Human brains are demonstrably not equivalent in power to each other, let alone AGIs. Try teaching an 85 IQ person quantum physics and tell me our brains are universal learning machines.
Some brains being broken in various ways is not evidence that other brains are not universal learning machines. My broken laptop is not evidence that all computers are not turing machines.
Agreed. Also, it’s not surprising that the universality threshold exists somewhere within the human range because we already know that humans are right by the cutoff. If the threshold were very far below the human range, then a less evolved species would have hit it before we came about, and they would have been the ones to kick off the knowledge explosion.
Regardless of where the threshold is, evolution routinely randomly breaks things anyway—it’s the only way it can find genes that have become redundant/useless. Sort of like ablation studies in machine learning papers.
Even if it’s true, it has no bearing on the question. The human range may be very wide, but it does not follow that it is so narrow, that more powerful systems exist. It does not touch on “the class of problems that human civilisation can solve without developing human level general AI”, which is my proxy for the class of problems the human brain can solve.
And like the fact that some human can accomplish a task means the brain is capable of a task. The fact that some humans cannot accomplish the same task has no bearing on that.
It seems supremely unlikely that this universality threshold happens to be just at Terry Tao’s level of intellect. Wherever this threshold is, it must be be below human hyper-genius level -as it is clear these geniuses are capable of understanding things the vast, vast, vast majority of people are not. Why posit this universality threshold thing exists when no one has seen it? David Deutsch has written huge swaths of text arguing for such a thing—I don’t find it at all persuasive myself.
it is clear these geniuses are capable of understanding things the vast, vast, vast majority of people are not
As the original post suggests, I don’t think this is true. I think that pretty much everyone in this comments section could learn any concept understood by Terry Tao. It would just take us longer.
Imagine your sole purpose in life was to understand one of Terry Tao’s theorems. All your needs are provided for, and you have immediate access to experts whenever you have questions. Do you really think you would be incapable of it?
I am not thinking at the level of particular humans, but of the basic architecture of the human brain.
It appears that you can raise human geniuses from average parents if you train them early enough. And while human intelligence is hereditary, there isn’t that much genetic drift within the human population.
And I’m unconvinced that in most cases it’s “functional person cannot learn concept X” as opposed to: “it’ll take functional person a lot more time/effort/energy/attention to learn concept X”.
It may not be economical for most people to learn linear algebra (but I suspect most babies can in principle be raised so that they know linear algebra as adults).
>It appears that you can raise human geniuses from average parents if you train them early enough. And while human intelligence is hereditary, there isn’t that much genetic drift within the human population.
Human brains are demonstrably not equivalent in power to each other, let alone AGIs. Try teaching an 85 IQ person quantum physics and tell me our brains are universal learning machines.
Some brains being broken in various ways is not evidence that other brains are not universal learning machines. My broken laptop is not evidence that all computers are not turing machines.
Agreed. Also, it’s not surprising that the universality threshold exists somewhere within the human range because we already know that humans are right by the cutoff. If the threshold were very far below the human range, then a less evolved species would have hit it before we came about, and they would have been the ones to kick off the knowledge explosion.
Regardless of where the threshold is, evolution routinely randomly breaks things anyway—it’s the only way it can find genes that have become redundant/useless. Sort of like ablation studies in machine learning papers.
I think this elides my query.
Even if it’s true, it has no bearing on the question. The human range may be very wide, but it does not follow that it is so narrow, that more powerful systems exist. It does not touch on “the class of problems that human civilisation can solve without developing human level general AI”, which is my proxy for the class of problems the human brain can solve.
And like the fact that some human can accomplish a task means the brain is capable of a task. The fact that some humans cannot accomplish the same task has no bearing on that.
It seems supremely unlikely that this universality threshold happens to be just at Terry Tao’s level of intellect. Wherever this threshold is, it must be be below human hyper-genius level -as it is clear these geniuses are capable of understanding things the vast, vast, vast majority of people are not. Why posit this universality threshold thing exists when no one has seen it? David Deutsch has written huge swaths of text arguing for such a thing—I don’t find it at all persuasive myself.
As the original post suggests, I don’t think this is true. I think that pretty much everyone in this comments section could learn any concept understood by Terry Tao. It would just take us longer.
Imagine your sole purpose in life was to understand one of Terry Tao’s theorems. All your needs are provided for, and you have immediate access to experts whenever you have questions. Do you really think you would be incapable of it?
Thanks for mentioning Deutsch. His arguments are very flawed. Swapping Yudkowsky for Deutsch is not the way forward … thinking for yourself is.
I am not thinking at the level of particular humans, but of the basic architecture of the human brain.
It appears that you can raise human geniuses from average parents if you train them early enough. And while human intelligence is hereditary, there isn’t that much genetic drift within the human population.
And I’m unconvinced that in most cases it’s “functional person cannot learn concept X” as opposed to: “it’ll take functional person a lot more time/effort/energy/attention to learn concept X”.
It may not be economical for most people to learn linear algebra (but I suspect most babies can in principle be raised so that they know linear algebra as adults).
>It appears that you can raise human geniuses from average parents if you train them early enough. And while human intelligence is hereditary, there isn’t that much genetic drift within the human population.
Don’t make me call Gwern!
Do please link the relevant post. I’d like to change my mind on this.
Ignore the other links I gave, I’ve just recalled a Steve Hsu post that is more to the point at hand: https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2010/05/psychometric-thresholds-for-physics-and.html
The Blank Slate is a good polemic on the topic. The Nurture Assumption is also good.
Gwern links:
https://www.gwern.net/docs/iq/index
https://www.gwern.net/reviews/McNamara