This is true, I didn't think of this. A superintelligent sheperd. Interesting idea. It just seems so stagnant to me, but I don't have the value meme for it.
In this case, tame might mean: "Able to co-exist with other males in your species". Our concestor with chimpanzees probably wasn't, but we had to adapt.
Agreed. One of the interesting points in that Dawkin's book is how sexual selection can result in the enhancement of traits that neither increase survivability or produce more offspring. He talks about 'fashions' spreading within a species, in his personal theory of how humans started walking upright.
Basically, the females or the males start selecting for a particular rare behavior as indicative of something desirable over their lessers, which leads to that male or female exhibiting that trait reproducing and the trait being reinforced for as long as it is...
Well, yes, on Pg. 31 of 'The Ancestor's Tale',
I feel as though if you are hoping to preserve the specific biological scope of humanity you have some significant roadblocks on the way. Our species was generated in millions of years of shifting genes with selection factors blatant to subtle, and more recently we've stripped as many selection factors out as we can. (For good reason, natural selection is a harsh mistress...)
Malaria etc still is a selecting factor as has been documented but they're greatly reduced. In Dawkin's 'The Ancestor's Tale', he tells the story of the Russian Silver Fox breeding exp...
Oh, I'm sorry I misunderstood you. Yeah, it can be tiring. I'm a fairly introverted person and need a good amount of downtime between socialization. I guess I was projecting a little -- I use to think social norms were garbage and useless, until I realized neglecting their utility was irrational and it was primarily an emotional bias against them in never feeling like I 'fit in'. Sometimes it feels like you never stop discovering unfortunate things about yourself...
Being called 'profoundly stupid' is not exactly a criticism of someone's reasoning. (Not that anybody was called that.) I think we're objecting to this because of how it'll offend people outside of the 'in group' anyway. Besides that, As much as we might wish we were immune to the emotional shock or glee at our thoughts and concepts being ridiculed or praised. I think it would be a rarity here to find someone who didn't. People socializing and exchanging ideas is a type of system -- It has to be understood and used effectively in order to produce the best results -- and calling, essentially, everybody who disagrees with you 'profoundly stupid' is not good social lubrication.
I agree completely. If intelligence-generated problems cannot outpace the solutions total destruction awaits.
I apologize if the stupid pill characterization feels wrong, I just was trying to think of a viable alternative to increasing intelligence.
I disagree. It is rational to exploit interpersonal communication for clarity between persons and comfortable use. If the 'language of rationality' can't be understood by the 'irrational people', it is rational to translate best you can, and that can include utilizing societal norms. (For clarity and lubrication of the general process.)
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 diffic...
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. Intellig...
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 inform...
I almost totally agree here. The implementations are often provocative rather than rational. It's an emotionally charged subject and yeah, the formalization and thorough understanding of the problems it addresses leaves a lot to be desired. Yet some of the ideas are right, and just discarding the commentary makes the problem seem worse to anyone introduces to those ideas encountering your average 'bunch of intellectual-seeming guys' style forum. I wouldn't say just feminists have generally "no reasoning" about the problems involved -- that strikes me as a little wide of a generalization. Thanks a lot for the well-referenced post.
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 mediocrity principle: 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 ...
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...
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.
It's true that feminists make some correct empirical and moral claims that are prematurely discarded. Yet this mistake doesn't mean that Women's Studies isn't rightly looked down on as a real academic field.
I've taken Women's Studies classes at a top university. Here's a quote from my F...
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.
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...
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.
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.
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 ...
I don't think this is the case. It seems like we keep running into problems that are more based on our biological heritage rather than our personal intelligence: For example, limitations in our ability to accept evidence that goes against 'sacred' beliefs of a group, the idea that a belief told to you by a trusted peer or authority figure is more valid than something with reputable evidence. This might have been valuable to ancient societies to maintain cohesion, but less so in a world that is increasing piles of uncomfortable evidence against some sets of...
If the ancient (proto-human) mental construction of 'self' was a remodeled and turned inside-out version of the 'other people' mental construction, the distinction between signaling to nobody and signaling to yourself may not be on as sturdy grounds as it seems.
The idea seems to make sense: Evolution doesn't jump in huge strides, so the progress from not-having-a-self to having-a-self must have been a cumulative one. The only place for similar parts to be worked on an advanced is within social behavior with your group, so that at least seems reasonable at...
In 'Proust and the Squid', Maryanne Wolf talks about just that, how external reading and writing skills behave as a kind of storage area for brain contents. I can't remember the exact passage (I guess because I have it written down in a book at home) but she talks about how we don't write things down to remember them, but so that it's okay for us to forget them. She goes into an analysis of a few cultures and their strengths and weaknesses when it comes to writing, reading, and memory. Very related and a good read. It follows along a bit with Plato's Phaed... (read more)