This seems like a pretty good example of what I was talking about in my reply to the OP. You gave a significant disadvantage, but then a great advantage to even it out. As always, it's socially easier to sell an identity that's a well-balanced bundle of strengths and weaknesses than it is to go around claiming to be 100% awesome.
It may also be important to point out that with each pair, the drawback tends to be more mundane (clumsy, bad at socializing, etc.), and the benefit is usually something much more "majestic" (can't think of a good word for this, but it's usually something that has less to do with our "material" existence and more to do with philosophizing, thinking, and so on).
For the utility function of the speaker or his intended audience, the drawback tends to be much less damaging than the benefit is helpful (e.g., "who cares about my athletic ability? we live in a world dominated by intellectuals!"), but for the purpose of signaling, the pairs tend to sound as if they are related enough to balance each other out. In your comment, the disadvantage was "incredibly poor memory regarding spatial relations", and the advantage was "my verbal and visual memory are superb".
They sound like they balance each other out, but of course the point is that the former is a much more "base" incompetence, and the second is what's much more useful in this day and age--one dominated not by strong, sturdy hunter-gatherers or traditional farmers, but by physically clumsy academics and scientists.
To cut this short, I should close by saying that the test for whether or not you're engaged in destructive social signaling is simple: Are you disturbed by your "incredibly poor memory regarding spatial relations", or have you simply welcomed it as a part of your identity? Has your awareness of this fact impelled you to try to fix it, or have you let it linger uncontested?
For reference, if I personally had that problem, I would be reacting something like this: "WTF IS GOING ON?? I MUST FIX THIS." Or at the very least, I certainly wouldn't accept it as a fun aspect of my identity.
It is a royal pain in the ass, and I certainly don't view it as some sort of adorable quirk. It hinders my social life and occasionally makes me feel completely incompetent. Getting lost when you're on your own is one thing, but getting lost with a date is a completely different level of embarrassment. I'm not sure where you got the idea that I think this is some sort of "fun aspect" of my personality, it's a patch of uselessness in my brain which I have to work around all the time. The reason I pointed out some positive characteristics was becau...
Partially to help reduce the typical mind fallacy and partially because I'm curious, I'm thinking about writing either an essay or a book with plenty of examples about ways by which human minds differ. From commonly known and ordinary, like differences in sexual orientation, to the rare and seemingly impossible, like motion blindness.
To do this, I need to start collecting examples. In what ways does your mind differ from what you think is the norm for most people?
I'm particularly interested in differences - small or large - that you didn't realize for a long time, automatically assuming that everyone was like you in that regard. It can even be something as trivial as always having conceptualized the passing of years as a visual timeline, and then finding out that not everyone does so. I'm also interested in links to blog posts where people talk about their own mental peculiarities, even if you didn't write them yourself. Also books and academic articles that you might think could be relevant.
Some of the content that I'm thinking about including are cultural differences in various things as recounted in the WEIRD article, differences in sexual and romantic orientation (such as mono/poly), differences in the ability to recover from setbacks, extroversion vs. introversion in terms of gaining/losing energy from social activity, differences in visualization ability, various cognitive differences ranging from autism to synesthesia to an inability to hear music in particular, differences in moral intuitions, differences in the way people think (visual vs. verbal vs. conceptual vs. something that I'm not aware of yet), differences in thinking styles (social/rational, reflectivity vs. impulsiveness) and various odd brain damage cases.
If you find this project interesting, consider spreading the link to this post or resharing my Google Plus update about it. Also, if you don't want to reply in public, feel free to send me a private message.