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Comment by reverendsteveii | Hacker News Reader

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."

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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)

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.

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