"Reading the room" describes the ~10% most immediate part of a basic critical human social instinct that extends to our entire civilization. It's an individual skill that is not inborn, ie it must be learned and cultivated - but that does mean different people are dramatically better and worse at it.
I believe this large spread is behind a lot of the popular disconnects about the current social favor of the AI/LLM bubble.
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@jplebreton i think most people will subtly alter the way they label their own perception ("lie to themselves" i suppose) to make their preferred emotional conclusion more likely to be true. one of the more malleable ways to do this is to push or relax definitions slightly, so, if so motivated, you could easily believe AI is popular because "all those people hating datacenters don't count" or "people use instagram filters which is AI" or "i only count the AI people who understand AI" or whatever
"But isn't one's 'read' all hopelessly subjective? Isn't it all defined by your ingroup/outgroup relations? Aren't we all in our own little bubbles, and have only a dim idea of what's really going on in distant spheres of social discourse?" - all that being said, I think people who believe that "AI is very popular and only getting moreso" are whiffing on very significant macro-social cues all around them, because of various social and ideological biases.
We'll see, I guess!