> I’ve taught public school teachers, who were incredibly bad at formal mathematical reasoning (I know, because I graded their tests), to the point that I had n

> I’ve taught public school teachers, who were incredibly bad at formal mathematical reasoning (I know, because I graded their tests), to the point that I had not realized humans could be that bad at math — but it had no effect on how they came across in friendly conversation after hours. They didn’t seem “dopey” or “slow”, they were witty and engaging and warm. > Whatever ability IQ tests and math tests measure, I believe that lacking that ability doesn’t have any effect on one’s ability to make a good social impression or even to “seem smart” in conversation. > If “human intelligence” is about reasoning ability, the capacity to detect whether arguments make sense, then you simply do not need human intelligence to create a linguistic style or aesthetic that can fool our pattern-recognition apparatus if we don’t concentrate on parsing content. In the context of the article, these are troubling assertions for the author to be making. They seem to be implying that people who struggle with mathematics are fundamentally less intelligent that those who don't, in a way that cannot be picked up by chatting to them. If I understand correctly, the author furthermore seems to be saying that a GPT-2 style text generator will sooner be able to match the conversation of such a person than of someone more well-versed in formal mathematical reasoning. This seems factually wrong to me; I think the author vastly underestimates complexity of the subconscious processing that people do in order to come to the viewpoints they hold, and to transform ideas into coherent speech. As a related point / analogy, the process by which humans do conscious mathematics (such as arithmetic) is inherently slow and inefficient, whilst at the same time it manages to perform incredibly advanced "calculations" in the process of being a highly-advanced motion-control system. I posit that the human process for synthesizing ideas is happening primarily in this more complex underlying format, which we are still some way off from being able to simulate (though I do believe we will be able to, eventually). The author's conclusion seems a bit like seeing that computers are better at arithmetic than humans are and thus concluding that they will soon surpass us in intelligence. Furthermore, the author's reasoning seems demeaning to people who struggle with mathematics and explicit logical reasoning, and is a few steps from a claim that such a person is inherently less "conscious". To claim that a strong grasp of formal reasoning is necessary for those in a position of policy and decision making is one thing. But to assert (without substantial evidence to back it up) that someone with low mathematical-logical reasoning ability has speech which is significantly easier to emulate because it fundamentally contains less content seems to be simply a form of intellectual/academic self aggrandizement.