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Comment by dillydogg | Hacker News Reader

I find it hard to imagine ever assuming so much about people I've never met. This read as incredibly judgemental to me.

Funnily enough, this response gives some insight into your personal affect. What kinds of mental states are capable of producing just such a reaction?

FWIW, hypothesizing attributes about a person is also just what's required to begin empathetically understanding them. Judging this as judgemental seems like an unpleasant kind of state to be in, at least to my eyes.

I certainly don't know you but have just as certainly felt some aspect of you. Hoping you are well, stranger.

I think we got very different reads here. I understand the comment on the author to be judgemental to be very gentle. Dillydog is a person who affords everyone a rich and deep hidden inner life, so much so, that assuming people are so shallow to be read by a glance makes them angry on their behalf. I think they are in a good place already, emphasizing deeply with others.

Of course just my interpretation.

Indeed! But haven't we now hypothesized dillydog here to be "a person who affords everyone a rich and deep inner life"? Or more provocatively, haven't we made a character judgement?

In the same way that we perform root cause analysis via guesses and validations, I think it's natural, and perhaps unavoidable, that we also make guesses as to a person's personality.

Of course, we usually call someone judgemental for making negative assessments, but I think it's important to allow a person whatever possibilities, regardless of moral judgement.

My read of the article is that the author ascribes negative traits without judgement and just as easily as positive ones. Heck, as I see it, big part of empathizing with someone is recognizing how all their conditions and traits are natural and operate similarly inside ourselves to one degree or another.

None of us chose to be the way we are in the situation we're in. Like, 3+1 dimensions and mostly Euclidean space. Who ordered that? Modus ponens?! Glaciation periods! All these deeply affect our day to day experience, obviously or not and at the behest of no one.

Well, that character judgement (if you want to call it that) was based on dillydog's shared thoughts about a long article that itself reflects a very specific way of viewing people. To compare that conclusion to someone who purports to confidently extrapolate someone's self-worth, philosophy regarding how they view themselves and others, the 'narrowness' of their understanding or love for the world (what?), and more just by watching them stand around at a wedding for an afternoon seems strange. It's a much more solid base to draw that conclusion from, in my opinion. The character judgement is that they are "a person who affords everyone a rich and deep inner life," and the judgement comes from the fact that applying their perspective is impossible unless they afford everyone a rich and deep inner life. It's emergent from their stated philosophy in a way that the examples in the article are not.

> My read of the article is that the author ascribes negative traits without judgement and just as easily as positive ones

I don't think this is true at all? The 'negative traits' she assigns to people are things like desperation, self-hatred, 'hating the world (or having a very narrow understanding of it)', 'thinking they are better than everyone'. It's hard to call those categorizations anything but judgemental. She even goes as far as to say she has a 'favorite kind of person' by these categorizations. That she ascribes them as easily positive ones is meaningless. It's the ascribing that is the problem.

My take away is that the article is a small list of things that most people know (i.e. it's easy to tell if someone is actually interested in something or not) paired with a series of ways to judge someone based on some extremely surface-level traits, which slowly veers into a sort of prescriptive take on which combination of those traits makes a person identifiably good. It has a feel-good tone, but I found the article difficult to get through because it put me off so much.

> Heck, as I see it, big part of empathizing with someone is recognizing how all their conditions and traits are natural and operate similarly inside ourselves to one degree or another.

See, to me applying the 'insights' outlined in the article seems like the opposite of empathizing. It's couched in gentle phrasing, but it essentially boils down to "here's how you put someone into a box by looking at them."

> here's how you put someone into a box by looking at them

Heck yeah. If we're putting people in boxes, then I agree. That said, the author's characterizations sound much less absolute to me, like they're median estimates with implied wide error bars. That's similar to how I experience people, actually.

Does your intuition change if you assume that different framing?

Judgmentalception? Judgmentalpocalypse. Personal Droste affect.

No, it gives arrogant people like you the impression of an insight. There's not enough information for real insight, but you'll invent an insight in your head and you'll stick with it. You're judgmental.

How insightful.

I have to agree. There is a clear pattern indicating what she thinks is "the best way to live". Be open and be happy. Be otherwise at your own demise. It also sounds a lot like she is trying to convince herself she is striving for the right way of living. First it seemed she has a point, later in the post I felt she lacks intellectual humility, a "healthy" level (oh the irony) of doubt.

IMO "judgement" of a person carries a sense of finality and should be separated from one's "expectation" of a person.

I think it's okay to let your observations of someone guide your expectations of them so long as you are open to being wrong and do not use those expectations as justification for mistreating someone.

Interestingly, your comment reads as hostile and condescending to me.

One wonders how much of it is true and how much is fundamental attribution bias.

Just because they parse people this way, doesn't mean they're too attached to the results of that parsing (which is what I'd describe as being judgemental).

Ignore the other comments you're right on the money. Self described empaths always make roll my eyes and this post is that on steroids.

That's quite a judgment about the author, based on a single blog post.

You could argue that one reveals much more about their personality on a blog post that's about their though process, than one does when walking in a room and behaving during a wedding reception but... I'm actually not sure it's true, considered the former is the fruit of conscious reflection and the later is mostly not filtered by consciousness.

How would you explain when these predictions then turn out to be right? People who are this skilled at reading others are rare, but they do exist.

I'm sure they do exist, but I need to see harder evidence of these skills.

It's not enough that the person is correct in some predictions, they have to also make few mistakes. And the predictions must be objective and not vague or horoscope-like.

Would you be impressed if I made a prediction of a coin flip and was right? What about if I predict a 50/50 choice someone is about to make?

What if I have a book of instances where I made correct predictions?

Not impressive unless the mistakes are there too.

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