Ah, thx! Will try.

If I did, I wouldn't publicly say so.

It's of course not yes or no, but just a probability, but in case it's high I might not want to state it here, so I should generally not state it here, so you cannot infer it is high by the fact that I didn't state it here.

I can say though that I only turned 22y last week and I expect my future self to grow up to become much more competent than I am now.

2. I mentioned that there should be much more impressive behavior if they were that smart; I don't recall us talking about that much, not sure.

You said "why don't they e.g. jump in prime numbers to communicate they are smart?" and i was like "hunter gatherer's don't know prime numbers and perhaps not even addition" and you were like "fair".

I mean I thought about what I'd expect to see, but I unfortunately didn't really imagine them as smart but just as having a lot of potential but being totally untrained.

3. I recommended that you try hard to invent hypotheses that would explain away the brain sizes.

(I'm kinda confused why your post here doesn't mention that much; I guess implicitly the evidence about hunting defeats the otherwise fairly [strong according to you] evidence from brain size?)

I suggest that a bias you had was "not looking hard enough for defeaters". But IDK, not at all confident, just a suggestion.

Yeah the first two points in the post are just very strong evidence that overpower my priors (where by priors i mean considerations from evolution and brain size, as opposed to behavior). Ryan's point changed my priors, but I think it isn't related enough to "Can I explain away their cortical neuron count?" that asking myself this question even harder would've helped.

Maybe I made a general mistake like "not looking hard enough for defeaters", but it's not that actionable yet. I did try to take all the available evidence and update properly on everything. But maybe some motivated stopping on not trying even longer to come up with a concrete example of what I'd have expected to see from orcas. It's easier to say in retrospect though. Back then I didn't know in what direction I might be biased.

But I guess I should vigilantly look out for warning signs like "not wanting to bother to think about something very carefully" or so. But it doesn't feel like I was making the mistake, even though I probably did, so I guess the sensation might be hard to catch at my current level.

Yes human intelligence.

I forgot to paste in that it's a follow up to my previous posts. Will do now.

In general, I wish this year? (*checks* huh, only 4 months.)

Nah I didn't loose that much time. I already quit the project end of January, I just wrote the post now. Most of the technical work was also pretty useful for understanding language, which is a useful angle on agent foundations. I had previously expected working on that angle to be 80% as effective as my previous best plan, but it was even better, around similarly good I think. That was like 5-5.5 weeks and that was not wasted.

I guess I spent like 4.5 weeks overall on learning about orcas (including first seeing whether I might be able to decode their language and thinking about how and also coming up with the whole "teach language" idea), and like 3 weeks on orga stuff for trying to make the experiment happen.

Yeah I think I came to agree with you. I'm still a bit confused though because intuitively I'd guess chimps are dumber than -4.4SD (in the interpretation for "-4.4SD" I described in my other new comment).

When you now get a lot of mutations that increase brain size, while this contributes to smartness, this also pulls you away from the species median, so the hyperparameters are likely to become less well tuned, resulting in a countereffect that also makes you dumber in some ways.

Actually maybe the effect I am describing is relatively small as long as the variation in brain size is within 2 SDs or so, which is where most of the data pinning down the 0.3 correlation comes from.

So yeah it's plausible to me that your method of estimating is ok.

Intuitively I had thought that chimps are just much dumber than humans. And sure if you take -4SD humans they aren't really able to do anything, but they don't really count.

I thought it's sorta in this direction but not quite as extreme:

(This picture is actually silly because the distance to "Mouse" should be even much bigger. The point is that chimps might be far outside the human distribution.)

But perhaps chimps are actually closer to humans than I thought.

(When I in the following compare different species with standard deviations, I don't actually mean standard deviations, but more like "how many times the difference between a +0SD and a +1SD human", since extremely high and very low standard deviation measures mostly cease to me meaningful for what was actually supposed to be measured.)

I still think -4.4SD is overestimating chimp intelligence. I don't know enough about chimps, but I guess they might be somewhere between -12SD and -6SD (compared to my previous intuition, which might've been more like -20SD). And yes, considering that the gap in cortical neuron count between chimps and humans is like 3.5x, and it's even larger for the prefrontal cortex, and that algorithmic efficiency is probably "orca < chimp < human", then +6SDs for orcas seem a lot less likely than I initially intuitively thought, though orcas would still likely be a bit smarter than humans (on the way my priors would fall out (not really after updating on observations about orcas)).

Thanks for describing a wonderfully concrete model.
I like that way you reason (especially the squiggle), but I don't think it works quite that well for this case. But let's first assume it does:
Your estimamtes on algorithmic efficiency deficits of orca brains seem roughly reasonable to me. (EDIT: I'd actually be at more like -3.5std mean with standard deviation of 2std, but idk.)
Number cortical neurons != brain size. Orcas have ~2x the number of cortical neurons, but much larger brains. Assuming brain weight is proportional to volume, with human brains being typically 1.2-1.4kg, and orca brains being typically 5.4-6.8kg, orca brains are actually like 6.1/1.3=4.7 times larger than human brains.
Taking the 5.4-6.8kg range, this would be 4.15-5.23 range of how much larger orca brains are. Plugging that in for `orca_brain_size_difference` yields 45% on >=2std, and 38% on >=4std (where your values ) and 19.4% on >=6std. 
Updating down by 5x because orcas don't seem that smart doesn't seem like quite the right method to adjust the estimate, but perhaps fine enough for the upper end estimates, which would leave 3.9% on >=6std.

Maybe you meant "brain size" as only an approximation to "number of cortical neurons", which you think are the relevant part. My guess is that neuron density is actually somewhat anti-correlated with brain size, and that number of cortical neurons would be correlated with IQ rather at ~0.4-0.55 in humans, though i haven't checked whether there's data on this. And ofc using that you get lower estimates for orca intelligence than in my calculation above. (And while I'd admit that number of neurons is a particularly important point of estimation, there might also be other advantages of having a bigger brain like more glia cells. Though maybe higher neuron density also means higher firing rates and thereby more computation. I guess if you want to try it that way going by number of neurons is fine.)

My main point is however, that brain size (or cortical neuron count) effect on IQ within one species doesn't generalize to brain size effect between species. Here's why:
Let's say having mutations for larger brains is beneficial for intelligence.^[1]
On my view, a brain isn't just some neural tissue randomly smished together, but has a lot of hyperparameters that have to be tuned so the different parts work well together.
Evolution basically tuned those hyperparameters for the median human (per gender).
When you now get a lot of mutations that increase brain size, while this contributes to smartness, this also pulls you away from the species median, so the hyperparameters are likely to become less well tuned, resulting in a countereffect that also makes you dumber in some ways.

So when you get a larger brain as a human, this has a lower positive effect on intelligence, than when your species equilibriates on having a larger brain.
Thus, I don't think within species intelligence variation can be extended well to inter-species intelligence variation.

As for how to then properly estimate orca intelligence: I don't know.

(As it happens, I thought of something and learned something yesterday that makes me significantly more pessimistic about orcas being that smart. Still need to consider though. May post them soon.)

1. ^{^}

   I initially started this section with the following, but I cut it out because it's not actually that relevant: "How intelligent you are mostly depends on how many deleterious mutations you have that move you away from your species average and thereby make you dumber. You're mostly not smart because you have some very rare good genes, but because you have fewer bad ones.
   Mutations for increasing sizes of brain regions might be an exception, because there intelligence trades off against childbirth mortality, so higher intelligence here might mean lower genetic fitness."

Thanks!

Yeah that might be a great idea.

Earth species project might be promising too.

Thanks for the suggestion, though I don't think they are smart enough to get far with grammar. No non-cetaceans non-humans seem to be.

One possibility is to try it with bottlenose dolphins (or beluga whales). (Bottlenose dolphins have shown greater capacity to learn grammar than great apes.^[1]) Those are likely easier to get research access to than orcas. I think we might get some proof of concept of the methodology there, though I'm relatively pessimistic about them learning a full language well.

1. ^{^}

   See the work of Louis Herman in the 80s (and 90s)