Humans are not “generally intelligent”; our intelligence is extremely well adapted to being a hominid family animal in a tribe or clan in a savannah habitat with large predators and hostile members of our own species lurking about.
Our senses and brains are well suited to reasoning about and making decisions in environments at “human” scales. By that, I mean that humans don’t receive relativistic, atomic or quantum phenomena directly with our unaided senses, and therefore our brains never developed intuition for these phenomena.
So it’s no surprise at all that our intuition completely fails us at those scales.
Again, our intelligence is not “general”; it’s hominid.
It's actually debatable given our capability for abstract thought and creating things like mathematics.
I think it's better to say that our minds have built in optimization for some patterns of behavior and thought but it doesn't mean we aren't "generally intelligent".
Just as if you have Turing complete language designed for accounting it doesn't mean you can actually write anything in it, even if that would be not optimal.
I've always thought of mathematics as something that reveals itself - self evident for those who know to look for it.
Humans are absolutely "generally intelligent" - the languages we all come preloaded with provide a substantial base hominid intelligence.
Were one to compare all known species and their respective forms of intelligence, humans would be the standard for general intelligence and intelligence in general - this is only debatable if you entirely ignore the works of humanity, as it is only us that can see all known things as resources or potentially so.
Let a tree be known by it's fruits. Not to discredit the intelligence of dolphins, octupi/squids, chimps, ravens, certain dogs and cats but by no means are they, in any measurable way, comparable generally to a human or even specifically, save species specific intelligence, like how to operate a built in ink cloud organ.
If the point of evolution is to create endlessly more complex iterations of life forever, which it might as well be, we are the finest known example of evolutions success - we are the earth's magnum opus. Furthermore, were Earth alive and we its offspring, we are more than it - as a child is more than it's mother or father alone. We are the most important thing here rn.
At least so far. Definitely win overall.
Can another species do math, identify everything, name it all and turn a tree into a chair? That's base reqs to challenge for the smart crown.
tl;dr: I agree with the comment I'm replying to - I just like to write books
According to a few (related) mystical schools of thought (that share a boundary with Jungian psychology) there is a distinction to be made between mind and intellect. The former, the mind, is held to be effectively a super-sense and its content and preoccupations naturally (as with the elemental senses) are bound firmly to the body. The intellect however is seen as the realm of knowledge whose domain extends to the transcendent.
While our intuition is indeed informed by experience it should be understood that speculative meditations (should one care not to believe in inspiration "from above") can enrich mental content and provide structural elements for conceptualization that transcends ordinary perception.
So the intellect is indeed superior to mentation. And for many of us this distinction is informative of our belief in the incompleteness of our self-perception.[..]
Epidemics generally follow a logistic curve, like most "exponential" processes. It looks exponential at first, but at some point, it decays. COVID is no exception. It is now in "fuzzy up and down" mode.
True, unbounded exponential processes don't exist in nature. There is a simple explanation about why not: assuming the speed of light is the speed limit of causality and we don't have weird things like warp gates, then the influence of something cannot go further than a sphere around it expanding at the speed of light. The volume of this sphere of influence increase following a cubic function. Now, if an exponential process happen withing that sphere, for example a population growth, it will run out of space at some point, because an exponential function will always beat a cubic (or any polynomial) at some point. The fastest growth possible is cubic, not exponential.
And yet, counterintuitively, it's in precisely these areas (relativity, quantum physics) that our theories are best (most predictive with the strongest mathematical foundations) and the areas where our human intuition ought to supply the most assistance (psychology, sociology) where we seem to be lost at sea.
One explanation that I've come up with to explain this apparent paradox is that while humans may not have any special insight or intuition into microscopic or macroscopic phenomenon, at least we don't have any biases either. Thus, we are able to make progress in these areas by simply pouring in huge amounts of time and brainpower.
On the other hand, for subjects that are more "human," we come pre-equipped with a large number of instinctive insights; or to put it another way, we're burdened with a huge number of innate biases. These are mostly shortcut heuristics that only vaguely approximate the truth, and are deeply and unavoidable biased in ways that we ourselves are blind to. Thus, no matter how much time and brainpower we pour into these subjects, progress remains slow and theories remain poor.
It's a well-known theorem in machine learning that an ensemble of weak (only slightly better than random chance) but unbiased learners will eventually converge to a strong learner, but a collection of biased learners will never become unbiased unless their biases are all uncorrelated. In humans, of course, the biases are shared across all members of the species so do not cancel out in this way.
The biases you have are different than mine or rather, I'm aware of most of my bias and can account for them - I have many, many predispositions, assumptions, inferences, unknown incorrect conclusions, etc.
I love your example bc it highlights the bias of science of for me. We know that quantum equations can't be looked at - I'd say that's near trivia level "known" at this point. What it actually means functionality is obviously more complicated but simply stated - reality is aware of our observation of it and reacts, at least at a quantum level.
Scientific bias is so great that they can literally work with a system that must account for that rather incredible fact, while ignoring it bc they can't explain it.
The placebo effect, NYT crossword experiments, the Stanford University 60some% threshold for an idea to be adopted/accepted by all of a society as a known/true belief - those 3 facts reshape our understanding of the world if they are actually facts. All three are undeniable facts that have simply never been acknowledged or examined further.
Further bias is displayed with the insistence that all things spontaneously came into existence from nothing, despite nothing coming from nothing for no reason - that's impossible, as no example within reality exists I can't just take that at face value, but it's the accepted "theory" - despite common sense stuff like, say a future corporation created this universe - or an inexplicable being even, BOTH trillions of times more likely to be the origin of the universe than nothing exploding for no reason.
I could write a book about the incredible biases that allow some of the smartest people to actually talk about the multiverse is a serious sense - the universe is not infinite, so a new universe can't come into existence for every possibility, that would be an incredibly stupid waste of resources - with any thought at all the commonly understood definition of the multiverse fall completely apart. It may be the dumbest thing we believe rn frfr
This is all without discussing the ACTUAL bias in science that comes from who funds stuff and etc...
I agree with what you are saying, but I find it interesting that physics can also predict properties of planets, stars, and galaxies interacting over cosmic distances. At that scale, you can zoom out and reduce the complexity again back to a handful of rules.
This depends on how many digits of accuracy you are looking for. With living things, we care more than with hot rocks, because the entropy gradients are so much higher.
I could write a book about your comment. I am incredibly impressed how well you articulated our "human subject biases" - that is an excellent starting point for understanding the human condition, the root of all of our bias.
It isn't only instinct tho. Heritage and culture. Societal beliefs. Personal experience. Expectations. What we recall and forget, how and when we recall - all automatic functions of memory. Your brain is biased and actively attempts to deliver a reality that adheres to that bias - it can do so. An example is that we don't choose what we look at or when we do - to maintain a smooth image, without choppiness, our eyes dart to the next object of our attention before our eyes begin to move.
Perception is reality. We see what we want to see... except that we rarely actively choose to look, see and observe - we outsource the whole thing. If buying a new car is in the back of your mind bc it's necessary, your subconscious will see your anxiety, and high light every car dealership to you in a hundred mile radius - that can also be a little stressful - it's trying to help.
You don't actually think about the words that come out of your mouth in conversation - nobody does that at speed of talk. We just have a mental idea prompt and we talk.
All that we don't decide outright is fundamentally biased - that's the root of it, what has been before, what we/the body liked and how to get more of that and nothing it doesn't want. The choice of tacos or burgers - the presentation of your "craving" as maybe one or the other is biased framing.
Most of what the endless stream of thoughts says - the words that flow into our conscious mind, often for reasons not clearly defined, all of that is bias.
The intellect and knowledge we accumulate is what we use with logic and reason to make sense of reality as we live it - knowledge once learned becomes a newspaper unless well tended - unchanging, unadaptable and less applicable over time.
An old dog can learn new tricks but it might have to let go of the tricks it thinks it knows now - so an old dog just doesn't do that. Old tricks still be old tho - want isn't part of the adapt or die equation.
All of this is bias, fundamental bias - as humans all experience aspects of these things but no two people have identical bias it cannot simply be ignored.
This is the base of the "right view" that Buddha talked so much about. We think we are something we are not, that we do things we do not and the stuff we do we don't know we do or why we do anything at all. Where we sit amidst all this automation and optimization is critical.
We are not what thinks. We are what is aware of the thoughts being thunk. The view from there is better, like 3rd person view vs 1st person in video games. Most of the body is like this, most of our habits and routines are just habit and routine, with nothing real behind them - more like randomness repeated into normalcy.
Like, one day you decide to read a mystery series and you enjoy them. You begin to read them when you wake up. Then you finish the series. Ten years later you still read every morning but it doesn't matter what.
The last movement that your body made... did you consciously decide to move? Did you decide to scratch your arm? Have you ever drank all the coffee without realizing it til the cup was at your lips? Ever drive for hours a very familiar route and realize you can't exactly remember doing most of it. Our brain fill in the corners of rooms for us - ceilings at familiar places can surprise us, bc we've never bothered to look up. When you walk, do you decide to take a step?
Everything you are, all that you have not actively decided to be, is essentially just bias. That is what most people are but that doesn't make it correct, there is a right view that reveals what is.
This is a rant. This is huge tho and deserving of one, especially on a dead comment thread.
Scientists be dealing with all this bias too, they are no different from you.
This got me thinking about the radio lab episode where they had to vote on which animals they thought were the smartest. The idea was to put yourself in the context and environment of these animals and see which one has developed the best intelligence given what senses and capabilities the animals had to work with. The first round is Crows vs Slime Molds. I never thought about it, slime molds decision making abilities to find food are actually really fascinating and given that it’s a unicellular organism it’s adapted suprisingly well for the limited resources it has. I never thought about intelligence relative to other organisms before.
I love this comment! Why have I never read this key insight in the form of an essay. Having recently watch Chimp Empire on Netflix I have a good feel for the “lower” foundational levels of our stack.
I don’t think “general” means like, equally suited for all cases. Rather, being able to handle the things successfully at all, even after working past wrong intuitions, and taking much time, still counts.
I think that's pretty ignorant of historical materialism.
Humanity itself, insofar as its brain was made possible by new modes of nutrient-assimilation from the environment, is inherently technological. Nature is updated by work.
Our senses and brains are well suited to reasoning about and making decisions in environments at “human” scales. By that, I mean that humans don’t receive relativistic, atomic or quantum phenomena directly with our unaided senses, and therefore our brains never developed intuition for these phenomena.
So it’s no surprise at all that our intuition completely fails us at those scales.
Again, our intelligence is not “general”; it’s hominid.