Read my mind

When I came home from work, my spouse asked how about my day and I grumbled an answer “fine” and trudged into my room to change clothes. You can imagine that my greeting was not exactly enthusiastic nor showed any appreciation. But that is the person that knows me best and should understand what’s going on in my head to realize idiot coworkers and bad drivers were the cause of my disgruntlement, right? Pshaw! Since when is mind reading a real skill?

Often we see news stories where the pundits are explaining motivations and reasons for the actions by the person in their story. The revelation is shocking! That person is so selfish/racist/sexist/etc… Yet, how do they know what that person thinks? Oh, right, they are interviewing the person and asking them. Except… no, they are not even talking to them. If you cannot even know why someone close to you does something, then how can you know why a stranger did something? In critical thinking, we are objectively looking for an explanation for a situation and evaluating available evidence. Then we evaluate that information itself for credibility before attributing it to explanations. As the amount of facts decrease, the role of judgement in our assessment increases. The more dependent we are on judgement, the probably for errors increases. So if your assessment comes down to mind reading, you are not relying upon facts at all and any conclusions you have would be guesswork with high probability of error. Additionally, those guesses are likely to be influenced by biases and mindsets of the mind reader.

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