To all claiming that the judgment is too subtle to carry out, agree or disagree: “Someone could have the knowledge and intelligence to synthesize a mind from scratch on current hardware, reliably as an individual rather than by luck as one member of a mob, and yet be a creationist.”
Obviously I don’t think my judgment is perfect; but I’m not trying to use it to make subtle distinctions between 20 almost-equally-qualified candidates during a job interview. So the question is, is such judgment good enough that it can make gross distinctions correctly, most of the time?
Robin Hanson correctly pointed out yesterday that if I find that people generally rated as top names seem visibly more intelligent to me, this doesn’t necessarily verify either my own judgment, or the intelligence of these people; it may just mean that I tend to intuitively judge “intelligence” using the same heuristics that others do, which explains why the people were accepted into hedge funds, why various researchers are accepted as big-names, etc.
But I don’t know how plausible that really is. For one thing, talking with Steve Omohundro or Sebastian Thrun about math, and judging them by that, the math itself isn’t something that they could fake. Steve Jurvetson can’t just fake being able to construct a good counterargument using good biology. I know I’m judging from more than the core things that can’t be faked, but I don’t see so much of a conflict between the fakeable and unfakeable parts. I’ve met people who struck me as socially awkward but mathematically intelligent, and they’re not in hedge funds, but I don’t judge their level to be low.
It’s an interesting question, and I acknowledge the force of Hanson’s argument yesterday...
...but I’m not willing to flush the judgment down the toilet unless there’s some other gold standard I should be using instead.
I mean, really, a creationist? Am I supposed to ignore that, and assume that the universe works the way it should, and that my imperfect observations are just noise? To weaken evidence is to strengthen priors—what prior should I be using here? In interviews you just use the GPA, or something like that, and the failure of interviewer judgment is the failure to do better than the GPA. What do I use here, if not the should-universe that is clearly wrong? If I just assume that everyone involved is a literally average scientist, that actually downgrades them.
To all claiming that the judgment is too subtle to carry out, agree or disagree: “Someone could have the knowledge and intelligence to synthesize a mind from scratch on current hardware, reliably as an individual rather than by luck as one member of a mob, and yet be a creationist.”
Obviously I don’t think my judgment is perfect; but I’m not trying to use it to make subtle distinctions between 20 almost-equally-qualified candidates during a job interview. So the question is, is such judgment good enough that it can make gross distinctions correctly, most of the time?
Robin Hanson correctly pointed out yesterday that if I find that people generally rated as top names seem visibly more intelligent to me, this doesn’t necessarily verify either my own judgment, or the intelligence of these people; it may just mean that I tend to intuitively judge “intelligence” using the same heuristics that others do, which explains why the people were accepted into hedge funds, why various researchers are accepted as big-names, etc.
But I don’t know how plausible that really is. For one thing, talking with Steve Omohundro or Sebastian Thrun about math, and judging them by that, the math itself isn’t something that they could fake. Steve Jurvetson can’t just fake being able to construct a good counterargument using good biology. I know I’m judging from more than the core things that can’t be faked, but I don’t see so much of a conflict between the fakeable and unfakeable parts. I’ve met people who struck me as socially awkward but mathematically intelligent, and they’re not in hedge funds, but I don’t judge their level to be low.
It’s an interesting question, and I acknowledge the force of Hanson’s argument yesterday...
...but I’m not willing to flush the judgment down the toilet unless there’s some other gold standard I should be using instead.
I mean, really, a creationist? Am I supposed to ignore that, and assume that the universe works the way it should, and that my imperfect observations are just noise? To weaken evidence is to strengthen priors—what prior should I be using here? In interviews you just use the GPA, or something like that, and the failure of interviewer judgment is the failure to do better than the GPA. What do I use here, if not the should-universe that is clearly wrong? If I just assume that everyone involved is a literally average scientist, that actually downgrades them.