Epictetus comments on Innate Mathematical Ability - Less Wrong

40 Post author: JonahSinick 18 February 2015 11:11AM

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Comment author: JoshuaZ 19 February 2015 02:37:52PM 7 points [-]

Furthermore, if not for people with unusually high intelligence, there would have been no Renaissance and no industrial revolution: Europe would still be in the dark ages, as would the rest of the world.

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.

Comment author: Epictetus 23 February 2015 09:04:51AM 4 points [-]

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.

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.