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FrF comments on Humans are not automatically strategic - Less Wrong
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This a point I've been thinking about a lot recently - that the time between the evolution of a species whose smartest members crossed the finish line into general intelligence, and today, is a blink of an eye in evolutionary terms, and therefore we should expect to find that we are roughly as stupid as it's possible to be and still have some of us smart enough to transform the world. You refer to it here in a way that suggests this is a well-understood point - is this point discussed more explicitly elsewhere?
It occurs to me that this is one reason we suffer from the "parochial intelligence scale" Eliezer complains about - that the difference in effect between being just barely at the point of having general intelligence and being slightly better than that is a lot, even if the difference in absolute capacity is slight.
I wonder how easy it would be to incorporate this point into my spiel for newcomers about why you should worry about AGI - what inferential distances am I missing?
We who are the first intelligences ever to exist ... our tiny little brains at the uttermost dawn of mind ... as awkward as the first replicator (2:01 in).
With all respect to Eliezer I think nowadays the gravely anachronistic term "village idiot" shouldn't be used anymore. I wanted to say that almost every time when I see the intelligence scale graphic in his talks.
Why do you think the term "village idiot" is "gravely anachronistic"? It's part of an idiom. "Idiot" was briefly used as a quasi-scientific label for certain range of IQs, and that usage is certainly anachronistic, but "idiot" had meaning before that, and continues to. The same is true for "village idiot".
You're right, wnoise, "village idiot" is part of an idiom but one I don't like at all and I don't think I'm particular in this regard.
I should have put my objection as "'Village idiot' is gravely anachronistic unless you want to be insensitive by subsuming a plethora of medical conditions and social determinants under a dated, derogatory term for mentally disabled people."
This may sound like nit-picking but obviously said intelligence graph is an important item in SIAI's symbolic tool kit and therefore every detail should be right. When I see the graph, I'm always thinking: Please, "for the love of cute kittens", change the "village idiot"!
For what it's worth, I don't find anything wrong with the term "village idiot".
However, from previous discussions here, I think I might be on the low side of the community for my preference for "lengths to which Eliezer and the SIAI should go to accommodate the sensibilities of idiots" - there are more important things to do, and a never-ending supply of idiots.
Still, maybe it should be changed. It's not because it doesn't offend me that it won't offend anybody reasonable.
In conversation with friends I tend to use George W Bush as the other endpoint - a dig at those hated Greens but it's uncontentious here in the UK, and if it helps keep people listening (which it seems to) it's worth it.
This seems a bad example to use given the context. If you are trying to convince people that greater than human intelligence will give AIs an insurmountable advantage over even the smartest humans then drawing attention to a supposed idiot who became the most powerful man in the world for 8 years raises the question of whether you either don't know what intelligence is or vastly overestimate its ability to grant real world power.
For the avoidance of doubt, it seems very unlikely in practice that Bush doesn't have above-average intelligence.
Wikipedia gives him an estimated IQ of 125, which may be a wee bit off for the low end of the IQ distribution. Still, if that's the example that requires the less explanation in practice, why not.
Maybe Forrest Gump would work as well?
My most recent use of this example got the response George W Bush Was Not Stupid.