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sixes_and_sevens comments on Polling Thread - Personality Special - Less Wrong Discussion

6 Post author: Gunnar_Zarncke 05 November 2014 10:40PM

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Comment author: Adele_L 06 November 2014 06:42:45AM *  7 points [-]

It's well known that men are better at mental rotation and other forms of spatial reasoning than women. I've always been pretty good at it - my default technique is to carefully check the relations (i.e. count the number of cubes in the segment, note the relative angle of the joint, and make sure they match). It was only recently that I realized that some people actually just rotated it in their head, and 'looked' to see if it was the same.

Anyway, I was wondering if maybe the technique used was correlated with gender.

What sex were you assigned at birth?

With what gender do you primarily identify?

What method do you use to do mental rotations?

(Something else}

Submitting...

Comment author: sixes_and_sevens 06 November 2014 10:49:53AM 3 points [-]

Interesting result from misreading the question: I first tried to resolve this as "are the first and second figures in (b) a rotation of the first and second figures in (a)?"

Trying to mentally rotate the first figure in (a) to get the first figure in (b) crashed the entire process, to the point where I began to doubt whether I could mentally rotate things in my mind. On the other hand, it was immediately clear to me on inspection that they weren't the same, in a similar way that it's clear an acute and an obtuse angle aren't the same angle.

However, resolving the question as intended produces the subjective experience of "rotating in my mind".

Comment author: Leonhart 08 November 2014 02:09:02PM 1 point [-]

Exactly the same misreading here.