Humans are not Automatically Strategic (2010) | Hacker News Reader

Humans are not Automatically Strategic (2010)

lesswrong.com

57 pointsjeremynixon11 comments

While the author has a great underlying point, I find this style of writing a particular disservice: "Perhaps 5% of the population has enough abstract reasoning skill to verbally understand that the above heuristics would be useful once these heuristics are pointed out."

This is a version of "you, enlightened reader, are the special chosen few" - to me it reads no different in rationalist essays as when it gets pitched to me by multi-level marketers selling their get rich quick schemes. If you're familiar with reading bullshit such an appeal to the reader's vanity should immediately send up a few red flags, and it can completely detract from what would otherwise be a reasonable piece.

The site has always given me that vibe. I'm not sure I understand the point of a bunch of people getting together to celebrate how smart they are. Especially since they're pulling statistics out of thin air and using unconvincing examples: you're telling me most comedians don't keep track of which jokes are getting laughs?!

My final impression: https://xkcd.com/874/

If you like blog posts like these, check out the book Rationality: From AI to zombies. Basically a compilation of these posts.

Link: https://intelligence.org/rationality-ai-zombies/. The ebook collection has a suggested price of $5.00, and a minimum price of $0.00.

Wow, this is really interesting... I'm going to return later to read all the comments herein and in the article.

> Why? Most basically, because humans are only just on the cusp of general intelligence.

I agree. General intelligence, to me, is defined as the ability to create a greater intelligence. An ability that's hypothesized for humans, but yet unproven. Therefore, on the cusp of general intelligence.

General intelligence does seem to be non-orthogonal to strategic thinking.

(The nuance is what Yudkowsky et al. tend to write about.)

second edit: "Can we actually change that en masse?" is the most interesting question.

Is there any way this be done systematically with software?

Are you talking about software that provides relevant information for any human making a general decision? Or are you describing another kind of software?

General intelligence, to me, is defined as the ability to create a greater intelligence.

Define "greater". And since your definition is recursive, define your base case.

I'll suggest that "intelligence" is about how much information you can extract from a given set of data. And since information theory says any given set of data only has a limited amount of information in it, this would imply that "intelligence" is not potentially unbounded but is on a scale of 0%-100%.

Would having and raising children more intelligent than oneself count?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com