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Wei_Dai comments on The Social Coprocessor Model - Less Wrong
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What about the other side of the same coin: how can we get neurotypicals to use more of their cognitive resources to solve non-social (e.g., technical) problems? When I look at people who seem to spend almost all of their time and energy playing social games that largely don't matter, I can't help but think "what a waste."
To use myself as an example, I think I'm neurotypical, but lost interest in making friends and socializing in my teenage years due to negative feedback (not "fitting in" after immigrating from China and having different interests from my peers). As a result, I now have a lot more time to think about technical and philosophical problems. And while perhaps not quite GPGPU, I speculate that due to neuroplasticity, some of my neurons that would have gone into running social interactions are now being used for other purposes instead.
Since when do social games not matter?
When your utility function assigns little weight to them. Social games matter quite a bit to a lot of people, and less to others. I know that sounds almost tautological, but the point is that people differ here.
Even if they don't matter as terminal values, it doesn't mean they don't matter as instrumental values either.
Even if you don't like or care about social games, other things you may care about can depend on them, such as:
For social games to truly not matter, you need to have a very narrow preference set where you not only don't care for social games, but you don't need or want anything that can be achieved by them. It would be like not caring about money, and also not caring about anything money can buy you. It's possible to have that preference set; it's just a tall order.
A large amount of doors in neurotypical society are closed to you if you can't play social games at some level. I would speculate that for many people who think they don't care about silly things like social games, those very social games actually do impact other things they care about, and they are either unaware of that impact or in denial about it.
I think social games do matter, just not nearly to the degree that most people seem to think, judging from how they spend their time. I think the explanation for this is that social games mattered much more in the past than they do now, but most people don't realize this yet. And on the other side, there are a lot more opportunities for technical problem solving, which weren't available in the past.
I was bullied in school, but eventually graduated, and I don't think anyone tried to push me around after starting work. If they did, I would have complained to my boss or changed jobs. In a less mobile society, if you didn't know how to "handle yourself", you were probably stuck with low status for life.
Being single isn't that bad. I imagine it was a lot worse in the past, where there was much less you could do to entertain yourself.
I spent most of my spare time in college writing an open source C++ library, which led to plenty of business and job opportunities. I really doubt that I would have gotten more opportunities if I had spent most of my time socializing instead. I also didn't put any effort into networking after starting work, and I don't think that it's hurt me much.
Looking back at my past job interviews, I now realize that when the interviewer asked me what salary range I was expecting, that was supposed to be the start of the negotiation. At the time, I just told them honestly that I don't know, and that I care more about how interesting the job is than the salary.
That was probably not optimal, but I don't think I was hurt too badly by my lack of negotiation skill. And the reason for this is that salaries and other prices are constrained by market competition, and markets are more efficient today than in the past, leaving less room for negotiation.
Let's use them to simulate an economy!
LOLed and upvoted.
(Well, it was more like I made a wheezing screeching noise than an actual "laugh" out loud, but still...)
I've thought a bit about this question, and what I've come up with so far is that neurotypicals will become more interested in developing technical abilities when doing so is considered cool, and all their friends are doing it.