Igor Chudov @ home wrote:
Dale Thorn wrote:
On Mon, 20 Jan 1997, Dale Thorn wrote: Most of the erstwhile elite types do the ordinary things in a quite ordinary way. Get dressed, eat, collect and send e-mail, and so on. The un-ordinary things (for example) are the thought processes which take place while typing out a post. Those thought processes don't generally intersect directly with the mundane things such as operating
hjk wrote: the computer, unless the operations themselves are unusual and demand the full attention of the person involved.
So what?
The so what is that hjk believed that since cypherpunks were "elite", it followed that they would notice certain administrative messages more than non-elite people, and also remember those messages better. I had no contention with the remember-better part, assuming that was stated somewhere, but my argument is that greater intelligence does not necessarily lead to paying better attention to mundane everyday things like administrative messages and notices. The specific example was whether most cypherpunks subscribers would take more than momentary notice of the new list arrangements, and whether they would consciously think about whether they should change their status (subscription), and if so, why. My contention is that most would not give it any serious amount of attention. This is no different IMO than whether erstwhile "intelligent" people pay greater attention to road signs while driving than people of average mental power do.