tangerine

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Thank you for your response, I will try to address your comments.

Few people end up "contributing much to science or overall culture". It's like being surprised that most people who do sport regularly do not end up winning the Olympic Games.

Well, people often extrapolate that if a child prodigy, whether in sports or an intellectual pursuit, does much better than other children of the same age, that this difference will persist into adulthood. What I’m saying is that the reason it usually doesn’t, is that once you’ve absorbed existing techniques, you reach a plateau that’s extremely hard to break out of and even if you do, it’s only by a small amount and largely based on luck. And it doesn’t matter much if one reaches that plateau at age 15 (like, say, a child prodigy) or 25 (like, say, a “normal” person).

You don't specify what exactly is the "myth" and what exactly is your alternative explanation.

The myth of general intelligence is that it is somehow different from “regular” intelligence. A human brain is not more general than any other primate brain. It’s actually the training methods that are different. There is nothing inherent in the model that is the human brain which makes it inherently more capable, à la Chomsky’s universal grammar. The only effective difference is that the human mind has a strong tendency towards imitation, which does not in itself make it more intelligent, but only if there are intelligent behaviors available to imitate, so what is in effect different about what’s called a “general” intelligence is not the model or agent itself, but the training method. There is nothing in principle that stops a chimpanzee from being able to read and write English, for example. It’s just that we haven’t figured out the methods to configure their brains into that state, because they don’t have a strong tendency to imitate, which human children do have, which makes training them much easier.

If your point is that Einstein could not have discovered general relativity if he was born 1000 years earlier, I agree. If your point is that any other person with university education living in the same era could have discovered the same, I disagree.

We agree on the first point. As for the second point, in hindsight we of course know that Einstein was able to discover what he did discover. However, before his discovery, it was not known what kind of person would be required. We did not even know exactly what was out there to discover. We are in that situation today with respect to discoveries we haven’t discovered yet. We don’t know what kind of person, with what kind of brain, in what configuration, will make what discoveries, so there is an element of chance. If in Einstein’s time the chips had fallen slightly differently, I don’t see why some other person couldn’t have made the same or very similar discoveries. It could have happened five years earlier or five years later, but it seems extremely unlikely to me that if Einstein had died as a baby that we would still be stuck with Newtonian mechanics today.

No, you do not need any specific knowledge in order to be intelligent.

Well, this comes down to what is a useful definition of intelligence. You indeed don’t need any specific knowledge if you define intelligence as something like IQ, but even a feral child with an IQ of 200 won’t outmatch a chimpanzee in any meaningful way; it won’t invent Hindu-Arabic numerals, language or even a hand axe. Likewise, ChatGPT is a useless pile of numbers before it sees the training data, and afterwards its behavior depends on what was in that training data. So in practice I would argue that to be intelligent in a specific domain you do need specific knowledge, whether that’s factual knowledge, or more implied knowledge that is absorbed by osmosis or practice.

But it is also true that some people are way better at copying and repurposing these things than others.

Some people are better at that, but I wouldn’t say way better. John von Neumann was perhaps at the apex of this, but that didn’t make him much more powerful in practice. He didn’t discover the Higgs boson. He didn’t build a gigahertz microprocessor. He didn’t cure his own cancer. He didn’t even put wheels under his suitcase. It’s impressive what he did do, but still pretty incremental. Why would an AI be much better at this?

Nope. Depends on what kind of task you have in mind, and what kind of learning is available.

What kind of practical task wouldn’t require trial and error? There are some tasks, such as predicting the motions of the planets, for which there turned out to be a method which works quite generally, but even then when you drop certain assumptions, the method becomes intensive or impossible to calculate.

Also, intelligence is related to how fast one learns.

Yes, a bigger model or a higher IQ can help you get more out of a given amount of data, but the scaling laws show diminishing returns. Pretty quickly, having more data starts to outweigh trying to squeeze more out of what you’ve already got.

The difference between humans and chimpanzees is purely one of imitation. Humans have evolved to sustain cultural evolution, by imitating existing culture and expanding upon it during a lifetime. Chimpanzees don’t imitate reliably enough to sustain this process and so their individual knowledge gains are mostly lost at death, but the individual intelligence of a human and a chimpanzee is virtually the same. A feral human child, that is, a human without human culture, does not behave more intelligently than a chimpanzee.

The slow accumulation of culture is what separated humans from chimpanzees. For AI to be to humans what humans are to chimps is not really possible because you either accumulate culture (knowledge) or you don’t. The only remaining distinction is one of speed. AI could accumulate a culture of its own, faster than humans. But how fast?

The laws of physics are much simpler than the detailed structure of a given table

It is not practical to simulate everything down to the level of the laws of physics. In practice, you usually have to come up with much coarser models that can actually be computed within a reasonable time and most of the experimentation is needed to construct those models in the first place so that they align sufficiently with reality, and even then only in certain circumstances.

You could maybe use quantum mechanics to calculate the planetary orbits out for thousands of years, but it’s much simpler to use Newtonian mechanics for that, and that’s because the planetary motions happen to be easily modelable in that way, which however isn’t true for building rocket engines, or predicting the stock market or global politics.

Intelligence is indeed not magic. None of the behaviors that you display that are more intelligent than a chimpanzee’s behaviors are things you have invented. I’m willing to bet that virtually no behavior that you have personally come up with is an improvement. (That’s not an insult, it’s simply par for the course for humans.) In other words, a human is not smarter than a chimpanzee.

The reason humans are able to display more intelligent behavior is because we’ve evolved to sustain cultural evolution, i.e., the mutation and selection of behaviors from one generation to the next. All of the smart things you do are a result of that slow accumulation of behaviors, such as language, counting, etc., that you have been able to simply imitate. So the author’s point stands that you need new information from experiments in order to do something new, including new kinds of persuasion.

You are assuming a superintelligence that knows how to perform all these deductions. Why would this be a valid assumption? You are reasoning from your own point of view, i.e., the point of view of someone who has already seen much, much more of the world than a few frames, and more importantly someone who already knows what the thing is that is supposed to be deduced, which allows you to artificially reduce the hypothesis space. On what basis would this superintelligence be able to do this?

Your point c definitely rings true to me. An answer often seems simple in hindsight, but that an answer is simple doesn’t mean it’s simple to find. There are often many simple answers and the vast majority of them useless.

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