(Cross-posted from Facebook.)

Now and then people have asked me if I think that other people should also avoid high school or college if they want to develop new ideas. This always felt to me like a wrong way to look at the question, but I didn't know a right one.

Recently I thought of a scary new viewpoint on that subject.

This started with a conversation with Arthur where he mentioned an idea by Yoshua Bengio about the software for general intelligence having been developed memetically. I remarked that I didn't think duplicating this culturally transmitted software would be a significant part of the problem for AGI development. (Roughly: low-fidelity software tends to be algorithmically shallow. Further discussion moved to comment below.)

But this conversation did get me thinking about the topic of culturally transmitted software that contributes to human general intelligence. That software can be an important gear even if it's an algorithmically shallow part of the overall machinery. Removing a few simple gears that are 2% of a machine's mass can reduce the machine's performance by way more than 2%. Feral children would be the case in point.

A scary question is whether it's possible to do subtler damage to the culturally transmitted software of general intelligence.

I've had the sense before that the Internet is turning our society stupider and meaner. My primary hypothesis is "The Internet is selecting harder on a larger population of ideas, and sanity falls off the selective frontier once you select hard enough."

To review, there's a general idea that strong (social) selection on a characteristic imperfectly correlated with some other metric of goodness can be bad for that metric, where weak (social) selection on that characteristic was good. If you press scientists a little for publishable work, they might do science that's of greater interest to others. If you select very harshly on publication records, the academics spend all their time worrying about publishing and real science falls by the wayside.

On my feed yesterday was an essay complaining about how the intense competition to get into Harvard is producing a monoculture of students who've lined up every single standard accomplishment and how these students don't know anything else they want to do with their lives. Gentle, soft competition ...

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