People think of intelligence as some sort of magic. They ascribe all sorts of ability to intelligence, as if being smart should make you influential.
But why should that be? If you're a scientist, you are dependent on getting funding to do experiments, and the experiment showing something interesting. Neither of these things is very connected to intelligence, beyond that low IQ people will not be likely to get to the start line.
If you're an entrepreneur, you also have to do a bunch of things that are more social than smarts. Basically your life is going around meeting people and getting them to either invest or build something or buy something. Is it useful to be smart? Sure. But it isn't as useful as, say, having the right connections from school, or a family with a sensible budget so you can concentrate on building rather than finding food.
Pretty much the only area where being super smart works is pure maths, and even there you really want to be born in the parts of the world where the economy can support a young person on that path.
Then there's the transmission to suit your engine. A super smart person still needs to be mature enough to consume the intellectual royal jelly that develops them towards where they will make the greatest contribution. You won't just know what to do just because you're smart, you need to be shown what the interesting problems are. You need to have motivation, and motivation is often what you actually see when you meet someone impressive.
The way I think of it, the smart and useful people are plenty. Courses are taught so that universities can get a sensible number of people through some amount of content. Being smarter than your average student at a prestigious college is nice, but it mostly buys you some free time. Being at the cutoff is terribly stressful, but that guy is still pretty accomplished and useful for most things that we consider elite.
I like the car analogy for IQ. Having an engine with 50% or more horsepower above the people around you is only useful if you know how to handle it, how to steer, etc.
The transmission is another great analogy, IMHO for communication skills. Applying full power to the tarmac from a dead stop is a great way to spin your tires.
> I like the car analogy for IQ. Having an engine with 50% or more horsepower above the people around you is only useful if you know how to handle it, how to steer, etc.
And its not useful at all in a typical traffic situation, you are still limited to the speed of the one in front of you. Intelligence is only useful in environments that allows it to be, but most places are designed for typical people.
The very notion of IQ reduces the mind to a receptacle for some ineffable thing called 'intelligence'. One may as well have a CQ - Comedy Quotient and start speculating who has a higher GQ - Robin Williams or Dave Chapelle.
> They ascribe all sorts of ability to intelligence, as if being smart should make you influential.
By just applying some common sense it is obvious how absurd this statement is (and I thus rather have difficulties understanding how people can come to such a hypothesis):
Just look at your daily life: how much highly intellectual or academic content (for the latter: e.g. lecture recordings of complicated scientific lectures) do you watch on YouTube? If not: which kind of content do you then watch on YouTube?
This should make it insanely obvious which kinds of people are influential and which ones are not.
Most of life is like a 100m race where it's allowed to turn up and start early.
ie anybody can easily beat Usain Bolt by just starting a few seconds before him.
There are some things which are perhaps a bit more like the highjump - where I'm never going to beat the worlds best no matter how many attempts I do - however these kind of things are very much the exception, not the rule.
Most fields which are like highjumps have considerable incentives to develop tools to aid in performance. Even the greatest high jumper can't beat a muggle with a ladder, after all. Nor is any weightlifter a match for a forklift.
I supposedly have an iq of 140+ (I don't believe it though) and there's been two experiences where I've been in the presence of someone that just blew me out of the water. (Fellow graduate students in my program)
I don't think I'm that far away intelligently from my friends and other people, but these far outliers were amazing. Not alien, but almost.
It would be highly surprising if it was any different, given that books have not been around long enough for us to begin to adapt to their existence in an evolutionary manner. They'll be long gone before we could have.
This seems like a very flat view of intelligence. In my mind a sufficiently intelligent person isn't just "good at math" and is capable of understanding the landscapes you've laid out above and would also understand how to improve in them and to navigate them, assuming they're sufficiently motivated. Even then, intelligent people are better at parsing themselves, their own drives, knowing what they want and are motivated by and move towards it. I also think many of the most intelligent people I know are (gasp) extremely mature as well, as if those often go hand-in-hand.
This sort of feels like a cope-comment trying to say that smart people aren't ACTUALLY smart, but I'm not sure the motivation for that.
Hear Hear! If you have the Social Intelligence and work hard to cultivate relationships you can become President of the United States, even if you think you have a good idea to stop a respiratory virus by injecting disinfectant.
A really good litmus test of individual perspective and maturity, here. Already seeing comments nitpick specific arguments or points, which is itself the trap to shine a light on those individuals more obsessed with arbitrary external measures of their personal definition of success, rather than self-reflecting on said definition and asking whether or not this definition fits who they are or want to be as a person, or their desired achievements and goals in life.
It’s a sonnet of sorts about the curse of intelligence in an increasingly insane world, a reminder that brilliant people can be absolute monsters, and that the only person who can bring you contentment in life is yourself.
Dunno - I think it's hard for a lot of us who rolled the dice on our interests early on, picked the winning combo of CS + Finance, and then just raced ahead in the career ladder over our peers as software work consumed the world.
Now it's ten years later, those ladders have disappeared, many of us seeing the writing on the wall, and wondering whether we were anything special at all.
(The answer of course is no, but it's a tough pill to swallow)
As a former gifted kid who has had their fair share of struggles around identity, competency, and success, having to redefine each multiple times as the world shifts around me and ladders are either yanked up or burned down just as I arrive to climb them:
It sucks. It sucks ass. It has lead to many a night shouting in rage, anger, depression, and malaise. It continues to incense me as I see reprehensible actions receive phenomenal rewards in the short term for inflicting harm, and ignorance of their consequences of the long-term. It sucks.
You’re not alone, at least, and acknowledging that reality helped me rally around more social causes as I accepted that individual success was more luck than talent or effort, at least at present. It doesn’t really get easier to accept that reality either, even as I work to create a better one that’s built more around objectivity than individuality. Still, I’ve been far calmer, more productive, and even happier as I acknowledge the reality around me instead of reject it out of some notion of “specialness” or exceptionalism.
Acknowledging the reality around you is, in its own way, quite liberating, even if it’s also frustrating and lonely at present.
I think the big mistake is to assume that the landscape remains static during your lifetime. This hasn't really been true for a hundred years now (and possibly a bit more than that), and that rate-of-change is only accelerating.
I sort of relate. I suspect the misplaced confidence one can develop from early successes in one's career eventually manifests as a lot of beliefs needing to be unlearned later in life (especially when facing challenges requiring resilience). I think I am a better person for it (and that is the point).
I've watched those ladders disappear at least twice and come back over my life (Dotcom bubble and the Global Financial Crisis). These things are cyclical and for somethings we are at a low point. But in the long run there will always be opportunities for talent to florish.
The observation in this article is part of a more general principle: Happiness isn't a single variable equation. It directly parallels the observation that "money doesn't buy happiness." 210 IQ will never be enough. $20M dollars will never be enough.
This article is interesting to me because I see people falsely equivocating money with happiness all the time, and pretty much never see it with IQ. I didn't realize it was a thing.
Bearing in mind that my lived experience is entirely subjective, and that your mileage may vary accordingly:
I find that when people associate money with happiness, what they fail to observe is that they actually want the presumed stability such money would afford them, at their current lifestyle. Failing to acknowledge and plan around that leads to “lifestyle creep” as income rises, which simply perpetuates the same grievances they currently have around instability or insecurity, just with higher price tags and consequences for failure. I strongly suspect that billionaires engage in wealth and asset hoarding for this very reason: a terror of status, security, and stability collapse.
Once I let go of lifestyle creep and found contentment and gratuity in what I had, I began realizing that stability is shockingly affordable even under modern policies and economics. Releasing yourself from this forced societal obligation to “Keep Up with the Jones’” is a key step towards objectively reflecting on your life as it’s lived, and identifying what’s of genuine import to you. Only by doing that do you find what is actually needed for personal fulfillment, and thus, happiness.
> 210 IQ will never be enough. $20M dollars will never be enough.
At least, $20M dollars exists, while 210 IQ is mathematically nonsense -- it means "one out of several trillions", which exceeds the human population. You would have to colonize the entire galaxy, and then be the smartest human in that galaxy. If even that is not enough, I am giving up.
> arbitrary external measures of their personal definition of success
You say 'external' meausures, but these do manifest as internal identities - all of which collectively form your social identity: https://srid.ca/identity/social
> According to Yoo, by the time he was 1, her son learned both the Korean alphabet and 1,000 Chinese characters by studying the Thousand Character Classic, a sixth-century Chinese poem.[5]
Age reckoning in South Korea (and other east Asian countries) is quite different than what you might expect. Age 1 in this context could be up to 3; if year 1 is your birth date and you age up at the new year, you could be "2 years old" while being alive for only 3 days. It could also work the other way around if they follow one of the other methods. Pretty interesting and not yet fully standardized!
Not sure it is, so I assume a lot of stretching of the truth is involved. Most twelve month olds struggle to support their head, are just learning to shape their mouths to form syllables, and have only had eyes capable of resolving letters on a page for a few months. IQ won’t make blurry images sharp, or your neck muscles stronger.
My nephew was reading at age two… he is obviously a very special kid, but no one really pushed him to do that. Apparently this would kind of freak people out in public.
I’m not sure if reading before age one is biologically possible, but I have a surprising data point in my life, so who knows.
Bullshit detectors are blaring. Asian parent embellish the intelligence of their child without any verification. From what I understand Kim Ung-yong himself said many of the stories about him when he was young were misunderstood or exaggerated.
I guess it's not clear what they mean by learned the alphabet. Could point to the character and say the sound I guess? Know their meaning (you couldn't verify this easily if they cant talk)?
It's considered prodigious to be able to read at 3. I guess recognizing characters is short of that, but barely. And at 1? Im open to more information but I see no reason to think its true.
The "world's smartest man" very recently predicted on X that Bitcoin would hit $220k by the end of the year. [1]
Here's the thing: IQ probably doesn't mean much of anything. But it is one of only a handful of ways we have to benchmark intelligence. The training of AI systems critically requires benchmarks to understand gain/loss in training and determine if minute changes in the system is actually winging more intelligence out of that giant matrix of numbers.
What I deeply believe is: We're never going to invent superintelligence, not because its impossible for computers to achieve, but because we don't even know what intelligence is.
While it seems unlikely, I wouldn't find it impossible (edit: learning more about IQ score, yeah 276 is definitly BS). You can be "intelligent" as in very good at solving logic puzzle and math problem, and the most obtuse and subjectively dumb person when it comes to anything else. It might be less likely but definitely happened.
I have met people working in very advanced field having the perspective and reflection of a middle schooler on politics, social challenges, etc. Somewhere also clearly blinded by their own capacity in own field and thought that it would absolutely transfer to other field and were talking with authority while anybody in the room with knowledge could smell the BS from miles away.
Every 15 iq points makes you 1 standard deviation above the median. That means if you legitimately have an IQ of 276, you would 1 in 2.3 * 10^31, which is many orders of magnitude greater than the number of humans in history.
This guy is a fraud, he isn't measured by any legit institute, only by some random one which stated he is intelligent and he claims he was measured at 276 IQ.
He's low-key just trolling at this point, aaying he wants asylum in the US and making videos about how jesus/God is real with some scientific methods etc.
Just go check out his YouTube you'll see what I'm talking about.
First off, we don't have a good way to actually measure an individual's intelligence. IQ is actually meant to correlate with g which is a hidden factor we're trying to measure. IQ tests are good insofar as you look at the results of them from the perspective of a population. In these cases individual variation in how well it correlates smooths out. We design IQ tests and normalise IQ scores such that across time and over the course of many studies these tests appear to correlate with this hidden g factor. Moreover, anything below 70 and above 130 is difficult to measure accurately, IQ is benchmarked such that it has a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15. Below 70 and above 130 is outside of two standard deviations.
So, in summary, IQ is not a direct measure of intelligence. What you're doing here is pointing at some random guy who allegedly scored high on an IQ test and saying: "Look at how dumb that guy is. We must be really bad at testing."
But to say we don't know what intelligence is, is silly, since we are the ones defining that word. At least in this sense. And the definition we have come up with is grounded in pragmatism. The point of the whole field of research is to come up with and keep clarifying a useful definition.
Worth also noting that you can study for an IQ test which will produce an even less correlated score. The whole design and point of IQ tests is done with the idea of testing your ability to come up with solutions to puzzles on the spot.
My point is to state that one of two things must be true: Either IQ does not really measure Intelligence, or Intelligence (being the thing IQ measures or correlates to) isn't much of a desirable quality for agentic systems to have. I suspect its a mix. The people on the upper end of the IQ spectrum tend to lead wholly uninspiring lives; the 276 guy isn't the only example, fraud or not, there's a couple university professors with relatively average publishing history, a couple suicides, a couple wacko cult leaders, a couple self-help gurus... and the goat, Terrance Tao, he's up there, but its interesting how poorly the measure correlates with anything we'd describe as "success".
The apologists enter the chat and state "well, its because they're frauds or they're gaming the system" without an ounce of recognition that this is exactly what we're designing AI systems to do: Cheat the test. If you expect being able to pass intelligence evals as being a way to grow intelligence, well, I suspect that will work out just about as well as IQ tests do for identifying individuals capable of things like highly creative invention.
> IQ probably doesn't mean much of anything. But it is one of only a handful of ways we have to benchmark intelligence.
IQ means a lot of things (higher IQ people are measurably better at making associations and generating original ideas, are more perceptive, learn faster, have better spatial awareness).
It doesn't give them the power to predict the future.
It is less meaningful than that. It identifies who does well at tests for those things. That is not the same thing as being "better" at such things, it often just means "faster". IQ tests are also notorious for cultural bias. In particular with the word associations, they often just test for "I'm a white American kid who grew up in private schools."
And I say this as one of the white amercian kids who did great on those tests. My scores are high, but they are not meaningful.
It somewhat indicates better pattern recognition so I might give them advantage on predicting things in general. Not that it will make them prophets or oracles. But Prediction from higher IQ person is more likely to be correct. Not that world cannot be illogical and go against those predictions.
> What I deeply believe is: We're never going to invent superintelligence, not because its impossible for computers to achieve, but because we don't even know what intelligence is.
Speak for yourself, not all of humanity. There are plenty of rigorous, mostly equivalent definitions for intelligence: The ability to find short programs that explain phenomena (compression). The capability to figure out how to do things (RL). Maximizing discounted future entropy (freedom). I hate how stupid people propagate this lie that we don't know what intelligence is, just because they lack it. It's quite convenient, because how can they be shown to lack intelligence when the word isn't even defined!
How do you measure the capacity for improvisational comedy? How do you measure a talent for telling convincing lies? How do you measure someone's capacity for innovating in a narrative medium? How do you measure someone's ability for psychological insight and a theory of self? How do you measure someone's capacity for understanding irony or picking up subtle social cues? Or for formulating effective metaphors and analogies, or boiling down concepts eloquently? How about for mediating complex, multifaceted interpersonal conflicts effectively? How do you measure someone's capacity for empathy, which necessarily involves incredibly complex simulations and mental models of other people's minds?
Do you think excelling in any of these doesn't require intelligence? You sound like you consider yourself quite intelligent, so are you excellent at all of them? No? How come?
Can you tell me which part of an IQ test or your "rigorous, moslty equivalent definitions for intelligence" capture any of them?
> I hate how stupid people propagate this lie that we don't know what intelligence is, just because they lack it. It's quite convenient, because how can they be shown to lack intelligence when the word isn't even defined!
How's this: "I hate how stupid people propagate this lie that we know what intelligence is, just because they do well within the narrow definition that they made up. It's quite convenient, because how can they be shown to lack intelligence when their definition of it fits their strengths and excludes their weaknesses!"
If you want to have a discussion in good faith, then you need to work on your rhetoric. People are unlikely to want to engage with you, here or in your real life, if you regularly talk like that. Seek help.
Honestly not sure if this is a bit, it's so on-the-nose... Taking it at face value, you are literally claiming to know precisely what intelligence is? You would be the first to know if so. You should probably publish quickly before someone steals your definition!
In your post is demonstrated one of the deep mysteries of intelligence: How can a smart person make such a dumb assertion? (I'll give a hint: consider that "intelligence" is not a single axis)
Ok.. Let’s ask a different question. Assuming development of super-intelligence is possible.. How do you measure it? What criteria satisfies the “this is super intelligence”? You honestly sound like most pseudo-intellectuals I hear discussing this very topic..: Ironic how you think you’re the brilliant one and it’s others who are stupid… Actually not really ironic a fool doesn’t know he is a fool.
True: A shadow take that I have been noodling on is that "ability to correctly predict the future" is actually the only true characteristic of intelligence. All other things we might label as intellect are either expressions of that, or something different that is more accurately categorized under a different label.
This isn't even that. If I'm a person others may take as a reference and I hold Bitcoin, it is in my interest to publicly state that Bitcoin is going to increase in value, because that in itself makes it increase in value and it's good for me.
Exactly. We don't have a good definition of intelligence and I don't think we ever will. Like all social concepts, it is highly dependent on the needs, goals, and values of the human societies that define it, and so it is impossible to come up with a universal definition. If your needs don't align with the needs an AI has been trained to meet, you are not going to find it very intelligent of helpful for meeting those needs.
You're quite literally babbling. If a word has no good definition, it ceases to be a word. All you really mean is you use the word "intelligence" very loosely, without really knowing what you mean when you use it. You just use it to point at a concept that's vague in your head. That does not mean you could not make that concept more precise, if you felt inclined to be more introspective. It also does not mean that the precise idea I think of when I use the word "intelligence" is the same as your idea. But they'll often be close enough or even equivalent mathematically, as long as we both have precise definitions in mind.
> Langan has not produced any acclaimed works of art or science. In this way, he differs significantly he differs significantly from outsider intellectuals like Paul Erdös, Stephen Wolfram, Nassim Taleb, etc.
Paul Erdős is the only outsider intellectual on that list, IMO.
Can you even be called an "outsider" when everyone who recognizes the name associates it with "eccentric but well respected mathematician who was well liked enough in the community that people would regularly let him sleep in their homes for days on end"? According to his wikipedia page, Erdős collaborated with hundreds of other mathematicians. That's the very opposite of being an outsider IMO.
If you just take the statistical definition of IQ and run with it, AFAIK the smartest person alive will be at something like 190 IQ. If you really run with it, the smartest person that has ever lived should be around 200.
Chris Langan is a fraud, and not even a good one, he claims to have discovered a revolutionary new neural network architecture but lost the napkin he wrote it on.
PSA: Chris Langan has never achieved a super high score on a real IQ test.
Since the 90's he is feuding with Rick Rosner, when they both edited the Mega Society’s journal Noesis, over the title of smartest guy. They both took an untimed Richard Hoeflin test (that maybe only a few hundred people have actually taken and therefore impossible to norm) with completely arbitrary scoring criteria and self-assigned “record setting” IQs.
Neither has any outstanding intellectual contributions to their name. They are weirdos who have made "being smart" their identity.
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But why should that be? If you're a scientist, you are dependent on getting funding to do experiments, and the experiment showing something interesting. Neither of these things is very connected to intelligence, beyond that low IQ people will not be likely to get to the start line.
If you're an entrepreneur, you also have to do a bunch of things that are more social than smarts. Basically your life is going around meeting people and getting them to either invest or build something or buy something. Is it useful to be smart? Sure. But it isn't as useful as, say, having the right connections from school, or a family with a sensible budget so you can concentrate on building rather than finding food.
Pretty much the only area where being super smart works is pure maths, and even there you really want to be born in the parts of the world where the economy can support a young person on that path.
Then there's the transmission to suit your engine. A super smart person still needs to be mature enough to consume the intellectual royal jelly that develops them towards where they will make the greatest contribution. You won't just know what to do just because you're smart, you need to be shown what the interesting problems are. You need to have motivation, and motivation is often what you actually see when you meet someone impressive.
The way I think of it, the smart and useful people are plenty. Courses are taught so that universities can get a sensible number of people through some amount of content. Being smarter than your average student at a prestigious college is nice, but it mostly buys you some free time. Being at the cutoff is terribly stressful, but that guy is still pretty accomplished and useful for most things that we consider elite.
The transmission is another great analogy, IMHO for communication skills. Applying full power to the tarmac from a dead stop is a great way to spin your tires.
And its not useful at all in a typical traffic situation, you are still limited to the speed of the one in front of you. Intelligence is only useful in environments that allows it to be, but most places are designed for typical people.
By just applying some common sense it is obvious how absurd this statement is (and I thus rather have difficulties understanding how people can come to such a hypothesis):
Just look at your daily life: how much highly intellectual or academic content (for the latter: e.g. lecture recordings of complicated scientific lectures) do you watch on YouTube? If not: which kind of content do you then watch on YouTube?
This should make it insanely obvious which kinds of people are influential and which ones are not.
Most of life is like a 100m race where it's allowed to turn up and start early. ie anybody can easily beat Usain Bolt by just starting a few seconds before him.
There are some things which are perhaps a bit more like the highjump - where I'm never going to beat the worlds best no matter how many attempts I do - however these kind of things are very much the exception, not the rule.
I don't think I'm that far away intelligently from my friends and other people, but these far outliers were amazing. Not alien, but almost.
High social aptitude is "smarts". It has arguably been more central to our evolution, survival, and even advancement than "book smarts".
This sort of feels like a cope-comment trying to say that smart people aren't ACTUALLY smart, but I'm not sure the motivation for that.
Yes, because the article leads with that. But I think we're actually in agreement.
I make a distinction between intelligence and wisdom, something I thought about from D&D.
Intelligence is having accurate models. Quick thinking, and correct predictions.
Wisdom is about making good decisions. Risk control, understanding rewards.
Both are a mental qualities we appreciate in people, but often we are more dazzled by intelligence, and we often mistake wisdom for intelligence.
It’s a sonnet of sorts about the curse of intelligence in an increasingly insane world, a reminder that brilliant people can be absolute monsters, and that the only person who can bring you contentment in life is yourself.
Now it's ten years later, those ladders have disappeared, many of us seeing the writing on the wall, and wondering whether we were anything special at all.
(The answer of course is no, but it's a tough pill to swallow)
It sucks. It sucks ass. It has lead to many a night shouting in rage, anger, depression, and malaise. It continues to incense me as I see reprehensible actions receive phenomenal rewards in the short term for inflicting harm, and ignorance of their consequences of the long-term. It sucks.
You’re not alone, at least, and acknowledging that reality helped me rally around more social causes as I accepted that individual success was more luck than talent or effort, at least at present. It doesn’t really get easier to accept that reality either, even as I work to create a better one that’s built more around objectivity than individuality. Still, I’ve been far calmer, more productive, and even happier as I acknowledge the reality around me instead of reject it out of some notion of “specialness” or exceptionalism.
Acknowledging the reality around you is, in its own way, quite liberating, even if it’s also frustrating and lonely at present.
This article is interesting to me because I see people falsely equivocating money with happiness all the time, and pretty much never see it with IQ. I didn't realize it was a thing.
I find that when people associate money with happiness, what they fail to observe is that they actually want the presumed stability such money would afford them, at their current lifestyle. Failing to acknowledge and plan around that leads to “lifestyle creep” as income rises, which simply perpetuates the same grievances they currently have around instability or insecurity, just with higher price tags and consequences for failure. I strongly suspect that billionaires engage in wealth and asset hoarding for this very reason: a terror of status, security, and stability collapse.
Once I let go of lifestyle creep and found contentment and gratuity in what I had, I began realizing that stability is shockingly affordable even under modern policies and economics. Releasing yourself from this forced societal obligation to “Keep Up with the Jones’” is a key step towards objectively reflecting on your life as it’s lived, and identifying what’s of genuine import to you. Only by doing that do you find what is actually needed for personal fulfillment, and thus, happiness.
At least, $20M dollars exists, while 210 IQ is mathematically nonsense -- it means "one out of several trillions", which exceeds the human population. You would have to colonize the entire galaxy, and then be the smartest human in that galaxy. If even that is not enough, I am giving up.
You say 'external' meausures, but these do manifest as internal identities - all of which collectively form your social identity: https://srid.ca/identity/social
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Ung-yong
Is that true? How is that even possible? Like, biologically.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Asian_age_reckoning
I don't know about the other claims, but this one is false. It would be somewhat concerning if a 6-month-old struggled to support their head.
Skill issue. Needs more belly time!
I’m not sure if reading before age one is biologically possible, but I have a surprising data point in my life, so who knows.
I guess it's not clear what they mean by learned the alphabet. Could point to the character and say the sound I guess? Know their meaning (you couldn't verify this easily if they cant talk)?
It's considered prodigious to be able to read at 3. I guess recognizing characters is short of that, but barely. And at 1? Im open to more information but I see no reason to think its true.
Here's the thing: IQ probably doesn't mean much of anything. But it is one of only a handful of ways we have to benchmark intelligence. The training of AI systems critically requires benchmarks to understand gain/loss in training and determine if minute changes in the system is actually winging more intelligence out of that giant matrix of numbers.
What I deeply believe is: We're never going to invent superintelligence, not because its impossible for computers to achieve, but because we don't even know what intelligence is.
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/world-smartest-man-predicts-b...
> I will use 100% of my Bitcoin profits to build churches for Jesus Christ in every nation.
> “For with God nothing shall be impossible.” (Luke 1:37)
Something tells me maybe he doesn't actually have an IQ of 276.
Con artist skill of 276, maybe.
Deleted Comment
In other words, this news is a completely irrelevant piece of information.
He's low-key just trolling at this point, aaying he wants asylum in the US and making videos about how jesus/God is real with some scientific methods etc.
Just go check out his YouTube you'll see what I'm talking about.
First off, we don't have a good way to actually measure an individual's intelligence. IQ is actually meant to correlate with g which is a hidden factor we're trying to measure. IQ tests are good insofar as you look at the results of them from the perspective of a population. In these cases individual variation in how well it correlates smooths out. We design IQ tests and normalise IQ scores such that across time and over the course of many studies these tests appear to correlate with this hidden g factor. Moreover, anything below 70 and above 130 is difficult to measure accurately, IQ is benchmarked such that it has a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15. Below 70 and above 130 is outside of two standard deviations.
So, in summary, IQ is not a direct measure of intelligence. What you're doing here is pointing at some random guy who allegedly scored high on an IQ test and saying: "Look at how dumb that guy is. We must be really bad at testing."
But to say we don't know what intelligence is, is silly, since we are the ones defining that word. At least in this sense. And the definition we have come up with is grounded in pragmatism. The point of the whole field of research is to come up with and keep clarifying a useful definition.
Worth also noting that you can study for an IQ test which will produce an even less correlated score. The whole design and point of IQ tests is done with the idea of testing your ability to come up with solutions to puzzles on the spot.
The apologists enter the chat and state "well, its because they're frauds or they're gaming the system" without an ounce of recognition that this is exactly what we're designing AI systems to do: Cheat the test. If you expect being able to pass intelligence evals as being a way to grow intelligence, well, I suspect that will work out just about as well as IQ tests do for identifying individuals capable of things like highly creative invention.
IQ means a lot of things (higher IQ people are measurably better at making associations and generating original ideas, are more perceptive, learn faster, have better spatial awareness).
It doesn't give them the power to predict the future.
And I say this as one of the white amercian kids who did great on those tests. My scores are high, but they are not meaningful.
- making associations
- generating original ideas
- more perceptive
...
"spatial awareness" I can see though
Speak for yourself, not all of humanity. There are plenty of rigorous, mostly equivalent definitions for intelligence: The ability to find short programs that explain phenomena (compression). The capability to figure out how to do things (RL). Maximizing discounted future entropy (freedom). I hate how stupid people propagate this lie that we don't know what intelligence is, just because they lack it. It's quite convenient, because how can they be shown to lack intelligence when the word isn't even defined!
Do you think excelling in any of these doesn't require intelligence? You sound like you consider yourself quite intelligent, so are you excellent at all of them? No? How come?
Can you tell me which part of an IQ test or your "rigorous, moslty equivalent definitions for intelligence" capture any of them?
How's this: "I hate how stupid people propagate this lie that we know what intelligence is, just because they do well within the narrow definition that they made up. It's quite convenient, because how can they be shown to lack intelligence when their definition of it fits their strengths and excludes their weaknesses!"In your post is demonstrated one of the deep mysteries of intelligence: How can a smart person make such a dumb assertion? (I'll give a hint: consider that "intelligence" is not a single axis)
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Paul Erdős is the only outsider intellectual on that list, IMO.
(Also note that ő and ö are different!)
it's hard for me to not reject the article already for it's click bait headline...
ps: 170 is 4.666 std dev, about 10^-6. that's very rare, hard to measure but at least real.
Someone can design a test and claim it determines IQ up to 210, but there's no way to statistically validate that so it's simply meaningless.
to me the 210 simply signals a certain distance of the author to the topic. that may be unjust, but I can't help it.
This is my favorite video mocking Langan, made by someone smarter than him. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57IN9sBhYyg
Since the 90's he is feuding with Rick Rosner, when they both edited the Mega Society’s journal Noesis, over the title of smartest guy. They both took an untimed Richard Hoeflin test (that maybe only a few hundred people have actually taken and therefore impossible to norm) with completely arbitrary scoring criteria and self-assigned “record setting” IQs.
Neither has any outstanding intellectual contributions to their name. They are weirdos who have made "being smart" their identity.