If this is right, then we may talk of three different ‘minds’ at work in solving reasoning problems:
The autonomous mind, made of unconscious Type 1 processes. There are few individual differences in its operation.
(emphasis mine)
This feels wildly counterintuitive to me, unless “few differences” is much weaker than I’m expecting or “autonomous mind” is a way narrower concept than it looks. On LW the author gives further elaboration in the comments, which I understand as “some autonomous processes like face recognition seem to be mostly the same between people”.
Maybe it’s true that most people have nearly-identical performance in those domains. But to me it looks like almost all of the differences between people lie in the autonomous mind. The vast majority of actions I take throughout the day are autonomous. When I observe skill differences between myself and someone else, most of the variance seems to come from differences in our intuitions and pattern-matching, rather than our mindware or algorithmic thinking.
I can’t even imagine a worldview that says otherwise, so I’d be curious to hear from anyone who legitimately agrees with the “few individual differences in autonomous reasoning” model. If this turned out to be correct then I would restructure a lot of how I’m trying to become more generally competent.
(emphasis mine)
This feels wildly counterintuitive to me, unless “few differences” is much weaker than I’m expecting or “autonomous mind” is a way narrower concept than it looks. On LW the author gives further elaboration in the comments, which I understand as “some autonomous processes like face recognition seem to be mostly the same between people”.
Maybe it’s true that most people have nearly-identical performance in those domains. But to me it looks like almost all of the differences between people lie in the autonomous mind. The vast majority of actions I take throughout the day are autonomous. When I observe skill differences between myself and someone else, most of the variance seems to come from differences in our intuitions and pattern-matching, rather than our mindware or algorithmic thinking.
I can’t even imagine a worldview that says otherwise, so I’d be curious to hear from anyone who legitimately agrees with the “few individual differences in autonomous reasoning” model. If this turned out to be correct then I would restructure a lot of how I’m trying to become more generally competent.