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It's surreal to have innate feelings and thought patterns that are completely intuitive to you, but it turns out that 99% of people think differently.

I always assume that my brain is structured in a way that at least 5% of people could relate to my general thought processes, but it turns out that some of my experiences of being a human are really just a "me" thing. I've often told myself that I'm just like everyone else, and that all of my personality traits are explainable by a mishmash of stereotypes and systemic influences. But I guess there's more to it than that, and I've been selling myself a bit short.

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  • For me it's the opposite: I'm always shocked when broadly different people end up aligning on certain similar traits along multiple axes. Like conlanging and Linux or trans girls and communism.

  • Recently experienced this with my wife. We both described ourselves as internally organizing information "like bullet points".

    She means memorization of countless individual facts all stored/categorized at the same level.

    I tend to use bullet point lists to organize things hierarchically. Least indented is the high level takeaway, indented ones below are extended info for the less indented point above. That's how I tend to organize knowledge. I've learned that apparently this is not as ubiquitous as I believed.

    It illuminates some deep seated causes behind a some of the friction in our relationship, but unfortunately it doesn't do much to help me see any way around them unfortunately.

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