So I’m fairly new to LessWrong, and have being going through some of the older posts, and I had some questions. Since commenting on 4 year old posts was probably unlikely to answer those questions or to generate any new discussion, I thought posting here might be more appropriate. If this is not proper community etiquette, I’m happy to be corrected.
Specifically, I’m trying to evaluate how I understand and feel about this post:
The Level Above Mine
I have some very mixed feelings on this post, and the subject in general. (You might say I’ve noticed that I’m confused.) Sure. It’s hard to evaluate reliably just how intelligent someone who is more intelligent than you is, just like a test that every student in a class aces doesn’t allow you to identify which student knows the information the best, but doesn’t the idea of a persistent ranking system, and the concern with it imply a belief in intelligence as a static factor?
Less Wrong is a diverse community, but I was by and large under the impression that it was biased towards a growth mindset. Indeed, it seems in many ways the raison d’etre of LW relies on the assumption that it is possible to improve your intelligence. I would further argue that LW relies on the assumption that it is possible to recursively improve your intelligence, (i.e. learning things that help you learn better).
Is it possible that the fundamental attribution error is at work here? I mean, if it’s ridiculous to believe in “mutants born with unnaturally high anger levels” then why the rush to believe in mutants with unnaturally high levels of intelligence? I’m not sure what to make of a post that discusses assessing how many standard deviations above average intelligence someone is, if I really believe that “Any given aspect of someone’s disposition is probably not very far from average. To suggest otherwise is to shoulder a burden of improbability.”
Indeed if we make fundamental attribution error when assessing someone because “we don’t see their past history trailing behind them in the air”, then can we not say the same for experiences that result in greater situational intelligence? Perhaps I’m straining the bounds of metaphor slightly, since problem-solving intelligence tends to be more enduring than vending-machine kicking anger, but is it so fixed that my SAT scores from the 7th grade are meaningful or worth discussing? Is it possible that what we perceive as greater intelligence, as “the level above mine” is just someone who has spent more time working on something, or working on something similar to it? What is the prior probability that someone picks up a new idea quickly because they’ve been exposed to a similar idea before, versus the prior probability that they are of mutant intelligence?
The entire ranking debate to me, sounds suspiciously like human social hiearchies, and since that’s a type of irrationality humans are especially prone to, it makes me very suspicious. I know from personal experience, that being considered of “above average intelligence” is a very useful social tool which I can use to create a place for myself in social hierarchies, and often that place is not only secure, but also grants me reasonably high social status. I have at various times in my life, evaluated others, and granted social status accordingly, on the basis of their SAT scores and other similar measures. Is that what is going on here?
Fundamentally, I believe this question boils down to a handful of related questions:
How accurate over time is our evaluation of general intelligence?
Does our love of static hiearchies, esp. one that priveleges intelligence affect our answer to 1?
Sub-questions to #1
a. How varaible is intelligence, and over what time span? Or more generally, what do we estimate are the most heavily weighted inputs to a function that describes intelligence?
b. Is there an upper bound on human intelligence?
c. Are the people whose intelligence we’re evaluating operating near that bound?
d. Can we reliably distinguish between intelligence and knowledge? How?
I’m not sure about question 1, but I’m pretty sure the answer to question 2 is yes.
“Intelligence” seems to consist of multiple different systems, but there are many tasks which recruit several of those systems simultaneously. That said, this doesn’t exclude the possibility of a hierarchy—in some people all of those systems could be working well, in some people all of them could be working badly, and most folks would be somewhere in between. (Which would seem to match the genetic load theory of intelligence.) But of course, this is a partially ordered set rather than a pure hierarchy—different people can have the same overall score, but have different capabilities in various subtasks.
IQ in childhood is predictive of IQ scores in adulthood, but not completely reliably; adult scores are more stable. There have been many interventions which aimed to increase IQ, but so far none of them has worked out.
IQ is one of the strongestgeneral predictors of life outcomes and work performance… but that “general” means that you can still predict performance on some specific task better via some other variable. Also, IQ is one of the best such predictors together with conscientiousness, which implies that hard work also matters a lot in life. We also know that e.g. personality type and skills matter when it comes to rationality.
I would suppose that the kinds of people referred to “the level above mine” would be some of those rare types who’ve had the luck of getting a high score on all important variables—a high IQ, a high conscientiousness, a naturally curious personality type, high reserves of mental energy, and so on. To what extent these various things are trainable is an open question.
In which case, if IQ is a good and stable predictor, then we are placing high confidence in #1 if we know their IQ. Is IQ or test scores what we commonly base intelligence assessments on?
If we can put high confidence in #1 via testing, can we still put high confidence in it on based on a general impression or a conversation, or even on the basis of mysterious evidence? e.g. This quote: “(Interesting question: If I’m not judging Brooks by the goodness of his AI theories, what is it that made him seem smart to me? I don’t remember any stunning epiphanies in his presentation at the Summit. I didn’t talk to him very long in person. He just came across as… formidable, somehow.)”
I mean, I would assume aura judgment is less effective than testing, particularly at discriminating between levels above that of the aura judge, but how much worse isn’t clear to me. I’m particularly suspicious of it because evaluating someone else’s intelligence routinely involves a comparison with myself, and I’m very uncertain I can make those comparisons without bias.
I appreciate your response immensely. I have almost no training in any sort of cognitively focused science, and so my impressions about the constancy of intelligence are largely drawn from my personal experience, which is obviously an enormously impoverished data set. Your explanation and data does offer a compelling reason to believe intelligence corresponds with some fixed aspect of an individual, at least with some reasonable probability.
I can certainly think of exceptions, individuals with triple-digit SAT scores that went on to pursue Ph.Ds,, but perhaps that does not mean the model is wrong, as unlikely events do occur. Or perhaps the adult IQ doesn’t stabilize until sometimes after 25, and so they underwent a large IQ fluctuation in college. Perhaps as I age and spend more time with older people, I’ll become more confident in predicting future intelligence from current intelligence.
Intelligence is generally measured using either explicit IQ tests or performance on tasks which are known to correlate reliably with IQ (such as SAT scores).
I think there was a study somewhere—it might have been discussed on this site, but I couldn’t find it on a quick search—where an audience listened to two people have a conversation, and they knew that one of the people had been allowed to pick a topic that he knew a lot about and the other person didn’t. Despite knowing that, the audience consistently thought that the person who’d been allowed to pick the topic was more intelligent, as he had better things to say about it. That would at least weakly suggest that people aren’t very good at controlling for irrelevant factors when estimating someone’s intelligence.
One of the classic demonstrations of the Fundamental Attribution Error is the ‘quiz study’ of Ross, Amabile, and Steinmetz (1977). In the study, subjects were randomly assigned to either ask or answer questions in quiz show style, and were observed by other subjects who were asked to rate them for competence/knowledge. Even knowing that the assignments were random did not prevent the raters from rating the questioners higher than the answerers. Of course, when we rate individuals highly the affect heuristic comes into play, and if we’re not careful that can lead to a super-happy death spiral of reverence. Students can revere teachers or science popularizers (even devotion to Richard Dawkins can get a bit extreme at his busy web forum) simply because the former only interact with the latter in domains where the students know less. This is certainly a problem with blogging, where the blogger chooses to post in domains of expertise.
If anyone knows what this study is, I’d be very interested to learn more about it, since it sounds like it might be a falsification of my hypothesized http://www.gwern.net/backfire-effect
If we can put high confidence in #1 via testing, can we still put high confidence in it on based on a general impression or a conversation, or even on the basis of mysterious evidence? e.g. This quote: “(Interesting question: If I’m not judging Brooks by the goodness of his AI theories, what is it that made him seem smart to me? I don’t remember any stunning epiphanies in his presentation at the Summit. I didn’t talk to him very long in person. He just came across as… formidable, somehow.)”
I don’t think you can. A conversation or ‘general impression’ is going to be based on interpersonal skills, and unless it is a highly technical conversation, be based mostly on verbal sorts of skills. Asking whether an IQ test would be less reliable than a conversation is a little like asking ‘if we drop the SAT Math section and just use Verbal, is that better than using both the Math and Verbal sections?’ No one item loads very heavily on g which is why IQ tests typically have a bunch of subtests.
Following the line of reasoning in Correspondence Bias, because it’s probably much more likely that someone who seems to you to “be an angry person” has just had a bad day.
According to our current understanding, significant mood altering mutations are much less common than many other more probable causes of anger. This is one of the reasons gene therapy is not typically suggested as part of treating anger management issues.
Wouldn’t it be interesting if everyone had exactly equal hormonal tendencies toward various emotions?
“This particular episode of angry behavior is not as strong of evidence that this person has angry tendencies as my brain wants to treat it” is not the same as “Angry tendencies do not exist at all.”
Okay sure. I’m certainly not arguing that there is no variation in human intelligence or emotional make-up. Indeed it is probably supremely likely that there are indeed mutants born with “high anger levels”, whatever that is supposed to mean, While I am not a geneticist and can’t speak for the genetic complexity of that particular set of mutations, there’s a lot of humans and it seems like something in that vein is as least as likely in 1 in 5 billion, so there’s bound to be a couple of them around. It was sloppy writing I suppose, but the implication wasn’t that no mutants with high anger levels exist, just that the hypothetical person in the example in all probability isn’t one of them. I was working within the framework of an existing metaphor, not making my own original research claim about angry mutants.
I still feel like there’s a large discrepancy between how anger and intelligence are discussed in the two articles. I feel like intelligence is given an ontological weight, that anger is not granted. If you met John Conway at a summer camp, or better yet, some no-name kid who nonetheless carried on a brilliant conversation with you, dazzling you with insights you’d never imagined, would you also tell yourself, “This particular episode of intelligent behavior is not as strong a piece of evidence that this person has intelligent tendencies as my brain wants to treat it.”? If you would, then when you read The Level Above Mine and the following posts do you feel like that filter is being carefully applied? If you would not, then why is there a difference between intelligence and anger?
there are indeed mutants born with “high anger levels”, whatever that is supposed to mean
Maybe think animal taming, and the ways tame animals ended up different from wild ones. Taming seems to work way too fast to rely on only new mutations, so there’s probably existing genetic variation on aggressiveness in the starting population it can use.
I still feel like there’s a large discrepancy between how anger and intelligence are discussed in the two articles. I feel like intelligence is given an ontological weight, that anger is not granted.
Anger is much more situational thing, so maybe you should talk about temperament instead, as the relatively stable emotional makeup of person that affects how easily they become angry. Having high intelligence can make you do behaviors that are very improbable otherwise, like proving Fermat’s conjecture. But there can be many causes that lead to quite a similar fit of anger, both a large stimulus and a calm temperament and a small stimulus and an anger-prone temperament will work. So I don’t see the problem with the argument. If I see Alice proving Fermat’s conjecture, Alice being very intelligent is the only solid hypothesis I have. If I see Bob angrily kicking a vending machine, both Bob having a hair-trigger temperament and Bob having had a very bad day are plausible hypotheses.
I still feel like there’s a large discrepancy between how anger and intelligence are discussed in the two articles.
Intelligence really is more fixed than “anger”. Anger is an emotion, and even people highly inclined toward anger are not angry all (or even most of) the time. To put it plainly, you are more likely to come across a calm person experiencing rage, than a mentally retarded person having a conversation at Conway’s level. Do you really doubt that?
I will start with: +1 for caring about the community etiquette
Less Wrong is a diverse community, but I was by and large under the impression that it was biased towards a growth mindset. Indeed, it seems in many ways the raison d’etre of LW relies on the assumption that it is possible to improve your intelligence.
Intelligence (IQ) is more or less static. If you have a scientifically proven method of increasing IQ, please post it here, and I am sure many people will try it. But at this moment, LW is not about increasing human intelligence. It is about increasing human rationality—learning a better way to use the intelligence (brain) we already have—and about machine intelligence. A hypothetical intelligent machine could increase its intelligence by changing its code or adding new hardware. For humans, similar change would require surgery or implants beyond our current knowledge.
if it’s ridiculous to believe in “mutants born with unnaturally high anger levels” then why the rush to believe in mutants with unnaturally high levels of intelligence?
How high is unnaturally high? The intelligence is on the Bell curve. One in two persons has IQ above 100. One in ten has IQ above 115. One in fifty has IQ above 130; one in hundred above 135; one in thousand above 146; one in ten thousands above 156… this is all within the Bell curve. It is possible to search for people with this level of intelligence. (Speaking about someone with IQ 300, that would be unnatural.)
The question is, how much real-world effect do these levels of intelligence have. Clearly, intelligence is not enough to make people smart—a person with a high IQ can still believe and do stupid things. (This is why we usually don’t obsess about IQ, and discuss rationality instead.) On the other hand, some IQ may be necessary for some outcome, or at least could make the same person get the same outcome significantly faster. (This is easier to understand by imagining people with very low IQs. Even the best rationality training is not going to make them new Einsteins.) Being faster does not seem like a critical difference, but for sufficiently complex tasks the difference between years and decades, or maybe decades and centuries, can determine whether a human is able or unable to ever complete the task.
Is it possible that what we perceive as greater intelligence, as “the level above mine” is just someone who has spent more time working on something, or working on something similar to it?
In the article, Eliezer considers the alternative explanations. (Maybe Conway had more opportunities to show his mastery. Maybe he specializes in doing something different. Maybe Conway used the time of his youth better.) But maybe… it is the difference in general intelligence. All these explanations deserve to be considered.
What is the prior probability that someone picks up a new idea quickly because they’ve been exposed to a similar idea before, versus the prior probability that they are of mutant intelligence?
Depends on circumstances. Did it happen once, or does it happen all the time? Does it happen consistently in a field where both persons spent a lot of time learning? Does it happen in different fields? The prior probability of someone having higher intelligence is not so small that evidence like this couldn’t change the result.
\2. Does our love of static hiearchies, esp. one that priveleges intelligence affect our answer to 1? I’m not sure about question 1, but I’m pretty sure the answer to question 2 is yes.
Just because we have a bias for X, it does not automatically mean non-X must be true. People do love hierarchies. People are bad at estimating their skills, or skills of others. That does not mean different people can’t really have different traits.
Intelligence (IQ) is more or less static. If you have a scientifically proven method of increasing IQ, please post it here, and I am sure many people will try it. But at this moment, LW is not about increasing human intelligence. It is about increasing human rationality—learning a better way to use the intelligence (brain) we already have—and about machine intelligence.
Is it solid that IQ tests can distinguish between the intelligence we already have, and our ability to use that intelligence?
doesn’t the idea of a persistent ranking system, and the concern with it imply a belief in intelligence as a static factor? Less Wrong is a diverse community, but I was by and large under the impression that it was biased towards a growth mindset.
I’d just like to point out that a growth mindset is fully compatible with fixed intelligence. Fixed intelligence doesn’t mean that growth is impossible, only that some people can grow faster than others.
There actually are mutants with high anger levels (read about Brunner’s syndrome). Less Wrong is not about improving human intelligence but rather human rationality. The two are obviously distinct.
If you are asking these basic questions about intelligence, (i.e. proposing that it can easily be changed) you simply need to read more about this topic.
So I’m fairly new to LessWrong, and have being going through some of the older posts, and I had some questions. Since commenting on 4 year old posts was probably unlikely to answer those questions or to generate any new discussion, I thought posting here might be more appropriate. If this is not proper community etiquette, I’m happy to be corrected.
Specifically, I’m trying to evaluate how I understand and feel about this post: The Level Above Mine
I have some very mixed feelings on this post, and the subject in general. (You might say I’ve noticed that I’m confused.) Sure. It’s hard to evaluate reliably just how intelligent someone who is more intelligent than you is, just like a test that every student in a class aces doesn’t allow you to identify which student knows the information the best, but doesn’t the idea of a persistent ranking system, and the concern with it imply a belief in intelligence as a static factor? Less Wrong is a diverse community, but I was by and large under the impression that it was biased towards a growth mindset. Indeed, it seems in many ways the raison d’etre of LW relies on the assumption that it is possible to improve your intelligence. I would further argue that LW relies on the assumption that it is possible to recursively improve your intelligence, (i.e. learning things that help you learn better).
Is it possible that the fundamental attribution error is at work here? I mean, if it’s ridiculous to believe in “mutants born with unnaturally high anger levels” then why the rush to believe in mutants with unnaturally high levels of intelligence? I’m not sure what to make of a post that discusses assessing how many standard deviations above average intelligence someone is, if I really believe that “Any given aspect of someone’s disposition is probably not very far from average. To suggest otherwise is to shoulder a burden of improbability.”
Indeed if we make fundamental attribution error when assessing someone because “we don’t see their past history trailing behind them in the air”, then can we not say the same for experiences that result in greater situational intelligence? Perhaps I’m straining the bounds of metaphor slightly, since problem-solving intelligence tends to be more enduring than vending-machine kicking anger, but is it so fixed that my SAT scores from the 7th grade are meaningful or worth discussing? Is it possible that what we perceive as greater intelligence, as “the level above mine” is just someone who has spent more time working on something, or working on something similar to it? What is the prior probability that someone picks up a new idea quickly because they’ve been exposed to a similar idea before, versus the prior probability that they are of mutant intelligence?
The entire ranking debate to me, sounds suspiciously like human social hiearchies, and since that’s a type of irrationality humans are especially prone to, it makes me very suspicious. I know from personal experience, that being considered of “above average intelligence” is a very useful social tool which I can use to create a place for myself in social hierarchies, and often that place is not only secure, but also grants me reasonably high social status. I have at various times in my life, evaluated others, and granted social status accordingly, on the basis of their SAT scores and other similar measures. Is that what is going on here?
Fundamentally, I believe this question boils down to a handful of related questions:
How accurate over time is our evaluation of general intelligence?
Does our love of static hiearchies, esp. one that priveleges intelligence affect our answer to 1?
Sub-questions to #1
a. How varaible is intelligence, and over what time span? Or more generally, what do we estimate are the most heavily weighted inputs to a function that describes intelligence?
b. Is there an upper bound on human intelligence?
c. Are the people whose intelligence we’re evaluating operating near that bound?
d. Can we reliably distinguish between intelligence and knowledge? How?
I’m not sure about question 1, but I’m pretty sure the answer to question 2 is yes.
“Intelligence” seems to consist of multiple different systems, but there are many tasks which recruit several of those systems simultaneously. That said, this doesn’t exclude the possibility of a hierarchy—in some people all of those systems could be working well, in some people all of them could be working badly, and most folks would be somewhere in between. (Which would seem to match the genetic load theory of intelligence.) But of course, this is a partially ordered set rather than a pure hierarchy—different people can have the same overall score, but have different capabilities in various subtasks.
IQ in childhood is predictive of IQ scores in adulthood, but not completely reliably; adult scores are more stable. There have been many interventions which aimed to increase IQ, but so far none of them has worked out.
IQ is one of the strongest general predictors of life outcomes and work performance… but that “general” means that you can still predict performance on some specific task better via some other variable. Also, IQ is one of the best such predictors together with conscientiousness, which implies that hard work also matters a lot in life. We also know that e.g. personality type and skills matter when it comes to rationality.
I would suppose that the kinds of people referred to “the level above mine” would be some of those rare types who’ve had the luck of getting a high score on all important variables—a high IQ, a high conscientiousness, a naturally curious personality type, high reserves of mental energy, and so on. To what extent these various things are trainable is an open question.
In which case, if IQ is a good and stable predictor, then we are placing high confidence in #1 if we know their IQ. Is IQ or test scores what we commonly base intelligence assessments on?
If we can put high confidence in #1 via testing, can we still put high confidence in it on based on a general impression or a conversation, or even on the basis of mysterious evidence? e.g. This quote: “(Interesting question: If I’m not judging Brooks by the goodness of his AI theories, what is it that made him seem smart to me? I don’t remember any stunning epiphanies in his presentation at the Summit. I didn’t talk to him very long in person. He just came across as… formidable, somehow.)”
I mean, I would assume aura judgment is less effective than testing, particularly at discriminating between levels above that of the aura judge, but how much worse isn’t clear to me. I’m particularly suspicious of it because evaluating someone else’s intelligence routinely involves a comparison with myself, and I’m very uncertain I can make those comparisons without bias.
I appreciate your response immensely. I have almost no training in any sort of cognitively focused science, and so my impressions about the constancy of intelligence are largely drawn from my personal experience, which is obviously an enormously impoverished data set. Your explanation and data does offer a compelling reason to believe intelligence corresponds with some fixed aspect of an individual, at least with some reasonable probability.
I can certainly think of exceptions, individuals with triple-digit SAT scores that went on to pursue Ph.Ds,, but perhaps that does not mean the model is wrong, as unlikely events do occur. Or perhaps the adult IQ doesn’t stabilize until sometimes after 25, and so they underwent a large IQ fluctuation in college. Perhaps as I age and spend more time with older people, I’ll become more confident in predicting future intelligence from current intelligence.
Intelligence is generally measured using either explicit IQ tests or performance on tasks which are known to correlate reliably with IQ (such as SAT scores).
I think there was a study somewhere—it might have been discussed on this site, but I couldn’t find it on a quick search—where an audience listened to two people have a conversation, and they knew that one of the people had been allowed to pick a topic that he knew a lot about and the other person didn’t. Despite knowing that, the audience consistently thought that the person who’d been allowed to pick the topic was more intelligent, as he had better things to say about it. That would at least weakly suggest that people aren’t very good at controlling for irrelevant factors when estimating someone’s intelligence.
Found it: http://lesswrong.com/lw/4b/dont_revere_the_bearer_of_good_info/
If anyone knows what this study is, I’d be very interested to learn more about it, since it sounds like it might be a falsification of my hypothesized http://www.gwern.net/backfire-effect
EDIT: found it by accident, see sibling comment
I don’t think you can. A conversation or ‘general impression’ is going to be based on interpersonal skills, and unless it is a highly technical conversation, be based mostly on verbal sorts of skills. Asking whether an IQ test would be less reliable than a conversation is a little like asking ‘if we drop the SAT Math section and just use Verbal, is that better than using both the Math and Verbal sections?’ No one item loads very heavily on g which is why IQ tests typically have a bunch of subtests.
Why is it ridiculous to believe in mutants born with high anger levels?
Following the line of reasoning in Correspondence Bias, because it’s probably much more likely that someone who seems to you to “be an angry person” has just had a bad day.
According to our current understanding, significant mood altering mutations are much less common than many other more probable causes of anger. This is one of the reasons gene therapy is not typically suggested as part of treating anger management issues.
Wouldn’t it be interesting if everyone had exactly equal hormonal tendencies toward various emotions?
“This particular episode of angry behavior is not as strong of evidence that this person has angry tendencies as my brain wants to treat it” is not the same as “Angry tendencies do not exist at all.”
Okay sure. I’m certainly not arguing that there is no variation in human intelligence or emotional make-up. Indeed it is probably supremely likely that there are indeed mutants born with “high anger levels”, whatever that is supposed to mean, While I am not a geneticist and can’t speak for the genetic complexity of that particular set of mutations, there’s a lot of humans and it seems like something in that vein is as least as likely in 1 in 5 billion, so there’s bound to be a couple of them around. It was sloppy writing I suppose, but the implication wasn’t that no mutants with high anger levels exist, just that the hypothetical person in the example in all probability isn’t one of them. I was working within the framework of an existing metaphor, not making my own original research claim about angry mutants.
I still feel like there’s a large discrepancy between how anger and intelligence are discussed in the two articles. I feel like intelligence is given an ontological weight, that anger is not granted. If you met John Conway at a summer camp, or better yet, some no-name kid who nonetheless carried on a brilliant conversation with you, dazzling you with insights you’d never imagined, would you also tell yourself, “This particular episode of intelligent behavior is not as strong a piece of evidence that this person has intelligent tendencies as my brain wants to treat it.”? If you would, then when you read The Level Above Mine and the following posts do you feel like that filter is being carefully applied? If you would not, then why is there a difference between intelligence and anger?
Maybe think animal taming, and the ways tame animals ended up different from wild ones. Taming seems to work way too fast to rely on only new mutations, so there’s probably existing genetic variation on aggressiveness in the starting population it can use.
There’s also starting to be some research on actual high anger mutations in humans, which seem to be a bit more common than 1 in 5 billion.
Anger is much more situational thing, so maybe you should talk about temperament instead, as the relatively stable emotional makeup of person that affects how easily they become angry. Having high intelligence can make you do behaviors that are very improbable otherwise, like proving Fermat’s conjecture. But there can be many causes that lead to quite a similar fit of anger, both a large stimulus and a calm temperament and a small stimulus and an anger-prone temperament will work. So I don’t see the problem with the argument. If I see Alice proving Fermat’s conjecture, Alice being very intelligent is the only solid hypothesis I have. If I see Bob angrily kicking a vending machine, both Bob having a hair-trigger temperament and Bob having had a very bad day are plausible hypotheses.
Intelligence really is more fixed than “anger”. Anger is an emotion, and even people highly inclined toward anger are not angry all (or even most of) the time. To put it plainly, you are more likely to come across a calm person experiencing rage, than a mentally retarded person having a conversation at Conway’s level. Do you really doubt that?
I will start with: +1 for caring about the community etiquette
Intelligence (IQ) is more or less static. If you have a scientifically proven method of increasing IQ, please post it here, and I am sure many people will try it. But at this moment, LW is not about increasing human intelligence. It is about increasing human rationality—learning a better way to use the intelligence (brain) we already have—and about machine intelligence. A hypothetical intelligent machine could increase its intelligence by changing its code or adding new hardware. For humans, similar change would require surgery or implants beyond our current knowledge.
How high is unnaturally high? The intelligence is on the Bell curve. One in two persons has IQ above 100. One in ten has IQ above 115. One in fifty has IQ above 130; one in hundred above 135; one in thousand above 146; one in ten thousands above 156… this is all within the Bell curve. It is possible to search for people with this level of intelligence. (Speaking about someone with IQ 300, that would be unnatural.)
The question is, how much real-world effect do these levels of intelligence have. Clearly, intelligence is not enough to make people smart—a person with a high IQ can still believe and do stupid things. (This is why we usually don’t obsess about IQ, and discuss rationality instead.) On the other hand, some IQ may be necessary for some outcome, or at least could make the same person get the same outcome significantly faster. (This is easier to understand by imagining people with very low IQs. Even the best rationality training is not going to make them new Einsteins.) Being faster does not seem like a critical difference, but for sufficiently complex tasks the difference between years and decades, or maybe decades and centuries, can determine whether a human is able or unable to ever complete the task.
In the article, Eliezer considers the alternative explanations. (Maybe Conway had more opportunities to show his mastery. Maybe he specializes in doing something different. Maybe Conway used the time of his youth better.) But maybe… it is the difference in general intelligence. All these explanations deserve to be considered.
Depends on circumstances. Did it happen once, or does it happen all the time? Does it happen consistently in a field where both persons spent a lot of time learning? Does it happen in different fields? The prior probability of someone having higher intelligence is not so small that evidence like this couldn’t change the result.
Just because we have a bias for X, it does not automatically mean non-X must be true. People do love hierarchies. People are bad at estimating their skills, or skills of others. That does not mean different people can’t really have different traits.
Is it solid that IQ tests can distinguish between the intelligence we already have, and our ability to use that intelligence?
I’d just like to point out that a growth mindset is fully compatible with fixed intelligence. Fixed intelligence doesn’t mean that growth is impossible, only that some people can grow faster than others.
There actually are mutants with high anger levels (read about Brunner’s syndrome). Less Wrong is not about improving human intelligence but rather human rationality. The two are obviously distinct.
If you are asking these basic questions about intelligence, (i.e. proposing that it can easily be changed) you simply need to read more about this topic.