Often times we pick up on subtle cues before we consciously process them.
Your evaluations as someone present override what your non-present friends think based off your verbal accounting.
One of the funnier ones ended something like:
Me: So what exactly would I be selling? Or doing? That part isn’t clear yet.
Him: Ok, let me ask you something. If I told you that you had to shovel cow manure for two years and then you got to retire with a good steady income for the rest of your life, would you do that?
Me: does the job involve shoveling manure?
Him: No. That’s an analogy.
Me: Oh, so it’s not shoveling manure, but it’s like shoveling manure?
Him: No no no it’s nothing like that.
Me: Oh ok, so what would I be doing then…?
And on and on…
But, over time, you start to notice subtle tells, and can even see it as they’re walking across the parking lot. “Those folks are going to try to recruit someone into their MLM today!” I really wish I could nail down what exactly those tells are… but even years later, I was sitting having a coffee and my scammer alert went off at a couple walking across the parking lot and sure as shit they spent the following hour trying to recruit some kid.
Edit: actually, to your point, is that little things are off. When they do actually talk about business, they use business words but they don’t mean quite the same thing they normally do. Or in the couple from this weekend, they were dressed up like… a stereotype of a “business couple”. Like if you learned how business people dress by watching TV. Just the details were off. He was wearing an expensive looking shirt with a decent tie, but with a spring (not suit) jacket that didn’t match the look, and dress shoes that were simultaneously too fancy to be comfortable on a Sunday afternoon and also too cheap looking to be something you’d wear to the office every day.
She had the same kind of thing going on. Fancy frilly black dress with her hair done up (not something you’d normally just wear to Starbucks on a Sunday), but wearing very plain black flats that just didn’t match the fanciness of the dress. And something about her gait… like walking like someone who was trying to look confident?
Weird stuff. I dunno.
They make me feel like I have an IQ of about 60 . . . although I also believe you need to have some ability to even be aware of the truly skilled, so maybe I have some latent talent!
I grew up in an abusive alcoholic household. I had 18 years to really refine my "subtle cue" radar to try to guess whether or not it was going to be a calm night or a wild night of yelling and screaming.
It's often not as conscious of a process as the situation this past weekend was. As a brutal example, I had a partner a long time ago who, as it turned out, was having an affair. I started having anxiety attacks but couldn't explain what they were about. In an attempt to try to figure it out, I kept a journal of my thoughts every time it happened, but I couldn't find any kind of correlation. At some point the attacks just stopped and I was happy...
When the affair was finally revealed and after the dust had settled a bit, I pulled out my journal and we sat down together and put together a timeline. Every single anxiety attack lined up with one of the times she was out with the other guy, and I think we worked out that there was only one time they had been together where I didn't have an anxiety attack. Pretty much perfect correlation, but I had no clue _why_ it was happening until ~6 months after they had stopped the affair.
At any rate, yeah, you're spot on about the tuning. It's definitely tough to rationalize what's going on sometimes, and it does definitely come from deep inside the subconscious. I'm just torn on whether I like it being characterized as a "deep subconscious intelligence" or whether it might be better called "a powerful survival mechanism refined by two decades of (mostly) verbal and (occasional) physical abuse"
Perhaps you are exceptionally talented (smart) in that area. Is there a standardised test? How can you judge yourself against others? How do you go to a course to improve?
I think of intelligence as the ability to integrate subtle information and come up with a correct answer. Intelligence is usually seen as something rational, but I certainly see it as mostly subconscious. I try to be broad minded when looking for smart people as some of the smartest don’t appear to be on the surface (hidden/crypto smarts): the skill to recognise subtle fashions, the skill to correctly read complex human situations, the skill of pruning, etcetera. Usually the skills are not taught, instead a brain just picks it up.
If I wanted to get better at reading people, what do I need to do to get my brain tuned in? I know that the usual routes we are taught are poor: e.g. reading a book about how to ski.
Just like your questions about learning how to be better at reading people, I have absolutely no idea how to teach someone to think about software the way I do; I’ve been asked many times!
To further complicate things with learning or teaching any of these, I also was diagnosed with ADHD last year at age 37. Retrospectively, that makes perfect sense based on teacher feedback, report cards, getting 50s and 95s in the same semester… I’m sure that that also contributed to how this weird brain all got assembled, but damned if I can explain it.
Edit: thank you for this! I don’t think I’ve ever really made some of these connections before!
Don't ignore it.
Also, the "gut" is where things like racism are rooted.