There may be connotation issues here. The connotations to me of the phrase "the village idiot" are that one can refer to the fellow as that and everyone will know who one is talking about as one would for "the village doctor" or something similar. Hence my invocation of Dunbar's number.
In that case, the least intelligent person in the village would almost certainly be significantly smarter than a gorilla, but I think that any chart which puts a very smart humans and a very stupid human almost right next to each other, and a chimp way off to the left, seriously overestimates the distance between humans and other primates relative to the difference between smart and dumb humans.
There was an interesting article which I believe was linked to on Less Wrong at some point, although I can no longer find it, where a professor talked about his ti...
Today's post, My Childhood Role Model was originally published on 23 May 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
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