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Comment by gerdesj | Hacker News Reader

A blue whale's brain weighs in at around 15lbs. Mine is roughly 3.3lbs. I suspect size isn't everything. You are unlikely to receive a response from a blue whale. Can you imagine trying to type on a keyboard with

As you say, corvids, octopi and others have recently been interacted with in such a way as to be shown to demonstrate unexpectedly complex behaviour. Brain size doesn't seem to be quite as important as you might think.

Note my brain is about a fifth the size of a blue whale's brain. Now I am absolutely useless at living within the sea and I have no idea how complicated it is but I suspect that based on our relative brain size, that it can be very complicated compared to what we land lubbers get up to. Evolution doesn't leave rubbish lying around unless it does not impair things.

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I think most of the brain manages the physical body. This is why it's size is roughly proportional to the body weight.

I don'y know how much of the brain is used for "thinking", and I suspect science doesn't either.

I don't think it's quite that bad. I don't have my copy of Richard Dawkins' The Ancestor's Tale handy, but I remember it discusses research into the relationship between brain size and body size. The two key findings that I remember are:

(1) The scaling law. One might think brain size should scale as body size, if the key is simply weight, or number of neurons; or one might think brain size should scale as the 2/3 power of body size, if one takes into account the square-cube law. The research Dawkins describes found that the actual scaling was in between the two: brain size generally scales as the 3/4 power of body size.

(2) Differences between groupings of animals. This basically affects the constant that multiplies (body size to the 3/4 power) in the equation for expected brain size. IIRC primates have the largest constant, cetaceans have the second largest, but octopuses and squids also have a fairly high constant. I don't remember seeing any data on corvids.

This kind of scaling applies well beyond brain. I recommend checking out the book Scale by Geoffrey West[1] for more examples.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31670196-scale

Adding a drive-by comment about those stories you read where a person has had a significant X% of their brain removed due to illness, and they still function normally.

All is not what it seems.

I suspect what makes humans special is our combination of intelligence and communication. Society is kind of like a superorganism, we get to learn from the sum of all human knowledge.

Most of the things I know came from other humans who died long before I was born. I get to benefit from all their brainpower indirectly. I'd be much dumber on my own.

Humans are certainly the absolute kings of tool usage. Examples in the animal world that we find impressive are things that even a human infant will trivialize in short order. And if you think about it in this context, communication itself is really just another tool. It's taking something that's not particularly useful, the ability to make the same sounding grunt repeatedly, and turning it into something useful.

Any animal that can move its body in a consistent way, make the same noise repeatedly, or do any other sort of repeated 'thing' has the ability to create an arbitrarily complex language. But they lack something enabling them to do that, and it seems whatever this something is - it probably wouldn't be terribly far from the same thing that enables meaningful, complex, and intricate tool creation.

Right, but how many of these tools could you have invented (or even learned to use) by yourself, with no prior knowledge about tools to guide you? Even "primitive" tools like wooden bows and stone arrowheads are the result of generations of accumulated knowledge.

You are as smart as you are because other humans taught you.

More than generations. The hand axe, a sharpened rock with no handle, was the apex of human technology for over one hundred thousand years. Even fire took tens of thousands of years to become a widespread tool.

Back in the day human populations very absolutely tiny, supposedly being reduced to 10-30k as late as 75k years ago.

I would expect opportunities for any meaningful innovation to be very limited at such low densities. Anything “invented” would likely stay within your group and be lost in a few generations. Then it would have to be rediscovered several times until it caught on amongst a larger population.

Interestingly, even small and isolated human groups tend to have very rich oral culture. Why do people "innovate" their story-telling and songs so much faster than their tools?

Because one is a vector for storing information which mutates over time while still preserving.

Physical tools are more complicated, exist as discrete physical instances and knowledge depending upon skill to make it, component availability (needing flint for example), and mutation can occur seperately. Just because you used a partially burnt piece of wood to make a better spear doesn't mean you have the techniques for fire-hardening wooden weapons down.

> More than generations. The hand axe, a sharpened rock with no handle, was the apex of human technology for over one hundred thousand years. Even fire took tens of thousands of years to become a widespread tool.

With `s/humans/homo sapiens/g` in the above paragraph, I believe that H sapiens was around for approx 300k - 400k years, and thrived in a variety of environments that would have killed them off if they did not have fire or sharpened rocks (skin animals for rudimentary clothing).

This suggests, to me anyway, that your estimates might be erring on the side of caution.

[WARNING: pure speculation ahead]

Earliest H. sapiens remains in Africa date to approx 300k years ago. Around 150k years ago the climate was cold, dry and harsh (https://www.esd.ornl.gov/projects/qen/nercAFRICA.html).

If H. sapiens did not enter that climate already prepared, with generational knowledge of fire and sharp tools, they would have died out.

This makes me think that they had already had widespread use of fire and sharp tools, plus sophisticated enough communications to pass this knowledge down for multiple generations prior to the climate change.

Communication is still pretty special as a tool. Humans evolved specific hardware to support it. While humans have evolved hands for tool usage, that's way more generic...

Intelligence and communication and versatile hands.

If crows had hands at their disposal, they might have developed towards a civilized species earlier than us.

With advanced enough genetic engineering, we may yet see someone to actually try giving them hands. Not soon, certainly, but in 2050, who knows.

Edit: Look at this video.

https://www.reddit.com/r/therewasanattempt/comments/156yuj5/...

It took the guy longer to assemble the test than the raven to solve it. These are smart creatures, and they like to communicate and cooperate as well. With hands and somewhat more capable vocal chords, nothing would stop them from developing a civilization.

I think there's a distinct possibility that orcas are more intelligent than us. They have culture and could have very sophisticated philosophies. But without thumbs and the ability to use fire underwater, they have no chance at developing technology.

Also the way octopi can adapt their camouflage and topography of octopi brains/nerve cells suggest their brains may not work like ours, and that Pitt, et al paper about frog vision https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/4065609 strongly hints our first intuitive assumptions about how things work may not be correct.

Brain size correlates to cognitive ability quite well within a species. Outside of species, it gets much murkier on account of glial:neuron ratios among other confounds. As for whale brains, well who knows. Evolution isn't an optimizing force as you appear to believe, rather it is the tyranny of the merely adequate. The oceans are full of remarkably stupid creatures that haven't changed in hundreds of millions of years on account of having a lot of teeth and swimming well has proved sufficient.

And of course there's the interesting question of size efficiency. Vacuum tubes are considerably bigger than transistors, which in turn are considerably bigger than ICs. Perhaps raw size isn't really an interesting metric for cross-architectural brains either?

> Brain size correlates to cognitive ability quite well within a species.

Not quite; it is much more nuanced and not settled - https://neuroscience.stanford.edu/news/ask-neuroscientist-do...

0.3-0.4 is a decent correlation, though obviously there are other bigger factors.

The very next para points to the problems associated with forming such a correlation;

To be honest, I find these correlation a bit unsettling. Clearly, there is more to intelligence than brain size, or classic geniuses like Albert Einstein, who had an average-sized brain, would have been out of luck! It is important think about how we should actually define intelligence, and to keep in mind that the studies cited above only show a correlation between brain size and a person’s score on an intelligence quotient test. Although IQ is historically the most widely used intelligence measure, by no means does it account for all aspects of human intelligence, nor is it an entirely consistent readout of cognitive ability between individuals. Furthermore, a closer look at the results of the gene-association study reveal that most of the relationship the authors found between HMGA2 gene variations and cranial size could be accounted for by the fact that the gene is also correlated with human height. Correlational studies have only established a weak to moderate linear relationship between brain size an intelligence, which is enough fuel to ensure that the brain size and intelligence hypothesis doesn’t burn out, but does little to explain the true basis of human cognitive capacity.

You might also want to look at the paper Decreases in Brain Size and Encephalization in Anatomically Modern Humans i have linked here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36833133

The whole IQ is only one measure argument really misses the main lesson from psychometrics. It’s entirely well known that IQ test taking is a specific skill. However it’s also known that there is a g factor that predicts about 50% of performance on basically all tasks with a cognitive component. The other 50% is indeed skill specific. So someone with a slightly above average g factor could still be a world class composer or quarterback. Contrariwise someone with an extremely high g might be very good at many different tasks, but not world class at any. So when one talks about measuring intelligence in a general sense, one ought to be talking about g.

On the importance or supposed profundity of the g factor, here's Cosma Shalizi:

http://bactra.org/weblog/523.html

(If you like, skip to "Correlations explain g, not the other way around").

Interesting read. I’m not inclined to critique it much beyond observing that the author clearly set out with an objective in mind and argued well to that end. My brief response is that the fact that we can find similar patterns in noise doesn’t actually show that the discovery of patterns indicates the data is noise.

And of course intelligence is a real and observable thing. Some people really are considerably smarter than others. They have better recall, learn faster, and are able to reach correct conclusions either more quickly or with less information than less intelligent persons. Reducing that difference to a single factor almost certainly is a simplification, but just as we can usefully talk about height without getting caught up on difference in leg, torso, and neck length, we can talk about intelligence similarly.

The article addresses this: for instance, if you were to create a "sound mind and body" score that included "hot or not" results, and the results of the Presidential fitness test, you would inevitably come up with a score that was even more predictive of life outcomes than IQ or g.

Physical attractiveness correlates with many good things like fertility and genetic health. Not to mention beautiful people benefit from the halo effect. The causality there though is likely that the relative superiority of attractive persons causes the halo effect to exist. There’s a pretty obvious set of mechanisms that offer causal reasons why attractiveness leads to better outcomes.

As for the presidential fitness exam, well that’s true but quite facile. Much like how people who have taken the Wonderlic test are considerably more likely than the general populace to be or have been in the NFL.

In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if taking aptitude tests at all regardless of score predicts above average outcomes because of a selection effect.

The point is that you can drag a lot of unrelated things together and get an increasingly predictive metric, despite the underlying factors being unrelated, which simply means that "being predictive" is not by itself dispositive of some underlying mechanism. It doesn't mean prediction isn't real! The problem is people going from "prediction" to "inferred ground truth" --- which is exactly what happens in the "g" discussions.

> which simply means that "being predictive" is not by itself dispositive of some underlying mechanism.

Right. I don’t see how any statistical analysis can tell you if a mechanism exists or what it is. Quite the opposite. The better you understand the mechanism of the process that generates your data points the higher quality your statistical analysis will be. And in the case of intelligence we know there must be an actual real underlying factor because some people are observably smarter than others.

I don't think anybody is arguing that people aren't observably smarter than other people; the question is about the metrics we're using, which, I mean, an equally vivid (and equally non-rigorous) argument would be: if you really buy into the IQ/g story, go hang out with a bunch of Mensa people and see how long you hold onto that belief.

I’m willing to bet that a Y combinator founder’s event’s attendees have as high if not higher average IQs than persons at a Mensa meeting.

Mensa appears to select for high aptitude and low achievement, which is a really unfortunate combination.

The entire field of Psychometrics is suspect and is a pseudoscience. It came into existence in the early days when ideas from Social Darwinism, Racism and Eugenics were mainstream in the Western world. People ascribed an importance factor to traits which they considered successful in their culture/society/environment and then started making universal and general inferences from it without regard to its validity. These were then codified as tests, published and propagated to the detriment of all.

Today we know better; Humans are highly adaptable and everything only exists in the context of a specific environmental/cultural/social context. Genetics vs. Epigenetics, Nature vs. Nurture, Nutrition, Economic strata etc. are all inputs when it comes to our "fitness" for a particular task. We play "roles" which are context-dependent from which you cannot generalize to the "whole person".

Psychometrics has been called a "Pathological Science" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathological_science

This article named The Myth of Measurement brings a bunch of research together to show why - https://paulenglert.com/the-myth-of-measurement/

If the field makes testable predictions that prove true then it cannot be a pseudo science.

And indeed, one can predict with accuracy better than chance how well someone will perform in a software developer job (for example) from an IQ test.

This same test may do less well in predicting the ability to hunt an antelope across the serengeti, but that still wouldn't make psychometrics pseudoscience.

Also, if there wasn't a g factor that would be fairly weird, as there are numerous little slightly deleterious mutations one could have that can minorly affect neuronal functioning. You'd genuinely expect there to be a decent correlation here.

When the characteristics that a test is supposed to measure are completely ill-defined (there is no concept of a "Measurable Intelligence" independent of a context, leaving aside biological retardation) they are a measure of nothing definitive and any correlations/predictions are subject to bias and/or randomness.

Here is Nassim Taleb;

1) IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle - https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-...

2) Fooled by Correlation: Common Misinterpretations in Social "Science" - https://www.academia.edu/39797871/Common_Misapplications_and...

3) Correlation videos - https://nassimtaleb.org/tag/correlation/

See also :

a) The Pseudoscience of Psychometry and The Bell Curve - https://www.jstor.org/stable/2967209

b) Pseudoscience and Mental Ability: The Origins and Fallacies of the IQ Controversy. - https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED164662

Out of curiosity are you espousing that differences in intelligence don't actually exist, or just that we need to come up with better ways to measure them?

I wonder how many Fields medalists score one or two standard deviations below average on the Stanford-Binet. If the measure is meaningless then roughly half should, right?

Also while I certainly respect Mr. Taleb's insights and the mass market appeal of his punchy authorial persona, based on various writings of his I conclude that he views intelligence very narrowly in the "good at trading options" sense, which coincidentally is an area where he has demonstrated ability. Funny that. And to be fair in my own trading I benefitted quite a bit from his maxim that the first goal is survival.

I'd bet that Fat Tony would probably score well above average on an IQ test too, he just wouldn't be caught dead taking one. And I don't blame him; the kind of people who mistake aptitude for achievement are generally insufferable.

> Out of curiosity are you espousing that differences in intelligence don't actually exist, or just that we need to come up with better ways to measure them?

Yes and No to both.

Simply put;

1) There is nothing called "General Intelligence" beyond what enables a Human to survive in his/her environmental niche (including cultural/social since we are social animals). Leaving aside obvious biological retardation, if Extraversion/Introversion, Agreeableness/Disagreeableness, etc. enables one to survive, they are equally "Intelligent". Trying to rank these attributes on a ordinal scale and do quantitative calculations on them is nonsense. See Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of Man (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mismeasure_of_Man) for convincing arguments.

2) Humans are highly adaptable and exhibit dynamic behaviour in different contexts. This "role" and hence the "exhibited intelligence" is specific to that context but if that adaptation subsumes the need for another related context then obviously one will be intelligent in both the contexts. For example London Taxi drivers actually grew their hippocampus and became more intelligent in both spatial navigation and memory recall - https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/london-taxi-memor...

3) We know that gene expression can be influenced by the environment via Epigenetics over generations (see the documentary The Ghost in your Genes). Environment (cultural/social/nutritional/economic) now becomes of paramount importance and thus a person's "fitness" for a role is dependent on Nature, Nurture and his unique Family Past history. He will now be intelligent in certain roles not so in others.

4) Wrong understanding and misuse of Statistical methods in the above scenarios. This is where Taleb's writing/videos help one to separate the wheat from the chaff.

- Notes on Taleb's article - https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Taleb:_IQ_is_a_pseudoscientific_...

- IQ is a dismal measure of intelligence - https://supermemo.guru/wiki/IQ_is_a_dismal_measure_of_intell...

> See Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of Man

No thanks. Why would I refer to a source whose author either lied to get the results that suited his politics or was completely incompetent? From the NY Times[1]:

  But now physical anthropologists at the University of Pennsylvania, which owns Morton’s collection, have remeasured the skulls, and in an article that does little to burnish Dr. Gould’s reputation as a scholar, they conclude that almost every detail of his analysis is wrong.

Frankly I have my doubts about your knowledge of the subject if you’re relying on thoroughly discredited sources.

You did nicely restate Mr. Taleb’s novel redefinition of “intelligence” as survival ability though. No doubt then Taleb believes the humble tardigrade is one of the most intelligent creatures on Earth.

[1] https://archive.is/GhiVK

I pointed you to the wikipedia page of the book for a reason. The fact that you failed to note that the study you quote has itself been debunked/criticized by later studies leads me to question your knowledge of the whole topic.

Read the section on Reassessing Morton's skull measurements and follow the links as needed.

Finally, you might also want to checkout the following;

1) Triarchic theory of Intelligence - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triarchic_theory_of_intelligen...

2) Theory of multiple Intelligences - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_multiple_intelligenc...

The critique amounts to essentially: well Gould is observably incompetent or a liar, but Morton was a racist so Gould is somehow still right.

As for the triarchic theory, it’s not even wrong. I’m completely uninterested a non-empirical “theory” of intelligence.

You are in full-blown denial mode of every evidence/theory contrary to your cherished "g factor"/single general intelligence/psychometrics "belief system".

I will end this with the following observation;

In this modern day and age anybody who believes;

a Bedouin from the Sahara, a Aborigine from the Australian Outback, a Chukchi from the Northern Arctic, a tribal hunter from the Amazon Rainforest, a nomadic herder from the Mongolian Steppe, a Sherpa from the Himalayas, a Xhosa from Africa and a Techie from Silicon Valley

can all be ranked on a single scale using a single metric of "General Intelligence" is ... manifestly wrong and unscientific! The absurdity is self-evident.

Now you’re just falling back on bluster. You’re not even making claims anymore.

You may as well argue that height isn’t a scientific metric because some people have longer legs and others have longer torsos so clearly any single height metric is meaningless. It’s pure flimflammery.

In any event it’s pretty clear that your beliefs on the subject of intelligence are not evidence based, so I don’t think further discussion will be intellectually satiating for either of us.

You don't need an exact definition in order to be able to measure something approximately.

In fact, one could taboo the word "intelligence" entirely and merely say "that thing we observe where people who do better at these tests seem to also do better at these jobs and are more likely to win board games[1].". While the tails do come apart eventually, the correlation is observable up to at least 130 (there was a strong correlation at my previous work place between those who did well at board games and those who got a lot of good technical work done, these people also tended to have +2sd test scores compared to the +1sd average).

Btw: I've read Taleb's charged essay before and found it rather unconvincing. Very much "given these particular papers it's possible high IQ scores correlate with nothing other than high test scores".

[1] I'm not just basing this off my own observations, good chess players seem to have 130 level IQs: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36862687

Odd then that intelligence psychometrics is far less affected by the replication crisis than the other social sciences. The person that invents a useful intelligence test that doesn't display any politically inconvenient bias is going to make a whole lot of money.

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