Anthropic issues questionable letter on SB 1047 (Axios). I can't find a copy of the original letter online. 

Genes vs environment seems like an obvious thing to track. Most people in most places don't move around that much (unlike many members of our community) so if cancers are contagious for many cancers, especially rarer ones, you'd expect to see strong regional correlations (likely stronger than genetic correlations). 

Sure, I agree about the pink elephants. I'm less sure about the speed of light.

Thanks this makes a lot of sense! I remember reading the first sentence of OP and thinking "this is crazy, there's no way this is true...unless?"

Do you think ideal reasoning is well-defined? In the limit I feel like you run into classic problems like anti-induction, daemons, and all sorts of other issues that I assume people outside of our community also think about. Is there a particularly concrete definition philosophers like Chalmers use?

we can make progress by thinking about it and making arguments.

I mean real progress is via proof and things leading up to a proof right? I'm not discounting mathematical intuition here but the ~entirety of the game comes from the correct formalisms/proofs, which is a very different notion of "thinking."

Put in a different way, mathematics (at least ideally, in the abstract) is ~mind-independent. 

Sure but then this begs the question since I've never met a super smart ideal person who's thought about it for a long time and made all possible deductions. So then using that definition of "conceivable", 1) is false (or at least undetermined). 

Probably preaching to the choir here, but I don't understand the conceivability argument for p-zombies. It seems to rely on the idea that human intuitions (at least among smart, philosophically sophisticated people) are a reliable detector of what is and is not logically possible. 

But we know from other areas of study (e.g. math) that this is almost certainly false. 

Eg, I'm pretty good at math (majored in it in undergrad, performed reasonably well). But unless I'm tracking things carefully, it's not immediately obvious to me (and certainly not inconceivable) that pi is a rational number. But of course the irrationality of pi is not just an empirical fact but a logical necessity. 

Even more straightforwardly, one can easily construct Boolean SAT problems where the answer can conceivably be either True or False to a human eye. But only one of the answers is logically possible! Humans are far from logically omniscient rational actors. 

The question specified the restriction to humans in the last 300,000 years.

I think these are good ideas. I still agree with Erick's core objection that once you're outside of "normal" human range + some buffer, IQ as classically understood is no longer a directly meaningful concept so we'll have to redefine it somehow, and there are a lot of free parameters for how to define it (eg somebody's 250 can be another person's 600).