The Algernon Argument (2010) | Hacker News Reader

The Algernon Argument (2010)

gwern.net

35 pointsbenbreen9 comments

Hypothesis: The main evolutionary benefit social animals get from IQ is understanding the thinking of others and communication.

Thinking and understanding others is more important than thinking better. Slightly higher than average IQ is beneficial, but too much higher is net negative.

You can understand others in two ways.

1) Build a internal model for how others think. This is a difficult problem. It involves complex decode-encode process that eats resources and can fail. For social animal this process must be almost always on.

2) Have the same underlying thinking process as other individuals. The communication and understanding is now effortless.

If this hypothesis is true, social species have lower IQ variation than species where individuals live alone.

This is a very interesting hypothesis on the evolutionary origins of anti-intellectualism!

So I agree that a homogeneous population will be much better at communication (no one needs to "talk" down to each other).

But given that social animals often form a hierarchy, do you think it still matters as much? The "smarter" ones can get others to follow him without the rest understanding his internal thought process. Group selection should vastly favor tribes that are good at producing these intellectual leaders then.

Social intelligence that leads to the top may not be related to IQ or fluid intelligence. It may be ability to communicate, read and project ideas, not thinking better ideas.

ps. Group selection is very controversial theory. I think most evolutionary biologists reject it.

There are some things that we talk about everyday and even attempt to measure without having an explanation of what they are. For instance, we say a person is 'happy'. Or 'we feel that...' ('feel'? 'we'?)

Intelligence seems to me like one of those qualities. It's real, but it isn't what we think it is. To me it seems like it ought to be, and often is, subject specific. Yet IQ tests are apparently predictive of career salary.

Some people seem incredibly smart but they don't create anything new. So their impact on the world in limited to 'more of the same'.

Then there's the fact that intelligence isn't additive. A person can make massive contributions to an academic department simply by being genuinely motivated and thereby boosting the morale of his more intelligent colleagues. Whereas a bad genius can retard an entire field (or was is merely that he was mistaken?)

  more of the same

Oh, I don't know about that.

There are many new things I can think of, and wish to create, but there are some non-trivial artificial barriers between me, and the tools I need, to complete the tasks.

Things like licensing dongles and lawsuits, and access tokens, and passwords, and CD keys, and agreements to never reverse engineer, and bandwidth caps, and CPU core count or MAC address access limits. And lockstep dependency hell, and the decay of unavailable compatible versions reaching EOL.

Even if I had unlimited time to do whatever I want, I don't have capacity for unlimited spending, to authorize access to all the tools and remote resources needed, to create all the prototypes I want.

Then, what about getting you to even consider my voice as credible? What would I have to do, to prove myself, such that you'd consider adopting my invention.

Lastly, what if I am not regarded as morally pure, or somehow unsavory in character? This is to say, maybe some find my political leanings dubious. To some people that might preclude them giving me the time of day, let alone considering the utility of my invention.

Maybe the morality or default practical utility of my invention is suspect, and thus reflects upon my character.

I'm smart enough to invent a new application for the remote control of a device, but I'm unable to collect the resources I need to do it. So, intellect isn't the limiting factor here. I'm prevented from accomplishing the goal, because no one will sponsor the effort.

Some people don't like my appearance. Others don't like my personal style. Still others look at my code and scoff at the runtime, or the syntax formatting, or the compositional choices. Others think they can guess my age. Others carry an ethnic or sexist bias. The list goes on. But no one wants to see me as their boss, and raise an eyebrow at the idea of me even as a peer.

I cannot dress as I want, keep my hair as I want, speak as I want. I have to jump through hoops of social decorum, such that select audiences will not cringe and flee.

And this is just me. I'm sure there are other people like me or smarter no doubt, out there, stuck in a cage. Doomed to age out and whither away, never adding to the conversation, because of all the prerequisites to speaking at all.

Yes, most smart people invest their creativity into 'fitting in' better and enacting social memes more faithfully that the norm. Whereas the (rare) creative genius is disagreeable and thus usually ignored.

Or, possibly, intelligence beyond a certain point wasn't useful until recently, and didn't provide an evolutionary advantage.

For that matter, I'm not sure how much reproductive advantage intelligence beyond, say, 130 provides for a person now. Are there that many situations where it would keep someone alive long enough to reproduce?

Only quickly skimmed the beginning of this very long essay, but aren't Algernon's story and the first paragraphs of the essay about the impossibility of increasing the intelligence of a single individual? And what does evolution have to do with it? It seems to be impossible to increase the intelligence of, say, an average individual; yet Einsteins exist, there is actually a large number of them in absolute terms. One thing is the average level of human intelligence, evolutionarily determined; a completely different thing is the possibility of increasing the IQ of specific individuals during their lifetimes.

This is meta but does anybody know the name of any disciplines where human history is studied through the perspective of evolution theory?

This subject is a mite tricky to Google.

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