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210 IQ Is Not Enough

taylor.town

201–210 of 284 posts

Re: 210 IQ Is Not Enough

#201
post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Between 8 and 9 billion. But "impossible" means a chance of zero, and 8 billion / 17,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 > 0, so it's not impossible. The chances that he's lying or delusional are vastly higher of course, but that's no reason to use "impossible" incorrectly.

Impossible is almost always a colloquialism, almost everything is possible is you accept a low enough probability of success. We are talking about something less likely than almost anything else ever called impossible.

No, I think you are misunderstanding. IQ does not describe the likelihood of someone being that smart. It just means you order a number of people by their „intelligence“, the one in the middle is defined as 100 and then it depends on how many other people are in that line which IQ number the person at the end of the line gets. So it’s impossible because the definition of IQ is such that a certain number doesn’t come up without a certain number of measurements.

It‘s as if you would say 150% of all people are female. That is impossible, not just unlikely.

Re: 210 IQ Is Not Enough

#202
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does that say about you? :)

The charitable answer would be that they admire self reflection and try to engage i it themselves.

yes, i'm pretty sure that's the case, i was just making a meta joke about holding up mirrors

Re: 210 IQ Is Not Enough

#203
Christopher Langan does not have an IQ of 210.

He took a custom “iq” test of 48 questions, scored average, then retook the test knowing the questions, and got 47 right.

Re: 210 IQ Is Not Enough

#204
post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reducing comedy to 'subverting predictions' and empathy to 'compression algorithms' is like explaining music as 'organized sound waves', technically defensible yet completely missing the point. Missing the forest for the trees is an objective sign of limited metacognition, by the way. The fact that you claim to be 'above average' at empathy and social cues while writing this robotic dismissal that completely misses t…

I purposefully do not give out methods to measure intelligence, because people can train on them. I knew you wanted that, but that does not mean you get what you want. I also find it strange how you expect me to be empathetic in a way that makes you feel good about yourself, when you deserve no such compassion after pulling the dark arts on me.

That's ok, me and my "dark arts" will have to make do without your "compassion", somehow. And the world will have to make do without "training" on your secret "methods to measure intelligence", somehow.

I don't appreciate your expletives in your original unedited post, by the way, but the fact that you lost your temper is once again proof of something. You sound young, so I hope one day you "find a short program" to recover that data.

That last part was not sarcasm, in case you have any trouble picking it up.

Re: 210 IQ Is Not Enough

#205

I wholeheartedly agree with the point of the article, but the phrase “You are enough” really grinds my gears for some reason. Enough for what?

I tend to agree, most platitudes are less impactful simply because your mind inserts what it already knows/autocompletes the phrase meaning because it's something so commonly heard. I read it as something like... you have enough resources to lead a life that has prosperity relative to the limited faculties of a human organism. That seems less catchy, and if you're too literal in your phrasing in writing, then you get…

This phrase comes up alot in mindfulness and self-esteem related writings. I interpret it to mean that you don't have to do anything to justify your existence on the planet or prove your worth. I agree with this. But the phrasing of "you are enough" implies that it is possible to not be enough, but I don't think that's true since there's no bar that you have to meet, you just are.

Re: 210 IQ Is Not Enough

#206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're quite literally babbling. If a word has no good definition, it ceases to be a word. All you really mean is you use the word "intelligence" very loosely, without really knowing what you mean when you use it. You just use it to point at a concept that's vague in your head. That does not mean you could not make that concept more precise, if you felt inclined to be more introspective. It also does not mean that th…

> But they'll often be close enough or even equivalent mathematically Who is babbling? The number of concepts in human language that have no mathematical formalization far outnumber the ones that do, lol. Yes, we can, obviously, come up with shared, mathematically precise definitions for certain concepts. Keep in mind that: A. These formal or scientific definitions are not the full exhaustion of the concept. Linguist…

Babbling in the mathematics sense: no information transmitted.

I agree with you in the linguistic sense on the word 'intelligence'. Everyone has their own colloquial meaning. That doesn't make their definitions correct. If someone says, "exponential growth," just to mean fast growth, they're wrong (according to me). It's impossible to have universally agreed upon definitions, but we can at least try to standardize some of them. If you only care about intelligence in regards to a specific niche, add adjectives not definitions.

IQ tests measure 'intelligence' in the general, correct sense of the word. Not perfectly, but they're pretty good. If you care about a specific task, you can finetune on that task. While a generally intelligent agent will do better than a less intelligent agent at pretty much all tasks, it can still be defeated by test-time compute.

Re: 210 IQ Is Not Enough

#207
post #41

With age and experience I learned that intelligence has a lot of axis, IQ test is only one of them, it is meaningful but narrow. My favorites questions I like to ask people I know or I don't see often are: what are you passions, what do you like in life? It's often much more interesting about what it reveals of the person, than their ability of solving logic puzzles.

I like to think that Robin Williams was as intelligent as Stephen Hawking, but they both excelled at very different types of information to process and express insight on. Also some of the best athletes in the world are processing information and making decisions in ways those 2 never could.

I mean.. I don’t think Stephen hawking’s information processing was the issue here..

Re: 210 IQ Is Not Enough

#208
post #118

IQ has an enduring mystique, but before getting to excited by it, people should ask themselves a question: Does "IQ" measure something particularly useful or meaningful? (I think, at best, it's a very incomplete measure of something quite vague and ill-defined.)

Yes. It correlates strongly with problem solving abilities on most tasks, predicts health outcomes, educational outcomes, career outcomes and finances all pretty significantly.

Re: 210 IQ Is Not Enough

#209

My wife's nephew is the smartest person I've ever met (and I've met a lot of really smart people). Aced the SAT as a teen, and interned at JPL, etc. Got a free full ride, wherever he wanted. He got his undergraduate at CalTech. Ph.D at Some midwest college -a good one, but can't remember which one -may have been Urbana-Champagne. His mother was adamant that he have as normal a childhood as possible. She deliberately…

Why would that be a waste? The average professor at any college would probably be as smart as your friend. Professors (at least in the field I did my PhD in) are smart as hell.

I have a fairly Ivy-League family, including a number of teachers and professors (I'm the redneck engineer).

This guy is in a league of his own. Pretty stunning.

I would be quite surprised if "any college professor" is at the same level.

That said, I am also very much a "maker and doer." I spent my career amongst folks sort of like him, but focused on producing stuff. He would have knocked most of them, into a cocked hat.

Re: 210 IQ Is Not Enough

#210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What I deeply believe is: We're never going to invent superintelligence, not because its impossible for computers to achieve, but because we don't even know what intelligence is. Speak for yourself, not all of humanity. There are plenty of rigorous, mostly equivalent definitions for intelligence: The ability to find short programs that explain phenomena (compression). The capability to figure out how to do things (…

Honestly not sure if this is a bit, it's so on-the-nose... Taking it at face value, you are literally claiming to know precisely what intelligence is? You would be the first to know if so. You should probably publish quickly before someone steals your definition! In your post is demonstrated one of the deep mysteries of intelligence: How can a smart person make such a dumb assertion? (I'll give a hint: consider that…

I think Solomonoff beat me by about 70 years, and Wissner-Gross & Freer by about 10 years. Even if I had something novel to publish in this area, I think I would rather do something like solve ARC-AGI and make a lot of money.
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