Nice example of geek exceptionalism there, dude.
Nah, just plain-vanilla arrogance :-D I am not quite sure I belong to the American geek culture, anyway.
But I was using "Joe Sixpack" there in the sense of "someone who is not a geek", or even "someone who isn't part of the specific cluster of techies that LW draws from"
Ah. I read "Joe Sixpack" as being slightly above "redneck" and slightly below "your average American with 2.2 children".
So do you mean people like engineers, financial quants, the Make community, bright-eyed humanities graduates? These people are generally not dumb. But I am still having trouble imagining what would you want to do inside their heads.
So do you mean people like engineers, financial quants, the Make community, bright-eyed humanities graduates? These people are generally not dumb. But I am still having trouble imagining what would you want to do inside their heads.
The first group of people I thought of was lawyers, who have both a higher-than-average baseline understanding of applied cognitive science and a strong built-in incentive to get better at it. I wouldn't stop there, of course; all sorts of people have reasons to improve their thinking and understanding, and even more have incentives to become more instrumentally effective.
As to what we'd do in their heads... same thing as we're trying to do in ours, of course.
Previous Open Thread: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/k9x/open_thread_may_26_june_1_2014/
(oops, we missed a day!)
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.
Notes for future OT posters:
1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.
2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one.
3. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.
4. Open Threads should be posted in Discussion, and not Main.