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komponisto comments on The Correct Contrarian Cluster - Less Wrong
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Along with 99% of humanity my IQ isn't high enough for me to ever understand the math behind quantum physics. So I can't do the math myself, or figure out which physicist to trust when the physicists disagree.
Given your IQ and information set many worlds might be a slam dunk. But I submit that anyone with my IQ or lower would necessarily be irrational to think that many worlds is a slam dunk.
This may be a tangential point, but I need to say this somewhere: claims like this are quite likely false. (Notice how rarely they're accompanied by justification.)
Quantum mechanics is new (in the scheme of things). So, of course, we see right now that the only people who understand it are very smart people: the ones who first thought of it and their students and associates. But that doesn't mean that no one else can understand it; it just hasn't had time to trickle down into everyone's general education yet.
300 years ago, you could have replaced "quantum" by "classical" in that sentence, and it would have seemed reasonable: at that time, only a few dozen people in the world understood the differential and integral calculus. Yet now this kind of mathematics is taught regularly to hordes of IQ 110 college freshmen, and (I expect) is considered elementary and routine by a majority of LW readers. Taking an Outside View approach here, I don't see any reason not to expect that the same trend will continue into the future, with quantum mechanics eventually being considered a grade-school subject (even without recourse to transhumanist solutions such as intelligence enhancement, which will immediately come to the minds of many readers).
Going back further, once upon a time literacy was an elite skill. Now we take it for granted, but how much do you really think our IQs have improved in the last couple thousand years?
And let's not forget that even now, we already know that the fundamental mathematical ideas behind quantum mechanics are actually quite simpler than you would have thought from listening to physicists -- little more than linear algebra over complex vector spaces.
A lot! Western IQ scores have improved by ~30 points since IQ tests were invented around a century ago. And literacy is probably part of a positive feedback loop that historically boosted IQ: increased literacy improves IQ, and higher IQ increases literacy. That feedback loop likely hasn't been going for two thousand years, but it's been going for at least two hundred years, which is more than enough time for a feedback loop to go nuts.
Still, though I suspect IQs have improved massively in the last couple thousand years, I definitely agree with your comment. I think the rise in average IQ over time doesn't mean we've gotten qualitatively smarter, more that our environment has - and one aspect of that is the trickle-down effect of mental tools like literacy, classical mechanics, and quantum mechanics.
This seems factually false to me. For starters, the average IQ of college freshman (all colleges, all majors) is more like 115 or 120 (choose the reference you please from Google). And math or physics majors are a cut far above that average, with GRE scores indicating an average around 130. (Prospective grad students, yes, but the ranking fits with high school SAT scores.)
I don't think very many schools make relativity-level mathematics (or even just multi-variate calculus sufficient to solve Newtonian problems) a core requirement rather than major-specific...
The number 110 was just a guess, of course, but the point clearly stands even if the average IQ of people taking business calculus is 120.
The 17th-century counterparts of these folks would have been illiterate peasants or possibly, in a few cases, local merchants; they would not have been Newton and Leibniz.
You should look at the SAT math test to get an estimate of the percentage of Americans for which "linear algebra over complex vector spaces" can ever be simple.
I don't disagree, but keep in mind that these people went through horrible learning processes to get there.
I simply refer you again to my comment above. It applies to linear algebra as much as quantum mechanics.
Comments edited for clarification.