people will ask you, “why did you do X, you should have just done Y!”
and you’ll try to explain that Y would only have been appropriate if the situation was A, and would have been disastrous if it was B, and you were not in fact sure at the time whether the situation was A or B
and then they’ll say, “well OBVIOUSLY it was A, there is no imaginable way it could have been B!”
and then, put in this position, you are forced, in self-defense, to expend the effort of explaining several possible ways it could, in fact, have been B, as far as you could tell at the time (possibilities which you were taking into account when you made the choice)
and then they will glare at you, and say, in a voice barely holding itself back from tearing into you for being such a monumental waste of their time with your made-up imaginary scenarios: “But that’s not how it actually was!”
and then you try, desperately, to get across the concept of how you could not possibly have been certain of that, not with the information you had at your disposal in the moment you made the decision
…but, by this time, your explanation has simply exhausted the human capacity for imagining another person’s thoughts, and all hope is lost
most people are actually pretty terrible at theory of mind… compared to how much skill they’d need to have at it, in order to avoid most of the asinine time-wasting conflicts that erode their connections to other human beings
basic theory of mind is like, “what do I imagine he is thinking?"
and when you ask "what do you imagine he is thinking about what she thinks?” you’re already straining most people’s theory of mind, in my experience
by the time you get to “what do you imagine he’s thinking about what she thinks he’s thinking?” you’ve got no hope
…even though all of these levels of theory of mind are deeply important to having any functional interactions with the rest of the world
one real example of the third one, which has haunted my memory for years:
there was a scene in some work of fiction, where a man imagined starting a conversation with a woman, but then imagined she would interpret it as an unwelcome sexual or romantic advance and would yell at him for it, so he remained quiet
and i saw a bunch of people ranting very angrily about how they viewed the man in the scene as a sexual harasser who totally should receive the angry response that he imagined getting from the woman
and a few times, someone in the conversation would go, “but… the comment he considered making wasn’t offensive… it could easily have been just an attempt to make friendly conversation with another person regardless of gender… why should anyone respond to him that way?"
but those people would get shut down with an absolute tirade from the critics, berating them for how stupid they were
and this tirade wouldn’t even use any argument analyzing the comment itself, or looking at it from the woman’s viewpoint (which could have been valid criticisms!)
….instead they always would just go something like,
"we can see that the man was not thinking about just being friendly and making conversation! otherwise he wouldn’t be imagining that entire rant from the woman about how she didn’t want to be hit on!”
…it was like they had no critical thinking to draw the distinction between “he wants to harass her” and “he is worried she will think he wants to harass her”
…not to mention “he is worried she will think he wants to harass her– and therefore he does want to harass her– and therefore she should yell at him if he says anything to her– even though she would have no way of knowing what’s going on in his mind– so it’s unclear why we’re judging her hypothetical behavior based solely on what we know about his thoughts?”
this feels to me like a very obvious thing the people in this conversation were overlooking
but, technically, it is at the level of “what do I imagine she would think about what he thinks she’s thinking about what he thinks?”
….and that is considerably beyond where people stop keeping track, most of the time