Comment by catgary | Hacker News Reader

Comment by catgary | Hacker News Reader

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Whereas “abstraction ceiling” is hard science backed by ample literature, not a loose metaphor directly contradicted by several prominent mathematicians who didn’t quit when the going got tough.

I think the fact the Feynman took an IQ test and scored 127 is damning of the entire concept. I think what turns mathematicians off is the thought that psychologists who couldn’t tell you the difference between a scheme and a metric space think they can actually measure who has the capacity to be a mathematician and who doesn’t.

Like, why fucking bother doing anything? Why run the 100 meters at the Olympics, let’s just do some genetic testing and measurements to pick the fastest man in the world. Why teach kids music, let’s just measure hand size and do some sight singing exercises and teach the talented kids piano. This whole nonsense reeks of Gattaca-style quasi-eugenics where people get sorted into profession by people who don’t actually have expertise in any of them. You’re not in the guild, you don’t get to appoint to the guild, and you certainly don’t get to gatekeep who can apply for the guild.

Edit: Dropping slurs when someone compares your views to eugenics is an interesting strategy. Shouldn’t you be at a meetup discussing Curtis Yarvin’s work or something?

"Abstraction ceiling" is just a way to talk about intelligence at at the tails that reveals one of the difficulties / limitations you can encounter when it comes to compressing / abstracting complex mathematical objects. Your objections to the term are facile and clearly stem from an obviously unvocalized intelligence denialism that is simply indefensible today. Also, intelligence != IQ, obviously this is too simplistic.

Everything about your arguments and other posts is similar reductions to retarded extremes (our only options are "eugenics 2.0" or deranged intelligence denialism - there is no room for anything in between, e.g. the idea that base intelligence matters and sets a hard average ceiling on potential, but that effort and other factors might push one slightly above/below this ceiling relative to others with a similar intelligence, and etc). Or alternately you hallucinate things I never said or even remotely implied (e.g. we should gatekeep based on dumb psychology metrics or hand sizes).

Just be honest: you know intelligence is real and matters, but you want to dance around this fact because you find it ideologically inconvenient, or you can't admit you yourself have limits (and lack the courage to realize the obvious social broader consequences of this personal admission).

Dropping slurs after being compared to a eugenicist is an interesting choice. Maybe you would be more comfortable in the comments of Curtis Yarvin’s blog. You’d certainly get less pushback there.

Falling into deranged ideological projection is also an interesting choice - one I chose to mostly ignore. You seem to really obsess a lot about this Yarvin fellow: I tried reading his stuff once and found it intolerable.

I imagine you think calling some of my language choice a "slur" here is some kind of gotcha, when the term I used is specifically one widely disputed as actually being offensive, given it is mostly used now to refer to normal people acting in intellectually deficient ways, and not generally to those with actual learning disabilities that deserve our sympathy. There are studies on this, which you surely are aware of.

If I had referred to your more deranged positions as "smooth-brained halfwit extremes", you likely wouldn't haven't tried to impotently pull this "slur" card, even though the semantics are basically identical. Which basically goes to show that you value irrelevant surfaces over substantial realities, and frankly is perfectly consistent with the midwit intelligence denialism on display in your posts in this exchange.

It’s like someone had Claude binge on Galton, Murray and Yarvin then let it loose on Hacker News.

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