Followed by the “I have outlined how a typical conversation on this platform will play out” guy

lol, made me chuckle.

It's a pet peeve of mine how often programmers argue from their niche perspective without even attempting to think of things from a broader or different perspective. It's especially annoying when it goes from "people do X" to "well I do Y so nyah!".

It's not hard or difficult, you just have to try!

Does it get easier over time? I asked the most socially adept person I know about how she's so good with people. She said, "I just picture myself in their shoes." She made it sound easy, so I tried it, and phew! It's tough! It made me wonder whether part of the reason why perspective-taking is easy for her is because she's practiced it so much.

I suppose it’s a skill like anything else.

It’s also not binary. The biggest UX experts in the world will still be shocked by what people do in a user study! There’s always surprises.

Understanding a very specific individual is pretty hard! But I think understanding that there are literally billions of smart phone users and that some of them will be happy to buy expensive phones and some will be prefer to buy cheap phones is pretty straight forward! The larger the group being considered the less valuable a personal anecdote is!