But how do you explain people who intuitively understand things? Mathematicians, for example, intuitively understand math. Psychologists and experienced authors intuitively understand people. We gain intuition through education and experience, which in turn improve our understanding and sensitivity towards the truth. Expert mathematicians, for example, _can_ have a good sense of whether a theorem is true before they prove it. And in general, people who possess scientific knowledge can intuitively know things.
I do agree with your intent, though — we need to possess humility about the accuracy of our beliefs. The author can’t factually know what other people feel and think without asking them.
But we also owe some deference to wisdom. Being wise is like being an expert darts players: you’re better able to throw darts into the bulls-eye than most people. If we develop a wisdom worth trusting, we should trust it.
People-watch at enough weddings, your observations of wedding-goers will become more accurate.
But, only if it's a hypothesis that can be validated in such a way.
From OP
> By internal architecture, what I mean is, when someone talks to me, what I notice first are the supporting beams propping up their words: the cadence and tone and desire behind them. I hear if they are bored, fascinated, wanting validation or connection. I often feel like I can hear how much they like themselves.
The last part (how much they like themselves) is an interpretation or a causal speculation, and something very prone to confirmation bias.
Like, what kind of observed behavior would you make less confident in that?
The article is a mix of very good observations and some more speculative statements, which seems to trigger us, the HN commenter crowd :-)
You look at patterns and note them. Over years you will see similar patterns, both in people you only observe once, as well as people you get to know better. The ones you get to know better are the ones where you validate your theories. I’m not explaining it very well, but it works. It’s kind of like a sort of sparse sampling or a very long-term Monte Carlo simulation in n-dimensions (that’s an allusion and not a strict explanation)
From my own experience, with things to do with social interaction some of the most successful people forge on running purely on intuition, they don't burden their minds on things like worrying if their model of wisdom acquisition is deficient of a feedback loop
For example, I invited him to a BBQ at my friend's parent's house. (He was my roommate at the time, and had met my other friend a few times so this was not a random thing)
He talked to my friend's mother for maybe 15 minutes at the BBQ. She is a cheerful and loopy sort of person, and that was exactly the sort of conversation they had. On the drive home he asked me, "that family has been through a lot of tragedy, haven't they?". Indeed, it would break your heart to hear about them.
Burying a child is tragic.
But to answer your question, I would say most families have not suffered tragedy. Mine certainly hasn't.
If your psychologist asks you if you’ve ever thought about suicide: it is not being as in touch with humanity as you think to say; “Hasn’t everyone”.
Yes. This. And much more.
Here's what I think likely happened: your friend talked to other people who went through tragedy. He noticed something common in their behavior. It can be something so subtle that it's invisible to most people, but your friend notices these kind of things. Then when he talked to the current person, he found the similar pattern.
I imagine the author of this article is describing something along the lines of my friend's cognitive capabilities.
The author here does not go through that process at all. It just feels like saying: I watch people a lot so I feel like I know what I am talking about, I feel entitled to write a piece about it. Math people have those pieces peer reviewed and experimented upon before they are actually published.
They can intuit all they want, and good for them if it makes them more efficient in their job. But at the end of the day, if you have to convince others of your intuitions you have to provide verifiable proof. Your intuition might help you overcome a hurdle when proving a theorem, but, still, prove it you must.
I interacted with at least 7 psychotherapists (one of them is a relative) and a whole bunch of other specialists in the field. It took three decades and a push from my side for someone to even figure out that something about me was kind of strange.
Yes, experts can recognize patterns. But that has limits & biases, and tends to be unreliable for outliers. And when that person doesn't even check their results all bets are off.
You lost me here. This isn’t true.
- percentages aren't in a published paper
- isn't in a prestigious enough journal to be taken seriously
- hasn't been reproduced to be reliable
Stuff that sounds believable because it “sounded good” and was argued by charismatic people plagued medicine until shockingly recently.
It’s human nature to believe people and your snarky reply is evidence of that. Your gut reaction should be to agree with the comment or call out the author for fabricating stuff, not to dismiss intellectual rigor.
We are given no confidence interval, no error bars, not even a passing nod to the broader Veronese housing market. Two? Why not three? Why not seven?
Dignity, too, goes unmeasured. Are we talking patrician gravitas or the brittle self-importance of guys who name their swords? The line presumes a convenient symmetry where there is almost certainly chaos, over-leveraged family fortunes, and at least one uncle squatting in a basilica basement.
Frankly, I suspect "two households" is just the number Shakespeare could hold in his head without dropping his drink.
The dictionary definition of "observe" is to notice or perceive (something) and register it as being significant.
By that definition the word observation in the title and text is completely legitimate and used correctly.
> She's very good at telling stories, but these stories feel like fiction, not hard fact.
There was no claim of objective fact. This is a Substack piece, not a peer-reviewed submission to "Nature" journal.
Are you suggesting that we can't criticize the crap people say on Substack?
People attend weddings for a lot of reasons. Sometimes it's full of your most favorite people in the world, sometimes you only know a few people in the room. Sometimes you have a lot of fun, sometimes the entire thing just feels like a massive inconvenience. Sometimes it stokes the flame of your relationship, sometimes it occurs during a time when your relationship is under some stress. Sometimes I'm dancing/partying all night, sometimes I never leave my table and leave before the cake is cut.
Anyways, I'm sure she does see a lot of these patterns and you can try to infer a lot of things about the people, with some reason, but people are fluid and this is too small of a sample of their life to really know anything other than how this group of people interacted on a single night of their lives.
I don’t think any of the things she said are deterministic or objectively descriptive. At the same time I think she does capture some essence or wisdom from her multitude of experience and her knack for noticing this and being able to put it into words.
Painting is not just capturing the pixels of light on canvas. This is what children consider painting. Great painters capture emotion and energy on canvas -- that's part of the essence that I am alluding to. That's what separates an artist who can realistically capture a scene from a master. Emotionally mature people who experienced life can recognize that emotion and energy in great paintings.
It's kind of like math. Some proofs and formulas are considered elegant or even beautiful. To the untrained eye they look like letters, symbols, and numbers.
Take Euler's identity: e^(i*π) - 1 = 0. My kids see gibberish, since they are in grade school. I see something surprising and neat but don't fully understand it. I've spoken to people who have a deeper understanding of math who can talk wonder about this simple-looking equation and use words of feeling to describe it.
No, her job depends on making the married couple happy, which is not at all the same as 100% accurate representation.
Under that I see someone whose job it is to be keenly observant and to notice these things, otherwise she wouldn't be a very good wedding painter. It probably helps that she seems to be passionate about observing people. Why have someone paint your wedding if the painter isn't able to understand and observe the nuances of human interactions going on?
I disagree. The observations start to become extremely judgmental at around #8 and following.
> Why have someone paint your wedding if the painter isn't able to understand and observe the nuances of human interactions going on?
Do you think the wedding painter is paid to reproduce the naked reality of the situation, if that happens to be contrary to what the couple wants to see and preserve on canvas forever?
Like someone evaluating literature as if it's an academic paper. Hilarious. Just ego protection from things you don't wish to face. Carpe Diem! not "Scientific Blinkers" sold on amazon, $1 for a 10-pack. Wear it and you'll never be awed again!
Worship an idol of false objectivity, and demonize the subjective - to hide, when objective and subjective are both seeing and making from different points of view. But those trapped objectifying the world - an authoritarian abuse of science when science is observation - you're only harming yourself, and trying to turn your dynamic human-ness into a fixed robot!
Painting weddings presents good opportunities to observe the interactions of strangers. On the other hand, it does not present good opportunities to come to know strangers intimately, which is the only way to confirm or disconfirm your superficial observations of them. The wedding guests are unlikely to ever become the hired hand's close friend, lover, or relative. If the article author is somehow an expert at reading people, that expertise was assuredly not acquired by painting weddings. At best, preexisting expertise could be practiced there. Reading the author's list, however, I'm quite skeptical. She appears to be someone who is judgmental and jumps to unwarranted generalizations based on anecdotal evidence.
Most of us are pretty good at reading other people. That's natural, not magical. But pretty good is fallible at best, and overconfidence in our own abilities is another natural human trait. You can easily become overconfident by having a few lucky successes. The most troubling combination is overconfidence and charisma, which allows you to deceive not only yourself but many others.
> It is easy to spot the person in the room who thinks they are better than everyone. [...] This is also painful to see, because they often cannot see their own misery, how unpleasant the world is if no one is good enough to be loved.
Honestly, where does this person get off thinking they can evaluate a whole person's psyche based on how they walk into a room and chat with a few people?
It's also easy to spot the one with the canvas and the substack.
I think it's worth poking at why you feel that social interactions should be subjected to the rigours of the scientific method in the first place?
Could she be wrong, sure, but as we have learned over the past few years, so can more "scientific" approaches to psychology and sociology. But that doesn't really matter because what she's doing isn't failed science, but taking part in a sort of humanistic shared inquiry. It's a woman reporting her observations and thoughts, not as claimed facts, but as suggestions readers can integrate into their own developing understanding, so they can build on them to make their own observations and inferences.
I wish I (and lots of others) had just half of the ability to see people the way that the author does, it would make the world so much more rich and maybe more kind.
think this is just an observational essay. The confident tone makes for better reading, even if you're questioning the accuracy while you read it. It also allows a more loving tone than a more hedged rhetoric would allow.
This is... IMO, a misguided criticism. It implies every study of anything should be scientific. This is the road to bad science, pseudoscience and whatnot. In fact, it's the road we already have taken.
Psychology is full of dubious scientific pretense... often because art, anthropology, philosophy and such are derided and rejected as unscientific.
Give me great art or philosophy over bad science any day.
I'd be more interesting to know which unproven-social-deductions are commonly made by the general population.
Its frankly ridiculous to critique a post not just on its lack of rigor, but on its merit in regards to a hypothesis you've pulled out of thin air.
A nice example of this is Masamune Shirow, of Ghost in the Shell fame. If you go through the interviews, most of his inspiration comes from early scientific research and engineering debates that he internalized and integrated into a coherent and compelling vision of the future.
This is no small feat, he is extremely influential in that he exposed whole generations of people to these ideas and cutting edge research fields, and many researchers today probably chose their fields based on the ideas exposed in his art.
But did he get there before the researchers ? I'd say no. And he doesn't need to, what he did is incredible in other ways already.
PS: too many people assume that scientists or engineers don't have imagination nor project their ideas into the future. That would be misguided.
Did he "get there before the researchers"? I'd say "that question makes no sense".
Mathematicians certainly "beat him" to the realization that orbital periods depend on distance, and could obviously range longer and shorter than 24 hours. Physicists certainly "beat him" to calculating the altitude of a 24 hour orbit of earth. Engineers almost certainly "beat him" to the idea of satellite radio communications.
This is kinda cheating though. Clark was a physicist as well as a fiction author. He even calculated the delta-v needed to launch to geosync orbit and compared it to the German V-2 rocket.
https://www.wired.com/2011/05/0525arthur-c-clarke-proposes-g...