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the face blindness thing was one of the most striking things to me about the rationalists, it’s way more common than i would’ve guessed in that crowd. someone told me once if you learn to read too early the part of your brain that does face recognition gets coopted into reading?
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Very High IQ people favorite self-diagnoses, ranked: 0. Autist 1. ADHD 2. Seasonal affective disorder 3. Face blindness
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when i studied abroad at cambridge one of the people in the same cohort as me (as in, came with me from MIT) was also face blind, and when i ran into her at MIT afterwards she didn’t recognize me in the hallway at all. context was too different. kinda spooky
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i do also find it amusing to speculate about how face blindness might force you to get good at explicit bayesian reasoning about who the person you’re talking to is based on the evidence of their clothes, hair, etc. (yud is face blind, idk how well-known this is)
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I'm pretty face blind for people I don't know well, regularly have ppl at parties reference conversation we had a few hours earlier and I'm like who are you?? I have a sense I could train myself out of it by consciously trying to remember their face more
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This tweet & the next one with book excerpts:
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Replying to @SarahAMcManus @Malcolm_Ocean and 4 others
I read something in @JoHenrich 's The Secret of Our Success that might shed some light on what's up. Learning to read competes with facial recognition, for space in the fusiform gyrus. Pushes face recognition out of the left side, and into the right hemisphere as best it can
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I've wondered about this, not really faceblind but definitely worse than average It's also kind of weird to me how ok we seem to be with short-sightedness... like I'm sort of fine with the tradeoff, reading is good, but people don't even talk about it being a tradeoff
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