Comment by Logan Willans (loganwillans) on Our mental building blocks are more different than I thought · 2022-06-18T23:12:07.896Z · LW · GW

I'm having difficulty understanding your concept of mental building blocks. How did you come up with these categories?

To me, it seems that they are specific examples of different manifestations of general intelligence or personality traits. For example, could mental models of locations, sense of orientation, and rotating shapes be categorized as different "tasks" handled by mental rotation? I notice that "tailcalled" made a similar observation, noting that these building blocks might be related. I'm inclined to be pretty reductive and state that people simply have different personality traits and different levels of general intelligence and that this fact is important to bear in mind when interacting with others.

I did appreciate your discussion of your approach to matrix multiplication. You note that viewing matrices as squares and rectangles aids you in manipulating them and that "This mental building block did not exist 10 years ago." It reminds me of something I read about the discovery of the heart functioning like a pump. Despite physicians dating at least back to Galen making detailed observations of the heart, it was not until William Harvey that it was discovered that the heart really functions like a pump. It was noted that this discovery was likely aided by the widespread usage of pumps in mining operations in England at the time. It makes me wonder what kind of seemingly obvious realizations allude us due to the absence of a  fitting analogy.