HughRistik comments on The Social Coprocessor Model - Less Wrong

22 [deleted] 14 May 2010 05:10PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (570)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Wei_Dai 14 May 2010 07:41:35PM *  14 points [-]

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.

Comment author: HughRistik 14 May 2010 09:54:55PM 4 points [-]

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?

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.