This kind of brings up the quality of thought that is spent on a subject. Someone with a strong ability to be self-criticizing can more effectively find flaws and come to better conclusions quicker. Those who contemplate on ideas with wrong, but unshakeable (or invisible rather) assumptions, will stew in poor circles until death. The idea of a comforting or powerful diety, unfortunately, sticks so hard when indoctrinated early and consistently.
While I'd have a difficult time pinning myself as either introvert or extrovert, I notice when I'm with a comfortable crowd, ideas will fall out of my mouth with so little processing that many sentences end with "... wait, nevermind, scratch that." I'll use my close aquaintences as easy parallel processing or to quickly look at ideas from obvious viewpoints that I tend to easily overlook.
When I'm in an unfamiliar group or setting, I'll often spend so long revising what I want to say that the conversation moves on and I've hardly said a word for 20 minutes.
This reminds me of an idea I had after first learning about the singularity. I assumed that once we are uploaded into a computer, a large percentage of our memories could be recovered in detail, digitized, reconstructed and categorized and then you would have the opportunity to let other people view your life history (assuming that minds in a singularity are past silly notions of privacy and embarrassment or whatever).
That means all those 'in your head' comments that you make when having conversations might be up for review or to be laugh at. Every now...
You wouldn't give up one IQ point for say 10 million dollars? It would be a painful decision, but I'm convinced I could have a much better effect on the world with a massive financial head start at only the slightest detriment of my intelligence. A large enough sum of money would afford me the chance to stop working and study and research the rest of my life, probably leading me to be more intelligent in the long run. Right now, I have to waste away my time with a superior level of intelligence just pay for food, shelter and student loans.
Agreed. A lot of what we call intelligence is really speed - both in the short run (how long it takes you to add two numbers in your head, for instance) and in the longer run (how long it takes you to accomplish your ambitious projects). Ten million dollars would free up so much time and let you fake so much long-term speed that it would almost certainly be a gain if you got it for one IQ point. Not that anyone's actually offering this trade.
So the real question is: "How will one's credibility be affected in the environment where the idea is presented?" which most likely depends on one's current credibility.
As of now, I don't have much karma so my risk of putting out poor ideas is more detrimental to this screen name. Eliezer could probably sneak in an entire subtly ludicrous paragraph that might go unnoticed for a while.
He has a history in reader's minds as well as the karma metric to make people ignore that flash in the back of their minds that something was off. They are more... (read more)