AndyWood comments on That Magical Click - Less Wrong

58 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 20 January 2010 04:35PM

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Comment author: pjeby 20 January 2010 06:34:15PM 138 points [-]

My best guess is that clickiness has something to do with failure to compartmentalize - missing, or failing to use, the mental gear that lets human beings believe two contradictory things at the same time. Clicky people would tend to be people who take all of their beliefs at face value.

One of the things that I've noticed about this is that most people do not expect to understand things. For most people, the universe is a mysterious place filled with random events beyond their ability to comprehend or control. Think "guessing the teacher's password", but not just in school or knowledge, but about everything.

Such people have no problem with the idea of magic, because everything is magic to them, even science.

An anecdote: once, when I still worked as software developer/department manager in a corporation, my boss was congratulating me on a million dollar project (revenue, not cost) that my team had just turned in precisely on time with no crises.

Well, not congratulating me, exactly. He was saying, "wow, that turned out really well", and I felt oddly uncomfortable. After getting off the phone, I realized a day or so later that he was talking about it like it was luck, like, "wow, what nice weather we had."

So I called him back and had a little chat about it. The idea that the project had succeeded because I designed it that way had not occurred to him, and the idea that I had done it by the way I negotiated the requirements in the first place -- as opposed to heroic efforts during the project -- was quite an eye opener for him.

Fortunately, he (and his boss) were "clicky" enough in other areas (i.e., they didn't believe computers were magic, for example) that I was able to make the math of what I was doing click for them at that "teachable moment".

Unfortunately, most people, in most areas of their lives treat everything as magic. They're not used to being able to understand or control anything but the simplest of things, so it doesn't occur to them to even try. Instead, they just go along with whatever everybody else is thinking or doing.

For such (most) people, reality is social, rather than something you understand/ control.

(Side note: I find myself often trying to find a way to express grasp/control as a pair, because really the two are the same. If you really grasp something, you should be able to control it, at least in principle.)

Comment author: AndyWood 20 January 2010 07:24:01PM *  27 points [-]

This is overwhelmingly how I perceive most people. This in particular: 'reality is social'.

I have personally traced the difference, in myself, to receiving this book at around the age of three or four. It has illustrations of gadgets and appliances, with cut-out views of their internals. I learned almost as soon as I was capable of learning, that nothing is a mysterious black box, things that seem magical have internal detail, and there are explanations for how they work. Whether or not I had anything like a pre-existing disposition that made me love and devour the book in the first place, I still consider it to have had a bigger impact on my whole world view than anything else I can remember.

Comment author: FourFire 23 January 2014 09:14:34PM 2 points [-]

This is mine which I recieved at around age six. I don't recall how many tens of times I read and reread those pages.

Comment author: VAuroch 31 December 2013 07:35:51PM 2 points [-]

I got Macaulay's The Way Things Work (the original) at a slightly higher age. I suspect a big reason I became a computer scientist was the joy of puzzling through the adder diagrams and understanding why they worked.

Comment author: Nisan 23 January 2014 11:35:10PM 1 point [-]

I traced those adder diagrams as a child as well, and it surely was a formative experience.