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brian_jaress comments on The fallacy of work-life compartmentalization - Less Wrong
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Thanks, that's a good point. There's some authorial sleight of hand going on with that anecdote: I'm telling it to give the reader the feeling of what it's like to see a smart person fail at something basic because they fail to cross domains, but when writing I couldn't actually come up with a real example that was simple enough to fit in one paragraph.
The kind of real examples I had in mind involve the "tests" that people come up with when trying to diagnose a bug or other kind of breakdown, and they make a basic category mistake like trying to "fix" a keyboard stuck in AZERTY instead of QWERTY by unplugging the keyboard and plugging it back in. (And here again, I'm resorting to a simplified example to get my point across.) They know the hardware/software distinction, but they're failing to apply it to their current situation, and instead falling back on "trying" random things. With some justification, because quite often it's what they see "experts" do...
I would suggest the example of someone not getting the evil bit joke.
It's good because it works both ways. You only need common sense to understand it, but lay people can be intimidated by the context into not applying common sense, and you'll sometimes see domain experts try to implement essentially the same thing because they turn off common sense while in their domain.