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Lumifer comments on Open thread, 3-8 June 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion

3 Post author: David_Gerard 03 June 2014 08:57AM

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Comment author: Lumifer 04 June 2014 04:57:50AM 1 point [-]

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.

Comment author: Nornagest 04 June 2014 05:02:37AM *  5 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Lumifer 04 June 2014 05:11:10AM 0 points [-]

same thing as we're trying to do in ours, of course.

Um. Speaking for myself, what I'm trying to do in my own head doesn't really transfer to other heads, and I'm not trying to do anything (serious) inside other people's heads in general.