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rhollerith_dot_com comments on Checking for the Programming Gear - Less Wrong
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My experience with my friends without the gear suggests that an pretty good test on adults for the programming gear is to see if they have retained certain kinds of knowledge of arithmetic that schools everywhere try to teach young children.
E.g. ask multiple-choice questions like, "Express .2 as a fraction," and, "Express 1/4 as a decimal," listing 1/2 as one of the choices for the first question.
Another decent one, I am guessing is, "Which is a better deal for someone that knows they are probably going to keep taking Zowie pills for a long time: a bottle of 60 Zowie pills for $45 or a bottle of 100 pills for $80?" E.g., a simple alegbra word problem of a kind with which most people with economic concerns would regularly keep in practice just by being a consumer.
Note: this is me reply to myself (which I concede is a little lame and maybe I shouldn't've.)
I forgot my favorite question of this type, which, BTW, a couple of doctors I consulted did not seem to be able to answer: how many micrograms in .05 milligrams?
In other words, my hypothesis is that the way to identify the "programming gear" is to test knowledge of some really simple "formal system" such as arithmetic or metric-system prefixes that one would expect adults with a practical command of the simple formal system to be well-rehearsed in.