Perhaps I’m making a mistake by putting myself into the place of the subject of the experiment. I think I’d dissent, but I would predict that most people think that, and most people conformed at least once.
I think that is exactly your mistake. We have the most access to our own minds, and therefore using it to model the minds of others seems rather natural. What would I do in their place?
Problem is, if you’re here, you’re likely an odd duck and on the tails of many statistical distributions. You’re not a prototypical sample of the general population. Stop using yourself as a prototype for explaining the behavior of others.
Also, now I wonder, do other people grow up building multiple prototypical models of the internal thought processes of other people, instead of using their own thought processes as models, and setting a few belief and preference variables differently depending on the problem?
Am I just projecting my own intuitions of the “natural” way to solve the problem on others?
Problem is, if you’re here, you’re likely an odd duck and on the tails of many statistical distributions. You’re not a prototypical sample of the general population. Stop using yourself as a prototype for explaining the behavior of others.
Yep, one of the most difficult lessons in my life.
It feels so convenient to imagine that other people are like me. There are so many people saying that people just need to be more open and they will realize how everyone is so similar. I guess that advice is most useful for the average people, who are the majority of the population; and perhaps useful to everyone in some areas of life. But whenever I start believing that everyone is “secretly just like me, they are just hiding it just like I do”, it’s enough to open my mouth, and I quickly get corrected. (LessWrong meetups being one of the very few exceptions, and even there it depends on who I talk with.)
I think that is exactly your mistake. We have the most access to our own minds, and therefore using it to model the minds of others seems rather natural. What would I do in their place?
Problem is, if you’re here, you’re likely an odd duck and on the tails of many statistical distributions. You’re not a prototypical sample of the general population. Stop using yourself as a prototype for explaining the behavior of others.
Also, now I wonder, do other people grow up building multiple prototypical models of the internal thought processes of other people, instead of using their own thought processes as models, and setting a few belief and preference variables differently depending on the problem?
Am I just projecting my own intuitions of the “natural” way to solve the problem on others?
Yep, one of the most difficult lessons in my life.
It feels so convenient to imagine that other people are like me. There are so many people saying that people just need to be more open and they will realize how everyone is so similar. I guess that advice is most useful for the average people, who are the majority of the population; and perhaps useful to everyone in some areas of life. But whenever I start believing that everyone is “secretly just like me, they are just hiding it just like I do”, it’s enough to open my mouth, and I quickly get corrected. (LessWrong meetups being one of the very few exceptions, and even there it depends on who I talk with.)