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Its hard to argue with what you are saying. You defined our most intelligent types scaled as 1 and unbounded it for most intelligent. Then obviously majority falls under the line and are considered dumb. I don't know if there is any insight in that other than feeling disappointed at self.

On the other hand the article is arguing the opposite. Trying to be empathic towards human nature and look for solutions with that in mind. I think that is refreshing and useful.

I'd say your scale is heavily mis-calibrated and demonstrates nothing more than your personal pessimism. As an alternative:

  A scale of 1-10:
  - 1 is the minimum threshold for civilisation
  - 10 is the most advanced civilisation the universe has ever known

We are a 10.

Unless you know of any other civilisations out there we can measure ourselves against?

Eh, your scale is off. Let's surmise, only in this case, that the universe is sentient, and knows all civilizations. This universe could then judge where we are on the scale of have made.

The issue here is you have conflated humanity with the universe. Simply, we can't know, and it may be unknowable to any civilization where they are on the scale in an absolute measure, only a relative one.

On a relative scale, we are a 10. On an absolute one, we are no where close.

> So we are literally at the dumbest, most intellectually feeble level of sentience required to get where we are, otherwise we'd have done it sooner.

I totally agree with you, and you have some interesting points. But, this is a subjective definition of “dumb” that is tautological. It ignores the possibility that it could have taken longer. For example, there are other sentient species on this planet for which it hasn’t happened yet.

You could also phrase what you said with the optimist’s glass-half-full phrasing: we are literally the smartest and most intellectually capable beings to get where we are, otherwise it would have taken longer.

Do you know of Sturgeon’s eponymous Law, “90% of everything is crap”? I didn’t realize at first (maybe because I’m dumb) that this isn’t a statement that things are bad. It’s a subjective and un-arguable proposed definition of what bad is. There’s a distribution of stuff, let’s just call the top 10% good and the bottom 90% crap. Sturgeon’s law applies to people as much as anything else.

> most of us are below that, because we get taken along for the ride by people who are at 1.0 or higher.

This thought has occurred to me before, and I think it’s super interesting to ponder. Today I’m not as sure as I once was that this paints an accurate picture of how progress works. History tends to over-inflate the importance of individual contributions and leave out the vast majority of context and help that luminary figures had. The progress we feel around us today takes immense commercial effort that involves uncountable numbers of people. The US launched first into modern computing because the political and economic conditions were right, not because we had more geniuses.

Perhaps it’s not the top sliver of civilization that is driving innovation at all, perhaps the it’s the average intelligence that hit a threshold, or perhaps it’s not much to do with intelligence but with economy and culture, or maybe it’s inevitable once written language happens. It’s hard to speculate about these things since we have no basis for comparison.

To truly argue on this point you need to, I think or at least in my opinion, settle on a definition of "smart" and "dumb".

I like to view our intellect as a tool for survival of our species. By that measure, we are doing fairly well. We used to get wiped out by minor stuff like not enough food, not enough protection from the elements and other animals, diseases, we have eradicated the majority of these things hindering our survival.

I hypothesise that most of the people here (on average) on HN are highly educated. It's kind of fashionable and almost necessary social behavior to be humble in your own intellect. By all objective measures the people on HN are really fucking smart but you can't say that of course because that's "arrogant". Yes, I too think I'm stupid and suffer from impostor syndrome having two graduates degree in applied math.

Anyway, humans, compared to other animals we compete with for survival, food, and territory, are doing really well. I don't see any cows on the moon yet.

> Anyway, humans, compared to other animals we compete with for survival, food, and territory, are doing really well. I don't see any cows on the moon yet.

Would all this be possible without other mammals? Or is the ecosystem (including mammals) the enabler for us?

Probably yes, but on a longer timeline. Humans don't need other mammals to survive.

Maybe not survival, but would we be anywhere near where we are now without the help of say, cows and horses? Possibly, but maybe not.

>To truly argue on this point you need to, I think or at least in my opinion, settle on a definition of "smart" and "dumb".

That's exactly what I just did - the level of intelligence necessary to build a technological society. On that scale we only just register above the threshold, as a species.

I'm not saying our intellectual capacity is rubbish or useless, we make the grade to be significant on this scale. Yay us!

I'm just trying to put our intellectual achievements in perspective given that we have no other intelligences on the planet anywhere close to competing with us on this scale. Making a comparative analysis of a single data point is alway difficult, but I think this is a useful way to think about the problem.

> So we are literally at the dumbest, most intellectually feeble level of sentience required to get where we are, otherwise we'd have done it sooner.

But do we all want to be "super thinkers": Is that actually progress? Especially in the context of "sentience", maybe it's not just a blessing but also a curse?

Imho animals mostly run on instinct in a kind of "intuition mode", this even applies to humans. What makes humans, and maybe some other animals, different is their ability to have self-awareness, which allows them to have an inner monologue and active thought to influence their actual actions and decisions, instead of just leaving it all to intuition.

But we don't all constantly do that, "thinking" that is. When speaking with friends and family about this, how do they perceive their thinking, I was shocked to learn that some don't know/understand this "inner monologue" aka "active thinking" at all.

These people are not stupid, that's not what I'm suggesting, these are very productive people, who often manage to stay positive, wise and happy through some rather nasty hardships that would probably have broken me, due to my tendency to overthink things.

As weird as it might sound, sometimes I wish I could just turn the thinking off. That's when I pursue hobbies, to take my mind off, but usually results in my thinking being refocused on something more enjoyable, but in the end I'm still thinking about something.

Though I hesitate to suggest it because it's a fad right now, you might want to give "mindfulness" meditation a try for a month or so.

> sometimes I wish I could just turn the thinking off

I have this same feeling, a lot. Sometimes it just goes into overdrive. It's so easy to get wrapped up, when I want to be doing something else. It's fun, but doesn't always have a positive result.

Taking 10, 15, 20 minutes every day to do this exercise of being still and just watching the monologue has been really valuable to understand and recognize that state, which makes it easier to deflect. And I haven't lost anything; that thinking mode is still available if I really need to puzzle something out. But it's in service of something, rather just than a runaway train.

I've seen "mindfulness meditation" getting mentioned, and suggested, a couple of times on HN. I guess it's something I really should get around taking a look at.

Probably also a way more healthy and sustainable solution than trying to medicate the issue away.

I doubt that is true given the literal forms of intellectual disorders. Given sufficient time a society with say limited to be just shy of mentally disabled could progress but slower. Say a few centuries "tech period" at 1700s Europe scale. We could still have done much better however in reduced generation times between advances just by not being stubborn about inconvenient new facts and theories from upstarts.

Also ability to drive things forward is limited/driven by things other than just intelligence. Look at Hero's steam engine - without the other metalworking technologies it was a curiosity. Having slave workers do the task was more efficient than having them gather more expensive fuel for an expensive machine to do the task. Also look at the "discovery" that Aristotlian flight paths for thrown objects was wrong. Who already knew for centuries? Literally anyone who actually worked or fought with projectiles but they weren't in contact with them. (Eastern warrior-elites generally would also mock them given the prevalence of aristocratic archery there).

By geographic time scales (read: compared to every other species) we still look like a division by near zero near assimtope.

Thank you for being you. It has been very lonely for me to propagate that very idea, esp. given how tied humans are to the idea that they are smart. On the spectrum humans use, I'm certainly on the high-end of it, but, gosh, we are such retards. We only think that we think.

> I discussed this with my brother and he pointed out most of us are below that, because we get taken along for the ride by people who are at 1.0 or higher. They're the geniuses that truly drive innovation forward.

This is basically the theme of "Atlas Shrugged".

How do you quantify "sooner" on an evolutionary time scale?

I'm not sure I understand the issue. The same way you quantify 'shorter' on a height scale. Sooner isn't a quantity, it's just a direction.

I'm saying within the lifetime of a species I'm not sure it's fair to say it's taken us a long time. It could have taken way longer.