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XiXiDu comments on The beginnings of a test for Rationality Quotient - Less Wrong Discussion

16 Post author: lukeprog 07 September 2011 08:45AM

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Comment author: XiXiDu 07 September 2011 11:53:46AM *  3 points [-]
  • Intelligence quotient
  • Rationality quotient

I wonder what IQ and RQ you need to make up for a low social/emotional/ethical intelligence quotient. The latter 3 are in theory comprised in the former 2 but probably demand massive resources if they are not hard-coded.

ETA:

Autistic children, for example, are sometimes extremely clever. They're very good at making observations and remembering it all. However, it is argued they have low social intelligence. Chimpanzees are very clever at the level of being able to make observations and remember things. They can remember better than humans can, but they, again, are inept at handling interpersonal relationships. So something else is needed. What is needed is a theory of mind, a theory of how other people work from the inside.

Wikipedia

Comment author: wedrifid 07 September 2011 12:11:15PM *  3 points [-]

Chimpanzees are very clever at the level of being able to make observations and remember things. They can remember better than humans can, but they, again, are inept at handling interpersonal relationships.

Chimpanzees aren't that bad at handling interpersonal relationships. Especially compared to their cleverness in other areas. They have approximately the opposite problem as the autistics.

Comment author: wedrifid 07 September 2011 02:12:13PM 2 points [-]

I am genuinely surprised. The parent is the last of my recent comments that I would expect to be disapproved of but it managed to get to -2. And not out of any evident general assassination either from what I can tell. That usually means that either people disagree strongly or, more commonly, that it goes against people's politics. Since I am not aware of any group that would find that particularly objectionable the obvious hypotheses are either two people somehow disagree about the relative strengths of chimpanzees or the meaning of my words are less transparent than I thought.

Given their level of cleverness chimpanzees are more clever at dealing with other chimpanzees than they are generically clever at tasks other than interpersonal relations. Is that not both true and trivial? The corollary seems equally obvious. Given their level of cleverness and relative to other individuals of their species autistic individuals can be expected to be better at non interpersonal tasks than interpersonal tasks.

Comment author: Vaniver 07 September 2011 02:25:38PM 1 point [-]

(I didn't downvote the grandparent.)

I disagreed with that because it appears the difference between chimps and humans is that humans are better at social things, including modeling other humans. Chimps can learn, but they don't teach- probably because they don't understand that their children can learn.

The claim you're making seems subtler- that if you divide a chimp's ability to model reality by a human's, you'll get a lower fraction than if you divide a chimp's ability to model chimps by a human's ability to model humans. I don't know enough about their ability to model reality, but the impression I get is that chimps are pretty clever.

Comment author: Emile 07 September 2011 07:34:06PM 2 points [-]

Chimps can learn, but they don't teach- probably because they don't understand that their children can learn.

Citation needed - this seems to disagree, and, more generally, I would expect the ability to learn to go hand in hand with the ability to teach. Anybody whose cat had kittens knows that teaching exists in animals.

From what I've read in Chimpanzee Politics, I got the impression that chimps are pretty good at modeling other chips (better than many other primates), so I wouldn't be ''that'' sure that the relative increase in humans was greater in the ability to model peers than in the ability to model reality (though most likely it is).

Comment author: wedrifid 09 September 2011 02:00:17AM 5 points [-]

Citation needed - this seems to disagree, and, more generally, I would expect the ability to learn to go hand in hand with the ability to teach. Anybody whose cat had kittens knows that teaching exists in animals.

My cat used to teach us how to catch mice. It was adorable!

Comment author: [deleted] 09 September 2011 03:59:14AM 2 points [-]

Upvoted for adorable.

Comment author: Vaniver 07 September 2011 07:44:33PM 0 points [-]

Citation needed - this seems to disagree, and, more generally, I would expect the ability to learn to go hand in hand with the ability to teach.

That seems to suggest that teaching is rare among chimpanzees near the end. Regardless, I'm not a zoologist, and my model of chimps is fuzzy. It may be that someone was commenting just about male chimps and I extended that to all chimps, or that most chimps don't teach except for this variety, or a number of other options.

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