Zubon comments on Humans in Funny Suits - Less Wrong

22 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 30 July 2008 11:54PM

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Comment author: Zubon 05 August 2008 03:23:33PM 0 points [-]

This post series was seriously undermining my enjoyment of Hellboy 2 last weekend.

We have plenty of aliens available on our planet. We already have citations of animals and termites in these comments. My most recent reading on that was Mary Roach's Bonk, which enters via the topic of pig orgasms. We have trouble recognizing the emotional states of species not that different from us because we are looking for similar facial expressions; and where we see things that look like human facial expressions, we infer similar emotional states; and this is already assuming that other species have human emotional states.

AnneC, I find the same "effort" thing in dealing with my co-workers, with everyone more or less neurotypical. I do mostly quantitative work, and they are mostly innumerate. That seems to be a big enough distance. Most have no concept of whether a request will take five minutes or a week, or even what constitutes a well-formed request. I assume this is the case for most of us: those outside our specialties have trouble telling which are the hard cases.