4 ms·

Humans are not “generally intelligent”; our intelligence is extremely well adapted to being a hominid family animal in a tribe or clan in a savannah habitat wit

by efitz 2y ago

Humans are not “generally intelligent”; our intelligence is extremely well adapted to being a hominid family animal in a tribe or clan in a savannah habitat with large predators and hostile members of our own species lurking about. Our senses and brains are well suited to reasoning about and making decisions in environments at “human” scales. By that, I mean that humans don’t receive relativistic, atomic or quantum phenomena directly with our unaided senses, and therefore our brains never developed intuition for these phenomena. So it’s no surprise at all that our intuition completely fails us at those scales. Again, our intelligence is not “general”; it’s hominid.

snovv_crash 2y ago
We also fail horrifically at recognising exponential growth, or understanding its implications.
- mettamage 2y ago
  Exponential growth is pretty rare in nature, right? Linear growth or fuzzy up and down growth/swings seems way more commonplace
  - snovv_crash 2y ago
    COVID was an example of nature, and peoples' poor understanding of exponential growth.
    - GuB-42 2y ago
      Epidemics generally follow a logistic curve, like most "exponential" processes. It looks exponential at first, but at some point, it decays. COVID is no exception. It is now in "fuzzy up and down" mode. True, unbounded exponential processes don't exist in nature. There is a simple explanation about why not: assuming the speed of light is the speed limit of causality and we don't have weird things like warp gates, then the influence of something cannot go further than a sphere around it expanding at the speed of light. The volume of this sphere of influence increase following a cubic function. Now, if an exponential process happen withing that sphere, for example a population growth, it will run out of space at some point, because an exponential function will always beat a cubic (or any polynomial) at some point. The fastest growth possible is cubic, not exponential.
    - mettamage 2y ago
      The scale of COVID was rare. I guess viral infections though aren't, and they follow a curve like that, just on a smaller scale.
- LgWoodenBadger 2y ago
  and yet plenty of us can expertly catch balls thrown in the air
  - Vecr 2y ago
    By more or less holding its angle constant by moving. The intercept trajectory is nowhere near optimal.
  - snovv_crash 2y ago
    That's quadratic plus maybe some drag terms, humans are decent at projecting ballistic arcs.
robwwilliams 2y ago
I love this comment! Why have I never read this key insight in the form of an essay. Having recently watch Chimp Empire on Netflix I have a good feel for the “lower” foundational levels of our stack.
11101010001100 2y ago
We complement this weakness with tools. Now can we build tools that access all mass-energy scales is the question...(or do we need too :P)....
olooney 2y ago
And yet, counterintuitively, it's in precisely these areas (relativity, quantum physics) that our theories are best (most predictive with the strongest mathematical foundations) and the areas where our human intuition ought to supply the most assistance (psychology, sociology) where we seem to be lost at sea. One explanation that I've come up with to explain this apparent paradox is that while humans may not have any special insight or intuition into microscopic or macroscopic phenomenon, at least we don't have any biases either. Thus, we are able to make progress in these areas by simply pouring in huge amounts of time and brainpower. On the other hand, for subjects that are more "human," we come pre-equipped with a large number of instinctive insights; or to put it another way, we're burdened with a huge number of innate biases. These are mostly shortcut heuristics that only vaguely approximate the truth, and are deeply and unavoidable biased in ways that we ourselves are blind to. Thus, no matter how much time and brainpower we pour into these subjects, progress remains slow and theories remain poor. It's a well-known theorem in machine learning that an ensemble of weak (only slightly better than random chance) but unbiased learners will eventually converge to a strong learner, but a collection of biased learners will never become unbiased unless their biases are all uncorrelated. In humans, of course, the biases are shared across all members of the species so do not cancel out in this way.
- mensetmanusman 2y ago
  That’s mostly because complexity can’t be wrapped up in simple rules. Physics is easier because it is dealing with a handful of particles. There isn’t enough energy in the universe to calculate the full Schrödinger equation of a human. That tells us something…
  - xtreme 2y ago
    I agree with what you are saying, but I find it interesting that physics can also predict properties of planets, stars, and galaxies interacting over cosmic distances. At that scale, you can zoom out and reduce the complexity again back to a handful of rules.
    - BobaFloutist 2y ago
Workaccount2 2y ago
To be fair, humans, with all their ego, simply call hominid intelligence "general".
catanama 2y ago
It's actually debatable given our capability for abstract thought and creating things like mathematics. I think it's better to say that our minds have built in optimization for some patterns of behavior and thought but it doesn't mean we aren't "generally intelligent". Just as if you have Turing complete language designed for accounting it doesn't mean you can actually write anything in it, even if that would be not optimal.
- NemoNobody 2y ago
  I've always thought of mathematics as something that reveals itself - self evident for those who know to look for it. Humans are absolutely "generally intelligent" - the languages we all come preloaded with provide a substantial base hominid intelligence. Were one to compare all known species and their respective forms of intelligence, humans would be the standard for general intelligence and intelligence in general - this is only debatable if you entirely ignore the works of humanity, as it is only us that can see all known things as resources or potentially so. Let a tree be known by it's fruits. Not to discredit the intelligence of dolphins, octupi/squids, chimps, ravens, certain dogs and cats but by no means are they, in any measurable way, comparable generally to a human or even specifically, save species specific intelligence, like how to operate a built in ink cloud organ. If the point of evolution is to create endlessly more complex iterations of life forever, which it might as well be, we are the finest known example of evolutions success - we are the earth's magnum opus. Furthermore, were Earth alive and we its offspring, we are more than it - as a child is more than it's mother or father alone. We are the most important thing here rn. At least so far. Definitely win overall. Can another species do math, identify everything, name it all and turn a tree into a chair? That's base reqs to challenge for the smart crown. tl;dr: I agree with the comment I'm replying to - I just like to write books
PmTKg5d3AoKVnj0 2y ago
I think that's pretty ignorant of historical materialism. Humanity itself, insofar as its brain was made possible by new modes of nutrient-assimilation from the environment, is inherently technological. Nature is updated by work.
MiscCompFacts 2y ago
This got me thinking about the radio lab episode where they had to vote on which animals they thought were the smartest. The idea was to put yourself in the context and environment of these animals and see which one has developed the best intelligence given what senses and capabilities the animals had to work with. The first round is Crows vs Slime Molds. I never thought about it, slime molds decision making abilities to find food are actually really fascinating and given that it’s a unicellular organism it’s adapted suprisingly well for the limited resources it has. I never thought about intelligence relative to other organisms before. Edit: here’s the link https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4YtbQkzLo1E https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4YtbQkzLo1E
limit499karma 2y ago
According to a few (related) mystical schools of thought (that share a boundary with Jungian psychology) there is a distinction to be made between mind and intellect. The former, the mind, is held to be effectively a super-sense and its content and preoccupations naturally (as with the elemental senses) are bound firmly to the body. The intellect however is seen as the realm of knowledge whose domain extends to the transcendent. While our intuition is indeed informed by experience it should be understood that speculative meditations (should one care not to believe in inspiration "from above") can enrich mental content and provide structural elements for conceptualization that transcends ordinary perception. So the intellect is indeed superior to mentation. And for many of us this distinction is informative of our belief in the incompleteness of our self-perception.[..]
drdeca 2y ago
I don’t think “general” means like, equally suited for all cases. Rather, being able to handle the things successfully at all, even after working past wrong intuitions, and taking much time, still counts.

by efitz 2y ago

snovv_crash 2y ago

We also fail horrifically at recognising exponential growth, or understanding its implications.

mettamage 2y ago
Exponential growth is pretty rare in nature, right? Linear growth or fuzzy up and down growth/swings seems way more commonplace
- snovv_crash 2y ago
  COVID was an example of nature, and peoples' poor understanding of exponential growth.
  - GuB-42 2y ago
    Epidemics generally follow a logistic curve, like most "exponential" processes. It looks exponential at first, but at some point, it decays. COVID is no exception. It is now in "fuzzy up and down" mode. True, unbounded exponential processes don't exist in nature. There is a simple explanation about why not: assuming the speed of light is the speed limit of causality and we don't have weird things like warp gates, then the influence of something cannot go further than a sphere around it expanding at the speed of light. The volume of this sphere of influence increase following a cubic function. Now, if an exponential process happen withing that sphere, for example a population growth, it will run out of space at some point, because an exponential function will always beat a cubic (or any polynomial) at some point. The fastest growth possible is cubic, not exponential.
  - mettamage 2y ago
    The scale of COVID was rare. I guess viral infections though aren't, and they follow a curve like that, just on a smaller scale.
LgWoodenBadger 2y ago
and yet plenty of us can expertly catch balls thrown in the air
- Vecr 2y ago
  By more or less holding its angle constant by moving. The intercept trajectory is nowhere near optimal.
- snovv_crash 2y ago
  That's quadratic plus maybe some drag terms, humans are decent at projecting ballistic arcs.

robwwilliams 2y ago

I love this comment! Why have I never read this key insight in the form of an essay. Having recently watch Chimp Empire on Netflix I have a good feel for the “lower” foundational levels of our stack.

11101010001100 2y ago

We complement this weakness with tools. Now can we build tools that access all mass-energy scales is the question...(or do we need too :P)....

olooney 2y ago

And yet, counterintuitively, it's in precisely these areas (relativity, quantum physics) that our theories are best (most predictive with the strongest mathematical foundations) and the areas where our human intuition ought to supply the most assistance (psychology, sociology) where we seem to be lost at sea. One explanation that I've come up with to explain this apparent paradox is that while humans may not have any special insight or intuition into microscopic or macroscopic phenomenon, at least we don't have any biases either. Thus, we are able to make progress in these areas by simply pouring in huge amounts of time and brainpower. On the other hand, for subjects that are more "human," we come pre-equipped with a large number of instinctive insights; or to put it another way, we're burdened with a huge number of innate biases. These are mostly shortcut heuristics that only vaguely approximate the truth, and are deeply and unavoidable biased in ways that we ourselves are blind to. Thus, no matter how much time and brainpower we pour into these subjects, progress remains slow and theories remain poor. It's a well-known theorem in machine learning that an ensemble of weak (only slightly better than random chance) but unbiased learners will eventually converge to a strong learner, but a collection of biased learners will never become unbiased unless their biases are all uncorrelated. In humans, of course, the biases are shared across all members of the species so do not cancel out in this way.

mensetmanusman 2y ago
That’s mostly because complexity can’t be wrapped up in simple rules. Physics is easier because it is dealing with a handful of particles. There isn’t enough energy in the universe to calculate the full Schrödinger equation of a human. That tells us something…
- xtreme 2y ago
  I agree with what you are saying, but I find it interesting that physics can also predict properties of planets, stars, and galaxies interacting over cosmic distances. At that scale, you can zoom out and reduce the complexity again back to a handful of rules.
  - BobaFloutist 2y ago

Workaccount2 2y ago

To be fair, humans, with all their ego, simply call hominid intelligence "general".

catanama 2y ago

It's actually debatable given our capability for abstract thought and creating things like mathematics. I think it's better to say that our minds have built in optimization for some patterns of behavior and thought but it doesn't mean we aren't "generally intelligent". Just as if you have Turing complete language designed for accounting it doesn't mean you can actually write anything in it, even if that would be not optimal.

NemoNobody 2y ago
I've always thought of mathematics as something that reveals itself - self evident for those who know to look for it. Humans are absolutely "generally intelligent" - the languages we all come preloaded with provide a substantial base hominid intelligence. Were one to compare all known species and their respective forms of intelligence, humans would be the standard for general intelligence and intelligence in general - this is only debatable if you entirely ignore the works of humanity, as it is only us that can see all known things as resources or potentially so. Let a tree be known by it's fruits. Not to discredit the intelligence of dolphins, octupi/squids, chimps, ravens, certain dogs and cats but by no means are they, in any measurable way, comparable generally to a human or even specifically, save species specific intelligence, like how to operate a built in ink cloud organ. If the point of evolution is to create endlessly more complex iterations of life forever, which it might as well be, we are the finest known example of evolutions success - we are the earth's magnum opus. Furthermore, were Earth alive and we its offspring, we are more than it - as a child is more than it's mother or father alone. We are the most important thing here rn. At least so far. Definitely win overall. Can another species do math, identify everything, name it all and turn a tree into a chair? That's base reqs to challenge for the smart crown. tl;dr: I agree with the comment I'm replying to - I just like to write books

PmTKg5d3AoKVnj0 2y ago

I think that's pretty ignorant of historical materialism. Humanity itself, insofar as its brain was made possible by new modes of nutrient-assimilation from the environment, is inherently technological. Nature is updated by work.

MiscCompFacts 2y ago

This got me thinking about the radio lab episode where they had to vote on which animals they thought were the smartest. The idea was to put yourself in the context and environment of these animals and see which one has developed the best intelligence given what senses and capabilities the animals had to work with. The first round is Crows vs Slime Molds. I never thought about it, slime molds decision making abilities to find food are actually really fascinating and given that it’s a unicellular organism it’s adapted suprisingly well for the limited resources it has. I never thought about intelligence relative to other organisms before. Edit: here’s the link https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4YtbQkzLo1E https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4YtbQkzLo1E

limit499karma 2y ago

According to a few (related) mystical schools of thought (that share a boundary with Jungian psychology) there is a distinction to be made between mind and intellect. The former, the mind, is held to be effectively a super-sense and its content and preoccupations naturally (as with the elemental senses) are bound firmly to the body. The intellect however is seen as the realm of knowledge whose domain extends to the transcendent. While our intuition is indeed informed by experience it should be understood that speculative meditations (should one care not to believe in inspiration "from above") can enrich mental content and provide structural elements for conceptualization that transcends ordinary perception. So the intellect is indeed superior to mentation. And for many of us this distinction is informative of our belief in the incompleteness of our self-perception.[..]

drdeca 2y ago

I don’t think “general” means like, equally suited for all cases. Rather, being able to handle the things successfully at all, even after working past wrong intuitions, and taking much time, still counts.