That reminds me of NLP (the pseudoscience) “modeling”, so I checked briefly if they have any useful advice, but it seems to be at the level of “draw the circle; draw the rest of the fucking owl”. They say you should:
observe the person
that is, imagine being in their skin, seeing through their eyes, etc.
observe their physiology (this, according to NLP, magically gives you unparalleled insights)
...and I guess now you became a copy of that person, and can do everything they can do
find the difference that makes the difference
test all individual steps in your behavior, whether they are really necessary for the outcome
...congratulation, now you can do whatever they do, but more efficiently, and you have a good model
design a class to teach that method
...so now you can monetize the results of your successful research
Well, how helpful was that? I guess I wasn’t fair to them, the entire algorithm is more like “draw the circle; draw the rest of the fucking owl; erase the unnecessary pieces to make it a superstimulus of the fucking owl; create your own pyramid scheme around the fucking owl”.
I completely agree and share your skepticism for NLP modelling, it’s a great example of expecting the tail to wag the dog, but not sure that it offers any insights into how actually going about using Ray Dalio’s advise of reverse engineering the reasoning of someone without having access to them narrating how they made decisions. Unless your conclusion is “It’s hopeless”
(NLP assumes that you could reverse-engineer someone’s thought processes by observing their eye movements. That looking in one direction means “the person is trying to remember something they saw”, looking in another direction means “the person is trying to listen to their inner voice”, etc., you get like five or six categories. And when you listen to people talking, by their choice of words you can find out whether they are “visual” or “auditive” or “kinesthetic” type. So if you put these two things together, you get a recipe like “first think about a memory that includes some bodily feelings, then turn on your auditive imagination, then briefly switch to visual imagination, then back to auditive, then write it down”. They believe that this is all you need. I believe that it misses… well, all the important details.)
Sorry I made a mistake in my last reply: putting NLP aside, are there any effective methods of reverse engineering the decision making of people that you can’t get on the phone? There’s an abundance of primary evidence for many decisions, whether it be minutes of deliberations, press releases which might involve more reading of the tea-leaves. In the case of Prince one could possibly listen to different live-performances of the same song and analyze what changes are made. What words are crossed out on a lyrics sheet.
Many times people have to become very good at intuiting people in their life who are loathe to actually explain their reasoning, yet build pretty useful models of how to interact with those people. From grumpy shopkeepers, to school teachers, to coworkers etc. etc. Diplomacy is an entire profession based on building such models. Negotiation builds those models under pressure—but often has the ability to speak with the other side, as per Ray Dalio’s suggestion, which I’m trying to find a method for.
Are there no methods of understanding and reverse engineering the reasoning, not the superficial aspects, of another person?
Dunno; it probably depends a lot on the kind of task, the kind of person, and your observation skills. Some people explain more, some people explain less. Some people are more neurotypical (so you could try to guess their patterns by observing what other people similar to them would do in a similar situation), some people are weird and difficult to predict. At some tasks people produce artifacts (a mathematician can make notes on paper while solving a problem; if you obtain the paper you could reconstruct some of their thoughts), other tasks happen mostly in one’s head (so even if you placed hundred hidden cameras in their room, the important steps would remain a mystery).
I guess the success is usually a combination of superior observation skills and the person/task being sufficiently typical that you can place them in a reference group you have more data about. (For example, I have met people who had good observation skills, but had a difficulty understanding me, because their model maybe worked for 90% of people and I was among the remaining 10%.)
So, if possible:
make a good model of a similar kind of person
become familiar with the kind of work they are doing
try to obtain their working notes
That is, if you tried to reverse-engineer Prince, it would probably be useful to have knowledge about music and performing (even if nowhere near his level), as that might give you at least some insights about what he was trying to achieve. Looking at his notes or his history might help to fill some gaps (but you would need the domain knowledge to interpret them). People similar to Prince (not sure who would that be) might have a good intuitive model of him, and you could ask them some things.
At the end, it would all be probabilistic, unreliable.
That reminds me of NLP (the pseudoscience) “modeling”, so I checked briefly if they have any useful advice, but it seems to be at the level of “draw the circle; draw the rest of the fucking owl”. They say you should:
observe the person
that is, imagine being in their skin, seeing through their eyes, etc.
observe their physiology (this, according to NLP, magically gives you unparalleled insights)
...and I guess now you became a copy of that person, and can do everything they can do
find the difference that makes the difference
test all individual steps in your behavior, whether they are really necessary for the outcome
...congratulation, now you can do whatever they do, but more efficiently, and you have a good model
design a class to teach that method
...so now you can monetize the results of your successful research
Well, how helpful was that? I guess I wasn’t fair to them, the entire algorithm is more like “draw the circle; draw the rest of the fucking owl; erase the unnecessary pieces to make it a superstimulus of the fucking owl; create your own pyramid scheme around the fucking owl”.
I completely agree and share your skepticism for NLP modelling, it’s a great example of expecting the tail to wag the dog, but not sure that it offers any insights into how actually going about using Ray Dalio’s advise of reverse engineering the reasoning of someone without having access to them narrating how they made decisions. Unless your conclusion is “It’s hopeless”
Yes, my conclusion is “it’s hopeless”.
(NLP assumes that you could reverse-engineer someone’s thought processes by observing their eye movements. That looking in one direction means “the person is trying to remember something they saw”, looking in another direction means “the person is trying to listen to their inner voice”, etc., you get like five or six categories. And when you listen to people talking, by their choice of words you can find out whether they are “visual” or “auditive” or “kinesthetic” type. So if you put these two things together, you get a recipe like “first think about a memory that includes some bodily feelings, then turn on your auditive imagination, then briefly switch to visual imagination, then back to auditive, then write it down”. They believe that this is all you need. I believe that it misses… well, all the important details.)
Sorry I made a mistake in my last reply: putting NLP aside, are there any effective methods of reverse engineering the decision making of people that you can’t get on the phone? There’s an abundance of primary evidence for many decisions, whether it be minutes of deliberations, press releases which might involve more reading of the tea-leaves. In the case of Prince one could possibly listen to different live-performances of the same song and analyze what changes are made. What words are crossed out on a lyrics sheet.
Many times people have to become very good at intuiting people in their life who are loathe to actually explain their reasoning, yet build pretty useful models of how to interact with those people. From grumpy shopkeepers, to school teachers, to coworkers etc. etc. Diplomacy is an entire profession based on building such models. Negotiation builds those models under pressure—but often has the ability to speak with the other side, as per Ray Dalio’s suggestion, which I’m trying to find a method for.
Are there no methods of understanding and reverse engineering the reasoning, not the superficial aspects, of another person?
Dunno; it probably depends a lot on the kind of task, the kind of person, and your observation skills. Some people explain more, some people explain less. Some people are more neurotypical (so you could try to guess their patterns by observing what other people similar to them would do in a similar situation), some people are weird and difficult to predict. At some tasks people produce artifacts (a mathematician can make notes on paper while solving a problem; if you obtain the paper you could reconstruct some of their thoughts), other tasks happen mostly in one’s head (so even if you placed hundred hidden cameras in their room, the important steps would remain a mystery).
I guess the success is usually a combination of superior observation skills and the person/task being sufficiently typical that you can place them in a reference group you have more data about. (For example, I have met people who had good observation skills, but had a difficulty understanding me, because their model maybe worked for 90% of people and I was among the remaining 10%.)
So, if possible:
make a good model of a similar kind of person
become familiar with the kind of work they are doing
try to obtain their working notes
That is, if you tried to reverse-engineer Prince, it would probably be useful to have knowledge about music and performing (even if nowhere near his level), as that might give you at least some insights about what he was trying to achieve. Looking at his notes or his history might help to fill some gaps (but you would need the domain knowledge to interpret them). People similar to Prince (not sure who would that be) might have a good intuitive model of him, and you could ask them some things.
At the end, it would all be probabilistic, unreliable.