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Comment by Agentus | Hacker News Reader

a trickle of people sure, but most people never accidentally stumble upon good evaluation skills let alone reason themselves to that level, so i dont see how most people will have the semblance of an idea of a realistic trajectory of ai progress. i think most people have very little conceptualization of their own thinking/cognitive patterns, at least not enough to sensibly extrapolate it onto ai.

doesnt help that most people are just mimics when talking about stuff thats outside their expertise.

Hell, my cousin a quality-college educated individual, high social/ emotional iq, will go down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole so quickly based on some baseless crap printed on the internet. then he’ll talk about people being satan worshipers.

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You're being pretty harsh, but:

> i think most people have very little conceptualization of their own thinking/cognitive patterns, at least not enough to sensibly extrapolate it onto ai.

Quite true. If you spend a lot of time reading and thinking about the workings of the mind you lose sight of how alien it is to intuition. While in highschool I first read, in New Scientist, the theory that conscious thought lags behind the underlying subconscious processing in the brain. I was shocked that New Scientist would print something so unbelievable. Yet there seemed to be an element of truth to it so I kept thinking about it and slowly changed my assessment.

sorry, humans are stupid and what intelligence they have is largely impotent. if this wasnt the case life wouldnt be this dystopia. my crassness comes from not necessarily trying to pick on a particular group of humans, just disappointment in recognizing the efficacy of human intelligence and its ability to turn reality into a better reality (meh).

yeah i was just thinking how a lot of thoughts which i thought were my original thoughts really were made possible out of communal thoughts. like i can maybe have some original frontier thoughts that involve averages but thats only made possible because some other person invented the abstraction of averages then that was collectively disseminated to everyone in education, not to mention all the subconscious processes that are necessary for me to will certainly thoughts into existsnce. makes me reflect on how much cognition is really mine, vs (not mine) a inevitable product of a deterministic process and a product of other humans.

> only made possible because some other person invented the abstraction of averages then that was collectively disseminated to everyone in education

What I find most fascinating about the history of mathematics is that basic concepts such as zero and negative numbers and graphs of functions, which are so easy to teach to students, required so many mathematicians over so many centuries. E.g. Newton figured out calculus because he gave so much thought to the works of Descartes.

Yes, I think "new" ideas (meaning, a particular synthesis of existing ones) are essentially inevitable, and how many people come up with them, and how soon, is a function of how common those prerequisites are.

Sounds like your cousin is able to think for himself. The amount of bullshit I hear from quality-college educated individuals, who simply repeat outdated knowledge that is in their college curriculum, is no less disappointing.

Buying whatever bullshit you see on the internet to such a degree that you're re-enacting satanic panic from the 80s is not "thinking for yourself". It's being gullible about areas outside your expertise.

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