Friendship with telepathy
Imagine that people could read each other’s minds, at least once they knew each other and focused on each other’s presence in a common physical space. They can’t do this perfectly or with full transparency, but still they have a much better idea what the other person is thinking and feeling than what they receive today from external signals. They can even “feel” those thoughts from the other at some times, leading to potential embarrassment, both.in positive and negative ways of course. Still, some noise remains, so you are never sure just how intentional, explicit, or sincere a “sampled thought” might be.
Solve for the equilibrium:
1. Many people would develop thicker skins, as they would learn what others really thought of them. They also would tolerate more evil thoughts from others, though at the margin most people still would try to look better rather than worse.
2. A large minority of people, for instance potential child molesters, could not go out in public very much.
3. Sometimes we would meet people and, before initiating a friendship, decide to “get everything out of the way.” Think all the bad (and good?) thoughts up front, and acknowledge this mutually. Make it clear that this is your standard practice with all your friends. Then, if the person later on catches you having a particular thought, you can just say, or intuit, back to them: “Of course I am thinking of stealing a dollar from you. I thought that on the very first day we met, right after wishing you didn’t get that big raise. You’re simply sampling residual memories from all the intentional sins we committed together when initiating our friendship. We did that so subsequent negative signals aren’t really new signals at all.”
And it’s not just thoughts: people preemptively might do everything they are afraid others might discover they are thinking. Get it out of the way. Restore that pooling equilibrium, as they say. Make sure everyone has every thought, using action if need be.
4. A boss hiring a new worker may try to prevent the worker from going through this “mind clearing” process early on. The worker may try to do it. And trying to engage in “mind clearing” with your boss may not be such a negative signal if everyone has unacceptable thoughts of some kind or another. We’re just trying to get back to an equilibrium where those thoughts don’t matter so much. Is that so terrible?
What else?
5. You might keep special friends, with whom you don’t act out or think through all the possible suspicions in advance. In essence they would be “surprise friends.” We would call them surprise friends because you would sample their thoughts in real time and with some degree of surprise. Those sampled thoughts actually would contain significant new information about what the person was thinking about you. Having a surprise friend might be considered a sign of courage.
6. Alternatively, people might simply prefer dopey friends, namely those with weak telepathic abilities.
7. Other people will form vice groups, somewhat akin to current gangs.
8. Note that if you can interpret the bad thoughts of others in a truly Bayesian manner (“well, that may sound horrible, but most of the other people are thinking something much worse…”), it is harder for other people to engage in the signal-jamming equilibrium of transmitting all bad thoughts in advance. You would take their signal-jamming as a very negative signal of what their true thoughts are like, and thus the better people would refrain from signal-jamming. At the margin, thoughts would become relevant again, including bad thoughts.
Is there thus a positive or negative social value to an individual turning more Bayesian in this setting, and thus discouraging the signal-jamming in advance?
What else?