I've been trying to wrap my head around a specific quirk of human psychology: why are we so terrible at standing in someone else's shoes?

We assume empathy is a default setting. If I explain my side well enough, you should get it, right? Literature has a different view.reading David McRaney's book on this, and he points to the late psychologist Lee Ross.

Ross spent 40 years in conflict negotiation—Israel/Palestine, Northern Ireland. He found that people almost never considered the other side's perspective until explicitly asked to.

It's not malice. It's cognitive economy. "Analogic perspective-taking"—imagining what it's like to be someone else—is high-level cognition. It burns metabolic energy. Unless prompted, our brains just won't do the work. We stick to our own reality because it's cheaper.

So the question becomes: How do we force that software to boot up? If we don't do it naturally, what triggers it?

Research suggests we're approaching it all wrong. We usually try to overwhelm people with data. But data doesn't trigger empathy; it triggers defense.

There's this concept of "Naive Realism"—we think we see the world as it is, and others are just biased. when you challenge that, the brain protects its identity.

To get someone to use their analytical mind, you have to bypass that threat detection first. literature on "Deep Canvassing" and "Street Epistemology" converges on one insight: arguments trigger defense, but stories and curiosity bypass it.

By sharing vulnerable narratives or asking how a belief was formed rather than what it is, we shift the brain from combat to reflective puzzle solving to help dissect their visceral views well.

Ultimately, we can't force someone to see our view; we have to build a "ramp" of questions that allows them to walk there themselves.

When James Damore's memo first leaked, it sparked a binary war: you either believed the gender gap was purely biological or purely systemic. But as I've looked closer at the data and the culture, I've realized that both sides are missing the most critical piece of the puzzle.

The problem with Damore's argument isn't that he looked at biology—it's that he stopped there.

Damore treated biological differences like a final destination. He argued that because women might, on average, score higher in traits like agreeableness or an interest in people, they are naturally less suited for the high-stress, systemizing world of software engineering. To him, biology is the cause of the gap.

I disagree. I believe biology is not the cause, but the "raw material" that we choose to misinterpret.

Here is where I believe Damore got it wrong:

1. He confuses Difference with Deficit

Damore points to higher levels of agreeableness in women as a reason for lower salary negotiations and leadership representation. By doing this, he frames a biological trait as a professional weakness. He doesn't ask the more important question: Why does our corporate structure reward aggression and penalize collaboration? The problem isn't the trait; it's the way we've built the "game" to favor one specific biological expression over another.

2. He ignores the Interpretive Marker

Damore sees a biological marker—like a preference for people-oriented work—and assumes it's a barrier to coding. I see it as a signpost that society reads incorrectly. When a woman exhibits a "people-oriented" trait, our current culture often subjectively interprets that as a lack of technical focus. We are taking a neutral biological baseline and layering a biased interpretation on top of it.

3. He treats averages as destiny

While Damore acknowledges that distributions overlap, his conclusions still rely on the idea that tech as it exists today is a fixed, immovable environment that women must biologically adapt to. He fails to see that tech culture is a subjective social construct. If the environment is built to read certain traits as un-technical, the resulting gap isn't a biological inevitability—it's a failure of our interpretation.

The Path Forward

We don't need to deny biology to fight for equality. Instead, we need to realize that biology only provides the markers—it's our biased, subjective interpretation of those markers that creates the wall.

The goal is to stop arguing about whether the gap is "nature or nurture" and start looking at how we can change the way we value the traits that nature provides. We shouldn't be asking women to be less "agreeable" to succeed; we should be asking why our leadership models are so narrow that they can't see the value in it.

Watching this video, I expected a philosophical spiral, but it turned into a science-backed tour of how reality keeps us guessing. The "Existential Crisis Iceberg" chart is equal parts meme and map—each layer pulls in a different model for how the universe might work.

The idea that "observation creates the universe" lit up a familiar curiosity: our eyes invert what they see, and the brain quietly flips it back. What other "obvious" facts are really just constant adaptations?

Then entropy shows up with the Boltzmann brain thought experiment: in an infinite timescale, the unlikely becomes inevitable—maybe even us.

And if consciousness could hop timelines, the many-worlds interpretation hints that every decision spawns another version of us. The catch is assuming consciousness is bound to the body—something the quantum suicide experiment loves to poke at.

That's the fun (and the threat) with existential frameworks: the closer you look, the more physics and philosophy try to explain each other.

The solution is boredom. Completely delete all the options. Invite Boredom. Make the thing you need to do the only option apart from Boredom and wait for the magic.

The lack of distractions invites the boredom you need.

If you have something you need to do, clear all the things that can act like a distraction.

Always remember; You can just do things.

Human neural pathways are coerced or enforced to solidify memories, but that doesn't guarantee that they are pertinent and persistent every time when needed.

These pathways fade out and most times, when required, fail to stay consistent with the previous knowledge or experience.

This is a clear example of why you are less likely to remember all the books you have read when asked, but rather know when you have read a book when the book's title pops up.

This is great insight for asking questions. How then do you structure your questions to suit a situation where you demand less vague opinions? Questions that would require some neural pathways to fire again, but have them recall instances with pathways that are independent but somehow activate the desired pathways.

E.g. You would want to know the scoreline from a particular match about a month ago. Recalling that would somehow be difficult because you are being required to fire a particular pathway that had stored the scoreline in your head for a particular time period.

So in this instance, it is better to call out if a player the person liked or made prominence in that match had scored a goal or contributed something meaningful. If the said player performance was so spectacular to remember, the person would more likely know the scoreline by levels of inference. That guy did this and that and that would mean (activating the memory pathway that stored the scoreline in the match) this was the scoreline of the match.

This approach would greatly improve how people remember things and how they are going to be enforced in the mind later on. This is all an assumption and would hope that this generally holds any significant value to the Neurosciences.

References:

• Vsauce