Qiaochu_Yuan comments on Open Thread, March 1-15, 2013 - Less Wrong

3 Post author: Jayson_Virissimo 01 March 2013 12:00PM

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Comment author: Qiaochu_Yuan 13 March 2013 06:27:49PM *  4 points [-]

I know 4 (I think?) people with prosopagnosia and maybe 800 people total, so my first guess is 0.5%. Wikipedia says 2.5% and the internet says it's difficult to determine the true prevalence because many people don't realize they have it (generalizing from one example, I assume). The observed prevalence in CFAR / MIRI is something like 25%?

So another plausible hypothesis is that rationalists are unusually good at diagnosing their own prosopagnosia and the actual base rate is higher than one would expect based on self-reports.

Comment author: beoShaffer 13 March 2013 07:40:11PM 0 points [-]

That is a big difference.