On archetypes
Veer Hitesh Patel, 21 Jan. 2025
Being able to spot and understand specific archetypes of people is probably one of the most high ROI reasons to have a basic idea of current events in the world, and good pattern recognition capabilities. Walking into a room full of new people and knowing who to talk to can be cognitively demanding until you have large enough of a well trained database to know how each person will be like before you even interact with them. For example, the "Muslim boy with four sisters from Newham" or "the poor uncivilized mixed raced boy who lives in a flat". Of course these generalizations can be hard to make, but they help you navigate the world much more effectively in the long run as they will guarantee the quality of ideas to come out of a person, their behaviour, their habits. I'm in a new country now and feel agitated I'm not understanding the archetypes, because I did not grow up here.
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