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Comment by sekasi | Hacker News Reader

My job relies on me trying to establish the character of people in a quite limited time as well, and I can totally vouch for this. Human beings are notorious for overestimating their ability to 'judge character'. Myself included. There's been so many scientific studies done on this that I don't think you can make this claim anymore. Personal bias combined with past experience of similar character (or read character) influences your mental state a lot. I don't really like it when people say 'I can work out if they are good people or not', simply because it isn't true. Sorry, but evidence trumps opinions.

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Telling whether someone is a good person is not only hard, it's ill-defined. Good with respect to what ethical standard? Good by which morality? At most, a hypothetical perfect empath could tell you if the person is self-consistent, list which values it shares with you, or maybe predict their actions given an input situation. Even those things seem more within the purview of yet to be proposed ASI than humans.

That said, this part (for example) sounds both realistic and useful: "They'd get excited talking to the applicants about all the things they could do, and afterward think the interview went well, when sometimes all the applicants did was reflect their own ideas back at them. But it was second nature to me to notice these things." and I imagine there are many other insights someone trained to observe people (say a psychologist or anthropologist or someone self-trained in doing just that job) could gather that most engineers would miss by miles.

Edit: Humans also overestimate their understanding of say, software systems (ask anyone who has ever tried to formally verify anything). Yet an experienced programmer can still tell a bad architecture from a good one with far more success than an untrained/novice one. Aesthetics are as hard to define as Ethics, if not more, yet designers do know what they are doing to a far greater extent than your average person. Isn't it likely to be the same for reading people?

There is a second problem with reading people. When they come from an "alien" background and exhibit the characteristics of that background down to differences in movement, people make some poor assumptions.

As an example, I've had some sorrow watching some DC folks who are "amazingly good at reading the mood in a room"[1] badly misread a group of Native Americans. It was scary broken since they had no frame of reference. I would imagine a person who spent a lot of time jumping cultures[2] would get the feel, but I worry from experience.

1) direct quote

2) "a particular society that has its own beliefs, ways of life, art, etc." definition

"My job relies on me trying to establish the character of people in a quite limited time as well"

@Sekasi, in your opinion, what would be required to test and establish a persons character?

I don't know how useful this information is, because it's purely my opinion.. but, besides 'experience' and 'open mind' that are two pretty obvious ones, there are a few things I always look for and probably just as many that are unconscious;

* What they are motivated by [the motivation itself gives you clarity in their personality. Lack of motivation does as well. None are bad traits, they just reveal things]

* Posture and body language

* Eye contact and eye movement when speaking

* How they speak of other people, good and bad

* Lying [everyone lies. some people lie about important things]

* Reaction to criticism/blame

* Evidence of perseverance

* Dealing with silence [some people call them 'awkward silence'. That's pretty revealing ;D]

* Balance of aggressiveness and passiveness

* Ambition or lack thereof [no right or wrong here] * Levels of child-like enthusiasm for passions versus task driven enthusiasm

* Social interests [again, unsocial introverts aren't necessarily a 'bad' trait. Just something that adds to your personality]

* Instability

I just wrote those up then, it's hard to verbalize, admittedly.

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