Hacker News Reader

tldr:

"So you're saying the best way of figuring out what's inside someone else's mind is to ask them?"

"That's right."

People think things that range from typical to highly atypical. The more typical your thought patterns, the higher the probability that others can infer your thinking. This leads to more successful social interactions because people will infer your thinking incorrectly less often.

This is one significant reason why the neurodivergent (e.g., autism spectrum) often have social interaction issues. Highly intelligent people also have out of the box thinking that is hard to predict, but they often have increased capacity to infer the thinking of others and adjust accordingly (if they want).

> People think things that range from typical to highly atypical. The more typical your thought patterns, the higher the probability that others can infer your thinking. This leads to more successful social interactions because people will infer your thinking incorrectly less often.

I do think this is true, but as I've gotten older I have come to the conclusion that the two most typical people in the world would still fail to infer each other's thinking because typical thinking misattributes motivation in others to an almost absurd degree.

THANK YOU

Reply on news.ycombinator.com