You have no idea how difficult or easy something is for someone else.

Objectively yes, subjectively no. I don't know how difficult for person Nicole to do a sink full of dishes, but i do know that doing 2xSinkFullOfDishes would be more difficult, if not necessarily 2xArbitraryUnitOfDifficulty.

Given a random person, I agree. However with some knowledge of that person it is not difficult to estimate with reasonable precision how difficult a particular task will be for them.

I don't think so. You can make estimates about relative difficulty, and you can make estimates about what they are okay doing, but you can't really know how much effort it is for them. Much like you can't know how much pain someone else is in. There's no way to compare it.

Maybe someday with lots of brain imaging we will be able to make metrics that make sense, but even with that, it'd be hard to know exactly what to measure and exactly what it means.

literally false but metaphorically true. I have some idea; i probably even have a reasonably accurate though not necessarily precise idea.

but nowhere near as precise as most people seem to believe.

I think "You can make estimates" contradicts "You have no idea". I would agree if the claim began "You don't know exactly"

I did overstate a little... I should make a related claim.

No actually some have the gift you call empathy(the ability to read how the elements vibrate around someone when an event happens) which lets the person know exactly how the other person will feel and act and perform during said event.....and as you can tell not many humans have this awsome gift.

That's not how empathy works. Empathy is having mirror neurons that function well. It allows you to read how you would feel if you were in the same situation and acting the same way.

Unfortunately, people who are very good at this tend to not notice when someone is different from them, because so many people express themselves the same way. Bad empaths make life much harder for the minority who express themselves differently.

However, an observant empath who listens when people tell him or her that they feel something different and pays a lot of attention to when and how they are wrong can learn to better read multiple people and people who express themselves differently. But you can still never be completely aware of what it is like for them.

What did you go to school for Rachel? If you don't mind me asking. Was it biology?

I went to school for an education. I initially was going to study chemical engineering, but after a few classes, I decided I wasn't really into it. I did have a lovely lecture course on biomedical engineering, but am by no means well versed in the topic. I ended up getting a B.S. in psychology and in technical writing. Psychology is a field that I love and find quite fascinating. I do not know nearly enough about it, but I am regularly attempting to learn more. You'll notice a lot of my early Jyte claims are bits of information from within the field of psychology.

This might be slightly off-topic, but I thought your psychology claims were pretty fascinating. I'd love to see more of them.

It's tricky for me to think of things within the field of psychology, because I just know stuff, but unless something triggers me to think about it, I don't really have it in mind. It's like trying to tell people about myself, obviously I know tons of stuff about myself, but when people ask, it's hard to think of anything. And then I need to think of something likely to be interesting (there's a lot of fairly dull psych out there) and reasonably understandable without having already taken a couple psych courses.

But I can try to come up with some ideas for other things to claim about. I'll need to look through my old claims to see what I've already covered.

Mainly, I was trying to focus on the things I felt people really ought to know, like bystander apathy, maybe misattribution of emotion (did I claim anything about that?) ... hmm and then thinking of how to boil a topic down into a single, interesting jyte claim that isn't totally pointless or kinda sad looking (like just claiming Misattribution of emotion is interesting. It is, and yet...).

I'll consider making some new claims though. :) Many people did seem to like them. Psych has an advantage over many fields in that it so clearly has to do with people's lives that most people have some interest in it, even if it's not their field of choice.

The best example of this was demonstrated to us in one of my poli-sci classes that dealt with civil rights.

A man in a wheel chair took us out onto the street, and had us walk from the blacktop, onto the sidewalk. Obviously, we had little trouble.

When he tried to get onto the sidewalk in his wheel chair, however, he couldn't -- all because of the extra 4 inch of concrete that made up the sidewalk.

You won't know why you need those "dips" on the sidewalk, unless you saw a person in a wheelchair, struggling to be on his way.

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I know that this comment was more about emotional understanding, but I think the above example applies -- you may never understand what others are going through, because it's almost impossible to look at it from their point of view. So if someone tells you that they can or cannot do something, don't judge -- you will have no clue, unless you see that -- you have "legs," they don't.

I've never thought the same way about empathy and equality since.

'You won't know why you need those "dips" on the sidewalk, unless you saw a person in a wheelchair, struggling to be on his way.'

i can barely imagine needing to see that demonstrated to understand it. I understood it perfectly without a demonstration. Apparently you can't judge how hard it is for me. ( :

It's not a matter of understanding it, it's just one of those things that you would've never think about unless you were in a wheelchair.

That's really not at all true. Many people give thought to accessibility for disabilities that they do not suffer from.

Never mind, I read that wrong.

Anyway, seeing it definitely left an image burn on my brain so I guess it did work.

Man, my grammar's horrible today too.

That's it. I'm off to the bars.

Of course you have "an idea". Or call it an opinion if it makes the concept easier to grasp. I'm pretty sure you can (there, I just did it!).