Do you mean to say that you can generally predict not only what person A will do but precisely how they will do it? Or do you mean that if a person succeeds then you are unsurprised by how they did it, but if they fail or do something crazy you aren’t any better than other people at prediction? Either way I would be interested in hearing more about how you do that.
Since I’ve been teaching I’ve gotten much better at modeling other people—you might say I’ve gotten a hefty software patch to my Theory of Mind. Because I mostly interact with children that’s what I am calibrated to, but adult’s have also gotten much less surprising. I attribute my earlier problems mostly to lack of experience and to simply not trying very hard to model people’s motivations or predict their behavior.
Further, I’ve come to realize how important these skills are, and I aspire to reaching Quirrellesque heights of other-modeling. Some potential ways to improve theory of mind:
Study the relevant psychology/neuroscience.
Learn acting.
Carefully read fiction which explores psychology and behavior in an in-depth way (Henry James?) Plays might be even better for this, as you’d presumably have to fill in a lot of the underlying psychology on your own. In conjunction with acting this would probably be even more powerful. You could even go as far as to make bets on what characters will do so as to better calibrate your intuitions.
Write fiction which does the same.
Placing bets could be extended to real groups of people, though you might not want to let anyone know you were doing this because they might think it’s creepy and it could create a kind of anti-induction.
Do you mean to say that you can generally predict not only what person A will do but precisely how they will do it? Or do you mean that if a person succeeds then you are unsurprised by how they did it, but if they fail or do something crazy you aren’t any better than other people at prediction? Either way I would be interested in hearing more about how you do that.
Since I’ve been teaching I’ve gotten much better at modeling other people—you might say I’ve gotten a hefty software patch to my Theory of Mind. Because I mostly interact with children that’s what I am calibrated to, but adult’s have also gotten much less surprising. I attribute my earlier problems mostly to lack of experience and to simply not trying very hard to model people’s motivations or predict their behavior.
Further, I’ve come to realize how important these skills are, and I aspire to reaching Quirrellesque heights of other-modeling. Some potential ways to improve theory of mind:
Study the relevant psychology/neuroscience.
Learn acting.
Carefully read fiction which explores psychology and behavior in an in-depth way (Henry James?) Plays might be even better for this, as you’d presumably have to fill in a lot of the underlying psychology on your own. In conjunction with acting this would probably be even more powerful. You could even go as far as to make bets on what characters will do so as to better calibrate your intuitions.
Write fiction which does the same.
Placing bets could be extended to real groups of people, though you might not want to let anyone know you were doing this because they might think it’s creepy and it could create a kind of anti-induction.
That sounds like a very useful sequence.