Well, it’s more plausible than the bulk of speculations you’d see, I’ll give you that, but it is still rather improbable. No, they do not have 2 executives out of 4 smartest; that’s highly implausible, and if you include Thiel you ought to include dozens and dozens others. Nor do they have a particularly high fraction of world’s most intelligent people.
What I envision is that Google is uniquely posed to create an AI that primarily relies on human knowledge, being capable of seemingly superhuman achievement while only requiring subhuman general problem solving capacity. I.e. the very stereotype of uncreative artificial intelligence. Watson on steroids; an automatic plagiarist of ideas.
More interesting (but also less likely) possibilities ought to benefit less from the availability of utterly massive dataset. After all, we humans grow up with a much smaller data set.
No, they do not have 2 executives out of 4 smartest; that’s highly implausible, and if you include Thiel you ought to include dozens and dozens others.
I realize that if you administered IQ tests to all the executives in Silicon Valley, you would likely find many others who would score higher. This is shorthand for “2 of the 4 smartest top-level executives”, which was my original wording, but which I removed because once you begin introducing qualifications, people start to think you’re being precise, and misunderstand you even worse than before.
Then I’d have to start talking about what “smart” means, and explain that actually I don’t believe that “smarter than” is a useful concept for people on that level, and we’d be here all day.
I still doubt you’d find dozens and dozens of executives “smarter than” Thiel. Thiel is pretty damn smart. Aside from my own observations, that’s what Mike Vassar told me. I expect he’s has had more facetime with Thiel than the entire rest of LessWrong combined (and his judgement is considerably better than that of the entire rest of LessWrong combined, for naive “combine” algorithms).
What I envision is that Google is uniquely posed to create an AI that primarily relies on human knowledge, being capable of seemingly superhuman achievement while only requiring subhuman general problem solving capacity.
“Human knowledge” and “general problem solving capacity” are both sufficiently mysterious phrases that you can push content back and forth between them as you like, to reach whatever conclusion you please.
I still doubt you’d find dozens and dozens of executives “smarter than” Thiel. Thiel is pretty damn smart. Aside from my own observations, that’s what Mike Vassar told me.
This is really silly. You can’t predict a winner in some sort of mental contest by just going, ohh I talked with that guy, that guy’s smart. You’d probably do no better than chance if nobody’s seriously stupid. Mostly when someone like this says that someone else is smart, that merely means it is the most useful thing to say / the views align the most. Plus given the views on intelligence rating expressed here its a way to fake-signal “I am really smart, too—I have to be to recognize other’s intelligence” (the way to genuinely-signal that is to have some sort of achievement from which high intelligence can be inferred with sufficiently low false positive rate)
(That being said, Thiel is pretty damn smart based on his chess performance. But he doesn’t have much experience in the technical subjects, compared to many, many others, and to expect him to outperform them is as silly as to expect someone of similar intelligence who didn’t play chess, to win vs Thiel. Training does matter.)
“Human knowledge” and “general problem solving capacity” are both sufficiently mysterious phrases that you can push content back and forth between them as you like, to reach whatever conclusion you please.
I did outline exactly what I mean. Look at the superhuman performance of Watson. Make that tad more useful.
Well, it’s more plausible than the bulk of speculations you’d see, I’ll give you that, but it is still rather improbable. No, they do not have 2 executives out of 4 smartest; that’s highly implausible, and if you include Thiel you ought to include dozens and dozens others. Nor do they have a particularly high fraction of world’s most intelligent people.
What I envision is that Google is uniquely posed to create an AI that primarily relies on human knowledge, being capable of seemingly superhuman achievement while only requiring subhuman general problem solving capacity. I.e. the very stereotype of uncreative artificial intelligence. Watson on steroids; an automatic plagiarist of ideas.
More interesting (but also less likely) possibilities ought to benefit less from the availability of utterly massive dataset. After all, we humans grow up with a much smaller data set.
I realize that if you administered IQ tests to all the executives in Silicon Valley, you would likely find many others who would score higher. This is shorthand for “2 of the 4 smartest top-level executives”, which was my original wording, but which I removed because once you begin introducing qualifications, people start to think you’re being precise, and misunderstand you even worse than before.
Then I’d have to start talking about what “smart” means, and explain that actually I don’t believe that “smarter than” is a useful concept for people on that level, and we’d be here all day.
I still doubt you’d find dozens and dozens of executives “smarter than” Thiel. Thiel is pretty damn smart. Aside from my own observations, that’s what Mike Vassar told me. I expect he’s has had more facetime with Thiel than the entire rest of LessWrong combined (and his judgement is considerably better than that of the entire rest of LessWrong combined, for naive “combine” algorithms).
“Human knowledge” and “general problem solving capacity” are both sufficiently mysterious phrases that you can push content back and forth between them as you like, to reach whatever conclusion you please.
This is really silly. You can’t predict a winner in some sort of mental contest by just going, ohh I talked with that guy, that guy’s smart. You’d probably do no better than chance if nobody’s seriously stupid. Mostly when someone like this says that someone else is smart, that merely means it is the most useful thing to say / the views align the most. Plus given the views on intelligence rating expressed here its a way to fake-signal “I am really smart, too—I have to be to recognize other’s intelligence” (the way to genuinely-signal that is to have some sort of achievement from which high intelligence can be inferred with sufficiently low false positive rate)
(That being said, Thiel is pretty damn smart based on his chess performance. But he doesn’t have much experience in the technical subjects, compared to many, many others, and to expect him to outperform them is as silly as to expect someone of similar intelligence who didn’t play chess, to win vs Thiel. Training does matter.)
I did outline exactly what I mean. Look at the superhuman performance of Watson. Make that tad more useful.