You have a gift with words and lay out a provoking hypothesis, especially this part:
I tried—once—going to an interesting-sounding mainstream AI conference that happened to be in my area. I met ordinary research scholars and looked at their posterboards and read some of their papers. I watched their presentations and talked to them at lunch. And they were way below the level of the big names. I mean, they weren’t visibly incompetent, they had their various research interests and I’m sure they were doing passable work on them. And I gave up and left before the conference was over, because I kept thinking “What am I even doing here?”
But why stop early? Your observations are anecdotal and biased, and (according to you) they contradict the prior you and your culture hold. The obvious reaction would be to be skeptical about it, and carefully collect data to assess the hypothesis. Yet you go on updating hard on the anecdotal and biased data, dismiss the inconsistencies by appealing to .. a media conspiracy? and spread these unverified conclusions in your engaging writing style.
My point is not so much about what you assert but how you got there: to consistently get to the truth, we should stick to rational truth-seeking methods and this post seems like a prime example of how not to do that (despite your laying out rational truth-seeking methods in details in other posts!!).
As a very quick first pass, Claude finds that CEOs and CS students (closest to AI researchers it could find) have roughly the same IQ (125) on average but it seems that for both groups IQ was measured when they were students so it’s probably not very reliable …
Anyway, back to speculation, other people have already mentioned charisma, halo effect etc as a way to explain “sparkiness”, I would add agency and the power to make things happen (that has to energize them and give them confidence), plus some breadth of opportunity (in the people they meet, the places they visit or the milieu they grew up in) that translates to breadth of knowledge and endows them with an “aura”.
You have a gift with words and lay out a provoking hypothesis, especially this part:
But why stop early? Your observations are anecdotal and biased, and (according to you) they contradict the prior you and your culture hold. The obvious reaction would be to be skeptical about it, and carefully collect data to assess the hypothesis. Yet you go on updating hard on the anecdotal and biased data, dismiss the inconsistencies by appealing to .. a media conspiracy? and spread these unverified conclusions in your engaging writing style.
My point is not so much about what you assert but how you got there: to consistently get to the truth, we should stick to rational truth-seeking methods and this post seems like a prime example of how not to do that (despite your laying out rational truth-seeking methods in details in other posts!!).
As a very quick first pass, Claude finds that CEOs and CS students (closest to AI researchers it could find) have roughly the same IQ (125) on average but it seems that for both groups IQ was measured when they were students so it’s probably not very reliable …
Anyway, back to speculation, other people have already mentioned charisma, halo effect etc as a way to explain “sparkiness”, I would add agency and the power to make things happen (that has to energize them and give them confidence), plus some breadth of opportunity (in the people they meet, the places they visit or the milieu they grew up in) that translates to breadth of knowledge and endows them with an “aura”.