Epictetus comments on Innate Mathematical Ability - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (140)
I'm not sure about this: lots of humans can make small incremental progress. For every Isaac Newton or Terry Tao there's a 10 or 15 people who are a few years behind them.
If this is in fact true then there is I think a decent question here if the Great Filter is partially the presence of geniuses or people much smarter than the norm for the species.. It may be that most species have a very low levels of variation in intelligence levels. I know that for studies with ravens there's little variation in what puzzles they can solve, but the total intelligence may be substantially lower enough than humans that it is hard to see. Also it is possible that are samples are too small to notice the really smart ravens.
Carl Friedrich Gauss illustrates this quite well. He kept a lot of his mathematical discoveries to himself. When they went through his private papers after his death it was found that he'd discovered things years or even decades (or centuries) before anyone else published them. It's a matter of speculation how much farther math would have advanced had Gauss bothered to publish all his work.