Hacker News Reader

Comment by asveikau | Hacker News Reader

I am extremely skeptical of someone who claims this ability in themselves or others. What this tells me is that someone is misjudging a lot of circumstances very confidently. You just can't understand people on a snap judgment, there are too many outliers.

Imagine if we applied this kind of thinking in courts. We would convict a lot of innocent people. We wouldn't feel that we need to wait for all the facts and evidence to come in, because our radar for people is so good. We don't do it that way, because it's nonsense.

View on HN

I feel like anyone who fits the categorization (so called INFP/F types[0]) are unlikely to the ones to tell you.

That's why people who claim to have this ability almost never do. Its not in the nature of someone who can to really talk about it this way.

I'd also argue that courts are definitely not the place to have this. There's good reasons why this is likely to fail in a stressful setting (convicting someone of a crime or reviewing evidence) vs a situation of neutrality. Once you start mixing in other factors I imagine this gets blurry real fast. Its all very context dependent.

To tack on further, courts by structure also have a burden of proof aspect to limit / remove the human element as much as possible (in theory anyway) and that is very important.

[0]: https://www.simplypsychology.org/infp-personality.html

You're probably on to something. I frequently get impressions like, good Lord, can't you tell this person is schmoozing? Or that they're trying to hide their agitation? Same with people prone to black and white thinking. And it comes after just a minute or two. And it's often right. (Though I constantly doubt myself and possible confirmation bias.) I wouldn't say it's preternatural but better than most people, apparently. I almost never vocalize these impressions. Because the reasons why are inexplicable, and few have any reason to trust my gut instinct over any other person's.

Why is Myers Briggs being referenced when it has zero substance to back it up? I thought it was common knowledge that pop psychology stuff was garbage, at least amongst this website’s readers.

Not quite zero substance, the four dimensions are reasonable close to some of the five leading components of personality.

The problem is that each letter comes from splitting a normal distribution in half right at the middle where maximum likelihood is. So most people won't be very strongly attached to most of their letters.

That "common knowledge" is wrong. Myers briggs is not great for scientific studies since it splits people into 16 buckets instead of sliding scales (like the Big 5, which is used in research). But MB is an incredible mental toolkit to have.

Why would something with no evidence behind it be an incredible mental toolkit?

See the whole criticism section.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers%E2%80%93Briggs_Type_Indi...

MB is astrology for nerds.

Astrology has a one in twelve chance of accuracy since the only variable is birthday.

With the four discrete variables in MBTI, I can type people with 90% accuracy after a conversation.

Isn’t this often just the Barnum effect, especially when ground truth is established by asking people if you are right? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnum_effect

The buckets themselves are also false, so no.

100% right. My wife is an INFP and in 16 years of being together, she has not been wrong about someone once, even when I vehemently disagreed with her at the time. But she would never say she's good at reading people to a stranger lol.

>INFP

Hasn't Myers Briggs been debunked as a load of pseudoscience shit?

"I felt the gut-feeling that the guy sucked, so I didn't give him a job, told my connections he sucks, and lo and behold he didn't succeed, so I was right."

There's another variant of this that occurs after hiring. You don't trust them to take on a big project, so you give it to somebody else. At review time, you dock them for not having any big projects. Clearly a bottom performer.

Yeah, this always seems like a truism. If you give people opportunities, they will tend to succeed. If you deny people opportunities, they won’t. So anybody in the position of giving or denying opportunities to people will tend to be “right” most of the time.

Good point. So when we try and evaluate a person's "social radar", we should probably limit ourselves to cases where they are the minority dissenter and the person they dislike is given the opportunity, since it gives us the most controlled scenario in which we can evaluate their hypothesis.

> snap judgment

What this manager did isn't practically different from what all interviewers do, except the particular manager wasn't the specific target of the usual manipulations[0] candidates will do to seem better. The manager is likely to have a better understanding of how the candidate bullshits (or if they do) when they're not the target of the bullshit.

[0] Used as a descriptor; e.g. "manipulating" someone to decide they should see a doctor for their toe infection isn't bad.

> except the particular manager wasn't the specific target of the usual manipulations[0] candidates will do to seem better.

There's merit to this argument.

Consider people who get scammed or catfished -- it's obvious to an outside observer. You're less likely to fool yourself when you have no skin in the game.

Agreed, this sound like astrology for the Stanford set. Baffling.

There are people that can do this, that are "social radars." It's rare, but I've seen one and it's mindblowing to observe. 100% hit rate.

(that doesn't mean we should do it in courts to convict people)

And I'm saying a 100% hit rate is not possible. Your ability to determine an accurate numerical hit rate is also very difficult to impossible.

If we treat this kind of thing as an oracle rather than admit that it's a flawed heuristic, even a good heuristic being ultimately flawed, I think that's pretty dangerous. One has to be extremely humble at the task of evaluating people, because it's difficult and error-prone.

You bring up a good point in that false negatives could never be tracked.

E.g. if the manager in this story said "no" and that person wasn't hired, how would you know she was correct?

I will say that there was a non-zero number of "she said 'no', person was hired anyway and it turned out to not be good". As sister/cousin threads have pointed out: this might be a self fulfilling prophecy.

Well, it isn't possible because humans are not deterministic, but I imagine the manager in question could possibly have a high 'hit rate'.

Meh. You're underestimating how simple people are and how easy it is to read intonation and general presence of a person. Combined with questions that apply pressure it is very easy to read a person because the very basics of a human being are inherently simple.

You just can't understand people on a snap judgment, there are too many outliers.

Not so long ago, I would have certainly agreed with you until I met this one girl.

So we started dating and, a couple months in, sometimes, as a joke, I use to say to her: "the first time I saw you, blablabla beautiful blablabla a star in the sky blablabla". I did that not only once but many many times. And every time, every time, she would have the exact same answer. She would say: "the first time I saw you, I thought 'oh bof'" (meaning she thought I was mediocre). So you know, I thought she only plays hard to get, like women do. That didnt bother me. Time passes and I kept going with my "the first time I saw you .."s. Kind of know she liked it anyway. And she kept on having the same answer.

At one point I thought something was strange. She kept on having those exact same words again and again. 'Oh bof'. Again and again. I could sense she was actually trying to tell me something entirely else.

Until I realised what she was saying. When I did realised what she was saying, I was shocked.

The first time I saw her... what I really thought was... 'Oh bof'. This is literally word for word what I thought the first time I saw her. I thought in my head: 'Oh bof'. But not only the words matched perfectly, the ton as well.

I pass on the details but let me tell you that girl knew exactly my state of mind even when I was in the next room.

Thats the time I learnt some people can tell exactly what you think just by looking at you. This is frightening. They can because they started observing people at a very young age. They love to observe people. Exactly like it is said in that pg's post: they observe.

> I am extremely skeptical of someone who claims this ability in themselves or others.

Have you never heard of someone being a good judge of character?

> Have you never heard of someone being a good judge of character?

I’ve heard of people claiming to be a good judge of character, or claiming other people are, usually without evidence and as an excuse for actions which involve disregarding objective indicia of character as it relates to the decision at hand, and very often as an excuse specifically for making decisions that seem to amount to disregarding objective criteria to favor their own and/or a generally-socially-favored race, ethnicity, subculture, etc.

I like to use nominative determinism to figure out who to hire, myself.

Dragonwriter, now that's a good name, you'd have a shot for sure.

I've heard of many kinds of things. You've never heard of someone being wrong?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com