Hacker News Reader

Comment by disambiguation | Hacker News Reader

I would describe myself as the opposite of OP (very bad at reading people) so it was quite a shock the first time I met someone like this. Not only for the revelation that these type of people exist, but the experience of another person reading my "internal architecture" - and subsequently judging it - it opened a new avenue of self reflection for me. And while I think there's still a lot of the subjectivity in the author's formulation, I do have a relatively new appreciation for "people watching" insights like this now.

View on HN

It’s actually not that surprising that some people are incredibly good at reading others. Your body is constantly broadcasting information through tiny facial expressions, tone of voice, posture, and even micro-movements. Every second, you’re sending out lots of signals, and some people are just especially tuned in to pick them up.

The interpretation isn’t always right, but if you’re good at engaging with people (mostly by listening) you’ll improve that skill pretty quickly.

TV series Continuum has AR glasses interpreting human micro-signals.

Modern video conferencing streams may contain enough information for emotion inference.

Indeed. And I'm a bit surprised at how negative some of these comments are. These are just innocent observations, coloured by her experiences and biases. At no point is she claiming that these are absolute truths. We all make such snap observations all the time, but we mostly don't write them down or turn them into paintings.

It's a sight full of autists, don't be TOO surprised.

Site. Sorry, OCD. :)

Don't worry about it. And don't call me OCD!

The surprising thing isn't that the signals exist or are picked up, but that the SnR is good enough to be able to support the level of confidence expressed in TFA.

I don't think it's surprising at all, we've evolved to pick up social queues and read each other's body language/facial expressions. It's deeply ingrained in our social wiring, we do it so well it's subconscious.

I’m not sure that we know this to be the case. It’s difficult to objectively study.

In hindsight yeah it's obvious. But at the time I had a mentality of "well you can't know for sure, you can't assume this signal means that, it's not scientific, it's not objective, etc." There's also a part of it that feels kind of judgemental and impolite "intruding" in that way, especially if you make the wrong read.

"I don't like it" "I don't want it to be so" "I don't want this thing which I'm inept at to be real; it's unscientific!"

No not exactly, it was more "I'm not arrogant enough to assume I know someone better than they know themselves, I'm not going to dogmatically explain a person to themselves as if I have all the information and can magically intuit and deduce everything about them." This is still generally true, not just for myself, but for every rare true student of human nature there are a dozen fools trying to make a read and failing miserably.

I reached the same conclusion but in a roundabout way. I think the ultimate goal is to know about one's own self at the most deepest of levels. One way obviously is engaging with the self at a deeper level which is not always possible. Unfortunately, it is extremely hard to master.

However watching others and just collecting more datapoints help in the process of learning. You are learning to read and be more observant regardless of judgements.

I found the article really good.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com