Of course just my interpretation.
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.
> 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."
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?