= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
TheOtherDave comments on What Curiosity Looks Like - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (283)
Something I learned viscerally while I was recovering from brain damage is that intelligence is fun. I suspect I'd want to enhance my intelligence in much the same way that I'd want to spend more time around puppies.
Context matters, I suspect. I don't think that having a 140 IQ would be all that fun if everyone one interacted with on a daily basis was in the 90-100 range.
edited to depersonalize the pronoun.
Unless you really enjoy winning or achieving social success and dominance (and don't have an accompanying social disfunction to go with your IQ).
I suspect that in the country of the stupid the moderately intelligent individual would be less successful and dominant than he might hope.
I would bet against you - with the aforementioned caveats that said individual is not socially handicapped and is ambitious.
I also wouldn't call 90-100 IQ 'stupid' or 140 IQ 'moderately intelligent'.
That's certainly true. "If you're routinely the smartest guy in the room, find a different room."
And yeah, in a "post-Singularity" world that contained a lot of different ranges of intelligence I would probably tune my intelligence to whatever range I was interacting with regularly, which might involve variable intelligence levels, or even maintaining several different disjoint chains of experience.
And I'm perfectly prepared to believe that past a certain point the negative tradeoffs of marginal increases in intelligence outweigh the benefits.
But at least up to that threshold, I would likely choose to socialize with other people who tuned themselves up to that level. It's admittedly an aesthetic preference, but it's mine.
I have an IQ in the 140-ish range. (At least, that's what the professionally administered test I had when I was a child said. Online IQ tests tell me I've lost 20 IQ points in the intervening years. Make of that what you will.)
I would estimate I regularly converse "in real life" with someone of above-average IQ a few times a year. This is just a guess, of course. One indicator of the accuracy of this assessment (granting that education as a proxy for intelligence isn't perfect) is that no one in my circle of friends or family that I regularly communicate with has ever went to, or graduated from anything greater than high school.
You're right it's not fun.
The internet alleviates this issue to a large degree.