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satt comments on What resources have increasing marginal utility? - Less Wrong Discussion

36 Post author: Qiaochu_Yuan 14 June 2014 03:43AM

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Comment author: satt 23 June 2014 01:31:23AM 3 points [-]

One of the problems with discussing this is that IQ scores and all research based on it is purely an ordinal scale based on comparing existing humans, while what we really want is to measures of intelligence on a cardinal scale which lets us compare not just humans but potential future humans and AIs too.

For this reason, it seems to me that conjectures about people with no negative variants getting a 25 SD IQ gain are untestable. How would one distinguish such people from someone with a gain of only(!) 15 SD or 10 SD or even 7 SD, when the population available to norm IQ tests consists of only 7 billion people?

Comment author: gwern 24 June 2014 01:46:41AM 2 points [-]

Create enough people at 15SD to test the 25SD subjects. :)

More seriously, this may be practically untestable but I think it's also the sort of thing which doesn't need to be tested - if we're ever in a position that the answer might matter, we have bigger fish to fry.

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