@Eli: thanks for great post again, you speak to my hearts content :-)) I have also occasioned upon hero worship of Einstein in science (especially in physics circles) - this is not a good thing, as it hinders progress: people think “I can’t contribute anything important because I’m not a genius like Einstein” instead of sitting down, starting to think and solve some problems.
@Shane: I think the sentience quotient is a nice scale/quantification which can give some precision to otherwise vague talk about plant/chimp/human/superhuman intelligence.
@Eli: thanks for great post again, you speak to my hearts content :-)) I have also occasioned upon hero worship of Einstein in science (especially in physics circles) - this is not a good thing, as it hinders progress: people think “I can’t contribute anything important because I’m not a genius like Einstein” instead of sitting down, starting to think and solve some problems.
@Shane: I think the sentience quotient is a nice scale/quantification which can give some precision to otherwise vague talk about plant/chimp/human/superhuman intelligence.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentience_Quotient (The wikipedia article also gives a link to the “Xenobiology”-article by Freitas, who proposed the SQ idea)
According to SQ we humans (Einstein, village idiot and all) are around +13, whereas superintelligence can soar up to 50 (log scale!).