While Conway has a huge jump on you in mathematical ability, and I’m pretty sure you’re not going to catch up to him, rest assured that you are not strictly dumber than Conway in every respect.
You should bear in mind how the statement “Maybe anything more than around one standard deviation above you starts to blur together, though that’s just a cool-sounding wild guess” might apply to me. If your guess is literally true, then, because math is my strong-suit, high mathematical ability is the smartest kind of smart that I can detect at all. For me, philosophical ability and the like would blur into “go to college”-land sooner.
In terms of philosophical intuition, you are head and shoulders above Conway. Remember Conway’s “Free will theorem” (a brilliant piece of math to be sure, but very misleadingly named.) Yet, you report never having been confused about free will. My sense of awe at your philosophical intuition has only increased after reading the overcoming bias posts. It’s doubly impressive to me, because I keep realizing that you are making explicit more of the helpful little nudges you gave me over the course of our work together, and I am impressed at how helpful some of these things were in practice, and your ability to communicate things which seemed so elusive so clearly. I’m not sure how much of that was native intelligence and how much was starting with a good ideas in your mental toolbox, but I could ask the same thing about Conway.
While Conway has a huge jump on you in mathematical ability, and I’m pretty sure you’re not going to catch up to him, rest assured that you are not strictly dumber than Conway in every respect.
You should bear in mind how the statement “Maybe anything more than around one standard deviation above you starts to blur together, though that’s just a cool-sounding wild guess” might apply to me. If your guess is literally true, then, because math is my strong-suit, high mathematical ability is the smartest kind of smart that I can detect at all. For me, philosophical ability and the like would blur into “go to college”-land sooner.
In terms of philosophical intuition, you are head and shoulders above Conway. Remember Conway’s “Free will theorem” (a brilliant piece of math to be sure, but very misleadingly named.) Yet, you report never having been confused about free will. My sense of awe at your philosophical intuition has only increased after reading the overcoming bias posts. It’s doubly impressive to me, because I keep realizing that you are making explicit more of the helpful little nudges you gave me over the course of our work together, and I am impressed at how helpful some of these things were in practice, and your ability to communicate things which seemed so elusive so clearly. I’m not sure how much of that was native intelligence and how much was starting with a good ideas in your mental toolbox, but I could ask the same thing about Conway.