Alternately, perhaps it is possible to be much smarter, but it's not as effective as we expect?
If we think of intelligence as skill at solving problems, it might be that there are not many problems that are easily solved with increased intelligence alone, because the solutions we have are nearly optimal, or because other inputs are needed as well.
This seems most likely to happen with mathematical proofs and scientific laws. Increased intelligence doesn't let you prove something that's false, and it doesn't let you violate scientific laws.
But I don't find this particularly plausible. Consider computer security: hackers are finding new exploits all the time. We're far from fixing all the loopholes that could possibly be found.
How many problems do you have that would be solved with greater intelligence alone?
Greater intelligence plus years of study and hundreds of job applications might fix someone's material situation, but just being smart doesn't guarantee it will happen.
Enhanced ability to perform repeatable actions and responses is probably correlated with happiness though.
1. It helps to define your terms. My definitions, and what I think most people unconsciously mean, are that "smart" is all about making the best decisions and "intelligence" is all about pattern recognition. When you break it down like that it's obvious why "more intelligent" doesn't imply "smarter". The benefit of intelligence is that you can recognize patterns that other people don't, which can make you smarter. The downside is: the pattern might not be real, the pattern might not matter, analysis paralysis, etc. All of which can make you dumber. There's always a trade off. The post sums it up pretty well with:
"Less sophisticated developers would not have gone down this blind alley because they wouldn't have a clue that such a thing was even possible, let allow be able to figure out how to do it."
2. Intelligence has very little to do with the ability to think rationally. Rational thought is a skill that has to be studied and practiced. It's also crazy hard. Really really insanely hard. It's hardness is massively unappreciated. Intelligent people who think they have it down because they're better at it then most people are just fooling themselves. Most people haven't even tried to become good at it, so being better then them isn't that hard.
As a species (or society) do we have clear objectives in mind when we seek to 'increase intelligence'? Is it higher productivity? more progress? enhanced capability? faster learning? Aren't there lots of low hanging fruit that we haven't taken yet? First, shouldn't we try to eliminate the things that are known to cause decreases in intelligence? Or, do we not know what those are?
Also, having been around a lot of 'highly intelligent' people, I have found that many are still not very effective. Most still make bad choices, have poor judgement, adhere to dogma, can't think laterally or fluidly, lack curiosity, lack discipline, lack self-reflection, etc. Is it possible for a 'smart' individual to easily get better at those things?
It's not like that if you are intelligent you will automatically succeed and become the next genius. But without intelligence in the first place it's close to impossible to achieve something extraordinary.
Ultimately this can all be boiled down to the idea if working smarter not harder. Unfortunately mankinds definition of smart varies as as wildly as their actual intelligence
This may seem very good and useful at first sight but it actually doesn't mean anything. The classical stance is that intelligence it's something fixed and can't be improved, so the smart guy will outsmart the average guy. Now they say that intelligence can actually improve so it's possible for the average guy to outsmart the smart guy. Well, not at all. If intelligence can improve this means that the average guy can achieve an intelligence on par with that of the smart guy, but the smart guy can also, so the gap still remains. Maybe I'm missing the point but I don't really know what make of the whole article.
The effect of intelligence may be even harder to assess reliably - are smarter people simply committing less crimes or are they just harder to be found / convicted?
Anybody can rationalize anything to his own satisfaction, regardless of IQ. The problem with being smart is that there are fewer people who can see through your rationalizations. The skills of dissasembling your own cognitive biases and testing your ideas against reality grow in value as your IQ increases.
My third paragraph covered that, although less intentionally than you may have wanted. I don't think you just get things that are monotonically better on the one and single "intelligence" axis. I think you get an ever-increasing number of ways to be intelligent. I can easily imagine am intelligence that is great at solving physics but rubbish at dansaeltenzing. I don't know what dansaeltenzing is... I'm not intelligent enough.
Isn't intelligence known more for ground breaking work than becoming an expert in a particular field?
Also, I think a big reason we don't see more results from intelligent people is due to our cult of intelligence that worships the raw power more than people making good use of it.
Intelligence is not about problem solving but understanding. I can explain some complex topic to someone less intelligent ten times in all the ways I can imagine it being explained, I can try to break it up into pieces, I can try to take the pieces even more slowly... but in the end, if the person does not have the capacity, they don't grasp the whole picture.
Oftentimes intelligence translates into speed: speed of understanding new concepts; speed of doing things, but far from always. In fact the latter is typically just practice, no matter how smart you are.
It's some combination of reasoning and memory. But whatever it is, the thing that we call intelligent has to perform better than most people at relevant tasks.
It's interesting because some people are clearly better at thinking about very specific things. Like, is a chess champion the same kind of intelligent as a mathematician? I don't know, probably not.
We know that this amount of intelligence was a huge evolutionary advantage. That tells us nothing whether being twice as smart would continue to give better results. But arguably the advantages of intelligence are diminishing, otherwise we would have much smarter people in more powerful positions.
Also, a big tongue in cheek but someone like John von Neumann definitely had superhuman intelligence.
Intelligence is hard to define. I believe that some people are "exponentially" better for very specialized tasks, for instance, solving logical puzzles, or internalizing rhythm in music, but it isn't necessarily noticeable, and doesn't translate to great accomplishments.
One thing I've learned by being a "smart person" is that intelligence is not everything. I do not believe that high intelligence or even super-intelligence would automatically yield power, wealth, influence, or anything else that we might fear, especially if it has a high chance of coming with various forms of baggage and trade-offs.
We can't assume that the apparent correlation between intelligence and mental illness would hold in non-humans -- or that it wouldn't. That's because we don't understand why that correlation exists. But there is one trade-off that I think is likely to be universal: the smarter you are, the more effort you seem to have to put into "meta" thinking like philosophy to keep yourself on track.
Think of it this way: it's easy to drive a Honda Civic, but a supercar can actually require performance driving classes to learn to drive it safely. Otherwise you can do things like accelerate into the car in front of you very easily, lose control, etc. because it does not drive like a commodity car.
Many people with very high IQs use their high intelligence to create elaborate delusions and rationalizations that land them in a ditch. That's a "meta" problem, a philosophical problem, not a problem with engine size, but it's one that probably gets worse as the motor gets bigger.
It's another factor that I think might place rate limits on the rate at which an AI could self-improve. Technically it's just a special case of the combinatorial search problem associated with improving intelligence beyond known local maxima.
An AI just thinking "hey I can just double my processing power and storage and get twice as smart!" might very easily end in some novel form of madness, not super-intelligence.
I have come across a few great comments on intelligence here on HN — intelligence is not the bottleneck of almost anything we do. Let’s say you became “comically” smarter overnight, could you really significantly benefit that extra knowledge? Besides going for the Millenium Prize problems, the benefits would not be too significant, for example is it that valuable in the startup space? (otherwise we would see PhD students as CEOs everywhere). Opportunity/luck is much more meaningful.
We also regularly see these “with my super intelligence I predicted your next 347 steps” type of thinking, but that’s just bullshit. The bottleneck here is data if anything, so intelligence won’t aid much in itself.
The thing is, we live in an infinitely complex game with independent agents, many of which don’t operate on any sane strategy even. Let’s say we are at an endgame Monopoly — would knowing ahead of time your opponents dice rolls help you win?
(Of course I’m no expert on any of these topics, so take all these with a huge grain of salt)
Intelligence beyond "sufficiently competent to participate in society" is not consistently an advantage. "The kindest thing in this universe is our inability to correlate it's contents" applies to real life. High intelligence not really result in happier more productive people.
Not 'intelligence', but 'capability'. There are plenty of intelligent-but-not-capable people out there, and plenty of capable-but-not-highly-intelligent folks as well.
If we think of intelligence as skill at solving problems, it might be that there are not many problems that are easily solved with increased intelligence alone, because the solutions we have are nearly optimal, or because other inputs are needed as well.
This seems most likely to happen with mathematical proofs and scientific laws. Increased intelligence doesn't let you prove something that's false, and it doesn't let you violate scientific laws.
But I don't find this particularly plausible. Consider computer security: hackers are finding new exploits all the time. We're far from fixing all the loopholes that could possibly be found.
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