Have you ever played that thumb game where you stand around in a circle with some people and at each turn show 0, 1 or 2 thumbs? And each person takes turns calling out a guess for the total number of thumbs that will be shown? Playing that game gives a really strong sense of “Aha! I modeled you correctly because I knew that you knew that I knew …” but I never actually know if it’s real modeling or hindsight bias because of the way the game is played in real time. Maybe there’s a way to modify the rules to test that?
I once spent a very entertaining day with a friend wandering around art exhibits once, with both of us doing a lot of “OK, you really like that and that and that and you hate that and that” prediction and subsequent correction.
One thing that quickly became clear was that I could make decent guesses about her judgments long before I could articulate the general rules I was applying to do so, which gave me a really strong sense of having modeled her really well.
One thing that became clear much more slowly was that the general rules I was applying, once I became able to articulate them, were not nearly as complex as they seemed to be when I was simply engaging with them as these ineffable chunks of knowledge.
I concluded from this that that strong ineffable sense of complex modeling is no more evidence of complex modeling than the similar strong ineffable sense of “being on someone’s wavelength” is evidence of telepathy. It’s just the way my brain feels when it’s applying rules it can’t articulate to predict the behavior of complex systems.
Have you ever played that thumb game where you stand around in a circle with some people and at each turn show 0, 1 or 2 thumbs? And each person takes turns calling out a guess for the total number of thumbs that will be shown? Playing that game gives a really strong sense of “Aha! I modeled you correctly because I knew that you knew that I knew …” but I never actually know if it’s real modeling or hindsight bias because of the way the game is played in real time. Maybe there’s a way to modify the rules to test that?
I once spent a very entertaining day with a friend wandering around art exhibits once, with both of us doing a lot of “OK, you really like that and that and that and you hate that and that” prediction and subsequent correction.
One thing that quickly became clear was that I could make decent guesses about her judgments long before I could articulate the general rules I was applying to do so, which gave me a really strong sense of having modeled her really well.
One thing that became clear much more slowly was that the general rules I was applying, once I became able to articulate them, were not nearly as complex as they seemed to be when I was simply engaging with them as these ineffable chunks of knowledge.
I concluded from this that that strong ineffable sense of complex modeling is no more evidence of complex modeling than the similar strong ineffable sense of “being on someone’s wavelength” is evidence of telepathy. It’s just the way my brain feels when it’s applying rules it can’t articulate to predict the behavior of complex systems.