I don't have a problem, my environment has a problem.

Eliezer, I'm in complete sympathy with that attitude. I've had only limited success so far at nerdifying the rest of the world, but I'll keep at it!

Lara: As far as I can tell, there are four basic problems.

First, if adults constantly praise and reward you for solving math problems, writing stories, and so on, then you aren't forced to develop interpersonal skills to the same extent most kids are. You have a separate source of self-worth, and it may be too late that you realize that source isn't enough. (Incidentally, the sort of interpersonal skills I'm talking about often get conflated with caring for others' welfare, which then leads to moral condemnation of nerds as egotistical and aloof. But the two qualities seem completely unrelated to me. As often as not, those who are most skilled at convincing others to go along with them also care about others the least.) Of course, the same might in principle be true for any unusual talent, including musical or athletic talent---except that the latter are understood and rewarded by one's peer group in a way that intellectual skills aren't.

Second, math, physics, and so on can simply be fun, independently of whatever self-worth one derives from them. In this they're no different from tennis or basket weaving or any other activity that some people enjoy. The trouble, again, is that while math and physics are reasonably well-rewarded economically, they're not rewarded socially. And therefore, deriving pleasure from them can have the same sorts of social implications as deriving pleasure from heroin.

Third, even if you manage to overcome these handicaps, other people won't know you have, and will be guided by the reigning stereotypes. They might decide before talking to you that you couldn't possibly have anything in common with them. Naturally, this sort of thing can be overcome given enough social skill, but it's another obstacle.

The fourth problem is specific to technical fields (rather than literary ones), and is just the well-known gender imbalance in those fields.

Given all of this, what's surprising is not that so many "intelligence-centric types" are unhappy, but rather that in spite of it many manage to live reasonably happy lives. That's the interesting part! :-)

how much money (or other utility-bearing fruit) would you demand (or pay Scott) to take a drug which lowered your IQ by x pts?

Here's the funny thing: given who I am now, I would not pay to have my IQ lowered, and indeed would pay good money to avoid having it lowered, or even to have it raised. But I would also pay to have been, since early childhood, the sort of person who didn't have such an intelligence-centric set of priorities. I'm not transitive in my preferences; I don't want to want what I want.

Eliezer, I don't think there's a necessary tradeoff between intelligence (the academic rather than interpersonal kind) and happiness at the far nerd end of the spectrum---just that the way society is currently organized, it seems to be both true and common knowledge that there is (cf. Lara Foster's comment). Though despite the temptation, I can't justify dwelling on this phenomenon for too long---any more than on physical appearance, parental wealth, or any other aspect of our lives that we might love to "choose wisely" but can't. Unlike many other accidents of birth, one could even regard this one as "cosmically justified" if one saw intelligence as having a value of its own, independent from happiness. If you disagree, then yes, I might need a better argument than Pfffft.

We are the cards we are dealt, and intelligence is the unfairest of all those cards.

I completely agree with that statement, though my interpretation of it might be the opposite of Eliezer's. From The Simpsons:

Lisa: Dad, as intelligence goes up, happiness often goes down. In fact, I made a graph! [She holds up a decreasing, concave upward graph on axes marked "intelligence" and "happiness"] Lisa: [sadly] I make a lot of graphs.

Apparently many people just don't have a mental bin for global risks to humanity, only counting up the casualties to their own tribe and country. Either that or they're just short-term thinkers.

Eliezer, I certainly worry about global risks to humanity, but I also worry about the "paradoxes" of utilitarian ethics. E.g., would you advocate killing an innocent person if long-term considerations convinced you it would have an 0.00001% chance of saving the human race? I'm pretty sure most people wouldn't, and if asked to give a reason, might say that they don't trust anyone to estimate such small probabilities correctly.

I would have exploded the first bomb over the ocean, and only then used it against cities if Japan still hadn't surrendered. No matter how many arguments I read about this, I still can't understand the downsides of that route, besides the cost of a 'wasted bomb.'

But what's just as tragic as the bomb having been used in anger, is that it wasn't finished 2-3 years earlier -- in which case it could have saved tens of millions of lives.

What you seem to want is an intelligence that is non-human but still close enough to human that we can communicate with it. Although it's not clear what we'd have to talk about, once we get past the Pythagorean theorem.

How about P vs. NP? :-)

Can't we imagine the SF writers reasoning that they're never going to succeed anyway in creating "real aliens," so they might as well abandon that goal from the outset and concentrate on telling a good story? Absent actual knowledge of alien intelligences, perhaps the best one can ever hope to do is to write "hypothetical humans": beings that are postulated to differ from humans in just one or two important respects that the writer wants to explore. (A good example is the middle third of The Gods Themselves, which delves into the family dynamics of aliens with three sexes instead of two, and one of the best pieces of SF I've read---not that I've read a huge amount.) Of course, most SF (like Star Wars) doesn't even do that, and is just about humans with magic powers, terrible dialogue, and funny ears. I guess Star Trek deserves credit for at least occasionally challenging its audience, insofar as that's possible with mass-market movies and TV.

The algorithm has to assume many different possible actions as having been taken, and extrapolate their consequences, and then choose an action whose consequences match the goal ... The algorithm, therefore, cannot produce an output without extrapolating the consequences of itself producing many different outputs.

It seems like you need to talk about our "internal state space", not our internal algorithms -- since as you pointed out yourself, our internal algorithms might never enumerate many possibilities (jumping off a cliff while wearing a clown suit) that we still regard as possible. (Indeed, they won't enumerate many possibilities at all, if they do anything even slightly clever like local search or dynamic programming.)

Otherwise, if you're not willing to talk about a state space independent of algorithms that search through it, then your account of counterfactuals and free will would seem to be at the mercy of algorithmic efficiency! Are more choices "possible" for an exponential-time algorithm than for a polynomial-time one?