RE: https://newsie.social/@TheConversationUK/116147553248382659 I'm just an autistic layman with a contrarian streak, so I could easily be talking out me arse, but I can't help but feel 'theory of mind,' a bit like the concept of 'general intelligence,' is psychological dark matter. It looks like there's something there but we don't know what it is or how it works, or even whether it's one thing or a bunch of phenomena we don't know about interacting in ways that are unclear to us, so chuck it in the neatly labeled box and let's all pretend we have some sort of coherent model of how things work. The big difference is that physics is a lot more easily testable and far more objective, so even if nobody knows what dark matter is, we can be pretty sure it's there and not just the tester's confirmation bias wearing Groucho Marx glasses. I might be being really unfair to researchers here, I don't know, but I keep seeing headlines like, 'It Turns Out Autistic People Can Feel Complex Emotions' and it's giving me acid reflux.