The Human Brain Is a Time Traveler

Just gotta keep chasing that magic.

I also think working with real logic in science, math, etc, any engineering, is incredibly healthy for the brain and makes it much easier to converge on truth. The only way to be good with logic is to absorb new data into the picture as it becomes available. I've noticed the less people are exposed to real logic the more resistant they are to simple facts that conflict with their assumptions.

This is a poor definition. There are very intelligent Christians and very intelligent atheists. They can't both be right. Isaac Newton, one of the most intelligent people in history, believed in all sorts of weird astrological stuff. Etc.

My view is that intelligence is a number that's correlated with a wide variety of different measures of cognitive performance. So it's not really possible to give a glib, one-sentence description of it.

A person who graduates from technical program of good university, but then falls for the first Ponzi scheme and starts selling vacuum cleaners? Not very smart.

It's like he has very good processor able to run any math problem you throw at him. But at the same time he doesn't independently do very good job of discerning what is relevant and what is not.

On the other hand some of the greatest scientists of all time have been able to maintain certain "what if" state of mind for years. Doing quick and accurate true/false analysis is often a trait of street smarts, but the most genius of all seem to be able to play with probabilities.

It appears to me that we are processing substrate for a species-sized game of Core Wars. In turn, because the size of the playing field (aka total human population) has become so large, the outcomes of the game now can produce existential threats, something amplified by the speed at which everything runs.

When there were only 200 million humans, communicating by voice and using only muscle power, the ultimate impact of slow AIs running on Homo Sapiens hardware was bounded. Now, closing in on 8 billion of us with considerable upgrades in the form of industrial- and information-age technology, the output of the game can not just break the board, but flip the table.

Things that take longer than that are just not going to be responded to.

The fun thing is that if you go back in history long enough, there must have been a period where evolution was actually making this decision. De we go longer term ? Or shorter term. Obviously we know the outcome: shorter term and adaptation is the clear winner, with very few exceptions. But a few organisms do exist with reaction spans that are measured in decades. Even trees take something like a few months to respond to changes in their environment.

The difference seems to be that species that run more efficiently as a rule react slower. That does mean, of course, that after expansion they are running much closer to a level where they'd go extinct, which is not true of humans (it would take a true global catastrophe to really reduce human numbers). So this, assuming you have the choice, is probably the better bet to make long term: the bet that keeps you away from situations where you'll go extinct. Extreme efficiency and long-term reaction spans will do the opposite: they'll take a species closer to the point where it'll go extinct.

The cost, of course, is that members of such a species will always be adapting. Never ever will such a species be truly steady-state (although I'd say genes, both ours and animals' do a remarkable job of stabilizing our numbers). Every generation has to adapt and the solutions of even a few generations past ... just won't work. Well, not without a few changes at least.

And let's please not pretend that which camp you're in matters for this. Both the people against and for climate action (even climate deniers), from a behaviorist perspective, all do it for the same reason : it's a social interaction. It doesn't even have anything to do with science, as such. It has to do with environment. And yes, environment can mean high-priced lawyers and politicians, campus parties, PhD students and academia, protests and the accompanying social groupings, miners and their towns ... and those groups are the real things fighting. But none of the individuals in them are doing it for science.