, heightened state of awareness. Maybe some here have experienced this, it can be very mind blowing. People are open books and communicate much much more then we think we are. Motions, gestures, tiny subtle reactions, the way someone walks, it can give you a direct glance into someones soul.
Some people are probably naturally very skilled at being observant, the author being a painter only make sense.
This seems like a set of well balanced, if not comprehensive, principles behind how people interact. Even if it's not complete, I think it can still be helpful. There's a lot here that resonates with me, but only in hindsight. I struggle with understanding people emotionally in the moment a lot of the time it'd benefit me if I could internalize this list.
As they say, all models are wrong, some are useful.
It helped me to do only try to understand myself in the moment or conversation than the other. It is not easy and most of us do not know ourselves.
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.
That is exploitable. I tried it and it works. When I was 18 I got a job in a telemarketing boiler room. Two dozen people sitting at long tables with phones and scripts, asking for donations for various causes. Yes I should probably burn in hell for it, but I was a dumb kid.
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.
Do you think you might've been able to find a sincere, non-manipulative way of doing it?
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.
Probably not. You are taking their money. They become poorer because of your behavior. That doesn't fit with love, no matter how you try to contort yourself.
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.
The classic salesman tactic is that the salesman has to love the product. The best conmen have to con themselves first. They are basically method actors.
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)
To sell last-minute custom poems to HN? Impressive cynicism. Submarine poetry competition might be fun, but the quote is not even from the article. I saw it by randomly clicking on substack, then couldn't even find it again to link here, due to substack's inscrutable layout.
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.
Most poets who make any money sell their work by publishing it as song lyrics, I think. I don’t think we have many rock star poets left, and I’d be surprised if many at all made a living at it.
I’ve most often bought poems from people sitting on the sidewalk writing them out, FWIW :)
The author is projecting a lot into the hearts and minds of strangers, based on limited or indeed no interaction with them. These are not scientific observations in any sense. What does the author do to confirm or refute her psychological theories about others? She's very good at telling stories, but these stories feel like fiction, not hard fact.
Sure, the words she uses to represent her observations is a reflection of her self; in that she describes it in a more creatively descriptive way than, say, a scientist in a laboratory. It's observation, not research; but it's also not judgment which is where I find projection lives.
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 Arthur C Clark "beat the scientists" when he wrote about geosynchronous radio communication satellites in 1945? This was 12 years before humanity had launched _anything_ into orbit, and 20 years before we launched a communications satellite to geosync orbit.
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.
It doesn’t really have anything to do with HN. It’s anyone who cares about the truth.
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.
From the author, it's a newsletter on what she's thinking. I didn't see any advertising of shoddy medicine or claims of being scientific. Do we call out authors for writing poetry on the human experience? Why should we apply intellectual rigor on some observations made by an artist?
"Two households, both alike in dignity," he says, with the confidence of a man who’s never run a census.
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.
"call out" as a metaphor doesn't apply to the discussing of a online newsletter on a separate site; neither the author nor other readers are likely to be aware of the discussion. It does seem very apt, if poetry were posted here that makes claims about the human experience, for commenters to dispute those claims.
Please leave this gender war stuff to lesser mediums like X and Tiktok.
HN is following the standard principle that was true on the internet before pictographic avatars of real people became popular; that we are all who we choose to be online. “Nobody knows you are a dog” etc.
There are a few people who have tried to bring identity politics to HN over the years but it is unscientific to claim this bias without evidence regardless of anything else.
Interesting that you are critiquing a woman for making observations without evidence, then you yourself make an observation without evidence. It couldn't be a double standard, could it?
> it is unscientific to claim this bias without evidence
We have ample evidence that almost everyone is sexist. Assuming that this doesn't apply to people on Hacker News is rather odd.
At the time of writing, three of the four existing replies showed no indication of understanding your point xweb; the fourth one having been made unavailable via flagging (but one can guess from context that it too didn't understand).
I used to have similar concerns as you — how can anyone truly know what other people are like? Unless we’re doing research with the scientific method, we can only speculate unscientifically, right? Without science, what we say is just our belief, not established fact.
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.
I agree that repeated observation increases the confidence in a hypothesis.
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 :-)
Yeah a lot of those stood out like thorns to me cause I just don’t agree with her conclusions. Immediately set off some alarm bells i.e. that’s just, like, your opinion, man…
I don’t think the author had a chance to interview each person they observed to see if their worried were right. That does not mean that they could not validate their observations.
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)
Anyone who has had to learn social skills/cues as an adult, with analytical faculties in place of a more intuitive understanding, can attest to these seemingly universal patterns. People are ultimately more predictable than they believe themselves to be, and there are clear signs of a rich (evolutionary?) history of habit formation over many generations that in a real sense define "the human condition". One should consider themselves privileged not to have been forced to spend their cognitive efforts on understanding these patterns rather than merely be socialized into them.
Feedback is better, but lack of confirmation didn't stop the Greeks from dreaming up a model of the atom...
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
I have a friend who is a bit like the author here. He picks up on a lot of little things and seems to intuitively understand what those things mean.
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.
I believe that this comes from the exact opposite of what the author does. People like this can discard the irrelevant details, and find what can be put together to create a clear picture.
In my experience, it comes down to matching patterns.
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.
On key difference here is that those mathematician then go through the process of actually proving the theorem. Just having “an intuitive understanding” is never enough, no matter how many times you have been right before.
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.
Perhaps she talks to some people and learns something about their (self reported) life? I would imagine this is how these types of intuitions are formed?
>Mathematicians, for example, intuitively understand math.
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.
> Psychologists and experienced authors intuitively understand people
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.
I'm sorry to intrude, but this interests me very much. What was the thing that you wanted figured out about you that gave surch hard time for psychotherapists?
> 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?
I interpreted the “uninterested in giving … attention” part of that point a bit differently. To me, somebody avoiding socialising is not giving off a superiority complex. I suspect what the author meant is being inattentive while socialising (i.e., not actually listening to you, focusing the conversation on themselves, etc.)
I took a course on Freud in college, and what struck me at the time was that the framework of psychoanalysis seemed basically cruel, in that the analyst was free to say that either acceptance or rejection of their claims was evidence for them, and that it would be maddening to deal with that for any extended period of time.
Where did I say that the word "observation" was inappropriate? I'm certainly not denying that the author observed a bunch of people at weddings. My criticism is that these observations are insufficient to read accurately "into the hearts and minds of strangers".
Then what did your second sentence ["These are not scientific observations in any sense. What does the author do to confirm or refute her psychological theories about others?"] intend?
> 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.
The only way to validate such observations is to check if they have predictive power. I'm sure the author checked that to her satisfaction. You are free to do the same.
Somehow I knew that a comment along these lines was coming. HN never disappoints when it comes time to be nauseatingly analytic. No amount of whimsy or attempt at writing anything approaching literature or something long-form go unanswered and uncriticized.
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.
Why does it have to be scientific? Lots of people write their thoughts on the world and the people in it. Why would a blog called “skin contact” need hard facts?
It doesn't. But that is the GPs own projection when encountering this OPs work. It's the modern abuse of the scientific to insulate yourself from all things you cannot do or do not understand, or don't wish to face.
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!
My use of "scientific" was partly a play on words, because it's a natural accompaniment to "observation". But note that I said "in any sense". We don't have to don lab coats and acquire lofty job titles to take a kind of scientific approach to our own beliefs. And formulating a personal "theory of mind" is indeed necessary to navigate the social world. The crucial part is this: "What does the author do to confirm or refute her psychological theories about others?"
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.
Sure, she's also just peering into a single night/moment of their life. She's watching group dynamics of people who are attending a wedding. As I read through all the bullets, I thought about how many of the weddings I have attended have gone and where she would have pegged me on those nights and I could probably fit half the list depending on which event she was present on.
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.
Then again she is a painter whose job depends on literally observing the details and atmosphere and capturing not only the visual field but also the essence. So if not her, then who is better suited to make such observations.
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.
> Then again she is a painter whose job depends on literally observing the details and atmosphere and capturing not only the visual field but also the essence. So if not her, then who is better suited to make such observations.
No, her job depends on making the married couple happy, which is not at all the same as 100% accurate representation.
> These are not scientific observations in any sense.
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.
It’s fine to be non-rigorous as long as you’re not a jerk and treat your own conclusions on relatively little data as preliminary.
Sometimes it’s good to have some information with relatively large error bars and be willing to update quickly rather than ignore information because the error bars are large.
From the article it doesn’t become apparent that the author wouldn’t update her views quickly as new information comes in (eg by talking to someone).
So yes the observations in the post are not scientific, but there’s nothing preventing them from being the starting point of rational reasoning and behaviour.
It seems entirely mean spirited here to expect some rigid scientific insight from a person recounting their observations about the world. Where does science begin if not with a story that wants verifying?
"Fiction" doesn't seem to be the right word for open speculation positioned as open speculation, which is how I immediately evaluation observation.
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.
Science isn't the only form of empiricism. In this case, the writer is reporting what she has learned through a long process of observation, a useful form of experience. No doubt in the process she has formed ideas, watched to see if they bear out, changed her mind, examined events in context and their outcomes, come up with generalizations based on observations over time, and so on. You know, how most people learn most things.
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.
I would describe myself as the opposite of OP (very bad at reading people) so it was quite a shock the first time I met someone like this. Not only for the revelation that these type of people exist, but the experience of another person reading my "internal architecture" - and subsequently judging it - it opened a new avenue of self reflection for me. And while I think there's still a lot of the subjectivity in the author's formulation, I do have a relatively new appreciation for "people watching" insights like this now.
It’s actually not that surprising that some people are incredibly good at reading others. Your body is constantly broadcasting information through tiny facial expressions, tone of voice, posture, and even micro-movements. Every second, you’re sending out lots of signals, and some people are just especially tuned in to pick them up.
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.
Indeed. And I'm a bit surprised at how negative some of these comments are. These are just innocent observations, coloured by her experiences and biases. At no point is she claiming that these are absolute truths. We all make such snap observations all the time, but we mostly don't write them down or turn them into paintings.
The surprising thing isn't that the signals exist or are picked up, but that the SnR is good enough to be able to support the level of confidence expressed in TFA.
I don't think it's surprising at all, we've evolved to pick up social queues and read each other's body language/facial expressions. It's deeply ingrained in our social wiring, we do it so well it's subconscious.
In hindsight yeah it's obvious. But at the time I had a mentality of "well you can't know for sure, you can't assume this signal means that, it's not scientific, it's not objective, etc." There's also a part of it that feels kind of judgemental and impolite "intruding" in that way, especially if you make the wrong read.
No not exactly, it was more "I'm not arrogant enough to assume I know someone better than they know themselves, I'm not going to dogmatically explain a person to themselves as if I have all the information and can magically intuit and deduce everything about them." This is still generally true, not just for myself, but for every rare true student of human nature there are a dozen fools trying to make a read and failing miserably.
I reached the same conclusion but in a roundabout way. I think the ultimate goal is to know about one's own self at the most deepest of levels. One way obviously is engaging with the self at a deeper level which is not always possible. Unfortunately, it is extremely hard to master.
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.
This stuff always reminds me of "The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter" from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes TV series (This is Season 2, Episode 2, originally aired in 1985). In this episode Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson are at 221B Baker Street, and Holmes gives a detailed demonstration of his observational and deductive skills by people-watching out the window.
> 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..
The author uses several metaphorical dichotomies, and I think this one is the most tenuous and unintuitive. I understand the two groups of people, but tying it to where they "generally exist" doesn't make sense to me. The mind/body dichotomy can imply so many different things that this would need a lot more elaboration to clarify. Or maybe I'm not enough of a natural people watcher.
I think this is really about the actively made decision to spend longer with each sensation than you 'normally' would - relative to your own individual baseline. Basically whether this is a tool in the person's metacognitive toolkit that they typically use or not. Like 'the feeling of the touch of a thought' on the mind itself, as opposed to a linear pre-simulation of a performance to play out loud. Or the difference between making what you say out loud a cheap, low entropy, lossy encoding of all that you're thinking, versus gathering all the aspects quietly and needing to find a way linearize all that incidental complexity.
I do think some people are very good at reading others. And I also think that as we generally don't see ourselves we may not realise how we come across. There is a huge amount of information we send out by how we hold ourselves/talk etc.
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).
We all read people to an extent. Behavioural signs will show to a degree their emotional state, their status, their attention and interest in you/the conversation.
Combine it with how they use language and you get a good idea of how they think and how self aware they are. You can see if people monologue at you or if they are interested in turn taking. You can get a feel for how quickly people can grasp information, how relaxed/restless they are, how internal they are, how nice they are, how insecure they are, how aggressive they are etc.
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.
That is true. But also covered in my last point about people wearing masks to an extent. If you have a limited amount of time with someone you can be fooled but a mask "can" slip if you really get to know someone. But yeah it's not fool proof and people can definitely be fooled. But having an understanding of the power dynamic between yourself and the other person can help.
But yeah some people can hide negative emotions (e.g. sadness) very well.
I remember being amused to learn that psychology folks call a real smile a “Duchenne” smile, and that the tell, to them, is that a Duchenne smile forms creases around the corners of the eyes.
To hear Ekman, father of the Facial Action Coding System, tell it:
From what I've seen, a few people are intuitively correct at reading others.
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.
There’s the evergreen genre of business-oriented instruments that are mainly cheery self-assessments (“I notice when people are feeling sad: agree, or strongly agree?”)—but I’m not sure how valid those get.
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:
This feels like "Linda Goodman of Sun Signs" style of storytelling.
Arguments like what the author makes can never be confirmed or proven wrong. I feel like this is important work because it has a bit of mass delusional element to it (see the number of likes), very similar to Linda Goodman works, and we can see from the outside what makes these kind of arguments appeal to so many people!?
Funnily enough, this response gives some insight into your personal affect. What kinds of mental states are capable of producing just such a reaction?
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.
I think we got very different reads here. I understand the comment on the author to be judgemental to be very gentle. Dillydog is a person who affords everyone a rich and deep hidden inner life, so much so, that assuming people are so shallow to be read by a glance makes them angry on their behalf. I think they are in a good place already, emphasizing deeply with others.
Indeed! But haven't we now hypothesized dillydog here to be "a person who affords everyone a rich and deep inner life"? Or more provocatively, haven't we made a character judgement?
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.
Well, that character judgement (if you want to call it that) was based on dillydog's shared thoughts about a long article that itself reflects a very specific way of viewing people. To compare that conclusion to someone who purports to confidently extrapolate someone's self-worth, philosophy regarding how they view themselves and others, the 'narrowness' of their understanding or love for the world (what?), and more just by watching them stand around at a wedding for an afternoon seems strange. It's a much more solid base to draw that conclusion from, in my opinion. The character judgement is that they are "a person who affords everyone a rich and deep inner life," and the judgement comes from the fact that applying their perspective is impossible unless they afford everyone a rich and deep inner life. It's emergent from their stated philosophy in a way that the examples in the article are not.
> 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."
> 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?
No, it gives arrogant people like you the impression of an insight. There's not enough information for real insight, but you'll invent an insight in your head and you'll stick with it. You're judgmental.
That's quite a judgment about the author, based on a single blog post.
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.
I'm sure they do exist, but I need to see harder evidence of these skills.
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?
I have to agree. There is a clear pattern indicating what she thinks is "the best way to live". Be open and be happy. Be otherwise at your own demise. It also sounds a lot like she is trying to convince herself she is striving for the right way of living. First it seemed she has a point, later in the post I felt she lacks intellectual humility, a "healthy" level (oh the irony) of doubt.
Just because they parse people this way, doesn't mean they're too attached to the results of that parsing (which is what I'd describe as being judgemental).
IMO "judgement" of a person carries a sense of finality and should be separated from one's "expectation" of a person.
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.
This is phrenology nonsense and it’s shocking to see people almost nodding along in the comments. This is the same kind of nonsense people spout when they say they’re great interviewers and “just know”, when actual studies show they very much do not.
I disagree. The difference here is that she is not advocating for acting on her assumptions, like an interviewer does. Maturity is not letting your assumptions cloud your judgement.
I understand your concern I think, but still believe you are a bit harsh. In this case the author is not pretending to be always right, and seems to refrain from hard cut judgment based on those perceptions.
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.
Agreed. She's not actually stating anything. That is, it's so vague that you cannot pinpoint it, it could be interpreted in any way. You cannot make a prediction out of her "observations".
In every interaction with anyone they're reading you. How deeply varies by occasion and whom you're interacting with.
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.
Indeed, and there are interactions that I avoid, such as dealing with sales people. Why would I even want something that's sold to me via the best angle?
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.
> On a first date, you can bet both people involves are trying to read each other every minute of the date
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!
It's having a bit of pushback for presumption here, but considering this is "just" a list article, it seemed unusually thoughtful in its exposition of the author's perceptions. Genuinely interesting to read.
Also noticed this. Maybe we are starting to see well written articles by people in the format of badly written AI Slop for engagement purposes. "Well most articles read by people look like this now, so why dont I?"
From the movie, The Life of Pi: Animals don't think like we do! People who forget that get themselves killed. When you look into an animal's eyes, you are seeing your own emotions reflected back at you, and nothing else.
She wrote, “seeing someone is like noticing their internal structure” — that line made me pause for a while.
As a kid, I used to think everyone could pick up on those tiny things in people — like the hesitation behind a sentence, or the way someone's eyes seem like they’re trying to escape.
Turns out, not everyone “sees” like that.
Watching people is more like passive resonance. Sometimes you’re just passing by, but your body has already picked up the entire vibe of that person. No words, just a quiet read.
This is very good. I've also noticed I do the polite engagement sometimes and how its roboticsness is obvious to any person with not low EQ. Some people seem to just be naturally happy in almost any settings and its a very valuable trait imo.
I suppose what is the main friction in this piece is the constant attribution of things to body or mind, as if they are independent, or as if cannot be both at once. A second friction is that I perceive the author has definitely learned to observe well, and has successfully learned to generalize based on past observations. But the author has difficulty moving from learned to explainable.
I once met a gate agent in the Maui airport. She looked at me and my pregnant wife and congratulated us on our upcoming baby boy. I asked her how she knew. She said it was the way we carried ourselves and looked at each other. Not sure what specifically she saw, but she told us if another couple she observed who were having a girl. She said the man looked like the type who didn't treat women that well, but who was clearly trying to be on his best behavior.
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.
Not only does she have a privileged position, but good artists are skilled at making their art convey emotions and feelings.
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!
It likely includes projecting emotions that may not actually exist in order to tell a great story. It doesn't make the read any less interesting though.
> congratulated us on our upcoming baby boy. I asked her how she knew. She said it was the way we carried ourselves and looked at each other.
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.
Fair point - I guess it would be interesting to see how accurate many “people watchers” are, empirically.
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 :)
At least here in Argentina, after 6+2 weeks the mother gets an echography and may know if the baby is a boy or a girl. Another afer 10+2 weeks, where it's more clear. So I expect that the prediction is checked most of the times instantly.
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.
She can't make a prediction if the parents don't know.
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.
Often when we make guesses about other people, we reveal more about ourselves than the other person.
"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.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 335 ms ] threadStill, the article is insightful and a fun read.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Please leave this gender war stuff to lesser mediums like X and Tiktok.
HN is following the standard principle that was true on the internet before pictographic avatars of real people became popular; that we are all who we choose to be online. “Nobody knows you are a dog” etc.
There are a few people who have tried to bring identity politics to HN over the years but it is unscientific to claim this bias without evidence regardless of anything else.
Interesting that you are critiquing a woman for making observations without evidence, then you yourself make an observation without evidence. It couldn't be a double standard, could it?
> it is unscientific to claim this bias without evidence
We have ample evidence that almost everyone is sexist. Assuming that this doesn't apply to people on Hacker News is rather odd.
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:
https://www.paulekman.com/blog/fake-smile-or-genuine-smile/
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!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8t4pmlHRokg
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.