holy citation needed batman! among other serious issues with this perspective, variance in capability has many input factors; while genetics is involved, memetics and material circumstances also make a significant difference—guns, germs, and steel all can serve to amplify or reduce effective intelligence. society has been on a 12k-year energy availability growth process since the start of farming, and there have been many variations on the way—I don’t deny that there may be genetic differences. but I don’t think we can even conclude there’s been a deceleration in overall rate of insight with the deceleration in generally useful insight.
my view is that almost any human brain is theoretically capable of strong generalization and genius, given training data tuned for that human’s learning capabilities. which means that memetic contribution by a smart person can make everyone who encounters their knowledge smarter, and can lead to future contributors producing even more enlightening knowledge—though there’s no guarantee that new things retain all benefits of old things, the highest usefulness knowledge generally overrepresents new insights about how to better encode old knowledge. and as a result, it’s very hard to conclude anything specific about genetics.
holy citation needed batman! among other serious issues with this perspective, variance in capability has many input factors; while genetics is involved, memetics and material circumstances also make a significant difference—guns, germs, and steel all can serve to amplify or reduce effective intelligence. society has been on a 12k-year energy availability growth process since the start of farming, and there have been many variations on the way—I don’t deny that there may be genetic differences. but I don’t think we can even conclude there’s been a deceleration in overall rate of insight with the deceleration in generally useful insight.
my view is that almost any human brain is theoretically capable of strong generalization and genius, given training data tuned for that human’s learning capabilities. which means that memetic contribution by a smart person can make everyone who encounters their knowledge smarter, and can lead to future contributors producing even more enlightening knowledge—though there’s no guarantee that new things retain all benefits of old things, the highest usefulness knowledge generally overrepresents new insights about how to better encode old knowledge. and as a result, it’s very hard to conclude anything specific about genetics.