When I was a kid, my parents, especially my dad, used to talk about difficulties he had in raising me, and how they were related to difficulties that he had as a kid with his parents.
And I thought “that means I’ll get to grow up better than my dad. And when I grow up and have kids, I’ll have an advantage, and my kids will be able to grow up better off than me. And eventually my children’s children’s children will be rad as all get-out.”
And while I hadn’t really noticed until now, that was my point of reference for “intelligence explosion.” It now seems clear to me that (a) most people haven’t even begun to advance along this line, and/or see it as having some bounded destination, and (b) other types of changes will blow these out of the water, in the way that memetic evolution in humans blew genetic evolution out of the water. And honestly, that’s scary. Because the improved-parenting intelligence improvement comes with a responsibility and morality improvement as well, built right in. Because it’s a people-improvement, rather than mind-improvement.
But this type of intelligence increase, not really an explosion, seems pretty Greek-accessible to me, in the same way that “Science must pass Judaism” was accessible to Eliezer as a kid.
You correctly claim this inference to be Greek-accessible, while not an explosion, because it is explicitly mentioned in Plato’s “The Republic”—although the measurement of good bringing up is defined as morality, not intelligence.
When I was a kid, my parents, especially my dad, used to talk about difficulties he had in raising me, and how they were related to difficulties that he had as a kid with his parents.
And I thought “that means I’ll get to grow up better than my dad. And when I grow up and have kids, I’ll have an advantage, and my kids will be able to grow up better off than me. And eventually my children’s children’s children will be rad as all get-out.”
And while I hadn’t really noticed until now, that was my point of reference for “intelligence explosion.” It now seems clear to me that (a) most people haven’t even begun to advance along this line, and/or see it as having some bounded destination, and (b) other types of changes will blow these out of the water, in the way that memetic evolution in humans blew genetic evolution out of the water. And honestly, that’s scary. Because the improved-parenting intelligence improvement comes with a responsibility and morality improvement as well, built right in. Because it’s a people-improvement, rather than mind-improvement.
But this type of intelligence increase, not really an explosion, seems pretty Greek-accessible to me, in the same way that “Science must pass Judaism” was accessible to Eliezer as a kid.
You correctly claim this inference to be Greek-accessible, while not an explosion, because it is explicitly mentioned in Plato’s “The Republic”—although the measurement of good bringing up is defined as morality, not intelligence.