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# People think more differently than you think they do
- URL: https://signal-and-noise.io/people/
- Published: 2026-08-11T14:40:27.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-11T15:26:36.000Z
- Author: Tinycube
- Tags: noise

I used to assume people thought roughly the way I do. I don't believe that anymore.

Take the thought "they're after my job." It shows up when someone new joins the team, and some part of you decides that's what they want. That thought didn't come from evidence about them. It came from you. You only recognized it as a possible way to think because it already exists in you, as a fear or a wish or an old habit of mind. Look closely at what you assume about someone else and you're usually looking at a reflection.

For a long time I thought that was just what understanding other people meant. Step into their shoes, run your own mind on their situation, see what comes out. And at a rough level it works. You can usually tell if someone is annoyed, or scared, or bored. There's a theory, from a book called Sentience, that consciousness evolved partly for exactly this: a way for social animals to model what's happening in each other's heads, what the book calls a form of mind reading.

But that trick only holds up at the rough level. The finer the detail, the less it works. You don't have access to someone else's actual reasoning, the specific chain that got them from one thought to the next. You have access to yours. So when you try to model someone else's mind in detail, you're really just running your own mind again and calling the result theirs.

It's a version of the free will problem. You can do what you decide to do. You can't decide what you will decide to do. There's a wall behind every choice that you can't see past. Modeling someone else's mind hits the same wall from a different angle. You can guess, and sometimes guess well, but you're guessing from inside your own head, with no way to climb out and check.

I know people think differently than I do. I just used to assume the difference was smaller than it is.