men who think women are easy to understand are typically unusually non-empathetic men who don’t know that anyone cares about really understanding anyone else. By “understand” they mean “know a few tricks for manipulating that pretty reliably work as expected”
But of course! That’s what everyone means by “understanding other people”.
If humans actually understood other humans, we wouldn’t be stumbling and groping blindly towards constructing a true science of psychology. We’d have had one decades or centuries ago.
Humans intuitively grasp the mechanics of gravity acting upon moving objects. They can solve, in real time, the partial differential equations that describe such motion. That does NOT mean humans understand calculus intuitively, nor does it mean they understand physics. It means they evolved to be able to throw spears and hit targets with them—nothing more.
Only people with little insight into how minds work believe they possess an understanding of them. Rather in the same way that incompetent people tend not to be competent enough to recognize their own incompetence, actually.
Humans intuitively grasp the mechanics of gravity acting upon moving objects. They can solve, in real time, the partial differential equations that describe such motion.
If you’re thinking of e.g., catching a ball—there is a powerful heuristic where you merely move in such a way that the angular position of the ball wrt your body remains constant. I don’t suppose anyone solves the PDEs in any wise.
If humans actually understood other humans, we wouldn’t be stumbling and groping blindly towards constructing a true science of psychology. We’d have had one decades or centuries ago.
Humans intuitively grasp the mechanics of gravity acting upon moving objects. They can solve, in real time, the partial differential equations that describe such motion. That does NOT mean humans understand calculus intuitively, nor does it mean they understand physics. It means they evolved to be able to throw spears and hit targets with them—nothing more.
Only people with little insight into how minds work believe they possess an understanding of them. Rather in the same way that incompetent people tend not to be competent enough to recognize their own incompetence, actually.
If you’re thinking of e.g., catching a ball—there is a powerful heuristic where you merely move in such a way that the angular position of the ball wrt your body remains constant. I don’t suppose anyone solves the PDEs in any wise.