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Is It Worth Being Wise?
a day ago
- Wisdom is defined as knowing what to do in most situations, reflecting a high average outcome across various scenarios.
- Intelligence is characterized by exceptionally high performance in specific situations, akin to peaks on a graph.
- The relationship between wisdom and intelligence is that they represent the average and maximum of the same performance curve.
- Conventional explanations for the difference, such as problem types (human vs abstract) or origin (experience vs innate), are insufficient.
- As knowledge becomes more specialized, wisdom and intelligence diverge, leading to a societal preference for intelligence over wisdom.
- The path to wisdom involves discipline and removing childish biases, while intelligence is cultivated through curiosity and working on hard problems.
- Wisdom tends to produce calmness and contentment, whereas intelligence often leads to discontentment due to unbounded performance expectations.
- Educational traditions often aim at wisdom, but may be ineffective for fostering intelligence because they rely on discipline rather than curiosity.
The mistake of conflating intelligence and power
a day ago
- Defining intelligence as 'ability to achieve goals across domains' conflates it with power, as seen with Stalin and Trump.
- Power in the real world derives from authority and trust, not purely strategic reasoning like in games.
- Individual IQ correlates modestly with income, but national IQ strongly correlates with national outcomes due to spillover effects.
- AI collectives that can copy and share information may outcompete humans, posing risks beyond individual superintelligence.
- The real AI concern is high intelligence combined with agency, resources, and weak moral constraints, not just technical ability.
Genetics and intelligence differences: five special findings
2 days ago
- Intelligence is a highly heritable trait, with heritability increasing from about 20% in infancy to as much as 80% in later adulthood.
- Intelligence captures genetic effects common to diverse cognitive and learning abilities, with genetic correlations around 0.60 or higher.
- Assortative mating for intelligence is high (spouse correlations ~0.40), which increases additive genetic variance in the population.
- The genetics of high intelligence are continuous with normal variation; high intelligence is just as heritable as the rest of the distribution.
- Intelligence shares genetic causes with education and social class, linking genetics to social mobility and health outcomes.
Intelligence from Learnable Novelty
6 days ago
- Intelligence appears in different fields as data compression, universal computation, or adaptive behavior, each with its own objective.
- Two influential drives—novelty search (seeking surprise) and the free-energy principle (avoiding surprise)—fail in mirror image ways, such as being transfixed by a noisy television or content in a dark room.
- Both failures stem from treating the surprise a learner can convert into knowledge and the surprise it cannot as the same quantity.
- The learnable part of information, called learnable novelty, yields the disparate projections of intelligence, and a closed-form estimator is built on a cheap, differentiable reservoir computer.
- As a measure with no supervision, the estimator recovers decades of complexity classification, ranking Turing-complete rule 110 highest among elementary cellular automata.
- As an objective, its gradient guides a neural cellular automaton from simple dynamics into soliton regimes, organizing image encoder representations around MNIST digit classes fully unsupervised.
- As an intrinsic reward for reinforcement learning, it supplies exploration missing from task rewards, improving on baselines in nine of ten environments without collapsing.
- Complexity generation, abstraction, and exploration emerge from ascent on one differentiable quantity, unifying the projections of intelligence on a common quantitative footing.
What Makes Humans Stupid
16 days ago
- Stupidity is not the absence of intelligence but a sophisticated, active process that uses intelligence to make easy problems harder, often through elaborate theories or systems.
- Intelligence and stupidity scale together; more intelligent systems can achieve greater feats of stupidity, as seen in human institutions, technology, and ideology.
- Stupidity involves elaborating and defending errors, turning them into foundations for further action, which paradoxically requires prior intelligence.
- Examples include misapplying theories like quantum mechanics to consciousness or cybernetics to economies, worsening problems instead of solving them.
- Novelists and philosophers, such as Musil, Swift, and Pynchon, have explored intelligent stupidity, where intellect serves error, leading to collective or institutional failure.
- Stupidity persists due to environmental changes or overextension of heuristics, as seen in moths drawn to artificial light or specialized systems hacked by external agents.
- AI poses a risk of super-stupidity, where errors become undetectable as humans outsource cognitive capacities, potentially creating sophisticated stupidity indistinguishable from intelligence.
- A science of stupidity is proposed to study its mechanisms, evolutionary dynamics, and design principles to prevent tools from replacing rather than enhancing cognition.

intelligence

Is It Worth Being Wise?

The mistake of conflating intelligence and power

Genetics and intelligence differences: five special findings

Intelligence from Learnable Novelty

What Makes Humans Stupid