Joe, what you are forgetting is that human beings are not governed solely by their intelligence. I think Annoyance was referring to a sort of moral intelligence which isn't in your definition.
And intelligence doesn't generate extra problems? Ever hear of the Cuban Missile Crisis? Or, say, pollution?
I think those problems weren't caused by too much intelligence, but by too little. I know, intelligence enables these problems to form in the first place -- These entities wouldn't be making the problems if they weren't volitional agents with intelligence, but that seems like a kind of cop-out complaint -- Without intelligence there wouldn't be any problems, sure, but there also wouldn't be anything positive either, no concepts whatsoever.
Pollution is a great example: It's intelligent thought that allowed us to start making machines that polluted. Intelligence allowed us to realize we could capitalize on the well-being of the environment and save money by trashing it.
More intelligence realizes that this is still a value trade off, that you aren't getting something for nothing -- Depending on the rate at which you do this, you could seriously damage yourself and the people around you for the trade-off. You have to weigh the costs with the benefits, and if the benefit is 'some money' and the cost is 'destroying the world', the intelligent choice becomes clear. To continue to act for the money isn't intelligence, it's just insanity, overpowering greed.
The cuban missile crisis may have been caused by intelligence building the structures that led up to it, but the solution wasn't making everyone dumber so they couldn't build that kind of thing -- that just reduces overall utility. The solution is to act intelligently in ways that don't destroy the world.
I see your point about moral intelligence being considered separately though, I hadn't thought of that in the context. It's a more elegant package to wrap everything up together, but not always the right thing to do... Thanks for the reply.
Intelligence is how accurately you can mine the information of the past in order to predict the future.
Very few people would claim that is an adequate definition of intelligence. The fact that there is a substantial clique of such people here, at this site, does not constitute a validation of the definition.
Well, let's look at the short list google gives us:
the ability to comprehend; to understand and profit from experience
Capacity of mind, especially to understand principles, truths, facts or meanings, acquire knowledge, and apply it to practice; the ability to learn and comprehend.
Intelligence is an umbrella term used to describe a property of the mind that encompasses many related abilities, such as the capacities to reason, to plan, to solve problems, to think abstractly, to comprehend ideas, to use language, and to learn.
My definition was:
To mine information from the past in order to predict the future.
My definition is certainly more broad, but I think it breaks down to the same thing. In order to do anything in the list you have to use resources of past experience in order to apply information for future experience. I've been using that definition roughly since 'Consciousness Explained' came out, and I've never been in a discussion with somebody who felt it was a ridiculous way of describing the functional nature of intelligence especially in terms of biological utility. Do you just dislike summation and want a long, drawn out definition?
Either way, no matter which definition you use, the capabilities granted by extra intelligence do not generate extra problems, but help you mitigate the problems that come up. I don't really understand the criticism in context with the discussion.
Assuming that you are typical may turn out to be as bad as assuming you are special. Any "assuming" is approximation, and depending on the problem the approximation may be either adequate or infinitely disastrous. That's what happens with doomsday argument, for example.
The values of probabilities of specific situations don't particularly matter if you don't approximate. The preference is for actions (i.e. areas in state space) with highest average utility (according to probability measure), independently of the probability measure of those areas as whole.
That is, if you have a huge event, something that can be predicted to happen very likely, with a certain average utility (weighted by probability), and a tiny event with significantly higher average utility, the tiny event is preferred. Ignoring the tiny event because of its tiny probability measure leads to losing that opportunity.
I agree, but you still need evidence for the tiny event you are ignoring. Acting on the assumption that you are special/in a unique situation without any justification other than a blind guess and a worry that you are neglecting the opportunity is dangerous. It's the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediocrity_principle">mediocrity principle</a>: When we tend to assume something amazing about ourselves, like that the Earth is the center of the universe, we end up finding out otherwise.
Contrast with the anthropic principle, in that we know we must account for the universe being capable of supporting at least one type of intelligent life. The number of ways that could go wrong are already gigantic, so we've already hit the jackpot at once. How many times in a row do we win the lottery?
I see what you mean with the tiny event with high utility, but I mean compare:
1) Driving or walking slightly out of your way for 1 extra minute a day to check if a certain apartment building has opened up a unit you are looking to rent (Low chance, but no reason to squander the opportunity for small cost.)
2) Picking up every piece of paper you see, on the chance that some number of the pieces of paper could be lottery tickets and some number of those tickets could be winning ones. (Extremely high utility, extremely low chance, and most importantly, you don't have any reason to assume or guess somebody is around discarding used lottery tickets: You just know that it is possible.)
The chances described here are above and beyond the second. The top 10^-30% is a truly minuscule set out of the whole. (If still a Vast upon imagining set because we are dealing with Everett branches...) If we are in a particularly special branch, how do we take advantage of that? What useful information does that give us? At worst it will mislead our understanding of the universe and at best it is barely noticeable.
I think it's all too typical in geek culture for someone to consider just one topic worthy enough of his or her intellect. I run into this sort of person a lot... any given programming convention for example, but it's certainly not everybody. Still, a lot of people scoff;
"Philosophy? It's all total bs, who knows the answers to that stuff anyway?" "Literature is for english majors. Don't make me gag." "Economics is guesswork, at least programming follows defined rules for sure" "Physics and chemistry is for newbs, biology is where it's at."
One field that gets disregarded repeatedly is feminism or women's studies. Lots of geeks want to look at it like a solved problem, but anybody who has worked in the industry knows the ridiculous sexism that continues to pop up without the geeks-in-charge even noticing it. Understanding why these issues are important helps increase your total understanding and helps you tackle more difficult problems.
Interdisciplinary understanding at least some basic points in many different fields gives you more than just a hammer in your toolbox to handle problems that aren't nails. I'd agree that it's essential to solving the Big Problems. The payoff of specialization in things like agriculture and industry is obvious. With difficult problems requiring many different fields of knowledge, the clarity and bandwidth of your thoughts you can convey from one specialist in one side of the problem to another specialist in another side of the problem drops to nil without some basic understanding on all sides.
My guess is that there is a bottleneck still ahead of us.
Evolution => intelligence => complexity => instability => collapse
Many people here seem to think increasing intelligence will help us solve our problems. History indicates that increasing intelligence will increase the number and severity of our problems.
Phil, I'm sorry if this sounds negative, but I don't understand this attitude at all. Intelligence is how accurately you can mine the information of the past in order to predict the future. You can't possibly think that all of our problems would go away if you gave everybody in the world a lobotomy? Or is there just some preferable lower-limit to intelligence we should engineer people to?
I think the historical problems with intelligence is an uneven increase in different fields or typical misuse. This isn't a problem with the tool, but the protocols and practices surrounding it.
we don't have much of a choice about generalizing from one example in this case.
considering the space of all possible worlds I wouldn't hesitate to put us in the top 10^-30%
This strikes a bad chord with me.
We don't accept any scientific explanation that resides on 'Maybe we're just in a particularly rare or special configuration in the universe where this particular thing happens.' We assume we're in an average position in the universe and understand our observations from that framework because it's not good science to just assume you are special or unique and settle for that.
The probability of us just happening to be in the top # of universes out of an absolutely Vast number of universes seems highly unlikely if we have an even given chance of being any of those given universes. Given a set so huge, the vast majority of the cases are, by definition, average and we have no reason to assume we are not an average member of the set.
It disturbs me in some way to think of a universe where nobody has ever had a loved one die, been in a car accident or even accidentally spilled milk. But if every possible configuration must be real, that would mean there is not just one of these universes but a Vast number of them where some of them just had their first car wreck today... Living in one of these ridiculous disturbing branches would probably fantastically screw with your idea of reality.
If instead of by political and social organization and unity of purpose we sorted by 'number of unfortunate events happening' like above, it's intuitive to think we seem to be around the average: nothing ridiculously unlikely seems to persist in our universe, probability seems to roll exactly like we'd expect.
Agreed, in an ideal world self-diagnosing would be simply foolish, for all the reasons you listed. Even in this one, it's not always a good idea.
In my personal case, I already have a diagnosis of being neurologically atypical, which was made when I was very young and specifically re-tested when I was in my late teens, so I'd be able to claim most if not all of the benefits of belonging to the neurodiverse community anyway. Questioning that the correct diagnosis was made is not the same as questioning that there was something diagnosis-worthy going on in the first place. This is a relatively common story, given that the 'high-functioning' variants of autism only became well known about 10 to 15 years ago, and before that time people who were only mild--to-moderately autistic got other labels instead.
In most 'true' self-diagnosis cases that I'm aware of, the person was already very aware that there was something unusual about themselves, and had looked at and rejected one or more other explanations before realizing that autism was the one that fit. Those people generally did seem to also be autistic (the similarities in processing style tend to be pretty obvious when you're interacting with someone in realtime, if you know what to look for) and the few of them that pursued official diagnoses got them easily.
I did run into a few people who did appear to be using the diagnosis for reasons like the ones you suggested; they stuck out like sore thumbs. My general observation about those people is that their general sanity waterline was very low, and that if they hadn't been able to use autism as their attention-getter, they would just have chosen another one. The self-diagnosis appeared to be a symptom, not a cause, of poor rationality in those cases.
By the way, if you're wondering why I haven't gone for a diagnosis myself, it's because a series of very bad experiences with psychiatrists and other mental health workers as a teenager left me with a bit of what appears to be PTSD. I could probably force myself to go into a situation like that, but the chance of my having a panic attack and getting myself into serious trouble would be significant, and the chance of me actually being able to interact with them well enough to get any benefit out of it would be negligible. (I don't consider the diagnosis itself to be a significant benefit, just a prerequisite if I wanted other assistance, which... not goona happen.) (This is, by the way, a good example of that 'quiet emotional system' thing... I'm having a very quiet anxiety attack in the back of my head, which isn't strong enough to interfere with my thinking much. If I were in the real situation mentioned, there would be enough of a feedback loop that the anxiety would go from being quiet to being overwhelming in about 5 to 10 minutes without extensive conscious management.)
I apologize if I caused you any stress, thanks for filling me in on the details. I would think some psychiatrists exist that are relatively fine with people having a panic attack during a session and escaping without 'getting them intro trouble' -- It seems there's a niche to be filled, since lots of people 'don't test well' (in a sense) while they might be otherwise fine in a normal conversation without the connotations. I think I understand your trepidation though, mental health professionals certainly have a world with a dark side in that if the employees don't care of irrationally decide things on too little evidence can wreak severe consequences on people's lives.
The best empirical estimate we have for the probability that the Earth will not fail, is the fraction of Earth-like planets around us that have succeeded. (Zero.)
That said, they don't seem to have failed after achieving AI, so I don't know if that really tells us much.
It seems like we have a sample set of zero, as successes are not by definition or axiom noticeable. Certainly possibly noticeable but not required to be so. Failures are also not required to be noticeable. No earth-like planets sustaining life or having evidence of having sustained life have been documented yet. The probability estimate is useless, with a total margin of error.
I've been commenting for a little while, but it was requested that I post here, so, here I am.
I'm a 27 year old female programmer, currently working from home on complex Second Life projects. The company I work with is in the process of expanding into the OpenSim realm, so I'll be learning that soon as well. I'm mostly self-taught when it comes to programming, and did not go to college at all. I also recently left my 'day job' of working in the activity department of a nursing home; I held that job for four years, and had various retail jobs before that, mostly cashiering.
I'm deeply interested in brain function, mind function, neurology, and most related topics. One of my closest friends is a retired professor of neurology, so I do get to discuss those topics fairly regularly. I tend to be a bit aggressive about accepting unusual neurologies as natural variation, and have a distinct personal interest in that ideology, as I'm not neurotypical myself.
I was diagnosed as being ADD when I was five, but personal research has led me to the conclusion that I'm almost certainly autistic, with (now-)occasional attention issues depending on how much mental overload I'm dealing with at the moment. I am moderately faceblind, have several sensory sensitivities, intermittent sensory processing difficulties of various degrees of severity, occasional motor planning difficulties, poor episodic memory, and difficulties processing normal-style social signals. I also have an excellent semantic memory, excellent pattern-matching capability, perfect pitch, several other minor-to-moderate sensory advantages, and, apparently, a much better ability to 'see' what my own mind is doing than was previously thought possible. (I know the last one probably sounds unbelievable. From this perspective, I had a hard time believing that normal people couldn't perceive their brainbits activating to work on a problem, and probably wouldn't've believed it at all if I didn't know someone who's studied that specifically... and even then, I found it incredible enough of a limitation that I confirmed it for myself with a few carefully-placed questions to other friends.) I also have an unusual emotional system - I am not and would not try to be completely unemotional, but my emotions tend to be relatively 'quiet' and not distracting, which makes certain tasks, particularly rational ones, much easier.
I am currently starting a neurodiversity-related project called The Neuroversity. The web page is very much still under construction, but there's a description of the project, and the forum is open to anyone who's interested.
I have several different angles of interest in social signaling, most notably how and why normal people use it. I've also noticed that there are several different 'layers' of social signals, some of which I'm actually quite good at noticing and parsing, and I'd like to figure out why, but I don't have much to go on, there. Another angle of interest is non-human social signaling, which I am in some cases quite good at understanding, and which most people seem to underestimate the sophistication of.
I'm a member of Play as Being, an open-source meditation group. The group itself is not religious, but religion is often discussed there, so it may or may not be if interest to anyone here. That said, the meditation exercises can be very useful, and many of the discussions are very interesting.
I also tend to be very open about my life, and am certainly willing to answer questions. :)
You certainly prove your chops in your comments, which I always enjoy reading. I was curious: Do you think it is wholly rational to self-diagnose mental/social abnormalities, problems, or diversities?
It seems like it would be a difficult problem to tackle objectively, because:
1) The payoff, one way or another, is pretty intense: Either understanding a label that makes you unique and explains a lot about your life, fitting in a new piece to your identity, or learning of another thing that is wrong. These are intensely personal revelations either way.
2) If you suspect something is seriously different about your brain, you may suffer a confirmation bias in reviewing the data, quick to jump on different topics.
3) The existence of a supportive social groups like the neurodiversity community you listed allow a quick admission into a network of people that seem to understand your problems and eventually will likely respect you and your opinions, which is one of the basic requirements people have for happiness and something that is generally sought after i.e. Maslow's pyramid and all. This is another element of incentive, subconscious or conscious.
I'm not that you're wrong-- from the things you've described, you're probably right. I'm just curious what you think: self-diagnosis of a brain-related, social-affecting, central-to-personal-identity disorder seems like an extremely tricky position to maneuver through even for absolutely exceptional minds.
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This little tidbit highlights so much of what's wrong with this community:
"Many of my social 'problems' began once I recognized that other people didn't think like I did, and were usually profoundly stupid. That's not a recognition that lends itself to frictionless interaction with others."
You'd think a specimen of your gargantuan brainpower would have the social intelligence to handily conceal your disdain for the commonfolk. Perhaps it's some sort of signaling?
I agree here: Reading stuff like this totally makes me cringe. I don't know why people of above average intelligence want to make everyone else feel like useless proles, but it seems pretty rampant. Some humility is probably a blessing here, I mean, as frustrating as it is to deal with the 'profoundly stupid', at least you yourself aren't profoundly stupid.
Of course, they probably think given the same start the 'profoundly stupid' person was given, they would have made the best of it and would be just as much of a genius as they are currently.
It's a difficult realization, when you become aware you're more intelligent then average, to be dropped into the pool with a lot of other smart people and realize you really aren't that special. I mean, in a world of some six billion odd, if you are a one-in-a-million genius, that still means you likely aren't in the top hundred smartest people in the world and probably not in the top thousand. It kind of reminds me of grad school stories I've read, with kids who think they are going to be a total gift to their chosen subject ending up extremely cynical and disappointed.
I think people online like to exaggerate their eccentricity and disregard for societal norms in an effort to appeal to the stereotypes for geniuses. I've met a few real geniuses IRL and I know you can be a genius without being horribly dysfunctional.