Comment by fmora | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fmora | Hacker News Reader

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All humans have on average the same intelligence. Why do you assume that there will be a few who will be able to keep up with the pace of retraining oneself. In many poor countries the reason they stay poor has to do with cultural differences rather than IQ differences. i.e. If you teach your kids from a very young age to have good work ethics and good study ethics and teach that anything is possible as long as they work hard then they will grow up to be achievers. If you do not teach your kids this then chances are that they will be poor. Besides, if we ever do achieve the singularity and assuming that we do not destroy ourselves many things that are really expensive now will become extremely cheap in such a way that even the poorest person will still live like a rich person. Singularity will enable us to find solutions to energy much faster than if we tried to do it on our own. It will probably find a way to extract all the energy we need from the sun's rays. Once this happens energy will be as cheap as the oxygen you breath. We'll also have self replicating machines meaning that anything anybody has you will be able to build it in your own home. In fact, poverty may be eliminated all together. Who knows what will become valuable in the new economy. Really, I don't think we can even begin to imagine it. We will probably work to better ourselves and humanity. Yes, we will work maybe even more than before even if we have all the material wealth we can have. Why? Well, because most human beings become depressed if they are not doing anything. We will do what we truly feel passionate about rather than work in a crappy job just to pay the bills because there will be little to no bills to pay. The future is truly Star Trek.

> All humans have on average the same intelligence. Why do you assume that there will be a few who will be able to keep up with the pace of retraining oneself.

I think you do not quite understand the concept of an 'average'. When one is hiring for a job, does one hire 'humanity' with its average, or an individual human who can be arbitrarily above or below the average?

I stand corrected. You are assuming that a person with a phd is inherently smarter than a person running a hot dog stand. He is not. He has more accumulated knowledge but I don't think he is necessarily smarter. I bet that if the hot dog person had been rightly motivated at a young age he could also get a phd. Also, a lot of people are able to game interviews.

The difference between an average intelligent person and a super genius is really quite small when it comes to brain power. What you will notice is that the super genius got to where he is because he has worked harder at it than anybody else. From the outside it looks like he is just that much smarter than you or me. The truth is that he is probably just as smart as you or me. He just works harder than you or me at what he does. Same with talented pianist or painters. People like to think that they are borne that way. The truth is that they log thousands and thousands of hours working at it, usually at a very young age. Once they become very good at what they do people label it as talent and do not remember the hard work that it took them to get there. A really brief example, to people from 2000 years ago you will seem like a super-super genius because of all the things you know. Is that truth? No, people from 2000 years are just as smart as you and me. Difference between geniuses and average person is probably so minuscule that it really doesn't contribute that much to success. Persistence and working at it is what makes the difference. There are a lot of supposed geniuses (really high IQ averages) that are complete bums and never achieve anything in life.

> You are assuming that a person with a phd is inherently smarter than a person running a hot dog stand.

I'm assuming that if I pick random PhDs and hot dog vendors, I will get a higher average IQ from my random PhDs. Are my PhDs strictly greater in IQ than my hot dog sellers? Maybe, maybe not. But will, say, 99% of my PhDs have a higher IQ? I'd bet on that number or something like it.

> No, people from 2000 years are just as smart as you and me.

No, they were not. There were a few geniuses back then, the ones we still read and write books about. All few tens of thousands of them out of billions. But the average was vastly below the modern-day.

The environmental causes alone are legion: lead plumbing, no formal schooling (worth something like 5-10 IQ points), rampant parasitic diseases of every conceivable sort, irregular or poor nutrition with nutritional deficits (protein deficiency damaging early neurological development - low myelination of nerves, iodine deficiency, etc.), medicine that would kill most patients...

Your only valid points are that IQ is not perfectly correlated with success and that it varies within every group. This is not news to anyone who has done even a little reading on the topic.

> I'm assuming that if I pick random PhDs and hot dog vendors, I will get a higher average IQ from my random PhDs. Are my PhDs strictly greater in IQ than my hot dog sellers? Maybe, maybe not. But will, say, 99% of my PhDs have a higher IQ? I'd bet on that number or something like it.

Are PhDs dominated by technical types? Can you have PhD in arts or post modern philosophy? Does that require high IQ?

> No, they were not. There were a few geniuses back then, the ones we still read and write books about. All few tens of thousands of them out of billions. But the average was vastly below the modern-day.

Not everyone could write a book back then. Not every book from back then survived. You can't tell how many ancient Ramanujans left no trace. Ingenious concepts of later ages often cropped up multiple times centuries earlier only to be dismissed and forgotten.

That said you are spot on environmental factors. Here http://www.ted.com/talks/esther_duflo_social_experiments_to_... it is said that thing as simple as deworming might increase very significantly children spend on learning and training their intellectual capacities.

> Can you have PhD in arts or post modern philosophy? Does that require high IQ?

Yes, and yes for the latter. Philosophy is my own field, and while I would be much more comfortable making this assertion of analytic philosophers, post-modern (I'll assume you really mean 'continental') philosophers are still very smart people.

Since you aren't doing any research, I will do just a little, and point out that philosophy PhDs tend to have been philosophy majors, and philosophy majors tend to have extremely high GRE scores, and the GRE is extremely correlated with IQ; philosophy majors are #1 and beat every other major when it comes to the Verbal and Analytic Writing sections - surely not the work of people of average intelligence - and rank 15th out of 50 in math scores (ahead of majors such as biology, accounting, architecture and others; being beaten by various engineering, physics/astronomy, and math majors): http://www.ncsu.edu/chass/philo/GRE%20Scores%20by%20Intended...

> Not every book from back then survived.

Yes, but many catalogues (the Suda eg.) and quotes have survived. The survival rate and biases introduced by history can, and have been, estimated. (The latest one I heard about used statistics about the survival of works of the Venerable Bede, but I can't find the citation in a quick google.) The bias is not orders of magnitude, though it hits some authors badly (Sophocles's prize-winners, eg.) as one would expect from a random process.

I think you and me are using different definitions of smart. You think a person is smart only if he goes to school. That is not what I mean by smart. So that you understand I'll use potential education ability as my definition for smart. A person from a hot dog stand has the same potential to get a phd as anybody else. A person from 2000 years ago has the same potential to get a phd as anybody as in our time. Now, what is the potential for a dog. Its potential is that he can learn a couple of hundreds of words during his life time. You cannot increase your potential to learn when you are born the same way that a dog cannot increase his potential to learn so that it matches that of a human. I would say the majority (99%) of the human population today as with those of 2000 years ago have the potential to earn a phd.

Please read this article: http://calnewport.com/blog/2010/08/09/beyond-the-10000-hour-...

A person with far more education than you and me and by your definition much more smarter than you or me pretty much agrees with me. If you want to become great- i.e. get a phd and do great research - you have to work harder than the other person. Notice how much "work" is emphasized.

Honestly if you still don't agree with me after this than I give up. Go on believing that only a selected few chosen by God were given the gift of being smart. You cannot convince the person that simply refuses to see.

> You think a person is smart only if he goes to school.

I have never said this. It is a well-established fact that schooling is not just correlated with IQ, but actually causes an increase (Husén & Tuijnman 1991).

> A person from 2000 years ago has the same potential to get a phd as anybody as in our time.

...and you ignore my environmental arguments entirely.

And yes, I've read Hamming's lecture several times. Hamming was a great scientist. However, he was both not a social scientist, and he was addressing a room full of scientists at Bell Labs, one of the most effective research institutes in the 20th century. No one mentioned IQ because everyone there already had all the IQ they needed! Bell Labs was one of the brainiest places around! It was on par with MIT, where even the secretaries used and programmed early Emacs!

It'd be like discussing how to become a great programmer, and mentioning that you need to be alive. It's a prerequisite that's already met; discussing it is an utter waste of time and balmy.

Nowhere does Hamming say, 'and btw it doesn't matter if you score a 60 on an IQ test and can barely dress yourself in the morning, you just need to follow my suggestions and you have a shot at the Nobel!' Because that would be idiotic. Rather, Hamming at the very beginning states:

> "I saw quite a few very capable people. I became very interested in the difference between those who do and those who might have done."

He assumes from the beginning that he is discussing 'very capable' people and why some accomplish great things and some don't.

> Go on believing that only a selected few chosen by God were given the gift of being smart.

Hey, why give up? Doesn't Hard Work Conquer All?

>>Hey, why give up? Doesn't Hard Work Conquer All?

very funny

Or, the future is the most competitive, up to date persons moving into a range of capability which allows them to marginally outcompete their less up to date peers, catching a faster acceleration. Their less up to date peers follow suit, but while they're retraining for their new devices, the leading edge is learning, faster than before, an even newer device.

Or, even better, the minds of kurzwiel's singularity are owned, trained, and taught by competitive corporations, who's only job is to make a great deal of money. The best firms are the ones who compete in the harshest manner, and again, the average gets left far behind. I think its far a mistake to assume that more stuff means an egalitarian future.

If people are poor then they won't be able to buy your stuff. On the other hand people with more money means that they'll have a stronger buying power. It benefits the rich that the average person is also well off.

People will kill to own a singularity device. However, I don't think this will be necessary since by the time we are technologically ready to invent such a machine it will be invented or duplicated in every single country on earth and by anybody that wants one. We will reach a point in our future where the knowledge to build an Artificial Intelligence machine will be obvious by everybody the same way it is obvious now that the earth is round. This will make it impossible for any single entity to control this technology. The knowledge will be out there in the net for anybody to read. This assuming that we are not stupid enough to destroy ourselves before we reach this point.

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