Bob_Unwin9
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He looked at my diagram showing the "village idiot" next to "Einstein", and said, "That seems wrong to me; I think Einstein should be way off on the right."
We can distinguish between system I and system II abilities (http://web.cenet.org.cn/upfile/37554.pdf). Einstein and the village idiot share most of their system I abilities. For example: They learned the complex syntax and semantics of their respective native languages effortlessly as children without needed explicit tuition. They both mastered basic human folk psychology / theory of mind including reasoning about desire and belief ascriptions and motivation. They both are competent with standard human folk physics (involving recognition of objects as discrete, crude mechanics, etc.). They... (read more)
"But I'm skeptical that this uniformity extends to system II. The system II abilities of the best rationalists of today may depend significantly on their having learned a set of reasoning skills developed by their culture over a long period of time."
That's precisely the point; the biological difference between humans is not that great, so the huge differences we see in human accomplishment must be due in large part to other factors.
Agreed. But I think that if you put up a scale of "intelligence" then people will take into account abilities other than those that are (in some ill-defined and crude sense) dependent only on biology. And if we're talking about building... (read more)