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Gunnar_Zarncke comments on Experience of typical mind fallacy. - Less Wrong Discussion
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I don't think those things can be separated that cleanly -- I suspect there are certain unusual features of my mind that my IQ helps me work around, and would be more evident if my IQ was closer to 100 all other things being equal.
And conversely, some of the unusual-ness that can be attributed to IQ is only very indirectly caused by it. For instance, being able to work around some of the more common failure modes of the brain probably makes a significant portion of LessWrong more unusual than the average person and understanding most of the advice on this site requires at least some minimum level of mental processing power and ability to abstract.
Sure. They can't be separated. But the feeling of (a)typicality can't be quantified precisely either. This all is imprecise and only gains value from large numbers of respondents.
That was awesome - thank you for posting the poll! The results are quire intriguing (at N = 18, anyway - might change with more votes, I guess).
N=50 we appear to be making a bell curve. Also no one thinks they are typical.
I predict the results to stay near to where they are (at N=20) however what this means for how we might better model people is unclear. (it might be reasonable to think this subset of population is in fact a collection of unusual thinkers but I would say its safe to assume that this is representative of most of the population in this case)
Do we need to start modelling people as more to ourselves (as we all seem to feel like we have unusual though processes) or less (as we might have unusual processes in different directions to each other)? would doing either make us more effective at life?
Honestly, I suspect that the average person models others after themselves even if they consider themselves to be unusual. So this poll probably shouldn't be used as evidence to shift how similarly we model others to ourselves, one way or another.
When I was in my teens, maybe even early 20s I thought I had a nearly maximally unusual mind - but with more experience with other people (especially in different social groups to mine) I gradually adjusted my views and now, mid 40s I rate myself only as "slightly unusual" in both poll categories.
It's also possible that my mind has changed toward "typicality" but my impression is that I've just developed better coping strategies to deal with situations that would have been a lot more difficult when I was younger.
up until this point I never knew how. I was probably just about to look it up.