“you’re making so many assumptions about me”
— some people
(they mean hasty inferences otherwise known as presumptions but that’s not the point.)
presumptions about people are great because you can kinda-know a ton about people based on extremely limited information. here are some old reliables:
if someone knows what "bad dragon" is I'm immediately assigning a very high probability that they've seen an entire cluster of adjacent content on the internet based on only that, and this approaches near certainty if they know what "bad dragon" and "vore" are simultaneously. this works because bad dragon is compounded weirdness, i.e. it's multiple weird things in a single thing, so phrased another way you're also indirectly assessing the likelihood that someone is familiar with it while being completely unfamiliar with the adjacent phenomena — which isn't very likely. you can do this knowledge-fishing thing with any trait where knowledge of a thing requires multiple contingencies to be true, like if someone in the US knows the statute of limitations on debt collections in their state, or knows the price of a cessna.
likewise there are certain authors that just cause people to want to have opinions of them before they’ve ever actually been truly familiar with the primary source material. both jordan peterson and karl marx have this attribute, but also david foster wallace. anyway I judge people who do this opinion-grabbing thing really hard and it’s been a fantastic shortcut to find out who actually reads things versus who is hazardous to pay too much attention to.
finally if someone talks about "building another" (insert: dating app / social network) without emphasizing the importance of seeding the app with an initial active userbase I’m going to immediately dismiss them as someone who glosses over important and obvious social details and they become a lower hierarchy of nerd, in fact "tech guys who miss some extremely obvious normie thing they could’ve caught on to by just going out and asking regular people about it" is an entire category in my head.
presumptions are not just a thing people do, they’re essential for social organization at the most basic level as they allow you to sort through people really easily with incomplete information. you definitely do this already, because human interaction would be impossible if you couldn’t do that. you’d be unable to threat model whosoever, nor would you be able to get a sense for who to work with or who to be friends with. so, seeing as you already agree with me whether you know it or not, let’s appreciate that presumptions are in fact pretty great.
