Hacker News Reader

Comment by ineedasername | Hacker News Reader

So I guess the difference is that humans are good at training dogs, while cats are good at training humans.

As the old joke puts it: dogs have owners, but cats have staff.

Love it.

I know that certain “redditisms” like “username checks out” probably don’t fly here…but seeing someone named “RobWilliams” responding positively to a cat joke just puts a warm smile on my face.

A dog looks up to you and a cat looks down on you, but a pig looks upon you as an equal. - Winston Churchill

A reply from cstross! That's it, I'm done for the day. Doesn't get better than that. Thanks for all the great books!

Side note: I think Peter Watts is also a "cat person". Something about cat people must contribute to them being some of my favorite writers. Which is odd, since I'm more of a dog person. Maybe if I wrote fiction I would hate what I wrote. And Amazon should include a "author pet preference" as filterable criteria when searching for books. If Greg Egan likes cats that would make for a trifecta.

I loved Saturn's Children!

Now that is indeed a profound insight on what is deemed intelligence. If the “Observer” in unable to comprehend the article objectives of the subjects, how will the fulfillment of the objectives ever be recognized as intelligence? Decades ago, I read some article on how people with more than 30 IQ points of separation, effectively were incomprehensible to each other. Whether it is true or not, it also highlights a fallacy that the superior intellect can somehow “emulate/simulate” the lesser, and thereby understand the person.

If you have a high IQ, you can get high and wasted and lower it temporarily.

No way to do that the other way around.

Temporarily becoming intoxicated doesn't fix this.

If your IQ is very high or very low, you likely have not spent a whole lot of time practicing things and pursuing things that typical people have. So the shared social language and thread of common experience that people depend upon to relate is limited.

Hmm, I think it's possible to raise your IQ by practicing and applying certain thinking strategies. Especially given that IQ is an artificial measure of intelligence.

Like any target, when it becomes a target, ceases to be a good measure. But I remember some of the parts. most where pattern matching. or memory retention.

Most humans cannot get better at this easily at least. You can always try...

On working memory, I think the average is 7, or something like that, Try to remember a number in inversed order and see if you get past that to 9-10 that´s pretty hard to learn too

I remember the day our class was asked about a dice. I was the only know that knew by observation the response to which number was under the dice not being visible.

PS They always add up to seven

YMMV

Except when they don't.

I had dice as a kid that did not follow this rule.

Not temporary, but IIRC muy mother's measured IQ went up by twenty points when she learned how ratios work.

Huh.

I now want to take a standardized IQ test, three times - once with sober, once mildly intoxicated by cannabis, and as intoxicated as possible while still being able to focus on the questions.

I'm very confident that the time it would take me to answer a given question would increase about linearly with my level of intoxication, but I'm not at all confident that I would arrive at a different conclusion.

> Decades ago, I read some article on how people with more than 30 IQ points of separation, effectively were incomprehensible to each other.

It’s more like “fundamentally perceive the world in a different way”, and generally leads to a lack of empathy towards the other group due to this difference of perception.

This is one reason why, at least until recently, US generals were not known for their high IQ.

A lot of marriages are this way and do fine. A diverse but comprehensive worldview is helpful when operating as a singular unit. You can be smart and ignorant at the same time in some ways, and that's okay.

No they are not, most marriages are not between people with that different IQ. Most people are not that different even. What a weird thing to say.

> lack of empathy towards

This should be:

… inability to empathize with…

Poor wording on my part.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com