Experience of typical mind fallacy.

I wouldn't be too surprised to learn that people are capable of independently thinking that they have highly atypical minds while simultaneously falling prey to the typical mind fallacy. In general, I expect myself to spend more time thinking about the overt things that make me feel unique, without necessarily being aware of the things that underlie those differences. With the TMF, it's the unexamined assumptions that get you.

I think atypically, just like everyone else.

Here a very subjective poll for this question.

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And the same but disregarding IQ (which alone probably correlates with unusual-ness):

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General note: I see suggestions for poll-like questions quite often in Discussion posts, but no poster goes forward and posts a poll. It is so easy: Just create an initial comment, click on Help and then Poll help for instructions.

I was an atypical child with very noticeable unusual traits, yes, but as I've grown older I've "normal-ed out". If someone really gets to know me they might still be puzzled why there are certain normal-person things I cannot do and certain things I can do that most people can't, but for the most part I'm fairly close to baseline, with most of the deviation due to the hyper-WEIRD culture practically everyone on Lesswrong shares rather than unusual mental architecture. To the extent that my actual cognition is unusual, I consider most of the deviations from typicality to be a net negative.

I think the alienation and self-labelng of oneself as extremely atypical is paradoxically due to typical mind fallacy - when a person at first fails to accurately model other people and assumes others are like oneself, and then tries to figure out under what conditions would I behave like those people and do what they did, they very quickly start looking like fundamentally different aliens.

For example, people who are smart sometimes feel alienated from society because others around them are not able to respond appropriately to the nuanced conversational cues they are emitting. Others are unable to accurately express their feelings and thoughts and are generally more clumsy and fuzzy about everything. Others make bad decisions which they would not make if they understood what they did. The smart person attributes these differences to differences in intention and core mental architecture, rather than skill.

For example, picture a teacher of average cognitive ability worn down after a long day. He doesn't have sufficient mental control to keep his emotions in check. He also lacks the meta-cognitive ability to notice he is stressed. The gifted child asks a question he doesn't know the answer to, but the teacher lacks the meta-cognitive ability to realize that he doesn't know the answer and before he can stop it his brain just made something up. The child says "No, that doesn't make sense", and the teacher fails at social cues and takes it literally as "I didn't fully process what you just said" rather than a euphemism for "your explanation is not satisfying to me" and so they repeat themselves. Truth be told the teacher doesn't really know what it means for something to make sense, the way the gifted child does. The child sighs in frustration. The teacher feels resentful about that, but doesn't notice they feel resentful. Later on, when the child speaks out of turn the teacher snaps and gives them detention for interrupting. The teacher truly believes the detention was for interrupting.

The gifted child thinks to herself: "Even though I meant her no harm or disrespect, she has decided to find a small excuse to punish me after I questioned her knowledge. That teacher is punishing me because she thinks that children are not people, they do not have rights. She has status and she is willing to use it. Other human beings are conformist, they dislike those who question authority."

The ordinary child in the same situation would have thought, "Ugh, I didn't do anything really, what's her problem" and not analyzed the situation further. It's the same thought, but only the gifted child takes it to the logical conclusion that the teacher must be fundamentally alien to do such a thing. She'll project her mind upon the teacher, take the teacher's behavior, and then grossly miscalculate his intentions.

These would all be valid interpretations of the teacher's behavior if the teacher had the self-awareness of the child, but as it stands they are not actually true. The teacher and the child are identical in their basic cognitive infrastructure and share motivation and intention, it's just that the child just more self aware.

If the gifted child does not figure out how to accurately model the teacher, this will very quickly develop into "every single person except me and maybe that one other dude is absolutely batshit insane, and I am alone." Every knee jerk political reaction, every instance of blatant injustice, every bad decision, and every rationalization will feed this misconception further, when really differences in meta-cognitive ability are entirely to blame. They subsequently grow up to become contrarians and the word "typical" becomes vaguely insulting to them.

I listed intelligence because that's why I think lesswrongers think they are atypical at a far higher rate than could possibly be true, but another example: most college students might say that most people pressure others drink while simultaneously saying that they,themselves, would not pressure anyone to drink. They're looking at their own mental state, the behaviors of others, seeing a disparity, and concluding that others are mentally different. Like the gifted child, they are simply failing to model other people's failure to act the way that they would like to act, unable to realize that behavior isn't a direct reflection of internal state.

I know my mind is atypical, but I still get moments like "Oh dear, why do they make such stupid advertisements... oh, right" X-)

I distinctly remember, at some point in my teens, realizing that other people sometimes thought like me and I could model their reactions as something more than inscrutable environmental hazards. So there's that.

I've long known that I think very differently than most people around me. And my impression from talking to others is that lots of people think they are at least somewhat unusual in some ways of thinking. But I still often fall prey to the Typical Mind Fallacy in subtle ways.

Example: About a year ago I was working with a new employee. I asked her to take the Gallup StrengthsFinder test so that we could discuss more efficiently how best to use her talents. I looked carefully through the results and discovered that she actually enjoyed having numerous projects going on at once. This absolutely astonished me, but she confirmed that it was true. Until that point I hadn't realized that anyone could be like that, since it's so totally foreign to my personal disposition.

Another example: Until I got married, I didn't realize that people could actually find it relaxing to wash dishes or clean up a living room.

I think the general rule is that we (or at least I) tend to have a default assumption that others think like us at least on a fundamental level, and that they have fundamentally similar personalities. If we meet up with someone who has a different sort of mind / personality, we tend not to notice it unless it's really staring us in the face. If it's not staring us in the face but we notice differences in actions or attitudes, we tend to attribute the differences to surface causes rather than deep underlying differences in personality. Sometimes we might notice that something's wrong, but we either fail to notice that we're confused, or we notice but fail to attribute it to underlying differences. But if it's really staring us in the face - which it occasionally does - then we'll notice it.

Part of the problem is that I think it's actually true that for many fundamental aspects we are in fact more similar to others than we are different. The trick is being able to differentiate when we're similar and when we're different. Perhaps the key is just (a) noticing when we're slightly confused and then (b) getting our brains to raise a red flag saying, "hey, maybe this is a case of typical mind fallacy".

I think there are two important points I got from the typical mind fallacy. The first is the usually one, that people have different preferences and different ways of thinking. The second is that people have different experiences, and I shouldn't use my experiences with a certain subject as a model for everyone's. Perhaps this could be called the typical experience fallacy?

For example, I grew up in a reform Jew, and my experience from that was "Unpleasant to be forced to say things I don't agree with, but tolerant of differences." It wasn't until I talked with others about their experiences that I realized it ranged to anything from "Everyone must believe strictly in everything, any disagreements are signs of evil" of Orthodox to "God probably doesn't exist and we should do our best to help others" of humanistic chapters.

I noticed two currents along these lines in my life:

On the one hand, I had problems relating to people while growing up. I have the impression that during high school I was reasonably respected among those who knew me (I heard this from several sources), but it felt that there was some gap that I couldn't fathom how to cross.

On the other hand, over the years I've had multiple people swear to me that they knew someone else exactly like me, to the point where they claimed talking to me felt like talking to this other individual.

My conclusion is that my mind is unusual enough to be isolated, yet common enough to fit an identifiable mold and have several doppelgangers scattered about. No solace in being a special snowflake.

Everyone thinks differently from most people, just as everyone lives a long way away from most people, everyone lives in a different culture to most people, everyone in history lived at a different time to most people, and so on.

Everyone who thinks they think differently from most people is right. Only a few of them are more different from most people than most people are from each other.

There is a big difference between saying that you have an unusual mind, and answering every question of the form "what would a normal person think about X" with "I have no idea", rather than just using the only piece of evidence you have and giving what you think about X.

Mind fallacy plays a greater role in how we interpret other people's thinking, like what is their framework for making decisions. Mind fallacy has us believe that everyone else has the same terminal values and goals.

For instance, I suffer from mind fallacy in the sense that my system 1 believes that everyone has the goal of having a very tidy and efficiently run household. As soon as the dishwasher has finished drying the clean dishes, I find it logical to then immediately put away the dishes to make room for any dirty dishes. Not promptly putting away dishes creates more work and wastes time because one will eventually have to put the dishes away anyhow, and delaying doing so will create the extra task of putting dirty dishes in sink, then transferring into dishwasher. Mind fallacy has me believe that everyone else sees how promptly putting away dishes is the ideal method and the one that should be done.

Mind fallacy has a role in how we interpret ambiguous social cues or sentences that are not uber precise. My boyfriend was once asked by his housemates if he is okay with sharing his bath towel. Due to his mental framework, he interpreted the question as 'In the rare instances that someone in the house is in need of a towel (like a guest coming over, laundry machine broke and towel is drenched in water), can we use yours?'. He interpreted the question in that way because of mind fallacy. According to his mental framework, people prefer using their own towels and it didn't occur to correctly interpret the question as, 'Is it okay we if we use your bath towel everyday instead of having our own?'

Mind fallacy leads to misunderstanding and misinterpretations because it causes us to assume that others share our same values. Even under mind fallacy, one can appreciate that people think differently and have a different method to accomplish goals, but mind fallacy has one assuming that the goal is the same.

I am quite sure in my experience that at some point between the ages of 10-15 I concluded that...

You are describing the same fallacy in reverse, to think that everybody thinks like you or that you think in an unusual way are both generalizations from one example.

From what I've seen, there are -probably- around a hundred mental types in the social strata I spend most of my time in, maybe two hundred on the high end. I'd hazard a guess that there are probably five hundred to a thousand mental types overall. I've encountered only a handful - four or five - minds I've not seen repeated, which I internally translate to "exceptionally rare". I've met exactly one person whose mind was remotely similar to my own; they had suffered brain damage, and I didn't know the person before to ascertain whether or not the similarity was a result of the brain damage or not.

I guess I would draw a different conclusion than "I just think differently to most others". An equally valid hypothesis would be that you have a limited internal model of how other people think, and so can not intuitively grasp why they do what they do, or what they think about. This might even be a facet of a typical mind, considering how often communication (or the lack thereof) leads to relationship woes.

There are two errors. The one is to think that other people think like you. The other is to think that other people are completely different from you.

You might think that you are much more intellectual in your decision making than most people but still be surprised if other people think the dress has a different color.

Of course, there is the opposite fallacy of thinking others are too different, as it prevents empathic thinking that is actually pretty useful. I mean it is a fairly central aspect of human interactions to, for example, if you worry what you are about to say may be perceived as offensive then consider if you in a similar situation would consider it so. This does not always work but works often enough well enough to make it fairly difficult to live life if you don't do this.

For what it worths, my typical mistake when I was young was precisely this opposite, atypical mind fallacy, I was unable to think empathically because it did not occur to me to predict how others feel based on how I would feel. A bit schizoid I guess.

The point is both typical mind and atypical mind are heuristics that work in some situations and blow up spectularly in some others.