Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Notes -
Watching college football yesterday a friend was texting me about one of the better players being super quick. So the question I posed was would you trade your intelligence for getting to run like that? I have never wanted to be a pro sports player after I reached the age of like 7, but I do watch highlights of athletes getting to jump or basically fly and it looks like it would be a lot of fun. Most people here I assume do not have this skillset. To my question my friend replied depends how much money he gets.
So my question is would you trade your intelligence for getting to have that athletic ability. Basically you can do anything you want on a football field but the entire world outside the football field is complete confusion to you. I would say Antonio Brown is the leading brand of having no understanding of anything off the football field.
The reverse of AB I think would be someone like Leopold Aschenbrenner. Very high IQ. Like AB most of human society is something he does not get to be a part of. My gut says like 98% of humans would find him annoying but he’s fine when he stays in EA/AI type places. I am closer to this spectrum.
I’ve also been thinking of kinds of intelligence that I lack. I literally can not clean. And it’s not just laziness. My mind is just very bad at organizing things and I’m very messy. I feel like this is kind of common with people who are good at math. I remember in college math professors had the messiest offices. I noticed this when my cleaning ladies show up. My place can be a complete mess and in 2.5 hours the place is perfect after they arrive. To me this is absolute magic.
Thinking about different types of intelligence I feel it makes me more empathetic. I know I have some abilities that are absolute magic to other people. I know I have some weaknesses that no matter how hard I work I can’t do the tasks.
My answer to my original question is I would not give up intelligence for being a marvelous athlete. Getting to read Plato or the US Constitution and understand their arguments and reasoning is not something I would give up. But I would pay a lot of money to get to be a marvelous athlete for 1-day just to experience dunking over someone or being the best player in a college football game.
As for QOL being someone like Cam Heyward (I’m a Steelers fan) who seems like a functional human being is likely the highest QOL. He’s possibly too dumb to understand an index fund but smart enough to not get robbed by advisors and just pay a 1% tax to Goldman Sachs. Being someone like AB probably sucks because I am fairly certain everything off the field is magic to him.
If you read my rant I appreciate it.
For the most part, the conjecture of multiple intelligences is just egalitarian hopium, especially when it comes to carrying water for non-Asian minorities (e.g., blacks—and to a lesser extent—latinos). See, for instance: Other Ways of Knowing.
Assuming there are no aesthetic implications, I’d happily sacrifice 1/3 st. dev. of athleticism for +5 IQ points.
I played a lot of sports when I was a teenager and was quite good at them, which got me a lot of free female attention. However, as an adult it doesn’t do me too much good, aside from the very occasional sport-related work outing where I can do some aura farming.
Even with 1/3 st. dev. or more (within reason) of loss in athletic ability I could still easily ragdoll a chick if she initiates playfighting, so no concerns there in the domain that really matters.
Multiple intelligence is absolutely real. Look at the rationalists, “geniuses” who make obvious logic errors and can’t communicate.
Maybe social and emotional intelligence are just instinct and upbringing, while logic is faster thinking or larger context i.e. “liquid intelligence”. But intelligence is only valuable and measurable by what it observably does: in a way anything is “intelligent” because it follows the laws of physics, the secrets of the universe, but we generally don’t label it as so because it won’t tell us.
Nah. Throwing in an adverb like “absolutely” doesn’t improve an argument by assertion. Nor does vaguely sneering toward rationalists, without even an attempt to claim that say, a marginal replacement person would do better with regard to logic or communication skills.
I was already being a bit charitable by including the “for the most part,” since I had quant/verbal tilts in mind. Yet, even with range restriction and foreign test-takers, SAT and GRE quant and verbal scores tend to be moderately to strongly correlated—not orthogonal—much less anticorrelated. Peskily inconsistent with multiple intelligences and peskily consistent with a general cognitive ability.
It Just So Happens that basically everytime researchers set out to test another form of alternative intelligence, it just ends up being at best a reinforcement of the general cognitive ability. Meanwhile, the incentives are such that discovering an alternative form of intelligence beyond general cognitive ability would supercharge an academic’s career, especially if the hypothesized form of alternative intelligence would be higher on average in non-Asian minorities.
It’s mostly cope in my view. The people who push the idea that there are other forms of intelligence tend to be either teachers who want to believe that the dumb kids aren’t actually dumb, and the dumb ones who don’t want to believe that they’re not just as smart as the science math and logic leaders. But it’s not true. You can’t be smart about feelings or art or nature or smarts without using the same pattern recognition and extrapolation skills that the STEM people use. You might, by temperament, aim it at different problems. Patrick Mahomes is aiming his logic and pattern recognition at football where Elon Musk is aiming it at rockets and drones and flying cars. It’s the same brain, the same processes, but one guy is throwing to Kelcie and the other is building flying cars.
But the point is, that is what we measure and ultimately what matters.
There are savants who are STEM experts but cannot socialize or understand art, even when it clearly limits their QOL. Maybe their brains are technically wired better, so if we just teach or condition them right they could be therapy or art experts too, whereas we could not turn a mediocre therapist or artist into a STEM expert. But until we do that, their intelligence is for all intents different than someone who’s good at STEM but also socialization, or someone who’s charismatic but otherwise stupid.
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