Interesting. Eliezer took some X years to recognize that even “normal looking” persons can be quick on the uptake? ;)
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.
I guess it has a bit deeper explanation than that. I think clickiness happens if two people managed to build very similar mental models and they are ready to manipulate and modify models incrementally. Once the models are roughly in sync, it takes very little time to communicate and just slight hints can create the right change in the conversation partner’s model, if he is ready to update.
I think a lot of us has been trained hard to stop model building at certain points. There is definitely a personal difference between people on how much do they care about taboos the society imposes on them which can result in mental red lights: “Don’t continue building that model! It’s dangerous!” This is what I think Eliezer’s notion of “compartmentalization” refers to.
A lot of intelligent people have much less brakes and generally used to model building and do this uninhibitedly, can maintain several models and have fun doing that.
But in general, most people are lazy model builder, they build their models once and stick to it, or just find rationalizations to cut down on “mental effort” of generating and incrementally updating models.
However, I don’t think that brakes are the only reason people don’t click. If I just don’t know how to build the right model (miss the know-how, experience, etc.) I won’t click regardless.
For example I am not a musician and if I found it hard to have conversations with experienced musicians over music. Musicians among themselves can build very quickly models of musical concepts and click with each other. I can try to be maximally open minded, I won’t manage to click. I simply fail the necessary skills to build the required models.
Interesting. Eliezer took some X years to recognize that even “normal looking” persons can be quick on the uptake? ;)
I guess it has a bit deeper explanation than that. I think clickiness happens if two people managed to build very similar mental models and they are ready to manipulate and modify models incrementally. Once the models are roughly in sync, it takes very little time to communicate and just slight hints can create the right change in the conversation partner’s model, if he is ready to update.
I think a lot of us has been trained hard to stop model building at certain points. There is definitely a personal difference between people on how much do they care about taboos the society imposes on them which can result in mental red lights: “Don’t continue building that model! It’s dangerous!” This is what I think Eliezer’s notion of “compartmentalization” refers to.
A lot of intelligent people have much less brakes and generally used to model building and do this uninhibitedly, can maintain several models and have fun doing that.
But in general, most people are lazy model builder, they build their models once and stick to it, or just find rationalizations to cut down on “mental effort” of generating and incrementally updating models.
However, I don’t think that brakes are the only reason people don’t click. If I just don’t know how to build the right model (miss the know-how, experience, etc.) I won’t click regardless.
For example I am not a musician and if I found it hard to have conversations with experienced musicians over music. Musicians among themselves can build very quickly models of musical concepts and click with each other. I can try to be maximally open minded, I won’t manage to click. I simply fail the necessary skills to build the required models.