The problem with reading minds

Jere Krischel
Jul 10, 2017 · 2 min read

As humans, we are required to make all kinds of decisions on a daily basis without complete information. Sometimes this is trivial, like when you don’t actually know the cow that was used to make the milk that made the cheese that made the cheesestick that’s shrink wrapped in your refrigerator. The lack of information in this case, simply doesn’t matter to your decision to eat it.

However, there are cases where the impact of lacking information can have harsh consequences — the doctor who doesn’t know all of the patient’s allergies in an ER, or the retiree who doesn’t know whether or not the mutual fund she’s putting her life savings into is going to go up or down. With perfect information we might make perfect choices, but with imperfect or incomplete information, we take a risk, regardless of our choice.

I’ll assert that interactions between people, and in particular between men and women, fit into this category of incomplete information. You don’t know if the man sitting across the table from you is a sensitive microaggressed snowflake, or if the woman sitting three seats down is a foul-mouthed stock car racer. You might make some initial assumptions just based on statistical distributions, but given the odds, eventually you’re going to misapprehend the motives or background of a person, even if most of the time your incomplete information ends up being fairly accurate.

The issue in the conversation Svetlana Voreskova and Nicole Hallberg seems to dance around what the impacts of these informational “misses” are. Does someone get hurt when exposed to rough language and crude humor? Does someone get hurt when not exposed to rough language and crude humor? What is the consequence of either of those hurts?

Now, if we could all read minds, and if minds never changed after we read them, we could all make perfect choices, and nobody would get hurt. But we can’t read minds. And people get hurt. And there are consequences, and because people know that, they generally make the least risky choice, even though even that choice might have some risk involved as well.

Personally, I would love it if people (men or women), were clear and open communicators, who would say, “look, I’m kind of a prude, so please, don’t swear in front of me”, or “hey, I’m not going to be offended by your South Park humor, so please, don’t just clam up every time I walk into the room”. This, of course, is another pipe dream, since so much of social interaction is subtle, ambiguous, and absolutely not at all like the computers I work with all the time :)

Maybe, as a start, when these kinds of communication issues come up, we send the offending party to sensitivity training, and we send the offended party to insensitivity training…

    Jere Krischel

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    Socially liberal, fiscally conservative, born again carnivore, musician, firearms instructor and skeptical civil rights activist.