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This is a youthful blog with youthful worries. From the vantage point of age worrying about intelligence seems like a waste of time and unanswerable to boot.
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and I find this observation insightful, and even a bit understated.
Increasingly, as one ages, one worries more about what one DOES, rather than about abstract characterizations of one’s capability.
Obviously, one reason these sorts of questions about comparative general intelligence are unanswerable is that “general intelligence” is not really a rigorously defined concept—as you well know! And the rigorous definitions that have been proposed (e.g. in Legg and Hutter’s writing, or my earlier writings, etc.) are basically nonmeasurable in practice—they’re only crudely approximable in practice, and the margin of error of these approximations is almost surely large enough to blur whatever distinctions exist between various highly clever humans.
I have no doubt that you’re extremely smart, and especially talented in some particular areas (such as mathematics and writing, to give a nonexhaustive list) … and that you’re capable of accomplishing great things intellectually.
As an aside, the notion that Conway, or von Neumann or any other historical math figure is “more intelligent than Eliezer along all dimensions” seems silly to me … I’m sure they weren’t, under any reasonable definition of “dimensions” in this context.
To take a well-worn example: from my study of the historical record, it seems clear that Einstein and Godel were both less transparently, obviously clever than von Neumann. My guess is that von Neumann would have scored higher on IQ tests than either of those others, because he was incredibly quick-minded and fond of puzzle-type problems. However, obviously there were relevant dimensions along which both Einstein and Godel were “smarter” than von Neumann; and they pursued research paths in which these dimensions were highly relevant.
“General intelligence” has more and more meaning as one deals with more and more powerful computational systems. For humans it’s meaningful but not amazingly, dramatically meaningful … what’s predictive of human achievement is almost surely a complex mixture of human general intelligence with human specialized intelligence in achievement-relevant domains.
Pragmatically separating general from specialized intelligence in oneself or other humans is a hard problem, and not really a terribly useful thing to try to do.
Achieving great things seems always to be a mixture of general intelligence, specialized intelligence, wise choice of the right problems to work on, and personality properties like persistence …
Some else wrote
″
This is a youthful blog with youthful worries. From the vantage point of age worrying about intelligence seems like a waste of time and unanswerable to boot.
”
and I find this observation insightful, and even a bit understated.
Increasingly, as one ages, one worries more about what one DOES, rather than about abstract characterizations of one’s capability.
Obviously, one reason these sorts of questions about comparative general intelligence are unanswerable is that “general intelligence” is not really a rigorously defined concept—as you well know! And the rigorous definitions that have been proposed (e.g. in Legg and Hutter’s writing, or my earlier writings, etc.) are basically nonmeasurable in practice—they’re only crudely approximable in practice, and the margin of error of these approximations is almost surely large enough to blur whatever distinctions exist between various highly clever humans.
I have no doubt that you’re extremely smart, and especially talented in some particular areas (such as mathematics and writing, to give a nonexhaustive list) … and that you’re capable of accomplishing great things intellectually.
As an aside, the notion that Conway, or von Neumann or any other historical math figure is “more intelligent than Eliezer along all dimensions” seems silly to me … I’m sure they weren’t, under any reasonable definition of “dimensions” in this context.
To take a well-worn example: from my study of the historical record, it seems clear that Einstein and Godel were both less transparently, obviously clever than von Neumann. My guess is that von Neumann would have scored higher on IQ tests than either of those others, because he was incredibly quick-minded and fond of puzzle-type problems. However, obviously there were relevant dimensions along which both Einstein and Godel were “smarter” than von Neumann; and they pursued research paths in which these dimensions were highly relevant.
“General intelligence” has more and more meaning as one deals with more and more powerful computational systems. For humans it’s meaningful but not amazingly, dramatically meaningful … what’s predictive of human achievement is almost surely a complex mixture of human general intelligence with human specialized intelligence in achievement-relevant domains.
Pragmatically separating general from specialized intelligence in oneself or other humans is a hard problem, and not really a terribly useful thing to try to do.
Achieving great things seems always to be a mixture of general intelligence, specialized intelligence, wise choice of the right problems to work on, and personality properties like persistence …
-- Ben G