Ethan Kuntz

I wonder to what degree the genome has "solved" intelligence. You could imagine perhaps that we are all sort of noisy instantiations of the ideal intelligence, and that reduction in noise (possibly mainly literal cortex-to-cortex SNR) is mostly what results in intelligence variations. Even considering this, the genome probably does not encode a truly complete solution in the sense that there are plenty of cases where there are mental skills that have the potential for positive feedback and a positive correlation, but basically don't. The genome probably ha... (read more)

There seem to be some critical methodological errors here that have easy fixes. First, the intervention subject took the same or strictly more time in the second test compared to the first, and the control took the same or less time. This is pretty bad for iq tests of this sort, you would already expect more time to result in better scores. Second, the SAME tests were used for before and after, and some of the tests literally tell you the answers after you do the questions. In particular, the spatial aspect of the first test tells you the answers for a lar... (read more)

William Thurston seems like a mathematician that was not just leading the parade, but rather made fundamental contributions to his fields that no one else would have made in his time. To quote, "He wanted to avoid in hyperbolic geometry what had happened when his basic papers on foliations “tsunamied” the field in the early 1970s.", meaning that he made so many deep and varied contributions so fast that no one could keep up. More in https://www.ams.org/notices/201511/rnoti-p1318.pdf such as "The huge and daunting advances he made in foliation theory were o... (read more)