Yeah, I'm not sure I understand how moving up an abstraction layer necessarily makes you less intelligent. I also don't think it makes you smarter. For the aver

Yeah, I'm not sure I understand how moving up an abstraction layer necessarily makes you less intelligent. I also don't think it makes you smarter. For the average individual, I feel like it simply moves your "cursor" up the stack, but you're not necessarily increasing your context window. Perhaps the confusion comes from the fact that we often produce more complex things as we move up layers. It's then assumed that the people who made them must be more intelligent, but as I said, I don't think that's a fair assessment. I would say the real measurement for intelligence here is how much of the abstraction layers you actually understand. In other words, can you move your cursor back down the stack and operate just as well as in the higher layers? Can you do this while unifying the complex interactions between each layer into a cohesive model? I've noticed that even AI tends to be pretty bad at this last step. It often takes prodding to get it to see the subtle errors often introduced when working with complex systems.