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Comment by lrobinovitch | Hacker News Reader

It's unclear to me what you're defining as real. Coal mining? Childcare? Community centers? Through hiking? Interesting theoretical realms can have enormous consequences in the physical/tangible world, as I'm sure you know :). Maybe it's more of a "presence factor" in relation to this story: a measure of how aware you are of the roles and responsibilities you have and how engaged with them you are.

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I make no value judgement here. I thought the OP's post was interesting as an example of how humans can mediate their own "VR" experience, and have done so for all of human history. The "absent-minded professor" is a stereotype for a reason. It can be disconcerting for someone with high imagination factor to interact with someone with an imagination factor of 0, even if all other qualities (age, culture, language, etc) are the same, since the paths they have both walked are so very different. The error modes that arise from impedance mismatch go in both directions. It's not clear what nature will select for. Certainly over short periods of time, nature has selected for heavy abstraction and all the military/economic power it yields. The longer time frame has not yet played out.

The path everyone has walked is different from everyone else. You seem to be trying to reduce it to a formula, coin new terms, and literally apply numeric values to people. I don't think anyone is that simple in reality.

If you have struggled to interact with people who are different than you, that is also part of the human experience, not something we need to devise measurements for.

Your strawman assumes a reductive user who will replace a person with a number. This of course happens in real life, with IQ, Meyers-Briggs, and so on. This is wrong. It is a kind of wrongness exemplified by "Animal Farm", the nuanced ideals of revolution that eventually reduce to "4 legs good; 2 legs bad".

IF is a tool mostly to remind high IF people to cherish the value of both real and imaginary experience, and a tool to help people who dwell mostly in either realm to respect each other. If a high IF person forgets to respect the real, he's liable to forget his wedding. If a low IF person forgets, he's liable to miss out on the wonder and value of abstract thought.

Of course, there is disagreement on a person’s roles and responsibilities.

To someone, my responsibility might be answering the doorbell quickly when Amazon drops off a package.

To another, it might be how responsive I am to email.

These are in conflict, and sometimes it’s worth missing an Amazon package to finish an important email.

Absolutely, the concept of roles and responsibilities is highly subjective

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