Epiphany comments on Why Are Individual IQ Differences OK? - Less Wrong

39 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 26 October 2007 09:50PM

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Comment author: Epiphany 15 August 2012 01:00:02AM 1 point [-]

Awesome! Tell me super-intelligent thoughts? Have you met the others? (Nope, not gullibility. Explaining below in re to gwern.)

Comment author: OrphanWilde 15 August 2012 01:03:49PM 0 points [-]

I'm not sure what a super intelligent thought would look like; there's a limit on how intelligent a thought could be, as a thought that gets too clever ceases to be clever at all. But if that's your internal reaction as well, I don't have any room to argue/criticize on this front, as you're being fully consistent.

(Strictly speaking, incidentally, any score above 180 is merely an estimate; IQ tests cease to perform reliably above that level.)

Comment author: Epiphany 06 September 2012 02:28:03AM *  0 points [-]

I loved your experiment. (: As for what a super-intelligent thought would look like, there are multiple ways of interpreting you:

You might be saying that a person with an IQ of 220 could be prone to over-thinking things. In that case, it would cease to qualify as cleverness due to a failure to maintain a good cost-benefit ratio between the amount of brainpower put in and the results coming out.

You may mean that if someone were to say something significantly more clever than what is commonly thought of as "clever" it may not be recognized as such, may not even be observable to most minds once pointed out, and therefore might never end up recognized as "clever" by anyone.

There's a much more interesting possibility - that a super-intelligent thought may transcend cleverness, take on emergent properties, or otherwise be so advanced that our current definitions of intelligence can't express it.