m_i_s_t

Ha! I thought everyone without images had a sort of stylized geometric visualization instead of images, but maybe different people 'substitute' differently, some with music, some with geometry, some with ??

That's easy to answer without images. Either by reasoning your way out of it, or more plausibly, with this kind of 'geometrical imagery' that comes instead of images. I 'see' a sort of figure-stick elephant and can tell you immediately where the trunk is. Maybe a test involving details of pictures would fare better?

This is not about memory, it is about what you can access consciously. Those of us who have no image in our minds have memories of our houses, cars, friends, etc. just like you do (as far as I know!), they are just not part of our conscious experience. If you want to relate to this, think of language processing: you are not aware of how your brain parses the sentences you hear, though you still have access to the meaning that is produced by that parsing. We don't have access to the visual images, but they are there somewhere and can be used by our memory system. (ps. I suspect that getting images to reach consciousness or not is not just a random 'accident', but rather reflects a more generally different brain organisation -- just not wrt memory having access to visual representations or not)

This is supposed to be a 'condition' and an 'inability'? I have this and have always associated it with an enhanced ability to think abstractly, and more generally intellectual facility. I had never met anyone else having this, until I came upon a paragraph by Einstein who comments about his absence of mental images, replaced by geometrical-like thinking. That only confirmed my intuitive assumption that it related to enhanced intellectual abilities in the analytical and abstract thinking domain. It is therefore bizarre to read about this as a 'condition' or even 'disability'... On the bright side, it is wonderful to see that it is shared by others, even studied and meet fellow geometrical thinkers here -- hi fellow Jedis ;)

There is little point in an argument for or against a supposed 10k rule. The point is about the balance between genetics and practice, and the article makes a cogent argument that the "10k camp" has overstated its case for 'practice' and understated the role of genes.

Err... no? "chess players differed greatly in the amount of deliberate practice they needed to reach a given skill level in chess. For example, the number of hours of deliberate practice to first reach “master” status (a very high level of skill) ranged from 728 hours to 16,120 hours." The article implies at several points that the rule is neither necessary nor sufficient.

how do you reconcile "I don't know any good reasons for using Bayesian methods" with the fact that Bayesian methods revolutionized spam-filtering? (or maybe you disagree they did?)

even apart from the difficulty of "fire fast" that you point out, how does one reconcile "Hire friends and friends of friends" and "fire fast" without bringing rampant destruction in relationships and personal life?

Much of what you write here is perceptive, until:

"Things are terrible right now for cognitive 1-percenters who want meaningful, interesting work (i.e. an upper middle class salary isn't enough, and it's never "stable" for top-0.x-percent intellects because of the job security risks that level of talent implies)"

You write as if you need the monetary and security advantage of the climbers while at the same time needing the artistic/intellectual liberty of the "cognitive 1-percenter". We don't need that. Basically all the brilliant intellectuals that I've been blessed to be surrounded by is happy and productive without the money and social recognition -- as long as there is room for learning and creativity. Of course, heaps of money and recognition are welcome. But not needed. And certainly their absence is not the ground for recrimination (again, as long as there is learning, freedom and creativity -- with some basic food on the table).