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> Similarly, humans achieve about the same results when they have the same training. Small variations. What matters is not the brain but the education they get.

> Similarly, humans achieve about the same results when they have the same training. Small variations. What matters is not the brain but the education they get. That's misleading. Small average variation overall, but some outliers are dramatically better and dramatically worse. Some brains produce fields medals, some can barely count change. Unfortunate but true.

visarga 3y ago
Yes but they all stood on the shoulders of giants. Alone they couldn't have done it. Intelligence is a collective affair. Ideas are self replicators - usually by being useful to people, but their lifecycle is different from that of people, they evolve much faster. It's an evolutionary process. Modern man and that of 10,000 years ago are biologically not much different, the difference comes from cultural evolution.
- smolder 3y ago
  > Ideas are self replicators Maybe it's worth pointing out: That's a core idea of memetics, i.e. the study of memes, in the original sense of that word.
- naasking 3y ago
  > Alone they couldn't have done it. Intelligence is a collective affair. Yes, but the Gausses and Ramanujans of the world disprove the claim that architecture doesn't matter, and that only training data matters. The long tails that describe human variance I think show that architecture can matter a lot. I think you might be right that architecture for some machine learning algorithms doesn't matter so much given enough data, but the fact that they need so much data to perform well I think implies that there's a better architecture awaiting discovery.
  - sdenton4 3y ago
    The gausses and ramanujans still have the same basic architecture though - we're measuring outliers in the same family, not comparing across families.
    - naasking 3y ago
      If by "basic architecture", you mean auditory, visual, and motor centres, sure, but we're clearly talking about higher cognitive abilities here. I'm not at all sure that they have the same architecture given Ramanujan had even less high school math than most American students, yet clearly took the same knowledge much further.
      - sdenton4 3y ago
        If you're saying Ramanujan had a drastically different brain architecture than other humans, it's an extraordinary claim which will require extraordinary evidence. Einstein's brain is well studied, and fundamentally human...
klipt 3y ago
If you look at fields medalists I think most of them got interested in math super young and got exposed earlier to much more material than average mathematicians. So they may have an IQ advantage, but they definitely also have a data/training advantage.
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  You need to be so smart that you jump the chasm between what school can teach you to what you can teach yourself from undergrad and beyond textbooks. Given the pressure to pass exams, in addition you need to have enough in the tank that learning more maths doesn’t risk your hoop jumping to get into university. Ironically you need to do well in many things that isn’t maths to be allowed to study maths at an elite university. I am sure it helps alot if your parents are professors!
- naasking 3y ago
  > If you look at fields medalists I think most of them got interested in math super young and got exposed earlier to much more material than average mathematicians Even if that were true, you'd need only one Ramanujan to disprove the claim that architecture doesn't matter. We've seen many more than one.
  - klipt 3y ago
    It takes both, nature and nurture. If Ramanujan were raised as a goatherd in an illiterate society I don't think he would've accomplished much mathematically.
    - scarmig 3y ago
      Not quite a goatherd, but Ramanujan's father was a clerk in a sari shop. Ramanujan himself had little formal training in mathematics and was entirely self taught, and his research was in isolation until he sent an unsolicited letter to G.H. Hardy. It's as if you trained an LLM on children's books and it converged to Terence Tao.
hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago
See also: https://gwern.net/iq https://gwern.net/iq
mrshadowgoose 3y ago
Over the years, I've found that the "nurture is the only thing that matters" camp is typically intensely self-delusional. Despite hard evidence to the contrary, some people really really want to pretend that all human brains are equally capable. For example, instances of cognitive disability due to macroscopically visible brain structure deviations or brain damage are usually brushed away as "Well that's just a disability and therefore it doesn't count! All the other brains are the same!"
- mhuffman 3y ago
  An eye-opening version of this is a friend of mine has twin girls. Both have the same parents, took all the same classes with the same teachers, neither got more access to something that the other couldn't but one dramatically better at school, has a higher measured iq (not just a couple of points) and just seems "sharper" when you deal with her than the other. She just somehow seems to pick up a lot of things quicker than the other. Otherwise they are both basically identical when it comes to sports and the sorts of things they are in to. They both got the same "nurture" but "nature" had something to do with it somewhere in the mix that made them pretty different.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - nightski 3y ago
    I have a sibling very close in age and in my experience just coming from the same home and parents doesn't mean a whole lot, siblings can have wildly different experiences and be treated by the adults around them quite different. Not to mention there are forces which make you want to differentiate from your sibling and intentionally be different. I don't think that anecdote is nearly informative enough to make any conclusions.
    - mhuffman 3y ago
      >siblings can have wildly different experiences and be treated by the adults around them quite different. Not to mention there are forces which make you want to differentiate from your sibling and intentionally be different. That's true, but is that due to all the adults and "forces" around them conspiring to treat them different, or is it due to them behaving in a way that elicits certain responses? Surely some of each, no? So then, nature may have a way of manipulating nurture in a sense.
MrRolleyes 3y ago
[dead]
littlestymaar 3y ago
Not to defend the original argument (because comparing the difference between people, belonging to the exact same animal specie, and difference between radically different model architecture make zero sense). > Small average variation overall, but some outliers are dramatically better and dramatically worse. Some brains produce fields medals, some can barely count change. Unfortunate but true. We don't actually know which part of the “can barely count change” situation comes from the “brain” compared to the situation people were raises in. Sure you'd always have outliers (good or bad) for purely genetic reasons, but if you looked at sport performance for instance you'd find that the theoretical difference between people is much lower than the practical one for many environmental reasons: in theory, once you factor in rare medical conditions, almost every human between 18 and 40 should be able to run a marathon. The reason why most people cannot is entirely environmental (not enough physical activity, overweight, work related health issues, etc.). And it's also true in terms of performance: almost any human ought to be able to run a 100m in less than 14 seconds, which is only 30% slower than the world record. Yet, for purely environmental reasons, only a small fraction of the population is actually able to do it. I suspect that in terms of intelligence the results would be roughly in the same ballpark: almost everyone, except rare mental development disorders, ought to be 70% as intelligent as the most intelligent person in history (and the enormous majority fitting in a much narrower band), but most end up far worse for environmental reasons alone. For some reason (mostly politico-philosophical), most people in the “nature” camp of the “nature vs nurture” debate are completely oblivious to the evidence for this.
- naasking 3y ago
  > We don't actually know which part of the “can barely count change” situation comes from the “brain” compared to the situation people were raises i I think this too is misleading. We've quantified the heritability of intelligence to quite a significant degree. Twin studies of twins who have been raised apart even shows that outcomes are largely the same despite different environments. Nurture is very much oversold. Basically, as long as you don't traumatize one of two twins they will develop very similarly. > And it's also true in terms of performance: almost any human ought to be able to run a 100m in less than 14 seconds But it's literally not true of all humans, and it won't be true if you drop that below 13 or 12 seconds. Which shows that the specific biomechanics you're born with will influence your natural physical abilities. By extension, we also have natural cognitive abilities with similar consequences. > most people in the “nature” camp of the “nature vs nurture” debate are completely oblivious to the evidence for this I think you're way overselling this claim. "It's all nurture" is a far more common opinion, and far less evidence supports it.

visarga 3y ago

Yes but they all stood on the shoulders of giants. Alone they couldn't have done it. Intelligence is a collective affair. Ideas are self replicators - usually by being useful to people, but their lifecycle is different from that of people, they evolve much faster. It's an evolutionary process. Modern man and that of 10,000 years ago are biologically not much different, the difference comes from cultural evolution.

smolder 3y ago
> Ideas are self replicators Maybe it's worth pointing out: That's a core idea of memetics, i.e. the study of memes, in the original sense of that word.
naasking 3y ago
> Alone they couldn't have done it. Intelligence is a collective affair. Yes, but the Gausses and Ramanujans of the world disprove the claim that architecture doesn't matter, and that only training data matters. The long tails that describe human variance I think show that architecture can matter a lot. I think you might be right that architecture for some machine learning algorithms doesn't matter so much given enough data, but the fact that they need so much data to perform well I think implies that there's a better architecture awaiting discovery.
- sdenton4 3y ago
  The gausses and ramanujans still have the same basic architecture though - we're measuring outliers in the same family, not comparing across families.
  - naasking 3y ago
    If by "basic architecture", you mean auditory, visual, and motor centres, sure, but we're clearly talking about higher cognitive abilities here. I'm not at all sure that they have the same architecture given Ramanujan had even less high school math than most American students, yet clearly took the same knowledge much further.
    - sdenton4 3y ago
      If you're saying Ramanujan had a drastically different brain architecture than other humans, it's an extraordinary claim which will require extraordinary evidence. Einstein's brain is well studied, and fundamentally human...

klipt 3y ago

If you look at fields medalists I think most of them got interested in math super young and got exposed earlier to much more material than average mathematicians. So they may have an IQ advantage, but they definitely also have a data/training advantage.

quickthrower2 3y ago
You need to be so smart that you jump the chasm between what school can teach you to what you can teach yourself from undergrad and beyond textbooks. Given the pressure to pass exams, in addition you need to have enough in the tank that learning more maths doesn’t risk your hoop jumping to get into university. Ironically you need to do well in many things that isn’t maths to be allowed to study maths at an elite university. I am sure it helps alot if your parents are professors!
naasking 3y ago
> If you look at fields medalists I think most of them got interested in math super young and got exposed earlier to much more material than average mathematicians Even if that were true, you'd need only one Ramanujan to disprove the claim that architecture doesn't matter. We've seen many more than one.
- klipt 3y ago
  It takes both, nature and nurture. If Ramanujan were raised as a goatherd in an illiterate society I don't think he would've accomplished much mathematically.
  - scarmig 3y ago
    Not quite a goatherd, but Ramanujan's father was a clerk in a sari shop. Ramanujan himself had little formal training in mathematics and was entirely self taught, and his research was in isolation until he sent an unsolicited letter to G.H. Hardy. It's as if you trained an LLM on children's books and it converged to Terence Tao.

hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago

See also: https://gwern.net/iq https://gwern.net/iq

mrshadowgoose 3y ago

Over the years, I've found that the "nurture is the only thing that matters" camp is typically intensely self-delusional. Despite hard evidence to the contrary, some people really really want to pretend that all human brains are equally capable. For example, instances of cognitive disability due to macroscopically visible brain structure deviations or brain damage are usually brushed away as "Well that's just a disability and therefore it doesn't count! All the other brains are the same!"

mhuffman 3y ago
An eye-opening version of this is a friend of mine has twin girls. Both have the same parents, took all the same classes with the same teachers, neither got more access to something that the other couldn't but one dramatically better at school, has a higher measured iq (not just a couple of points) and just seems "sharper" when you deal with her than the other. She just somehow seems to pick up a lot of things quicker than the other. Otherwise they are both basically identical when it comes to sports and the sorts of things they are in to. They both got the same "nurture" but "nature" had something to do with it somewhere in the mix that made them pretty different.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- nightski 3y ago
  I have a sibling very close in age and in my experience just coming from the same home and parents doesn't mean a whole lot, siblings can have wildly different experiences and be treated by the adults around them quite different. Not to mention there are forces which make you want to differentiate from your sibling and intentionally be different. I don't think that anecdote is nearly informative enough to make any conclusions.
  - mhuffman 3y ago
    >siblings can have wildly different experiences and be treated by the adults around them quite different. Not to mention there are forces which make you want to differentiate from your sibling and intentionally be different. That's true, but is that due to all the adults and "forces" around them conspiring to treat them different, or is it due to them behaving in a way that elicits certain responses? Surely some of each, no? So then, nature may have a way of manipulating nurture in a sense.

MrRolleyes 3y ago

[dead]

littlestymaar 3y ago

Not to defend the original argument (because comparing the difference between people, belonging to the exact same animal specie, and difference between radically different model architecture make zero sense). > Small average variation overall, but some outliers are dramatically better and dramatically worse. Some brains produce fields medals, some can barely count change. Unfortunate but true. We don't actually know which part of the “can barely count change” situation comes from the “brain” compared to the situation people were raises in. Sure you'd always have outliers (good or bad) for purely genetic reasons, but if you looked at sport performance for instance you'd find that the theoretical difference between people is much lower than the practical one for many environmental reasons: in theory, once you factor in rare medical conditions, almost every human between 18 and 40 should be able to run a marathon. The reason why most people cannot is entirely environmental (not enough physical activity, overweight, work related health issues, etc.). And it's also true in terms of performance: almost any human ought to be able to run a 100m in less than 14 seconds, which is only 30% slower than the world record. Yet, for purely environmental reasons, only a small fraction of the population is actually able to do it. I suspect that in terms of intelligence the results would be roughly in the same ballpark: almost everyone, except rare mental development disorders, ought to be 70% as intelligent as the most intelligent person in history (and the enormous majority fitting in a much narrower band), but most end up far worse for environmental reasons alone. For some reason (mostly politico-philosophical), most people in the “nature” camp of the “nature vs nurture” debate are completely oblivious to the evidence for this.

naasking 3y ago
> We don't actually know which part of the “can barely count change” situation comes from the “brain” compared to the situation people were raises i I think this too is misleading. We've quantified the heritability of intelligence to quite a significant degree. Twin studies of twins who have been raised apart even shows that outcomes are largely the same despite different environments. Nurture is very much oversold. Basically, as long as you don't traumatize one of two twins they will develop very similarly. > And it's also true in terms of performance: almost any human ought to be able to run a 100m in less than 14 seconds But it's literally not true of all humans, and it won't be true if you drop that below 13 or 12 seconds. Which shows that the specific biomechanics you're born with will influence your natural physical abilities. By extension, we also have natural cognitive abilities with similar consequences. > most people in the “nature” camp of the “nature vs nurture” debate are completely oblivious to the evidence for this I think you're way overselling this claim. "It's all nurture" is a far more common opinion, and far less evidence supports it.