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Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 18, 2026

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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but at the bottom it’s all g

Well, it's nearly half g anyway. There's a seeming-paradox where, although you can estimate g from two different sets of tests and get a correlation of .99 between the estimates, that's entirely due to having each set be broad enough not to be too swayed by any individual test, because correlation coefficients between g and individual tests (including in test batteries designed to measure g!) hit .82 (g explaining 2/3 of variance) at the very highest and go way down from there. It's possible that some people just don't spend their time using their g for e.g. "Subtraction/Multiplication" (correlation .59; presumably they used their g for evading the elementary school truancy officer instead?), but a more likely answer might be that Moravec's Paradox has implications for human intelligence alone, not just when comparing human to non-human. Enough general intelligence can augment or compensate for weaker special-purpose systems, but that doesn't mean the special-purpose systems aren't there.

Or maybe they’re too stupid for logic but can figure out how to get a picture to look good (using cause and effect AKA logic). It makes no sense.

The predicate "makes no sense" is binary, not unary. The history of human progress is a series of discoveries of observations that made no sense, to us, followed by formulations of theories that revealed why the observations had sense behind them after all.

In this case, we observe (repeatedly! this one seems to be surviving the replication crisis!) that most people are unable to solve an abstract logic problem which is isomorphic to non-abstract logic problems they are able to solve. This is even more shocking than being able to catch a baseball without being able to solve the differential equation predicting its motion from observations, but it doesn't seem like it's a difference of kind, just a difference of magnitude. It's been less than 2500 years since humans first classified which possible syllogisms of deductive logic are fallacious; that is not the history you'd expect from a hundreds-of-millennia-old species which has inherently mastered logic and obviated the need to find other ways for our brains to solve logic problems.