Pretty excited about the post I’m currently working on!

Here’s an excerpt:

Other people are agents too. Everybody else has their own goals, their own model of how the world works, and their own constraints on what they can do. Truly understanding this (really understanding it, not just nodding along) isn’t just a natural stage of development. It’s a disposition, a cultural tendency, and a teachable skill that one can intentionally learn and cultivate. Most people plateau at a level far below what is possible. The difference between people who really get it and people who don't explains a surprising amount: avoidable wars, pointless arguments, relationship catastrophes, organizations that can't coordinate, negotiations that fail for no good reason.

This idea goes by many names: “Theory of Mind” is the phrase I find the most helpful. Other terms from other fields might include strategic modeling, level-k-thinking, intentional stance, decentering, stakeholder analysis, (non-) hope chess, sonder, alterity, or polyphony. Still others might call it “strategic empathy,” “cognitive empathy”, or just “empathy.”  

The core idea is very simple: treat other agents as real. It sounds banal, until you realize how rare it can be, and how frequently people mess up.