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hyporational comments on Stupid Questions December 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
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How do I improve my ability to simulate/guess other people's internal states and future behaviors? I can, just barely, read emotions, but I make the average human look like a telepath.
It's trial and error mostly, paying attention to other people doing well or making mistakes, getting honest feedback from a skilled and trusted friend. Learning social skills is like learning to ride a bike, reading about it doesn't give you much of an advantage.
The younger you are the less it costs to make mistakes. I think a social job is a good way to learn because customers are way less forgiving than other people you randomly meet. You could volunteer for some social tasks too.
If your native hardware is somehow socially limited then you might benefit from reading a little bit more and you might have to develop workarounds to use what you've got to read people. It's difficult to learn from mistakes if you don't know you're making them.
One thing I've learned about the average human looking like a telepath is that most people are way too certain about their particular assumption when there are actually multiple possible ways to understand a situation. People generally aren't as great at reading each other as they think that are.
My native hardware is definitely limited - I'm autistic.
The standard quick-and-dirty method of predicting others seems to be "model them as slightly modified versions of you", but when other people's minds are more similar to each other than they are to you, the method works far better for them than it does for you.
My realtime modeling isn't that much worse than other people's, but other people can do a lot more with a couple of minutes and no distractions than I can.
Thanks a bunch for the suggestions!
It certainly doesn't feel that way to me, but I might have inherited some autistic characteristics since there are a couple of autistic people in my extended family. Now that I've worked with people more, it's more like I have several basic models of people like "rational", "emotional", "aggressive", "submissive", "assertive", "polite", "stupid", "smart", and then modify those first impressions according to additional information.
I definitely try not to model other people based on my own preferences since they're pretty unusual, and I hate it when other people try to model me based on their own preferences especially if they're emotional and extroverted. I find that kind of empathy very limited, and these days I think I can model a wider variety of people than many natural extroverts can, in the limited types of situations where I need to.
Thanks! Your personality archetypes/stereotypes sound like a quick-and-dirty modeling system that I can actually use, but one that I shouldn't explain to the people who know me by my true name.
That probably explains why I hadn't heard about it already: if it were less offensive-sounding, then someone would have told me about it. Instead, we get the really-nice-sounding but not very practical suggestions about putting yourself in other peoples' shoes, which is better for basic* morality than it is for prediction.
*By "basic", I mean "stuff all currently used ethical systems would agree on", like 'don't hit someone in order to acquire their toys.'