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My (little) problems with Theory of Mind (ToM).

I have a theory. My theory is:

• That you too have self awareness.
• That your knowledge differs from mine.
• That you think about different thinks then I do.
• That although you have the same set of feelings that I do, you feel different about different things.

That is my theory.

Well, actually it isn’t my theory. It is one of the problems of people with autism I came across when I started reading about autism.
My theory is that this theory gets it’s name from the way people think about other people. You can’t really know whether other people have feelings, thoughts and knowledge. But you can theorize about it.

As I understand it people without autism think that ToM is a very important concept in communication theory. A lot of people with autism thinks it’s not.

The first ten months after I had discovered that I have autism I didn’t think that ToM posted a problem for me. Not only do I know about self awareness and the other three points on the list. But I recognized the problem in the guy who first made me aware that something was wrong with me.

He told me that he changed after his friend died and I didn’t understand him. It took me a month before I realized that he never told me how long ago his friend died. Only when he told me that it was something like eight years ago did I realize what he tried to tell me.
He never told me when this friend died because he assumed that I knew. But since I only knew this guy for a little over a year, at the time, and we had never talked, he should have known that I wouldn’t know that.

(He didn’t want to talk about his friend but about something that happened around the same time. This was something I recognized. People with autism have a problem with either the way they remember or the way they talk about things that happened in the past. As soon as I’ve figured this one out I’ll write an article about it.)

Clearly this guy has a problem judging which kind of knowledge I could have and which kind of knowledge I couldn’t have. So he has problems with ToM. But I don’t make this kind of mistakes. Or do I?

Two months ago I caught myself doing something really stupid. Sitting in the toilet I was thinking about ways to justify the amount of sheets of toilet paper I use.
What if someone would tell me that ten sheets are to many. Maybe you should only use eight or five sheets.
I was thinking that I could tell them to bugger off and leave me alone or something along that line. I spent a large amount of time thinking about how I could defend myself against critics.
This time though I finaly realized something. How could they know?
I live alone. But even if I didn’t, I’m alone in the toilet. Nobody can see how much toilet paper I use. Using the information in there computer somebody at the grocery could calculate how much toilet paper I use. But seeing as how unimportant this is, they probably wouldn’t.

Now I know. I know that nobody can possibly know how many sheets of toilet paper I use. But even after two months of thinking about this I still catch myself defending myself against criticism. I don’t do it as much as two months ago. But I still do it.
Although I know that people can’t know I still have the feeling they do.

Which brings me to the subject of lying.
I never lie.
I know that you’re supposed to tell the wife of your boss that she has a lovely dress but I won’t. I never get in this kind of situations but if I did, I wouldn’t spare her feelings.
But of course I don’t recognize her feelings so it’s only natural that I don’t think they are important.

I thought about lying. I remember a few instances in the last 20 years that I would have wanted to hide something and I thought about lying about it. But I always felt that it was pointless because it always would come out.
I’ve been in situations where I could have volunteered information but didn’t. But that isn’t really lying, is it?
I still feel that lying is something like telling people that the ceiling is black while everybody can see that it is white!

But a few days ago I’ve done it. I’ve told my first lie ever. Everybody who visits my website can see my lie and you don’t even know it.
I’m very proud of this new ability of mine.

If you look to the left (and a little up) you’ll see a list of popular post.
I have a plugin to calculate that. It gives points for:

• the times a post gets read by people visiting my site.
• the amount of links to a post.
• for the times a post gets read via my RSS feed.

It looks at a few more variable, but mostly at the times it gets read by visitors.

I’ve been annoyed with this plugin for as long as I have it.
There is something fundamentally flawed with any list that influences it’s own creation.

People visiting my site want to read my best work. So they will read the article that is on the top of the list. This article will get more points and stay on top.
The problem is that it is quite possible for a mediocre article to reach the top. That’s because when I first started using this plugin I didn’t have that many readers and articles didn’t get read that much.
Let’s say that when I first started using this plugin, article on average got read three times. That would mean that an article only would have to be read four time to reach top possition. After reaching top position the article would gain points just by virtue of being in first position.

I know from experience that some of my colleagues roam the internet looking for articles about the company. That means that any article about Promen – especially when I mention the name in the title of the article – will get read by four or five colleagues.
About a week after installing the popular post plugin I wrote an article entitled “Promen is running out of work (drawing: Truck 1th sketch)”. I don’t link to it because it wasn’t a very good article. For one thing the title didn’t match the subject of the article.

Today it wouldn’t matter if four or five colleagues read one of my articles only because the name Promen is mentioned. But a few months ago when I published this story it tipped the scale and put this article on top. Which resulted in the situation where one of my worst articles ever got read most.
To amend the situation I pulled the output of the plugin a few weeks ago. The plugin is still running. When I feel that the list has changed enough to be a real represent the populous of my posts I’ll put the list back in.
Or at least that was what I thought three weeks ago.

Two weeks ago I realized that nobody knows what the most popular article on my site is. Even I don’t know.
All the plugin tells me is which article has the most pageviews. But even if people leave within a second it still counts as a pageview.
So I could very easily make a list of articles and call it “popular post” and nobody would know. That is except for the people that read this site regularly. But like with most sites, although they are very important to me, the regulars only compose a small percentage of my total readership.
I could get away with it.

I thought about it for a few days. Looked at it from all angles to convince myself.
If theory of mind is really true it means that nobody knows what I know. I know that the popular post list on my site is false. But except if I tell, nobody will know.
Usually you would expect that the most popular article wouldn’t be a recent article. Since it would need some time to accumulate points. But the Blog rush site was something of a hype when it was first launched so it is possible that a lot of people would google for information and found my article that way, wouldn’t it?

Saturday I falsified my list, so here you have it. My first lie ever!

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