I'm still baffled about what you are getting at here. Apparently training people to think better is too hard for you, so I guess you want a pill or something. But there is no evidence that any pill can raise the average person's IQ by 10 points (which kind of makes sense, if some simple chemical balance adjustment could have such a dramatic effect on fitness it would be quite surprising). Are you researching a sci fi novel or something? What good does wishing for magical pills do?

Well if ASCII has his way, there may be one data point at casualty level 6.6 billion ...

The problem with all of these is that they are all likely to be adopted mostly by the minority of people who are already very smart, whereas this post is aiming at something for the average intelligence people who comprise the majority of the population.

The only difference was that he was mostly risking his own life, whereas asciilifeform is risking mine, yours and everyone else's too.

ASCII - the onus is on you to give compelling arguments that the risks you are taking are worth it.

if we could improve the intelligence of the average voter by 10 IQ points, imagine how much saner the political process would look

It's highly non-obvious that it would have significant effects. Political process is imperfect but very pragmatic - what makes a lot of sense as there's only as much good an improved political process can do, and breaking it can cause horrible suffering. So current approach of gradual tweaks is a very safe alternative, even if it offends people's idealistic sensibilities.

While I would not yet claim "black belt" competence in it, Mathematica has already enabled me to perform feats which I would not have previously dared to contemplate, despite having worked in Common Lisp. Mathematica is famously proprietary and the runtime is bog-slow, but the development environment is currently in a class of its own (at least from the standpoint of exploratory programming in search of solutions to ultra-hard problems.)

Sounds cool, but this is not quite what I was aiming at.

I suppose the question is not whether it would be good, but rather how. Some quick brainstorming:

• I think people are "smarter" now then they were, say, pre-scientific-method. So there may be more trainable ways-of-thinking that we can learn (for example, "best practices" for qualitative Bayesianism)

• Software programs for individuals. Oh, maybe when you come across something you think is important while browsing the web you could highlight it and these things would be presented to you occasionally sort of like a "drill" to make sure you don't forget it, or prime association formation at a later time. Or some kind of software aid to "stack unwinding" so you don't go to sleep with 46 tabs open in your web browser. Or some short-term memory aid that works better than scratch paper. Or just biting the bullet and learning Mathematica to an expert level instead of complaining about its UI. Or taking a cutting-edge knowledge representation framework like Novamente's PLN and trying to enter stuff into it as an "active" note-taking system.

• Collaboration tools -- shared versions of the above ideas, or n-way telephone conversations, or freeform "chatroom"-style whiteboards or iteratively-refined debate thesis statements, or lesswrong.com

• Man-machine hybrids. Like having people act as the utility function or search-order-control of an automated search process.

Of course, neural prostheses may become possible at some point fairly soon. Specially-tailored virtual environments to aid in visualization (like of nanofactories), or other detailed and accurate scientific simulations allowing for quick exploration of ideas... "Do What I Mean" interfaces to CAD programs might be possible if we can get a handle on the functional properties of human cognitive machinery...

I have located a paper describing Lenat's "Representation Language Language", in which he wrote Eurisko. Since no one has brought it up in this thread, I will assume that it is not well-known, and may be of interest to Eurisko-resurrection enthusiasts. It appears that a somewhat more detailed report on RLL is floating around public archives; I have not yet been able to track down a copy.

I personally suspect that the creation of the first artificial mind will be more akin to a mathematician's "aha!" moment than to a vast pyramid-building campaign. [...] my sole justification [...] is that a number of pyramid-style AGI projects of heroic proportions have been attempted and failed miserably.

"Reversed Stupidity is Not Intelligence." If AGI takes deep insight and a pyramid, then we would expect those projects to fail.

This is not how truly fundamental breakthroughs are made.

Hmm---now that you mention it, I realize my domain knowledge here is weak. How are truly fundamental breakthroughs made? I would guess that it depends on the kind of breakthrough---that there are some things that can be solved by a relatively small number of core insights (think Albert Einstein in the patent office) and some things that are big collective endeavors (think Human Genome Project). I would guess furthermore that in many ways AGI is more like the latter than the former, see below.

Why do you assume that AGI lies beyond the capabilities of any single intelligent person armed with a modern computer and a sufficiently unorthodox idea?

Only about two percent of the Linux kernel was personally written by Linus Torvalds. Building a mind seems like it ought to be more difficult than building an operating system. In either case, it takes more than an unorthodox idea.