LessWrong (30+ Karma)

“How the aliens next door shower” by Ruby


Listen Later

Episode Recap

In this series, I have been building up the argument that other people's internal psychology is much weirder and a lot more alien than it seems on the surface, and that this explains why most humans on this planet fail to make obvious and important inferences. They just don't think right.

Supporting arguments so far:

  1. Human thought has a lot more degrees of freedom than we manage to remember because surface-level conscious thoughts are made up of many little micro-acts of cognition that we don't think about. Elaboration here.
  2. Even when they can theoretically execute the same mental motions (not always), e.g., make a deductive argument, different people (and groups of people) have learned very different patterns of using different mental motions. Elaboration here.

Today's supporting argument is:

Hidden behavior is more varied and surprising than you think

The claim goes like this: when behavior is publicly observed, e.g., how we eat food, or simply how we walk and talk, there is a regularizing and standardizing effect. What mix of conformity instinct, mimicry, and practical convenience causes this, I'm not sure. Restaurants probably like it that they stock knife/fork/spoon, and maybe also chopsticks, and not a [...]

---

Outline:

(00:09) Episode Recap

(01:02) Hidden behavior is more varied and surprising than you think

(04:01) What about them shower thoughts?

The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.

---

First published:

November 19th, 2025

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CEexspLWxmSAbv9X9/how-the-aliens-next-door-shower

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

---

Images from the article:

Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

...more
View all episodesView all episodes
Download on the App Store

LessWrong (30+ Karma)By LessWrong


More shows like LessWrong (30+ Karma)

View all
Making Sense with Sam Harris by Sam Harris

Making Sense with Sam Harris

26,330 Listeners

Conversations with Tyler by Mercatus Center at George Mason University

Conversations with Tyler

2,453 Listeners

The Peter Attia Drive by Peter Attia, MD

The Peter Attia Drive

8,557 Listeners

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas by Sean Carroll | Wondery

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

4,182 Listeners

ManifoldOne by Steve Hsu

ManifoldOne

93 Listeners

Your Undivided Attention by The Center for Humane Technology, Tristan Harris, Daniel Barcay and Aza Raskin

Your Undivided Attention

1,601 Listeners

All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg by All-In Podcast, LLC

All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg

9,927 Listeners

Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST) by Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST)

Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST)

95 Listeners

Dwarkesh Podcast by Dwarkesh Patel

Dwarkesh Podcast

511 Listeners

Hard Fork by The New York Times

Hard Fork

5,512 Listeners

The Ezra Klein Show by New York Times Opinion

The Ezra Klein Show

15,931 Listeners

Moonshots with Peter Diamandis by PHD Ventures

Moonshots with Peter Diamandis

545 Listeners

No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups by Conviction

No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups

131 Listeners

Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast by swyx + Alessio

Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast

94 Listeners

BG2Pod with Brad Gerstner and Bill Gurley by BG2Pod

BG2Pod with Brad Gerstner and Bill Gurley

467 Listeners