Thread by @owenbroadcast

lots of people posting regarding realizations about other peoples cognitive differences and things like that. obviously it opens you up to accusations of thinking youre a galaxy brain urself or something but its something i have thought a lot about and i have one or two anecdotes

https://twitter.com/eigenrobot/status/1411044583941672963

all of this dovetails with a certain theory of spirituality and esoterica that i have outlined at the start of one of the painting shows i did about egyptian stuff. ill pull it up later but for me its not innately negative, people are just different. i mean obviously, right.

my first real experience with hitting “a wall” that i couldnt get over with someone was in highschool. i think a hidden aspect of the larger discussion here is that a lot of people are completely insulated from spending extended periods of time with non-filtered groups of people.

like yeah maybe you have a random friend and family members and stuff but you arent spending a lot of time going through mental tasks with those people in a “grind”y setting where people cant 100% do things for one another. that happens in a classroom or at certain jobs.

so theres a large number of people who were in honors classes and never worked certain kinds of jobs so they have never been in a situation to have to abruptly confront the reality of people just being innately suited to different kinds of things. thats interesting to recognize.

anyway, in this class in high school we learned about this situation where soldiers were eating white rice, and they were getting sick, then when they switched to brown rice, they stopped getting sick. the brown rice had some vitamin they werent getting anywhere else. ok. get it.

so a few people in the class asked, “what in the white rice was making them sick?”. so we explained, nothing in the white rice was making them sick. they were [missing something], that thing wasnt in the white rice. they only got it from the brown rice. so the brown rice fixed it

and they didnt get it. so we explained it a bunch of different ways. but it just came back to the same question: but why was the white rice making them sick? we literally spent like ten to fifteen minutes explaining the causality here. that the white rice [wasnt] [doing it].

and, they just didnt get it. at all. they were like, totally incapable of zooming out and tweaking their presuppositions about the causality. it was, literally, impossible. i thought about this all the time for days and just refused to accept that something like this was possible

the more interesting experience i had with cognitive “walls” was with kids. theres no documentation of me working this job and they didnt even have a real website so im cool talking about it, but i was in a position, helping out a friend, at this semi-educational casual group.

there, i got the unique experience of interacting with a ton of kids, from all different ages (4-18), from all different places + situations, going over the same material with all of them, in small batches, multiple times a day. it was basically a case study in mental development

and of course im “that guy” so i realized i was getting access to a very strange unique cross section of data and i thought about it, a lot. what made it more interesting was that we were going over greek art, so a lot of it was explaining stories, symbolism, things like that.

the most interesting thing there was you could see and anticipate the jumps that happen at certain ages. these were essentially 100% dependable. maybe there were a few variations but i could bank on certain developments in terms of metacognition happening at certain stages.

example: i tell a story, sort of like a little fable i guess, and then i ask the kids about it. in third grade, the kids intuitively understand, yeah theres a moral, this story kind of illustrates or embodies these larger ideas. they probably couldnt explain it, but they get it

so for third graders i could just tell the story, and then cut to asking about the moral or the higher ideals or larger principles that the story illustrates. however, for second graders (around 7 years old), this was not the case. for them it was just a story about something.

and that was like, a hard wall. if i wanted to go from the story to the higher ideals and principles the story was obviously pointing to, i had to build a bridge and walk them over it. when i told them the story it was just like me telling them something that happened, thats it.

whereas for 3rd graders it was almost like they would look at me and be like “yeah, we get it. you told us that because the moral is XYZ, duh”. interestingly this manifested across any internal group differences, of which there were many (all variables except age varying totally)

theres more examples but that was the most tangible dependable “wall” of development i could essentially always bank on + had to anticipate. i think of that often when i encounter cognition walls in people sometimes. sometimes the feature is just there, in the hardware / software

for me the edge of this seeming to be a superior inferior thing is cut by spirituality and life experience. people are coached to tether this kind of thing to intrinsic self worth but i dont really think its like that.

if u work a job with a lot of guys you naturally adjust to the reality of who is good at what and utilize it. brian has XYZ quality so hes going to take this position, im ABC so ill do this, oh someone needs to Y, get tim hes really good at that. who is “better”, it means nothing

conversely i have a theory that people who are really uncomfortable with this kind of thing have never been in that situation at a job like that, but thats just theoretical. like yeah i can rotate objects in my mind but if tim couldnt help me do XYZ id be screwed so... who cares.