<story><title>The Curse of Smart People (2014)</title><url>http://apenwarr.ca/log/?m=201407#01</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>yakult</author><text>My pet theory: much of &amp;#x27;gut feelings&amp;#x27; and intuition boils down to having our internal black box predict the behavior of other people.  When you are &amp;#x27;average&amp;#x27;, this often simplifies to reasoning about what you would do in the same circumstances, which is relatively easy.  If you are 3 standard deviations out, you&amp;#x27;ll have to compensate that consciously, which is inaccurate and difficult and slow.  This is like how UI designers have difficulty to discern which parts of their UI are hard to use, while the end user could do so effortlessly.&lt;p&gt;Smart people end up having to run SmartPerson + NormalPersonVM(pre-alpha) in parallel.  Normal people just run NormalPerson natively.  Then they complain about bugs and slowness (&amp;#x27;smart people are out of touch with reality!&amp;#x27;, etc.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ThrustVectoring</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve got a similar-ish theory. &amp;quot;Smart&amp;quot; people get rewarded as a child or adolescent for doing &amp;quot;smart&amp;quot; behavior, which teaches them to interact with deeper and richer observations and insights. If you don&amp;#x27;t get trained as a &amp;quot;smart&amp;quot; person, you get better responses to surface appearances.&lt;p&gt;The slowness comes out of this natively - &amp;quot;smart&amp;quot; children are taught to do more complicated things with social data, and brains need more time to get the sensory data necessary for more complicated behaviors. It takes a tenth of a second for the Patellar reflex, about a second to recognize a friend and wave hello, and a conversation to get someone on board with your project.&lt;p&gt;No magic required, just training the same sort of behaviors normal people have in the same sort of way. The most difficult part is un-learning &amp;quot;impress people with how clever you are&amp;quot; behaviors.</text></comment>
<story><title>The Curse of Smart People (2014)</title><url>http://apenwarr.ca/log/?m=201407#01</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>yakult</author><text>My pet theory: much of &amp;#x27;gut feelings&amp;#x27; and intuition boils down to having our internal black box predict the behavior of other people.  When you are &amp;#x27;average&amp;#x27;, this often simplifies to reasoning about what you would do in the same circumstances, which is relatively easy.  If you are 3 standard deviations out, you&amp;#x27;ll have to compensate that consciously, which is inaccurate and difficult and slow.  This is like how UI designers have difficulty to discern which parts of their UI are hard to use, while the end user could do so effortlessly.&lt;p&gt;Smart people end up having to run SmartPerson + NormalPersonVM(pre-alpha) in parallel.  Normal people just run NormalPerson natively.  Then they complain about bugs and slowness (&amp;#x27;smart people are out of touch with reality!&amp;#x27;, etc.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>yyhhsj0521</author><text>Agree. One of my friends is pretty smart (at least, above above-average) and works in the tech industry. When he was young he had to &amp;quot;simulate&amp;quot; his emotions to &amp;quot;look like a normal person.&amp;quot; He had to think what normal people would feel under his situation and tried to feel that way (or tried to make himself looked feeling that way in front of people). For example, he thinks that crying on funerals is illogical, because the dead are dead already, nothing can bring them back and the dead would surely rather see people they love live happily instead of in sorrow. But no. Until he escaped from the environment he was born he had to live like a normal person, and tried to cry on funerals.</text></comment>