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I often do not understand how people could not see something that seems obvious to me.

It may help to contemplate things other people seem to understand that you don't, and what your mental state was before you understood things which are clear to you now.

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11 [SEQ RERUN] Illusion of Transparency: Why No One Understands You

by MinibearRex

2nd Oct 2011

1 min read

11

Today's post, Illusion of Transparency: Why No One Understands You was originally published on 20 October 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Everyone knows what their own words mean, but experiments have confirmed that we systematically overestimate how much sense we are making to others.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).

This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Pascal's Mugging: Tiny Probabilities of Vast Utilities, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.

Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.

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[SEQ RERUN] Illusion of Transparency: Why No One Understands You

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[-]MinibearRex13y70

Another Meta Note: we're coming up on another block of un-summarized sequence posts. This block runs from "Expecting Short Inferential Distances" to "Fake Justification". There are eleven posts in total. Who wants 'em?

[-]EphemeralNight13y60

This was actually one of the major things I learned in the course of learning how to write narrative prose. I had to train myself to notice the ambiguity in my own writing, notice when there was less on the page than I thought there was. Before that, thinking something would be clear to a reader because it was clear in my own mind was a mistake I made with appalling regularity.

Recognizing the mistake I was making in writing narrative actually made me a lot more careful about not underestimating the necessary level of specificity to convey what I want conveyed, when communicating in general.

[-][anonymous]13y60

That's actually one of my biggest problems. I think my ability to model other people is way below average.

[-]MinibearRex13y10

Well, what sort of mistakes has your model made? Is it limited to predicting how well you'll be understood, or are their other, specific types of predictions that your mental model consistently gives the wrong answer on?

[-][anonymous]13y30

I often do not understand how people could not see something that seems obvious to me. And I have been told by several people that I am oblivious to how my demeanor is perceived by others and I probably have offended some people without intending or even realizing it.

Also I have no idea why this comment of mine is at -2 karma while this one is at +6. To me they look the same.

And recently I thought that maybe my lack of concern for other people could be because some subconscious part of my brain fails to model them as humans at all. It helps a lot to keep these things in mind, but I have not yet found a pattern of failures that I could easily correct.

[-]NancyLebovitz13y70

I often do not understand how people could not see something that seems obvious to me.

It may help to contemplate things other people seem to understand that you don't, and what your mental state was before you understood things which are clear to you now.

[-]JoshuaZ13y30

This sounds like you may be on the autism spectrum, possibly some form of Asperger's.

As to your comments one at +6 and one at -2, the +6 comment is a succinct reply that makes clear what might otherwise be difficult. The -2 comment is an answer but one that has no hope as phrased of enlightening the person you are talking to, which is why it then resulted in a subthread explaining what you had done. Your phrasing also wasn't helpful since the problem in question had multiple possible approaches and as you phrased it the other approach was wrong and yours was the only way.

[-][anonymous]13y10

This sounds like you may be on the autism spectrum, possibly some form of Asperger's.

I don't seem to show other signs of Asperger's which is why I ruled that one out.

the +6 comment is a succinct reply that makes clear what might otherwise be difficult

That's exactly my point. I have no idea why that point might be difficult. It was really obvious to me, so I made something that I took for a sarcastic comment.

[-]jhuffman13y-10

I'm not sure that speculations about mental disorders are really called for based on these posts.

[-]wedrifid13y20

If neither of the words "Asperger's" or "austistic" were used in at least one comment in response to this then something would be wrong:

I often do not understand how people could not see something that seems obvious to me. And I have been told by several people that I am oblivious to how my demeanor is perceived by others and I probably have offended some people without intending or even realizing it.

[-]JoshuaZ13y00

There's a large fraction of LW which is on the autism spectrum. Moreover, information about potential mental disorders is relevant if someone then goes to get diagnosed/tested. Question: Would you have the same concern if this were speculation purely about a physical illness? If so, what is the difference other than the social stigma issues?

[-]jhuffman13y00

You have very little evidence here - a couple posts, and a notion that a "large fraction of LW is on the autism spectrum". I've seen some people mention this but I'm not aware of evidence of a "large fraction". A large fraction would be like 5%, right? That would be about 10 times as many people as in the general population. Do you have evidence of even that much?

[-]JoshuaZ13y00

I don't know the actual percentages. There was a poll on this very question a while ago. See here but the sampling issues make it very hard to judge how accurate it is.

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