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Viliam_Bur comments on The Importance of Sidekicks - LessWrong
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Hmm. I grew up with a different experience. Don't remember feeling especially alone-as-a-rationalist. Some parts of my childhood were unusual; my parents are pretty exceptionally sane, my brother is as interested in rationality as I am. And I think to a large degree it's just a personality difference. From the outside, it sometimes looks like other rationalists are trying to conclude that other people are dumb or unstrategic. (Including Eliezer). This makes no sense to me.
I sometimes wish I could drag various rationalists to my job at the ICU for a while, make them see the kind of teamwork and cooperation that happens in a place where cooperation is a default and a necessity. Nurses, for the most part, just cooperate. Even when there are conflicts. Even when they don't like each other. (Although the degree of "agency" that the team as a whole has does vary with how much the individuals like each other and get along.) I don't know how to make this magic happen on demand, aside from applying selection bias to get the kinds of people who want to be nurses, and then giving them hard-but-manageable problems to solve. And I think I did learn a lot about cooperation at work.
Now I'm curious about the other implications of a society where individuals are isolated. What does that even look like? What do people spend their time doing? What causes the isolation? ...Sci-fi plot brewing.
There was a research (sorry, I don't have the link) about highly intelligent children, whether they later in life became successful people or losers, and the conclusion was that it mostly depended on the family. If the family provided models of how to use high intelligence for professional success (e.g. the parents were doctors or lawyers), the children became successful and integrated; if the family didn't have such model (a gifted child in otherwise average family), the children often became weird loners. But if I remember correctly, if those loners had families and their own highly intelligent children, the second generation was okay.
Of course rationality is not the same as high intelligence, but I suspect there is a similar effect of being a weirdo in one's own family, versus being a part of the team. There are differences: High intelligence is often considered a positive trait by average people; the problem is it creates unrealistic expectations (if you have high intelligence, you are supposed to magically overcome any problem and should never need any help). Epistemic rationality probably doesn't get much respect from irrational people (not believing in group dogma makes you seem evil; not doing the stupid things that everyone else considers smart makes you seem dumb). Also, when highly intelligent people sometimes dream about becoming average, they know it is impossible (without brain surgery or similar); but for a lonely rationalist, becoming irrational feels like a realistic option they could take any time, so it feels like their troubles are maybe just all their own fault.
When I imagine having a rationalist sibling, my emotional reaction is: "By this time we would have already conquered the world together!" Which most likely isn't literally true... but it illustrates how it can feel not having one.
Some kind of teamwork should definitely be a part of a rationalist group training.
Done.
Being highly intelligent comes with it's own opportunities and pitfalls.
Having people close to you with life experience relevant to your life is a huge advantage, as would having people close to you with useful social connections to professional fields that leverage intelligence.
Yes. The question is whether those disadvantages of high intelligence are intrinsic, or merely a consequence of incompatibility with the majority which is of the average intelligence. In other words, if the people with higher intelligence could create a society (or a sufficiently supportive subculture) where they would be the norm, whether they would still have some disadvantages compared with the average people, or whether all their disadvantages would then disappear.
A naive argument for the intrinsic disadvantages is the just-world hypothesis: people believing that when the Creator Fairy creates a new soul with higher IQ, the sense of justice makes the fairy balance it with less health or less happiness, because not doing so would simply be too unfair.
A more convincing argument called Algernon's law says that if intelligence would be a pure advantage, evolution would have already made us smarter, up to the level where there is some tradeoff in fitness. A possible counter-argument is that our environment changes faster that human biology. The fittness tradeoff for higher intelligence could be something that was a huge problem thousands of years ago, but is not a problem now: for example needing more calories.
On the other hand, if highly intelligent people are successful as long as they have highly intelligent families and friends, that would be an evidence that the disadvantages mostly come from incompatibility with the majority. Which means, the disadvantages could be solved if the highly intelligent people managed to cooperate at overcoming them.
A human will be a greater success in a human tribe than a chimpanzee tribe.
At climbing trees, a human in a primitive human tribe will still be less successful than the chimps.
So, are there any tree-climbing equivalents for highly intelligent people? Or is everything merely a question of having the right tribe?
(Note: I am totally "yay, smart people!" However, if there is some intrinsic weakness we have, I want to know about it, so that I can think strategically about overcoming it.)
It's not whether he is more or less successful than chimps, it's what environment he will be most successful in.
From your comments, I took it as the usual career status and money scale. On a first approximation, being able to produce more intellectual product quickly should be an advantage, if used in accordance with the reward structure of the environment.
On advantages/disadvantages relative to less intelligent people, each in their best environments, I see a few issues.
Being on the tail of the human distribution likely means that the genes aren't as robust as more central genotypes. Less testing. I wouldn't be surprised if biologically based mental illness is more likely.
It is likely that there is some trade off between intelligence and other brain functions, some functional cost to more intelligence, depending on how you want to slice and dice brain function.
But in the current environment, I think the environmental disadvantages are so huge that I'm not losing sleep over the intrinsic disadvantages.
For starters, being shuttled through the usual factory school system is easily crippling for a smart kid. Not only does it fail to teach a kid what every kid most needs to learn - how to focus and apply himself, it rewards a smart kid just for being smart, which is about the most dysfunctional lesson he can learn.
I agree with this. All kids would benefit from a better system, but smarter kids could get greater benefits. In addition to the generally useful stuff, they could also learn about how to live specifically as a person more intelligent than others. Not just signalling their intelligence to the teacher.
Without systematical support, some of them will get the information from their family and friends... some will have to learn the hard way... and some will never learn.
An incorrect inference may, under rare circumstances, lead to a useful and coincidentally correct conclusion that just happens to be hard to reach without the incorrect inference. (Of course, it requires being very lucky as well. People make incorrect inferences all the time, but there are very few well-known examples of it working).
For example, viewing heat as a liquid might result in designing a stove that transfers heat to a pot very well, despite heat not being a liquid.
An incorrect inference can be considered basically random - this can, I think, be imitated more efficiently and more reeliably in many cases by considering an evolutionary-algorithm approach to design, in short making random design choices and testing them extremely quickly. This also has the advantage that instead of needing to be lucky enough to hit the right inference first, it can keep going until a suitable design is achieved.
I don't really know if this counts as an intrinsic weakness...