> i think most people have very little conceptualization of their own thinking/cognitive patterns, at least not enough to sensibly extrapolate it onto ai.
Quite true. If you spend a lot of time reading and thinking about the workings of the mind you lose sight of how alien it is to intuition. While in highschool I first read, in New Scientist, the theory that conscious thought lags behind the underlying subconscious processing in the brain. I was shocked that New Scientist would print something so unbelievable. Yet there seemed to be an element of truth to it so I kept thinking about it and slowly changed my assessment.