This post, in addition to being a joy to read, contains one particular awesome insight:
My best guess is that clickiness has something to do with failure to compartmentalize—missing, or failing to use, the mental gear that lets human beings believe two contradictory things at the same time. Clicky people would tend to be people who take all of their beliefs at face value.
Here’s some confirmation: I must have at least some clickiness, since I “got” the intelligence explosion/FAI/transhumanism stuff pretty much immediately, despite not having been raised on science fiction.
And, it turns out: I hate, hate, HATE compartmentalization. Just hate it—in pretty much all its forms. For example, I have always despised the way schools divide up learning into different “classes”, which you’re not supposed to relate to each other. (It’s particularly bad at the middle/high school level, where, if you dare to ask why you shouldn’t be able to study both music and drama, or both French and Spanish, they look at you with a puzzled expression, as though such thoughts had occurred to no human being before.) I hate C.P. Snow’s goddamned “Two Cultures”. I hate the way mathematicians in different areas use the exact same concepts and pretend they don’t by employing different notation and terminology. I hate the way music theorists invent separate theoretical universes for different historical periods.
In general, don’t get me started on “separate magisteria”....
This post, in addition to being a joy to read, contains one particular awesome insight:
Here’s some confirmation: I must have at least some clickiness, since I “got” the intelligence explosion/FAI/transhumanism stuff pretty much immediately, despite not having been raised on science fiction.
And, it turns out: I hate, hate, HATE compartmentalization. Just hate it—in pretty much all its forms. For example, I have always despised the way schools divide up learning into different “classes”, which you’re not supposed to relate to each other. (It’s particularly bad at the middle/high school level, where, if you dare to ask why you shouldn’t be able to study both music and drama, or both French and Spanish, they look at you with a puzzled expression, as though such thoughts had occurred to no human being before.) I hate C.P. Snow’s goddamned “Two Cultures”. I hate the way mathematicians in different areas use the exact same concepts and pretend they don’t by employing different notation and terminology. I hate the way music theorists invent separate theoretical universes for different historical periods.
In general, don’t get me started on “separate magisteria”....
Eliezer, you’re seriously onto something here.