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Well, admittedly, I'm not an elitist asshole that thinks I'm better than the rest of humanity. I lack the arrogance so inherent to think that the lowly peons have no worth.
The text speaks for itself.
Sometimes. Alas, they are merely human, and all too often fall into the trap that they are more convinced by their own rationalizations.
You don't have to be an elitist asshole to think society should work for the best of humanity. You don't have to believe yourself to be in the top of humanity to support the idea of the rising tide lifting all boats. A society that empowers and frees our smartest is a society that can directly fix dumb people problems, like what GLP1s are doing for obesity!
Dumb people no longer have to control themselves with food, cause the smart people solved that for them. Making a world where smart people are rewarded for doing stuff like this lifts all boats.
So it is just playground insults, got it.
Well yeah, but intelligence has no meaning if it doesn't reflect the general ability to get things more correct more often.
If there's 1000 questions and person A gets 750 right, B gets 500, and C gets 250, A is smarter than C.
And if a 1001 question pops up and you don't know the answer very well and can copy one of them, you should copy A. He might be wrong, but he's significantly more likely to be right.
And likewise if you find yourself giving C's answer in conflict with A, it should be a sign to self examine and double check. Maybe it's one of the times C is right and A is wrong. Maybe. But double and triple check.
As someone who's cleaned up after bright-but-overly-enthusiastic juniors, intelligence is the ability to ask the correct questions and the ability to know how seriously to take your answers. There are endless people who are very very good at getting things correct about quantum computers but very bad at designing e.g. societal resource allocation.
This is not how we measure intelligence. IQ tests are questions trying to discern one's ability to look at patterns and answer them correctly. Smarter people answer more correctly more often.
It's not just the ability to see a pattern, it's the ability to see the correct pattern.
This is what I'm trying to get at. IQ is correlated with intelligence, and strongly correlated with the ability to perform knowledge work under experienced supervision, but does not even slightly guarantee behaving 'intelligently' in complex real-world scenarios. What matters in the real world is spotting things you don't know, realising implications, having a good idea of your own abilities.
It's important not to Goodhart intelligence. IQ tests are a measurement device, not a target. I contend that "intelligence has no meaning if it doesn't reflect the general ability to get things more correct more often" is a bad way to describe intelligence, because it's fundamentally passive. Intelligence is an active phenomenon that reveals itself in interaction with the world and with other people.
And it does that by being more correct more often.
Let's imagine two people, Adam and Barry.
Adam: 110 IQ
Barry: 90 IQ
Neither of them have any knowledge beforehand about 1920s French artists and they both take the same class on it, and then are given the same test.
In general knowing nothing but their IQ, who do you expect to score higher? I expect Adam to do better. He is generally smarter, and thus generally I expect him to be more correct more often when presented with new information to learn and process.
If this is not generally the case, then we have an issue with how we measure IQ.
You are obsessed by tests. Life does not give you tests, it does not give you structured problems with right and wrong answers in a neat 100-question rubric. Life requires you to identify something useful and rewarding to do, go out and (collaborate with others to) do it, and not break too much while you do.
Somebody who is constantly wrong, but enjoys being wrong and expects himself to be wrong and puts in place structures to cope with the inevitable fuckups that happen when you bash yourself against reality and reality wins, is far more useful and intelligent than the kind of person who prides themselves on getting A** in a class about French artists.
It's the thing that drives PhD students to drink: you can spend your entire adolescence being more correct than everyone else, and none of that matters a jot when you have to accomplish something new. From the perspective of any individual human intelligence, reality is ancient, mysterious, almost actively malicious. Beautiful theories that make total sense just collapse when they come up against experiment, and a lot of the time you don't even get the comfort of knowing why and being able to derive a new theory. Stuff just doesn't work. Maybe you did it wrong, maybe it was the wrong thing to do, maybe the phase of the moon was wrong and it'll work tomorrow. You have to be able to function amongst constant, radical uncertainty! And then after 5 years you succeed and you find that actually your question was wrong and the result isn't nearly as useful as you thought it was.
Now, IQ tests have a meaning. Scoring better on IQ tests tends to correlate with the kind of intelligence I am talking about. Knowing nothing about them, I would rather have higher IQ students than lower IQ ones. But that is not enough, and a history of perfect test taking can often correlate with the kind of arrogance that makes you an extremely bad employee and problem solver.
IQ tests are a useful tool to approximate intelligence without further data.
Yes, because this is the generally accepted way we empirically measure intelligence.
Well obviously not. If they were more intelligent why are they constantly wrong?
The French artists is just an example. We can make it physics, we could make it engineering, we could make it anything. In general the smarter guy should be better. It's practically tautological.
Interesting enough, higher IQ tends to be correlated with prosocial traits. https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/2049959070556172302
Oh, what's the use. Either you can't see or you won't see. At least I got a couple of good paragraphs out of it.
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