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Comment by crux | Hacker News Reader

If somebody offered me a dollar to stand up when I heard a certain word in a certain talk, I'm sure my effective intelligence would go down, not up. I'd spend all my attention waiting to hear a certain word, and cease paying attention to or processing anything that was actually communicated.

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Agree; it would have been interesting to hear the responses if he had asked Alice (or Bob) "what was I trying to say at the time where I said 'points'"? Or if he had even asked them to summarize his talk up until that point.

I remember a class back in my psychology course in college. They ask you to focus on something, such as a counting task and (in this case waiting for him to say 'points') put something totally obvious in front of you that you won't see.

Here's a good example of the total blindness that focus can cause. [Ed: shasta beat me to it] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pK0BQ9CUHk; pretend there's money on it (like this guys presentation had) and focus on it hard.

Remember, magicians rely on misleading your focus for their entire acts. Watch the coin hidden in my right hand, when I really slipped it into my left hand and dropped it into my pocket and oh look the coin is gone. Is it behind your right ear? Oh no I took it out of my pocket and look it's behind your left ear!

Nice point. I've modified the post, adding a footnote pointing out your objection, and suggesting an amendment in response: to offer a dollar to whoever of Alice and Bob offers the best summary of the talk at the end. I'm confident this will work to make the point needed for the post. On a few occasions friends have asked me in advance to summarize a talk they know I will attend, but which they cannot; this certainly makes me focus on the talk much more effectively.

Don't IQ-raising points of view usually have this dark side?

For example, the methods of analytic geometry and calculus let you solve problems mechanically that would be difficult or even impossible by other means. That's great if you're just trying to get an answer. It's not so great when you realize after executing a rigorous calculus proof of Snell's Law that you are not an inch closer to understanding why Snell's Law is really true. You turned yourself into an unthinking piece of machinery.

This applies not only to calculus. Most people who can execute the algorithms for calculating with fractions or solving linear equations don't actually understand what they're doing. They want an answer and they get it.

I think it's true that when you adopt one perspective you (momentarily, at least) often suppress other perspectives. The trick seems to be to have ways of generating lots of different perspectives.

Absolutely. The problem is that the most powerful points of view are so effective they're easy to confuse with reality. That's the upside and downside of reductionism in a sentence. :)

When you can do the proof, you actually do understand; you just may not understand your understanding (viz. the SMBC comic on Polish Hand Math; I think this is it: http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1917)

Reminds me of: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo

A better challenge would have been "a million dollars to the first person that points out a contradiction in my viewpoints".

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