251–260 of 324 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting. I never knew about the link between Ashkenazi genetics and intelligence.
Its not talked about alot, but basically ashkenazis are the genesis of alot of modern intellectual ideas and companies. both FB and Google are ashkenazi creations
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is interesting. I hadn't heard of this dispute. I just read the Marcus paper from 1961 that is essential to Smith's thesis. I also read the back-and-forth rebuttals between Smith and Soames. I read the Marcus paper before reading the Smith and Soames papers. I don't really see how Soames' primary claim is not likely true. He says: "Marcus, along with certain other philosophers, do deserve credit for anticipating…
> He came up and provided a water tight refutation of it. Everyone in the room was taken back by this. His name? Albert Einstein. Just kidding. But do you have any text of this exchange?
von Neumann, Oppenheimer, Bohr, Einstein, Rutherford, Turing, Teller, Szilard, Wigner, Meitner... the list goes on... -- how did that time produce so many people of colossal intellect? War certainly can't be the primary factor, given that many of them were brilliant/productive even before WWI
4 on your list are Hungarian, and 3 of them went to the same high school: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fasori_Gimn%C3%A1zium Hungary had a great education system at the time.
It doesn't surprise me at all that the current political climate is not great for fostering great minds.
Wouldn't einstein qualify as the most intelligent human ever lived?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a hypothesis that almost all of the greatest intellectual achievements come from a very small number of bloodlines. I really doubt the idea that people are born and some just end up as the smartest in generations, I think theres more to the story
I am not sure that a ‘bloodline’ is a valid genetic concept. It depends a lot who the partner is, after all they provide 50% of the offspring’s genetic material. Put another way, if you are a genius in some field, the chance of having a child with someone of equal or greater aptitude is effectively zero. The ‘more to the story’ is possibly just affluence and family stability, which are also culturally embedded.
At a guess I would think these are the more important factors.
Being born into an affluent family gives access to higher likelihood of more varying influences and stimuli from an early age. Children are by their nature curious creatures, so having the possibility to satisfy their curiosity in more avenues should reflect on their later ability to absorb new information in these fields (because they already have an established baseline knowledge).
Family stability probably helps to support curiosity and emotional safety. When failures are treated as positive experiences ("what did we learn from this?"), as opposed to wasted effort, you are more likely to allow yourself to seek more such experiences.
Of course there are outliers. But over generations, I would expect more innovations and brilliant minds to emerge from families who can provide and support their offspring with the environment to flourish in their fields of interest.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Okay we get it, you blaze.
My word choice is more driven by exposure to the dataset that I'm working with. There's been some recent successes with autoencoders trained on virtual sensory input (i.e., video games) with surprising results, e.g., neural networks that can simulate the dynamics of these environments with surprising fidelity. Of course, learning to play video games at a high level is trivially easy, as everyone in the field now know…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I have a hypothesis that almost all of the greatest intellectual achievements come from a very small number of bloodlines. Nice hypothesis, but not exactly backed up by history. So many different societies have made so many diverse contributions to innovation, I'd be pretty amazed if you could draw a cohesive line through all (or most) of them. Also, separately, it's pretty difficult to separate "bloodlines", which…
I think the underlying mechanism is simply natural selection, just like you can breed dogs, tulips or bacteria for traits, humans can be "breed" into intelectual performance. None of religions/cultures do it, with exception of Ashkenazi.
Genetic natural selection takes thousands of years, or at an absolute minimum multiple generations. Social selection occurs far more rapidly, often within a single generation. A person born in the 1950s that is genetically predisposed to manual labor may do well for the first few decades of their life, but as society changes and starts valuing white collar work more, they will do far worse. Their genetics didn't change, but society did.
Those that favor nature over nurture vastly under-estimate the time-scales which it takes natural selection to occur as compared to social selection.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You may be using "smarter" to mean something different than IQ, but if you mean IQ then you're wrong. Different professions have different distributions of IQ, and programmers are among the professions with the highest average IQ. They definitely skew higher than house painters. https://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/Occupations.aspx Programmers may not be wiser, kinder, or better than anyone else, but on average they are…
[flagged]
Programming is correlated with higher IQ.
IQ is correlated with spatial reasoning and the kinds of multi-step puzzle solving that is often needed in programming.
I don't know why you find this so surprising or offensive. It's simply that the IQ tests the kinds of things that often make good programmers.
IQ isn't the only thing correlated with programming ability, and people with high IQ are often extremely dumb in many areas.
(I don't have a particularly high IQ)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're stunning me here. It's like you're objecting to someone saying gymnasts are coordinated or air traffic controllers can handle a lot of stress. Intelligence is a core qualification for programming, like height for basketball. You can't say "I play basketball, so I'm taller than others", but you can say "We're all basketball players, so we're likely taller than most". We're _selected_ for intelligence.
Citing Kathy Sierra’s book, Badass (pp 91–92) > Evidence has been mounting for decades that for most non-sport domains and for most people,“natural talent” is not an absolute requirement for reaching high levels of expertise. > Other than the sports that depend on specific physical prerequisites, few domains have hard genetic limits for expertise.There is a way in which natural ability might contribute to high expert…
This is probably true for programming too.
But just because something isn't necessary it doesn't imply there is a correlation.