Padriag
Posts: 2633
Joined: 3/30/2005
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Just some counterpoints to consider...
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ORIGINAL: ExSteelAgain
Often your passionate interest in a subject or person leads you to believe you know more about the subject or person than you really do.
That assumes passion is involved or required, not a valid assumption.
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The biggest arguments you will ever get in are the ones when someone confronts your knowledge about something you care about enough to study.
But that isn't why they argue... they argue because one offended the other's pride. One assumed they knew more and pinned their pride to that. When that gets challenged, it was their pride that was wounded, not their sense of knowledge. A good scholar is just as happy to discover they are wrong as they are to discover they are right... either way they learn something, either way progress is made. If one find themself offended, they should ask why it troubles them so.
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You may feel you know lots about the psychology of the person, but when she goes against your views, you end up confused and angry because she has challenged your ability in a subject that has value to you. It is better to know the person in a common sense type of way and not judge them from your perceived knowledge of a subject.
Who said anything about judging a person? Again, why would someone be angry to discover a belief about someone was wrong? Because it offended their pride? Because it has shaken their sense of how well they know the person? Because the unexpected made them uncomfortable perhaps? It seems to me in such a situation the problem is not the knowledge or observations they have made about another person... but their own instability in how they react to it.
I find that this generates any contoversy at all a bit fascinating. Perhaps it owes to the sense of privacy many presume they have. The idea that someone may know them, in some or any way, better than they know themselves intrudes on that privacy. For those that make an effort to erect walls, it wounds their pride or leaves them fearful (or both).
Yet the subject does not seem complex to me. To understand someone is a simple matter of first observing them and then understanding what you see. The more time one spends doing that, the more experience, the more skilled an individual becomes in that perception. We all do this to some degree. We observe the habits of other people, their daily routine. We learn what someone likes for breakfast, or when they like dinner, or what their favorite resteraunt may be, we learn what music they like or dislike, favorite TV shows or movies or books, what hobbies they have, their quirks, whether they tend to be truthful or when they are prone to lying. We do all this by observing them. By considering what we see, learning to understand it, we sometimes learn to predict their behavior... we may be able to predict whether they will like a new band, a new movie, a book, a different resteraunt, or a pair of pants... because we have come to understand them, understand their motivations and the choices they are likely to make. Sometimes, often because we see them more objectively, we see things about themselves they don't notice... like their habit of absentmindedly jingling change in their pocket while lost in thought, or that they prefer certain music in certain moods, or that they tend to be attracted to certain individuals for reasons they hadn't themselves considered. We sometimes talk to our friends for that very kind of insight... because they sometimes know us better than we know ourselves by virtue of their objectivity. Is it so hard to understand that a skilled observer would see still more, understand more, and thus know more? If that person is a more skilled observe than we ourselves are, is it so difficult to accept that they may see more about us than we see about ourselves? Is this not especially true about those things which we especially do not want to see... such as our flaws, those things we feel insecure about? There is nothing "mysterious" or "domly" about this... its simple observation and understanding of one another, nothing more.
That some individuals have honed that skill more than others should not be surprising. That some have learned to more carefully observe, to more carefully note behaviors and through experience and perhaps education have learned to also more accurately interpret those observations is no more "magical" than someone learning to play a musical instrument well. It is a specialized skill, but like any other such specialized skill it can be learned and developed by almost anyone who makes the effort. Some may show more of an aptitude than others, but anyone can learn the basics.
And again, anyone who has ought to be able to explain what they do, how they do it, and most importantly how they reached their conclusions and what observations they based them on. Anyone who cannot, I would be suspicious of.
Perhaps the most interesting fallacy I've seen in this thread is the assumption that an individual has perfect knowledge about themselves... or even, that they know themselves very well at all. Never underestimate the ability of some to live in denial about those things which they simply do not wish to accept... especially when that concerns themselves. We lie most cleverly and convincingly when we lie to ourselves.
_____________________________
Padriag
A stern discipline pervades all nature, which is a little cruel so that it may be very kind - Edmund Spencer
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RE: I know better than YOU - 
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