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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022

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The only meaningful measure of intelligence is one's ability to successfully make predictions about the world -- smart people can predict, geniuses can exploit. If you're right, you're right, and if you're wrong, you're wrong. It's a very straightforward thing.

Is there a name for this philosophy? I think it underpins a significant portion of rationalist thinking and leads to some of the more exotic conclusions.

The definitions you assign things should not change your understanding of the universe (i.e. the map is not the territory). "Intelligence is ..." should not underpin one's thinking in the same way that deciding whether electrons are negatively or positively charged does not meaningfully change our understanding of physics.

Teleb beleives that the measure of how smart someone is, is how rich he or she is by applying said intellect. This seems wrong though.

It seems like a decent heuristic to me. Why is it outright wrong?

because IQ encompasses far more than how materially successful someone is. There is a positive correlation between IQ and wealth but but it's small. You have to take into account individual preferences. Many smart people do not aspire to wealth or careers that lead to wealth.

Not everyone is solely motivated by money?

I don't think this is the best objection because smart people are far more likely to care about money.

If you were to exactly follow the cultural pressures, taking all the cliches to heart, then you would place a low value on money but a very high value on things that money can buy. This describes most people who say they are not motivated by money. However, since smart people have consistent preferences, they don't fall into this trap.

I think they are much better at making money compared to average IQ people, *if *they seek to make money .They can get good paying jobs, credentials, find loopholes or tricks to making money easier

smart people are far more likely to care about money.

I don’t claim to be a people expert but this is very much contrary to my life experiences, unless you use circular logic to define being smart as being good at making money.

It's wrong because there are so many other things that can sabotage wealth. Energy levels, social anxiety, obsession with something unproductive.

Conversely, there are ways to become rich without using intelligence. A person who is extremely energetic and wants to be rich will eventually hit the jackpot by immersing himself in opportunities and following up on them.

LessWrongers typically believe that real intelligence is changing the world (writing to it), not just predicting it (reading from it). But, in practice you need to be able to predict it in order to change it.

I'm sure there's a name for it, couldn't tell you what it is. I'm not a rationalist and only know bits and pieces of the lingo from cultural osmosis.

Looks like a version of the scientific method / empiricism. A scientific theory is good if it leads to accurate predictions on the outcomes of future experiments or events.

But to say that this is also the only useful measure of intelligence seems dubious. For example solving math problems or following complex argumentation, and rhetorically convincing other people are also marks of intelligence and they don't require making geopolitical predictions. You can be a highly intelligent theologian who knows the ins and outs of the trinity and all the heretical versions of it and this still demonstrates intelligence, even though the subject matter has no predictive value about physical reality.