BillSims

At one end of the spectrum you might read "Extreme Privacy: What It Takes to Disappear" by Michael Bazzell 3rd ed. or even an older edition might be enough.

There is much more to this than just hands. A very long time ago I really offended a biology prof. He was happy to think there were people with no hand dominance, but could not accept a lack of eye dominance, he couldn't imagine how that could be. I had just spent two years going through paper journals reading about dominance, before there was the internet. A substantial number of left handed people lack eye dominance and some other things. Fun experiment. Get a paper plate, cut about an inch round hole in the middle. Ask some right handed and some left handed people to hold the plate at arms length to look through the hole at something across the room and then keep looking at that as they bring the plate up to their face. Almost all the right handed people will automatically do this and not understand what the point is. A substantial number of the left handed people will move the plate part way and then hesitate and shift the plate back and forth. Some will finally obviously give up and just pick one eye. That is because they have partial or even total lack of eye dominance. Left handed people to some degree see the world differently. Nobody has ever brought it up and they just think that is the way everyone is, just like right handed people think. Supposedly before birth there is a major shift and reorganization of brain function and for left handed people some of that shift is incomplete. I suspect with some thought and just the right experiments it would be possible to find surprising differences. Remember, there aren't many of us, but we are sinister.

On your subject of an online questionnaire for synesthesia, I'm almost certain there was a post on HN related to this, but I don't find it in my bookmark library. But I think I found the same article with a Google search. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... is a paper describing an online survey of colors versus letters, the url for the survey is in the paper, is still registered, but doesn't seem to be responding to me at the moment. Over 6500 people had taken the survey at that time. A strange correlation appeared when they looked at the data. They accidentally tracked down that that a Fisher Price toy with colored letters matched the correlation. And people who took the survey but were not the age where they would have been exposed to this toy did not show the correlation. You can find lots of related posts with a Google search for Fisher Price synesthesia or perhaps other plausible key words. If you could use similar methods and look for correlations between notes and colors then there might be some toy that young children experienced for many many hours that might explain some of this.

About a decade ago I read a paper, which I have lost and would really like to find again. They took a group of mentally retarded children, ran each one past a panel of judges to evaluate them, then took all the children and put them in an acting class, not Shakespearean acting, but teaching them to "act normal", and then ran each one past the panel again. The increase in scores of every one of those children was impressive (I don't use words like skyrocketing, etc.)

I believe that is exactly the kind of class that is not included in schools for kids today, retarded or not, and that is exactly the kind of evaluation that others will do to them every day for the rest of their lives.

Now apply this to the post above. Imagine taking some or most of the children off in the direction of autism in schools and giving them two new required classes, one in decision making/theory in the world they will live in and the other in acting/interpersonal skills (really interpersonal warfare) that will let them carry out the decisions they have made. Both those are the things that those kids (and all of us) will face on a daily basis every day for the rest of our lives.

I think that has the potential of changing the lives of people in the next generation in that category more than teaching them history or algebra, despite how much it pains me to say that.

How can we test that idea to see if I am wrong or not? And if it works then how can we get that to spread faster and further than Covid and dramatically help 5-15% of kids today? And if it works for them we might even consider teaching it to more than the low hanging autistic fruit. Do you know normal people around who could have benefitted from being taught to make better decisions and learn better interpersonal skills?

If anyone knows of anything related to this idea, in support of or opposition to this, I would dearly like to see it. Thank you