Well, it is true that I think that I think to post effectively on LW is to translate my rather diverse life experience to Americanese and it is leaky. But it is nowhere this leaky.

There are mind people and body people. Where it comes from is a good question, but this phenomenon goes back to tribal chieftains vs. shamans, warriors vs clergy and who knows where.

Ultimately it comes from the fact that man is a smart animal and these two aspects are in a constant tension. Satoshi Kanazawa have put it so that as IQ is a general problem-solver, it tends to suppress earlier adapted problem-solver instincts, making intelligent people not too good at things like common sense, read signs of romantic attraction, pick up social cues and so on.

So this problem already arose at the earliest tribal societies, of the triangular chieftain - shaman - warrior dynamic. The warriors were the perfectly primates, who represented what is in humans like in every animal, who respected physical health and strength, liked such challenges, liked tackling problems head-on preferably clubbing them over the head, liked direct and impulsive action and raised the fiercest of them as chieftains. And the shaman was the intellectual who represented what is specifically human in man, the intelligence, which was back then probably interpreted as suggestions from spirits and gods perhaps through a bicameral mind setup.

If Kanazawa is right that the tension is inherent, because not only stupid people are not smart but also smart people are not good at being instinctive and sensible, then I think that explains it. But even when not I think the basic tension can also be seen empirically.

Liberal-arts intelligentsia and hackers are of the same mind-people, ex-clergy, ex-shaman stock. The whole point is that with some influence from body people they are more likely to become hackers than postmodernists :-) (Intelligentsia is much more a French than Russian concept.)

And the get-shit-done comes from the same body-orientation as machismo or sports come from, as our heads can be in any kinds of clouds but our body is always in the here in now, it is through the body how minds have contact with reality. People who care about their ass sitting on an uncomfortable chair will be practical and fix the chair. People who are not interested in their ass being uncomfortable because the body is a mere lowly vessel of their minds won't.