Increased intelligence does not mean [EDIT: does not automatically translate to] increased rationality… but still, with proper education, more intelligent people could become rational more quickly.
If we invent a pill for increasing everyone’s IQ by 50, distributing the pill to the world will not make it more rational. But if CFAR develops a curriculum for making people more rational, those who already took the pill will be more successful students.
(In the opposite direction: If a mad scientist releases a virus that will lower everyone’s IQ to 80, some specific forms of irrationality may disappear… but CFAR’s or MIRI’s missions will become completely hopeless.)
As a more technical elaboration, rationality is a computational process involving prioritized search. It’s a specific software algorithm. “Intelligence augmentation” is not well defined, but generally involves increasing the computational power of an existing human brain, aka making the hardware faster. That says nothing about the software running on it. But it is easy to show that if you increase the computational power available to a rational agent, you get a more rational agent (but increasing the computational power available to a non-rational agent would not magically impart rationality).
Increased intelligence does not mean [EDIT: does not automatically translate to] increased rationality… but still, with proper education, more intelligent people could become rational more quickly.
If we invent a pill for increasing everyone’s IQ by 50, distributing the pill to the world will not make it more rational. But if CFAR develops a curriculum for making people more rational, those who already took the pill will be more successful students.
(In the opposite direction: If a mad scientist releases a virus that will lower everyone’s IQ to 80, some specific forms of irrationality may disappear… but CFAR’s or MIRI’s missions will become completely hopeless.)
Yes, it does. It’s not a one-to-one (or linear) correspondence, but it’s really hard to be rational if you’re stupid.
As a more technical elaboration, rationality is a computational process involving prioritized search. It’s a specific software algorithm. “Intelligence augmentation” is not well defined, but generally involves increasing the computational power of an existing human brain, aka making the hardware faster. That says nothing about the software running on it. But it is easy to show that if you increase the computational power available to a rational agent, you get a more rational agent (but increasing the computational power available to a non-rational agent would not magically impart rationality).