Then what could possibly falsify your hypothesis?
If the point you're making is that a few specialists are good at reading signs and always pay attention, then sure. But there's little diff otherwise between "most people can't X" and "most people subconsciously refuse to X".
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i guess what i’m saying, to back up and be more specific about my experience, is that when i went from being worse at reading people to being better at reading people it did not feel to me like i was learning a skill. mostly it felt like i was unlearning an anti-skill
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this metaphor overstates it but it’s a little like i grew up in a society that taught me to completely ignore my sense of smell and then i got permission to stop doing that and actually started paying attention to smell data. it was there the whole time
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a concrete prediction i’ll stand by is that young children are unusually good at reading emotional states compared to what you would expect if you thought it was a skill you had to develop on purpose. similar prediction for dogs and other social animals
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another concrete prediction i’ll stand by is that people can suddenly get much better at reading emotional states (i’ve experienced this), through e.g. therapy, drugs, meditation, in a way that the skill model wouldn’t predict
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idk on the other hand uhhh “empath” discourse has gotten obnoxiously poisoned lately but there does seem to me to be something to the idea that people vary a lot along some kind of “sensitivity” direction and/but that it can get clogged up by trauma
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so i’d be willing to posit some kind of rough distinction between “normal-to-low sensitivity,” “high-sensitivity but ignoring it b/c it’s overwhelming,” “high-sensitivity but not ignoring it and unusually empathic” and i have legit no idea how big these groups are
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how do we study this, i need answers
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it's tricky stuff. the first thing you'd want to try is just getting a bunch of random people together and asking them to guess each other's emotional states but the problem is that people often either don't have access to or are pretending not to have their emotional state
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which means it's somewhere between rude to destabilizing to try verifying whether anyone's guess is actually correct
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i have been in social contexts where it's socially acceptable to say things like "i see a lot of pain in your eyes" and even then it's an extremely charged thing to say! you can completely change someone's concept of themselves
an indirect thing i've been playing with is reading fiction by lots of different authors and noticing variation in how much the characters are able to read each other's emotional states
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ooh i like this
have you written any threads on this?
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