I know it must be obvious but this proves to me that biological intelligence hasn't nearly reached its peak. If we select for pure intelligence, biological brains can get much smarter. Imagine if we had 5 million geniuses as smart or smarter than Tao doing quantum physics. But life doesn't select for pure intelligence, it selects for survival.
In the Dune books, they banned computers so they bred super mentally capable humans.
Physics is not stuck because we don't have smart theoreticians who have good ideas: it is stuck because we don't have big enough particle accelerators and detectors to distinguish correct from incorrect theories.
Sure. But it doesn’t really seem clear to me that selecting for intelligence actually results in a better world. It’s a fallacy to think that intelligence = more rational or immune to human flaws, as a cursory glance at any “intelligent” social group should make obvious.
I think we’d be better off optimizing for conscientiousness or empathy, frankly. Even a world run by gardeners would probably be more beautiful and meaningful than one run by math geniuses.
Intelligent people tend to reproduce a lot less than other people. You wanna be average (or slightly above) for the best chance at successful procreation. And hyper-intelligent people are especially bad at procreation.
it's been a while, but I think mentats in Dune are trained not bred. Also, they use mind enhancing drugs (sapho juice IIRC). Which I guess makes a interesting point too, though different from yours :D
(I do agree biological intelligence is not close to its peak)
There is a slightly unexplored tangent in Brave New World about an experiment on Cyprus, where a society of humans bread to be intelligent descended in to civil war because nobody wanted to do menial work.
This is the theory of Elite Overproduction
Interesting thought experiment.
The question is: what do we want to optimize for?
Minimize pain and suffering for humans? The spread of mankind throughout the universe?
I’m pretty sure your idea would help with the latter. Not so sure about the former tbh.
Strictly speaking, evolution selects for viable offspring, not simply surviving. But that’s a nitpick, quite beside your point.
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> Imagine if we had 5 million geniuses as smart or smarter than Tao doing quantum physics.
This is a real possibility in our lifetimes due to AI.
Careful, we live in a society which has taken a side in the nature vs. nurture debate and if you're deemed to be on the wrong side of that then you'll be accused of being a nazi
Not sure it works like that, I think his biggest superpower was intrinsic motivation. Any child who read maths textbooks with enthusiasm for 3-4 hours a day for years could in theory at least get close to doing what he did, but what kid had that level of motivation?
> Any child who read maths textbooks with enthusiasm for 3-4 hours a day for years could in theory at least get close to doing what he did
No, they couldn't. And neither could most adults, for that matter.
Innate ability is real.
> No, they couldn't.
Isn't that a bit too certain for something that's not settled at all? How else would you explain the Polgar sisters? I'm sure there are other examples, but this is the most famous one.
Few claims in the social sciences are more fully settled. I don't think you could find a researcher in the world at a major university making that claim that randomly selected children could be reliably turned into world-class mathematicians with enough training.
> How else would you explain the Polgar sisters?
Genetics is the obvious explanation. The father was clearly very intelligent.
Also to clarify: I agree that training and effort can have large effects, and that focusing on them is a good strategy. Over-believing in them is probably a good bias, even. But the idea that everyone is more or less the same except for effort is ridiculous.
I simply disagree. Yes, they could. Same with adults. Basically no one does.
Also I didn’t say innate ability doesn’t exist. But in my opinion is a small multiplier on top of effort. That’s why I said close to.
As a TA, I've seen adults try to pass initial college calculus many times (and failing - you were allowed to try several times) with enormous effort. It's not a small multiplier
And this was still people selected from the small subset of the population choosing an engineering major. Human are much, much more different than you seem to think
There are many, many people (math majors, competitive programmers, chess players, etc) who devote incredible effort to becoming better, and simply cannot reach elite levels. And while in most cases elite players are also putting in a lot of effort, there are many cases where it is still relatively less than their peers who are trying harder but still lagging them.
Would you ever be tempted to make such a claim (that everyone is close to the same in ability and effort is the main determiner of success) about athletes? It's so obviously untrue that it's laughable. Why would you think that mental ability is magically distributed evenly?
> Would you ever be tempted to make such a claim (that everyone is close to the same in ability and effort is the main determiner of success) about athletes?
Well yes, absolutely. People don’t do quadruple axels on the ice because they were somehow born with the ability, they can do it because they practice figure skating every day for years. Innate ability (or in this case, let’s be honest, mostly genetics determining body shape) certainly makes the difference between becoming an Olympic gold medalist and just being very good at the sport, but you need to get very far in the field before it truly holds you back.
I don’t have a lot of experience with high-level professional sports, but I’m a classically trained violinist, and I’ve seen first-hand how a lot of the abilities that many people chalk up to “talent” (sense of rhythm, perfect pitch, composing music) are just skills that can be learned. Some students might need to practice more than others, sure, and some might reach a higher ceiling, but I firmly believe anyone can reach a high level with applied effort.
“I don’t have the talent to paint so I won’t learn to do it” is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
> People don’t do quadruple axels on the ice because they were somehow born with the ability, they can do it because they practice figure skating every day for years.
You've changed my claim. My claim isn't that world-class athletes, or even good athletes, don't have to work hard because of their talent to achieve elite levels. It's merely that talent is a huge determiner in success. It's also a huge determiner in how effective training is. An hour of training might improve a talented person 5 or 10x more than an hour of training would improve someone else.
This is all blindingly obvious if you've seen a sample of kids growing up. I remember the sister of one of my daughters friends, at age 3, was easily out-performing her brother and my daughter, who were a couple years older. This little 3 year could fearlessly climb up jungle gyms with ease, and kick around a ball, and swim fast. She hadn't practiced more. She could just do it.
That's probably why some competitions are called Math Olympics.
OTOH maybe there is no posibility whatsoever that genetics can determine mind shape no matter what.
Your post reads like someone is bitter because he is a midwit
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The important factors seem to be intrinsic motivation and other good mental faculties like great memory for concepts and formulas, understanding.
It's hard to say whether the motivation came from the good skills (understanding, memory) e.g. "I'm good at this, I like it!", or that the good skills came from the motivation. I believe both are important though, and that they are intertwined.
I actually agree with you on the first part, that is his super power is more on that persistence. But I’m not sure about the second part.
No .. not really. Not even close. Just like even if I practiced music 8 hours a day I wouldn't be able to come up with the music Kurt Cobain has or Mozart. There are plenty of musicians who try really hard but lack the innate talent - at best they can learn to play other people's music but never can come up with good original music, at least not something other people want to hear.
As someone wrote here innate ability is a real thing
I think you’re confusing mastery with marketability. “Other people want to hear it” is at best adjacent to someone’s skill at composing or playing music.
There’s plenty of mediocre musicians who became world-famous, and plenty of great musicians who nobody’s heard about. Skill and success are pretty weakly correlated.
> I think you’re confusing mastery with marketability. “Other people want to hear it” is at best adjacent to someone’s skill at composing or playing music.
This is a fun and complicated topic. Yes, sometimes things outside of the music influence our perceptions of the music. If the Red Hot Chili Peppers were a bunch of bald fat dudes maybe they would have had less fans; if Kurt Cobain hadn't killed himself he would still be a legend but perhaps in the calbire of Eddie Vedder and not what he became. But the following underlying principal I believe to be true : it's impossible to survive the test of time in music without producing "good" music. Example of music that survived the test of time : The Beatles, Queen, Pink Floyd and I'd argue Nirvana, Pearl Jam etc. How do I define "survive the test of time" is another discussion I'd rather not get into lol.
I actually think you could. If you’d done that, with enthusiasm* - and not just practiced but guided, trained practice, you 100% could.
whatever helps you sleep at night, brother.
I don’t say everyone has the same mental ability. But I stand by my point. Those people you mentioned might be dimwitted in part _ because_ their lack of enthusiasm for learning is low, so they didn’t do it. I don’t care how smart you are, effort matters.
Yeah, Fermi was such an unmotivated slacker.
Relayed by Nick Metropolis: Fermi and von Neumann overlapped. They collaborated on problems of Taylor instabilities and they wrote a report. When Fermi went back to Chicago after that work he called in his very close collaborator, namely Herbert Anderson, a young Ph.D. student at Columbia, a collaboration that began from Fermi's very first days at Columbia and lasted up until the very last moment. Herb was an experimental physicist. (If you want to know about Fermi in great detail, you would do well to interview Herbert Anderson.) But, at any rate, when Fermi got back he called in Herb Anderson to his office and he said, "You know, Herb, how much faster I am in thinking than you are. That is how much faster von Neumann is compared to me." [0]
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39965802
There is a massive body of research showing this is not true
I think it has to be both. You need some ability to understand and thus find happiness in the thing that you are reading which leads to the motivation.
Yes, the “with enthusiasm” bit is very important.
That's why I loved comic books.
There are probably hundreds of people on this site who had the same enthusiasm for math and time dedication as Terence Tao, but lacked his extreme outlier fluid intelligence, processing speed, perfect memory, and even handwriting talent(!). Terence Tao mastered calculus at an age when most future-mathemician geniuses weren't yet strong readers of chapter books.
Another requirement is the emotional capacity at 8 years old to focus, feel confident, and feel safe.
I think that is the main obstacle to most people doing highly effective work and putting in long hours. You hear some call people who don't 'work hard' lazy, but my impression is that it's emotional capacity, and a lot of that comes from family.
I wonder if there is a correlation between prodigies and emotionally stable, healthy, present parents. It's hard to imagine children under a lot of stress - e.g., from abusive parents, highly unreliable parents (e.g., overwhelmed by addictions to drugs), emotionally unstable parents (e.g., narcissists), highly neglectful parents (e.g., who abandon their kids) ... - it's hard to imagine those kids doing what Tao did, regardless of their talent.
Yes the correlation is there but it doesn't really matter. There are hundreds of millions of kids growing up with stable healthy parents and a handful of prodigies.
There are a only handful of prodigies regardless of what we're talking about, but I think that is a misguided way to look at the situation:
If my GP comment is true to some significant degree, it matters for people who are prodigies. It matters for the world, which benefits from the prodigies.
But I don't want to underemphasize the first or overemphasize the second. These are human beings, which is the overwhelming issue. They have the same needs and same importance as everyone else. That means we don't want to disregard their needs either because they are unusual and therefore more expensive to nurture, or because the world benefits from them and and doesn't care about their individual needs or thinks their needs can be sacrificed.
And on a similar basis, it has strong implications for all the other kids in the world, who need stable, loving, nurturing family.
Very true! Lots of things had to go right for Terrance.
I take it you've never met another human before
This can descend from a hive-mind of not ever giving credit to anyone different than themselves.