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Funny, I've read the same thing about intelligence, particularly trainability, in both rats and dogs. It's driven by a social aspect. The existence of a peer group necessitates imagination and theory of mind: you have to be able to think about what someone else is thinking about. From there you can have thoughts like "That big monkey wants me to do this thing that we do sometimes and has indicated that they'll give me a thing I like if I do it."

I wonder if there is any kind of bias of perception. If we agree with this point, this probably means bankers are much more intelligent than engineers, considering the former profession has to communicate with hundreds, maybe thousands of clients throughout their career life, while engineers mostly communicate with machines -- they do communicate with their colleagues but you can see the vast gap between the two.

Maybe there are two types of intelligence -- versus humans and versus nature.

It's a lot more than just two.

But a banker and an engineer are 2 individual members of the same species. Evolutionary pressure to develop a specific type of intelligence doesn't apply.

But yes, there are of course many different kinds of intelligence.

Please go back to your resting place, Mr Lamarck.

The obnoxious pro-engineering equivalent of your statement is to say that engineers are more intelligent because they are held accountable to a higher standard of objective truth, one that is judged through the cold eyes of physics and math rather than the rosy glasses of a strategically cultivated in-group.

It's probably wrong to directly compare these two types of specialization. However, we do have an interesting social experiment going on: China's bureaucracy leans towards engineering backgrounds while the USA bureaucracy leans towards legal backgrounds. You can see this in the strategies pursued by each side: China pulls large and small levers to acquire hard power (in the sense of manufacturing capacity, not just guns) while the USA has historically been better at pulling large and small levers to acquire soft power (and even though tension from the Triffin Dilemma is peaking again, that's still probably a fair assessment). The next decade will probably see a showdown that supports or repudiates the "engineer primacy" vs "lawyer primacy" narratives on the level of international strategy, even though both will obviously still exist and have primacy within their respective niches. Interesting times.

Soft power is essentially a euphemism for influence, which in the best case is necessary but not sufficient.

Er...I'm not saying engineers are smarter than bankers. I'm just saying "smart" is a bit of too broad of a word.

And I'm just following the original logic, so I don't see what's wrong here. If you are not happy about the conclusion, I politely point to the original post/reply.

but perhaps communicating with millions is just the same skill being used over and over again - doesn't make they smarter in any way. I can add 1 and 1 a million times doesn't make me smarter. Sure, bankers are more skilled at understanding money, inflation, investments but engineers are more skilled in their field. Take the banker and train them in engineering and vice versa, I'm sure they'll both be able to handle the job well.

>If we agree with this point, this probably means bankers are much more intelligent than engineers, considering the former profession has to communicate with hundreds, maybe thousands of clients throughout their career life, while engineers mostly communicate with machines -- they do communicate with their colleagues but you can see the vast gap between the two.

I don't think anything I said about social vs asocial species applies to two members of a a single social species. I feel like this is one of those intuitive leaps that serves as a great reminder that intuitive leaps aren't usually good science.

Maybe. But at least in mammals, visual information processing is a very expensive operation that involves coordinated activity across many cortical areas. Vision being such a central sensory modality for birds, I do wonder if it was a strong driver for the evolution of their brains.

Edit: don't mean to imply a contradiction with the social interaction hypothesis -- needless to say there can be multiple factors that drive evolution in the same direction...

I just want to agree with you wholeheartedly that there are certainly multiple independent factors driving intelligence. After all, one of the most asocial groups one can imagine, the octopodes, are also at the forefront of animal intelligence (and to further your theory, more of their brains are dedicated to visual processing than we see in humans)

How does this theory show that birds didn't first become intelligent, and then started cheating because they're now intelligent enough to do it? The "sitting and watching" theory makes a lot more sense to me.

Also, "cheating" is common in many species, including other birds, and it doesn't seem to affect their reproduction enough to justify evolving cheater powers; as spicy as that hypothesis may be.

I also agree that it makes more sense that pressure to become smarter is linked to prediction and preservation, as they're fragile creatures. A wounded mammal could crawl inside its nest and heal, a wounded bird is likely a dead bird.

> How does this theory show that birds didn't first become intelligent, and then started cheating because they're now intelligent enough to do it?

I recommend reading the linked book from a bird expert who has been studying this for her entire career. I promise it is much better and deeper than my comment here.

It links to 266 references (papers) at the end. I just checked

I firmly believe that it's the root of all run-away intelligence. Social species trying to outsmart itself. Predator-prey or individual-environment dynamics are just too slow to compete with self-referential feedback loop.

Given that we probably won't need to worry about AI getting significantly smarter unless we put it with existential competition with itself.

AI companies are definitely pitting their AI models against both in-house and external models. Didn’t Alpha Zero get to some insanely high level in go by only playing against itself without any reference to existing go literature? So if this generation of AI plateaus at some point, lack of competition again other AI won’t be the reason.

I don't think it's just about comparing or letting AIs compete. It's more about making success of one AI dependant on it understanding how other AI works (that's uncooperative and has its own goals).

Hold on, I've got a great pitch for an AI startup...

The sky is the limit in the intelligence race when adversaries are of your own species. Or metabolic constrains are the limit.

> Many species of bird also use this advanced ability to keep track of who knows what for food. They’ll hide a stash for winter and find it all later. But it’s easier to remember where your friend hid theirs than to get your own. So a whole arms race of deception developed.

This reminds me of a backyard squirrel anecdote from a decade ago.

A squirrel would laboriously dig a hole and hide a nut in it, cover it with soil, and tamp down the soil -- until it noticed another squirrel watching it from the top of a fence, at which point it immediately proceeded to dig up the nut and carry it away.

"Lullaby, lullaby, swindles and schemes. Flying's not near as much fun as it seems."

-- Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn

They... What? They tell on each other about cheating? Is that actually real? I am very surprised, it seems the kind of communication that is pretty complex, not the kind I expect birds to be capable of.

They do according to the source I linked. At least some species seem to, it's not all birds.

You have to remember that "bird" is not like "human", it's more like "mammal". Lots of variation between species :)

Darwin saw sexual selection as so important to evolution and that he discusses natural selection and sexual selection as different types. Of course sex is part of nature.

Some species have properties that seem way beyond what would be necessary for evolutionary success. For example, an inland taipan has enough venom in a single bite to kill 100 people. There is no imaginable situation where a taipan is going to need to bite an entire village and take them all out. Why on Earth did it evolve such insanely strong venom?

When you dig into it, these outliers are often the result of an evolutionary arms race [1]. In teh case of the inland taipan, they are often prey for mulga snake and perenties, who have evolved immunity to their venom. So you've got a feedback loop where the taipan keeps evolving stronger venom to fight back against predators, who continue evolving stronger immunity to the same venom. Run that loop a million years and you get a snake who can kill a busload of people.

Human intelligence is another such outlier. I know it's popular to talk about how animal intelligence is underestimated but even so, human intelligence is just astronimcally greater than any other species. Sure a squirrel can find a bunch of nuts it buried. Humans have built machines and landed them on other planets. Our intelligence is orders of magnitude greater than any other species.

My pet hypothesis for years is that this must be the result of an evolutionary arms race within the species. Humans are a profoundly social species. We are mostly too fragile to survive in the wild on our own. The functioning survival unit of humans is a hunter-gatherer group. We are sort of like eusocial animals like ants.

But unlike ants who can mostly rely on simple chemical signals to tell which other ants are part of their anthill, we have to rely on social cues. There is a very strong incentive to be able to deceive humans in other groups and infiltrate or sabotage their group. If you're smart enough to sneak in, you can steal a lot or do a lot of damage. Likewise, there's an equally strong incentive to be able to suss those bad actors out to prevent them from doing that. The smarter you are, and the better you're able to remember people and describe them to others, the harder it is to get taken advantage of.

Turn that evolutionary crank a few hundred thousand years, and you get a species so smart that the only other animals that can possibly hope to compete with them in terms of intelligence are other Homo sapiens.

If we weren't so deeply social, I don't think we'd be so smart. We have these huge brains in order to navigate the fantastically complex social world which we have in turn created by having these huge brains.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_arms_race

I'd argue that it's not intelligence alone that lets us land a machine on the moon — it's our cooperation, written language, learned culture, communication. An individual person cannot land a machine on the moon on their own. It is not intelligence that produces that, but intelligence contained and continually improved upon within a superorganism of social culture.

Yes, but it requires intelligence for cooperation to be evolutionarily viable. Dumb but cooperative animals are too easy for a freeloader to take advantage of.

And it obviously requires massive intelligence for written language and high fidelity communication.

I think that there are two sides of an intelligence, intelligence as an inborn ability to become intelligent and intelligence as the result of the process of becoming intelligent. People are more intelligent then animals in the first sense, AND they developed a process of training the "raw" inborn intelligence into an adult mind.

> My pet hypothesis for years is that this must be the result of an evolutionary arms race within the species.

Frans de Waal studied primates and defended just this hypothesis. He wrote a bunch of books, so you may be interested in reading at least some of them.

BTW, my pet hypothesis is the social roots of our intelligence is the reason why people mostly hopelessly dumb. They kinda go on intuition and it works in normal social situations, but when it comes to politics or science the intuition fails them. One needs to train their mind to stick to logic and rationality, without taking sides which seem the most beneficial for them. But training is hard and training can easily be overcome by the intuition, which is the natural way for brain to work. You need to keep your brain working against its nature to not lose your intelligence in situations which are not hierarchy games.

I suspect we are not orders of magnitudes more intelligent than some of our cetacean friends in the deep sea.

At the end of the day, all the achievements you've listed are not only the result of massive intelligence but opposable-thumb hands (for tool use and writing) and fire (for an easy early source of energy to runaway with).

If humans were just as intelligent but never had these, we'd never reach the moon or build machines.

Taipan venom evolved to take down small mammals, and it's just by accident that it is so toxic for humans.

There's no need for taipan venom to be as strong as it is just to kill a little long-haired rat.

That's a consequence of its attack style, it doesn't just strike the prey and then retreat, it actively subdues it and doesn't let go.

So there's an evolutionary pressure to make venom as fast acting as possible so that the prey has fewer chances to injure the snake before dying.

Black mamba in Africa is in a similar situation. It's an arboreal snake, so its toxic venom helps it to hold on to the prey.

Given that every evolutionary outcome is about which genes survived long enough to produce viable offspring that have some of those same genes

A) at all

B) more than others

C) happened to pass on

this makes more sense, since its about sex

every other use of the same skill is happenstance

for example with C), in humans, cancer occurs mostly after sexual reproductive periods, so there is no way for that to have been weeded out of the population. Demonstrating that many non beneficial traits pass on alongside beneficial ones and its all happenstance.

It can if having non-dead grandparents gives an advantage before reproduction occurs. Could be why we live longer than most species too.