Interesting choice to use the A.I. box experiment as an example for this post, when the methods used by EY in it were not revealed. Whatever the rationale for keeping it close to the vest, not showing how it was done struck me as an attempt to build mystique, if not appear magical.
This post also seems a little inconsistent with EY’s assistant researcher job listing, which said something to the effect that only those with 1 in 100k g need apply, though those with 1 in 1000 could contribute to the cause monetarily. The error may be mine in this instance, because I may be in the minority when I assume someone who claims to have Einstein’s intelligence is not claiming anything like 1 in 100k g.
Whaaa? Is this saying you think Einstein had substantially less than 1 in 100,000 general intelligence? That seems like a severe underestimate. 1 in 1e5 really isn’t much, there should be 70,000 people in the world like that. There isn’t a small city full of Einsteins. I’ve gotten back standardized test reports showing higher percentiles than that.
This reminds me of the time somebody asked me if I considered myself a genius and I asked them to define genius as a fraction of the population. “1 in 100,000? 1 in 1 million?” I inquired. And they said, “1 in 300″ to which my reply was to just laugh.
Or am I reading it the wrong way around, i.e., Einstein is much above this level? If so, I wouldn’t think more than a couple of orders of magnitude above, like 1 in 1,000,000 or 1 in 10,000,000. Other factors than native g will be decisive past that point.
We could quibble a bit about exact rarities—Einstein was clearly exceptionally bright, but whether he represents 1 in 10^4 or 1 in 10^6 g depends on all sorts of trivia that I don’t have good estimates for. (I think I’d start by trying to figure out the number of scientists active in math, physics, and chemistry in [say] 1935 and estimating the intelligence of the average 1935-era hard scientist relative to the population average, then assuming that Einstein was at the top of that community. That’s just a ballpark estimate, though.)
That’s all pretty orthogonal to what I read the grandparent as suggesting, though. By my reading of b_f2′s post, someone claiming Einstein-level intelligence is probably saying that their estimate of their own intelligence exceeds all their convenient reference points below “famously smart scientist”, suggesting a very smart person, but probably not 1 in 10^5 smart.
Which is actually a lot more charitable than my probable interpretation of such a claim: without impressive supporting evidence, I’d be more likely to assume that anyone claiming to have Einstein’s brain is full of shit and probably a crackpot.
Which is actually a lot more charitable than my probable interpretation of such a claim: without impressive supporting evidence, I’d be more likely to assume that anyone claiming to have Einstein’s brain is full of shit and probably a crackpot.
Not only do I agree, but I can’t even envision what such “impressive supporting evidence” could be. I would be extremely surprised if anyone who had more than a vague idea of what Einstein did claimed to be as smart as him with a straight face; even if someone I thought was actually in the same league as him said that, I’d assume they are in jest or out of their mind—indeed because such a statement would pattern-match a crackpot. (IME, people who are both extremely intelligent and very arrogant may say stuff like “99.99% of the people are idiots”, but they hardly ever say “I am as smart as $famously_smart_person”.
And BTW, I don’t think many laymen by “Einstein” mean “someone as smart as the 60th smartest person in my home town of 60,000”—they usually mean “one of the friggin’ smartest people ever”.
I would be extremely surprised if anyone who had more than a vague idea of what Einstein did claimed to be as smart as him with a straight face; even if someone I thought was actually in the same league as him said that, I’d assume they are in jest or out of their mind—indeed because such a statement would pattern-match a crackpot.
Supporting your point of view is Lev Landau’s list. Even as one of the greatest theoretical physicists of the 20th century, Landau ranked himself far below not only Einstein but also Newton, Bohr, Heisenberg, Dirac, & Schrödinger.
What’s rarely appreciated is that Einstein also lucked out, besides being 1 in 10^? genius. A lot of things went right for him early on. On the other hand, a lot of things went wrong for him later on, and so he was left out of the mainstream scientific progress, save for his incisive QM critique.
In what sense was Einstein left out of the mainstream, because of what life events, besides his (correct, assuming MWI) criticisms of QM? I don’t think I’ve heard this story of Einstein before. Szilard approached him to ghost-send his letter to Roosevelt, that’s all I know of Einstein’s later years.
As far as I know, it was mostly because in his last decades he focused his research mostly on obtaining a classical field theory that unified gravity and electromagnetism, hoping that out of it the discrete aspects of quantum theory would emerge organically. Most of the forefront theoretical physicists viewed this (correctly, in retrospect) as a dead end and focused on the new discoveries on nuclear structure and elementary particles, on understanding the structure of quantum field theory, etc.
Einstein’s philosophical criticism of quantum theory was not the reason for his relative marginalization, except insofar as it may have influenced his research choices.
In what sense was Einstein left out of the mainstream
Not out of the mainstream in general, only out of the useful scientific research.
his (correct, assuming MWI) criticisms of QM
His criticism of QM was useful regardless of MWI. Among other things, he pointed out several issues with objective collapse and hidden variables (with his famous EPR paradox). Even when he was wrong (in his almost as famous debates with Bohr), he did not make any obvious errors, it took Bohr some time to figure why a certain thought experiment did not contradict QM in its shut-up-and-calculate non-interpretation.
Now, what I was referring to is that he was fortunate to get the education the he had, to have a fellow scientist as a fiancee and (apparently) as a sounding board for his ideas during his work on SR, he was fortunate to have had the mathematician Marcel Grossmann as a friend who helped him with the critical piece of differential geometry later on, etc.
Early on he also had a good sense to apply his genius to constructing models based on known but not yet explained experimental data: photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, Michelson-Morley experiment, Maxwell equations, gravity acting like acceleration, and a few others.
This changed some time in 1920s/1930s, when he decided that unifying classical gravity and classical EM is a good idea on general principles (like Occam’s razor and aesthetic considerations), probably because of his understandable dissatisfaction with QM. To be fair, he had quite a bit of success with models not based on experiment, such as predicting Bose-Einstein condensate. He also remained confused about some of the less clear the aspects of GR, like gauge invariance, gravitational waves and stress-energy tensor. And that’s what meant by “went wrong”.
Nearly there: you can’t predict backward from success to raw (non domain specific) ability, for just the same reason you can’t predict forward from high IQ to success in arbitrary field.
They’re not the same, but they do correlate (which is why it’s not pointless to define g in the first place); now, due to regression to the mean, someone better at theoretical physics than 99.999999% of the population (and no, I don’t think that’s too many 9s) is likely not also better at general intelligence than 99.999999% of the population—but I very strongly doubt that the correct number of 9s is less than half that many. (Anyway, I’m not sure it’d make sense to define g precisely enough to tell whether someone’s 1 in 10^6 or 1 in 10^9.)
You get extreme rarities for specific tasks very easily by combination.
E.g. 1 out of 1000 by g, 1 out of 1000 on factors having to do with intellectual endurance and actually using g to work rather than to find ways to avoid work, 1 out of 1000 on some combination of lucky external factors having to do with becoming a physicist rather than something else, and you have 1 in a billion going.
Given all the other rarities necessary, extreme rarity in g got to be unlikely. Furthermore it is not clear how rarities correspond to actual performance. The world’s best athletes don’t do anything quantifiable a significant % better than merely good athletes.
And of course, at Einstein’s level, Spearman’s law of diminishing returns makes g relatively meaningless. Plus the regression towards the mean severely lowers any measurement by proxy, such as via IQ. The same regression towards the mean severely lowers the expected performance of an individual you’d pick to have same IQ as Einstein by administering IQ tests.
We could quibble a bit about exact rarities—Einstein was clearly exceptionally bright, but whether he represents 1 in 10e4 or 1 in 10e6 g depends on all sorts of trivia that I don’t have good estimates for.
If Einstein represents 1 in 1000, then it would imply that on average the 3 top students in each highschool of 3000 students could be expected to be as “smart as Einstein”. Does that sound reasonable to you?
No, I’m pretty sure Einstein-level intelligence is rarer than that, which is why I put my lower bound at 1 in 10^4 (i.e. the top three students in a region’s worth of high schools). I’m not sure it’s much rarer, though—we don’t have an outstandingly good idea of what makes an Einstein other than sheer weight of g, and we don’t even know that people with the prerequisites of an Einstein would consistently have been funneled into fields where they’d have the opportunity to do things like make famous discoveries in physics.
As to the latter, I kind of suspect not. Of the three smartest people in my (pretty large) high school as measured by the National Merit Scholarship program—probably the only American program that looks for exceptional g on a national scale that late in life, though any number of programs exist for gifted children—one now works for Google’s IT department and a second was, last I heard, going into an art school. The third is… well, not in physics or math either. Not sure what the equivalent of Google would have been in 1935 -- maybe something in mechanical engineering? -- but I doubt the hard sciences then selected for intelligence much better than they do now.
Youre are edging into understanding why this is thread meaningless. Einstein-level g is rarish but not specatacular. Einstein-level
domain ability is another thing. Being in the right place at the right time with the right idea is another thing again. Einstein probably wouldn’t have made a Rembrandt-level painter.
Einstein probably wouldn’t have made a Rembrandt-level painter.
...and then, by total coincidence, a couple days ago I went to the website of a Nobel laureate theoretical physicist and was surprised by how much the graphic design looked like the work of a 14-year-old, and not bothering and letting the browser use the default black-on-white text would probably have looked prettier IMO.
But the overwhelming majority of the population (I won’t bother to pull a number of 9s out of my ass) never become a top-level theoretical physicist nor a top-level painter nor a top-level novelist nor a top-level musician nor a top-level statesperson nor a top-level chess player nor anything like that. So, even without assuming that theoretical physics is any more g-loaded than painting, the fact that “Einstein probably wouldn’t have made a Rembrandt-level painter” isn’t a terribly good reason to doubt that Einstein’s g was in the top 0.1%.
But the overwhelming majority of the population (I won’t bother to pull a number of 9s out of my ass) never become a top-level theoretical physicist nor a top-level painter nor a top-level novelist nor a top-level musician nor a top-level statesperson nor a top-level chess player nor anything like that.
By definition, the vast majority of the population can never be top-level. It would stop being top-level if everyone could do it.
On the other hand, you can look at curricula in good schools these days and notice that we definitely seem to be expecting higher intellectual aptitude and greater achievements at early ages these days in order to give people the same levels of status and respect. So hmmm....
By definition, the vast majority of the population can never be top-level. It would stop being top-level if everyone could do it.
Yes, the vast majority of the population can never be top-level at one given thing. But in principle it could well be possible that almost each person is top-level at something (though different people would be top-level at different things). That this isn’t the case is an empirical fact.
On the other hand, you can look at curricula in good schools these days and notice that we definitely seem to be expecting higher intellectual aptitude and greater achievements at early ages these days in order to give people the same levels of status and respect. So hmmm....
I think we’re feeling two different legs of the elephant, so to speak—or there may just be vast inequalities in education as in everything else these days.
I’d have to do quite a bit of searching to get hard backing statistics, but consider, for instance, the average age at which a young scientist achieves an independent position or tenure, or the average publication quantity of people who do get positions, or even (so I’ve heard) the average publication quantity/quality of people who get into graduate school. As far as I know, these indicators have very much been increasing over time; there may even be a causative link: grade inflation at the lower end of the system causing grade deflation the further up you go.
(For example, I’m told that it’s now difficult to get into graduate school if you don’t already have authorship on a publication.)
There’s also anecdotes like these, indicating that people (at least, aspiring Officially Smart People) are being taught more mathematics at an earlier age than previously.
I’d have to do quite a bit of searching to get hard backing statistics, but consider, for instance, the average age at which a young scientist achieves an independent position or tenure, or the average publication quantity of people who do get positions, or even (so I’ve heard) the average publication quantity/quality of people who get into graduate school.
That slash is a division bar, right? ;-)
(More seriously: Sure, students today might know much more maths than Newton did, but being able to learn calculus from a teacher and/or a textbook is a much lower bar than being able to invent calculus from scratch.)
(More seriously: Sure, students today might know much more maths than Newton did, but being able to learn calculus from a teacher and/or a textbook is a much lower bar than being able to invent calculus from scratch.)
True. But the average Maths PhD today is doing something Newton could never have invented at all. Yes, we do stand on the shoulders of giants nowadays, as did Newton, but picking higher-hanging fruit (say: the Standard Model compared to classical mechanics) requires both a greater knowledge of maths and a greater creative effort.
Anyway, point being, I simply don’t feel able to believe that “incredibly high general intelligence” is truly the determining factor of even Famous Historical Hero-level science. There seem to be lots of other things going on.
This reminds me of the time somebody asked me if I considered myself a genius and I asked them to define genius as a fraction of the population. “1 in 100,000? 1 in 1 million?” I inquired. And they said, “1 in 300″ to which my reply was to just laugh.
I remember a time I saw a newsreport about a little girl who “miraculously” survived some terminal disease. Later in the report, it was mentioned that the recovery rate for said disease was something like 2%, and I laughed out loud that 1 in 50 was not a miracle.
You know well that raw intelligence doesn’t predict success as much as good circumstances and a hell of a lot of work-ethic. Einstein’s sum-total qualities may have been extremely rare, but I would never bet that he was just that neurologically different from the rest of us merely very smart people.
Interesting choice to use the A.I. box experiment as an example for this post, when the methods used by EY in it were not revealed. Whatever the rationale for keeping it close to the vest, not showing how it was done struck me as an attempt to build mystique, if not appear magical.
This post also seems a little inconsistent with EY’s assistant researcher job listing, which said something to the effect that only those with 1 in 100k g need apply, though those with 1 in 1000 could contribute to the cause monetarily. The error may be mine in this instance, because I may be in the minority when I assume someone who claims to have Einstein’s intelligence is not claiming anything like 1 in 100k g.
blink blink
Whaaa? Is this saying you think Einstein had substantially less than 1 in 100,000 general intelligence? That seems like a severe underestimate. 1 in 1e5 really isn’t much, there should be 70,000 people in the world like that. There isn’t a small city full of Einsteins. I’ve gotten back standardized test reports showing higher percentiles than that.
This reminds me of the time somebody asked me if I considered myself a genius and I asked them to define genius as a fraction of the population. “1 in 100,000? 1 in 1 million?” I inquired. And they said, “1 in 300″ to which my reply was to just laugh.
Or am I reading it the wrong way around, i.e., Einstein is much above this level? If so, I wouldn’t think more than a couple of orders of magnitude above, like 1 in 1,000,000 or 1 in 10,000,000. Other factors than native g will be decisive past that point.
We could quibble a bit about exact rarities—Einstein was clearly exceptionally bright, but whether he represents 1 in 10^4 or 1 in 10^6 g depends on all sorts of trivia that I don’t have good estimates for. (I think I’d start by trying to figure out the number of scientists active in math, physics, and chemistry in [say] 1935 and estimating the intelligence of the average 1935-era hard scientist relative to the population average, then assuming that Einstein was at the top of that community. That’s just a ballpark estimate, though.)
That’s all pretty orthogonal to what I read the grandparent as suggesting, though. By my reading of b_f2′s post, someone claiming Einstein-level intelligence is probably saying that their estimate of their own intelligence exceeds all their convenient reference points below “famously smart scientist”, suggesting a very smart person, but probably not 1 in 10^5 smart.
Which is actually a lot more charitable than my probable interpretation of such a claim: without impressive supporting evidence, I’d be more likely to assume that anyone claiming to have Einstein’s brain is full of shit and probably a crackpot.
Not only do I agree, but I can’t even envision what such “impressive supporting evidence” could be. I would be extremely surprised if anyone who had more than a vague idea of what Einstein did claimed to be as smart as him with a straight face; even if someone I thought was actually in the same league as him said that, I’d assume they are in jest or out of their mind—indeed because such a statement would pattern-match a crackpot. (IME, people who are both extremely intelligent and very arrogant may say stuff like “99.99% of the people are idiots”, but they hardly ever say “I am as smart as $famously_smart_person”.
And BTW, I don’t think many laymen by “Einstein” mean “someone as smart as the 60th smartest person in my home town of 60,000”—they usually mean “one of the friggin’ smartest people ever”.
Supporting your point of view is Lev Landau’s list. Even as one of the greatest theoretical physicists of the 20th century, Landau ranked himself far below not only Einstein but also Newton, Bohr, Heisenberg, Dirac, & Schrödinger.
What’s rarely appreciated is that Einstein also lucked out, besides being 1 in 10^? genius. A lot of things went right for him early on. On the other hand, a lot of things went wrong for him later on, and so he was left out of the mainstream scientific progress, save for his incisive QM critique.
In what sense was Einstein left out of the mainstream, because of what life events, besides his (correct, assuming MWI) criticisms of QM? I don’t think I’ve heard this story of Einstein before. Szilard approached him to ghost-send his letter to Roosevelt, that’s all I know of Einstein’s later years.
As far as I know, it was mostly because in his last decades he focused his research mostly on obtaining a classical field theory that unified gravity and electromagnetism, hoping that out of it the discrete aspects of quantum theory would emerge organically. Most of the forefront theoretical physicists viewed this (correctly, in retrospect) as a dead end and focused on the new discoveries on nuclear structure and elementary particles, on understanding the structure of quantum field theory, etc.
Einstein’s philosophical criticism of quantum theory was not the reason for his relative marginalization, except insofar as it may have influenced his research choices.
Not out of the mainstream in general, only out of the useful scientific research.
His criticism of QM was useful regardless of MWI. Among other things, he pointed out several issues with objective collapse and hidden variables (with his famous EPR paradox). Even when he was wrong (in his almost as famous debates with Bohr), he did not make any obvious errors, it took Bohr some time to figure why a certain thought experiment did not contradict QM in its shut-up-and-calculate non-interpretation.
Now, what I was referring to is that he was fortunate to get the education the he had, to have a fellow scientist as a fiancee and (apparently) as a sounding board for his ideas during his work on SR, he was fortunate to have had the mathematician Marcel Grossmann as a friend who helped him with the critical piece of differential geometry later on, etc.
Early on he also had a good sense to apply his genius to constructing models based on known but not yet explained experimental data: photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, Michelson-Morley experiment, Maxwell equations, gravity acting like acceleration, and a few others.
This changed some time in 1920s/1930s, when he decided that unifying classical gravity and classical EM is a good idea on general principles (like Occam’s razor and aesthetic considerations), probably because of his understandable dissatisfaction with QM. To be fair, he had quite a bit of success with models not based on experiment, such as predicting Bose-Einstein condensate. He also remained confused about some of the less clear the aspects of GR, like gauge invariance, gravitational waves and stress-energy tensor. And that’s what meant by “went wrong”.
Nearly there: you can’t predict backward from success to raw (non domain specific) ability, for just the same reason you can’t predict forward from high IQ to success in arbitrary field.
But you can predict forward from high IQ to success in an arbitrary field, at least to some degree. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Social_outcomes.
They’re not the same, but they do correlate (which is why it’s not pointless to define g in the first place); now, due to regression to the mean, someone better at theoretical physics than 99.999999% of the population (and no, I don’t think that’s too many 9s) is likely not also better at general intelligence than 99.999999% of the population—but I very strongly doubt that the correct number of 9s is less than half that many. (Anyway, I’m not sure it’d make sense to define g precisely enough to tell whether someone’s 1 in 10^6 or 1 in 10^9.)
You get extreme rarities for specific tasks very easily by combination.
E.g. 1 out of 1000 by g, 1 out of 1000 on factors having to do with intellectual endurance and actually using g to work rather than to find ways to avoid work, 1 out of 1000 on some combination of lucky external factors having to do with becoming a physicist rather than something else, and you have 1 in a billion going.
Given all the other rarities necessary, extreme rarity in g got to be unlikely. Furthermore it is not clear how rarities correspond to actual performance. The world’s best athletes don’t do anything quantifiable a significant % better than merely good athletes.
And of course, at Einstein’s level, Spearman’s law of diminishing returns makes g relatively meaningless. Plus the regression towards the mean severely lowers any measurement by proxy, such as via IQ. The same regression towards the mean severely lowers the expected performance of an individual you’d pick to have same IQ as Einstein by administering IQ tests.
If Einstein represents 1 in 1000, then it would imply that on average the 3 top students in each highschool of 3000 students could be expected to be as “smart as Einstein”. Does that sound reasonable to you?
No, I’m pretty sure Einstein-level intelligence is rarer than that, which is why I put my lower bound at 1 in 10^4 (i.e. the top three students in a region’s worth of high schools). I’m not sure it’s much rarer, though—we don’t have an outstandingly good idea of what makes an Einstein other than sheer weight of g, and we don’t even know that people with the prerequisites of an Einstein would consistently have been funneled into fields where they’d have the opportunity to do things like make famous discoveries in physics.
As to the latter, I kind of suspect not. Of the three smartest people in my (pretty large) high school as measured by the National Merit Scholarship program—probably the only American program that looks for exceptional g on a national scale that late in life, though any number of programs exist for gifted children—one now works for Google’s IT department and a second was, last I heard, going into an art school. The third is… well, not in physics or math either. Not sure what the equivalent of Google would have been in 1935 -- maybe something in mechanical engineering? -- but I doubt the hard sciences then selected for intelligence much better than they do now.
Youre are edging into understanding why this is thread meaningless. Einstein-level g is rarish but not specatacular. Einstein-level domain ability is another thing. Being in the right place at the right time with the right idea is another thing again. Einstein probably wouldn’t have made a Rembrandt-level painter.
...and then, by total coincidence, a couple days ago I went to the website of a Nobel laureate theoretical physicist and was surprised by how much the graphic design looked like the work of a 14-year-old, and not bothering and letting the browser use the default black-on-white text would probably have looked prettier IMO.
But the overwhelming majority of the population (I won’t bother to pull a number of 9s out of my ass) never become a top-level theoretical physicist nor a top-level painter nor a top-level novelist nor a top-level musician nor a top-level statesperson nor a top-level chess player nor anything like that. So, even without assuming that theoretical physics is any more g-loaded than painting, the fact that “Einstein probably wouldn’t have made a Rembrandt-level painter” isn’t a terribly good reason to doubt that Einstein’s g was in the top 0.1%.
The point was this: that Einstein was very exceptional was not a good reason for thinking he had a very exceptional g, because it’s not all about g.
I agree if by the second instance of “very exceptional” you mean “one in a billion”, but not if you mean “one in a thousand”.
By definition, the vast majority of the population can never be top-level. It would stop being top-level if everyone could do it.
On the other hand, you can look at curricula in good schools these days and notice that we definitely seem to be expecting higher intellectual aptitude and greater achievements at early ages these days in order to give people the same levels of status and respect. So hmmm....
Yes, the vast majority of the population can never be top-level at one given thing. But in principle it could well be possible that almost each person is top-level at something (though different people would be top-level at different things). That this isn’t the case is an empirical fact.
Where are you looking, exactly? Over here it looks quite different.
I think we’re feeling two different legs of the elephant, so to speak—or there may just be vast inequalities in education as in everything else these days.
I’d have to do quite a bit of searching to get hard backing statistics, but consider, for instance, the average age at which a young scientist achieves an independent position or tenure, or the average publication quantity of people who do get positions, or even (so I’ve heard) the average publication quantity/quality of people who get into graduate school. As far as I know, these indicators have very much been increasing over time; there may even be a causative link: grade inflation at the lower end of the system causing grade deflation the further up you go.
(For example, I’m told that it’s now difficult to get into graduate school if you don’t already have authorship on a publication.)
There’s also anecdotes like these, indicating that people (at least, aspiring Officially Smart People) are being taught more mathematics at an earlier age than previously.
I wish we had some hard data to clear things up.
That slash is a division bar, right? ;-)
(More seriously: Sure, students today might know much more maths than Newton did, but being able to learn calculus from a teacher and/or a textbook is a much lower bar than being able to invent calculus from scratch.)
True. But the average Maths PhD today is doing something Newton could never have invented at all. Yes, we do stand on the shoulders of giants nowadays, as did Newton, but picking higher-hanging fruit (say: the Standard Model compared to classical mechanics) requires both a greater knowledge of maths and a greater creative effort.
Anyway, point being, I simply don’t feel able to believe that “incredibly high general intelligence” is truly the determining factor of even Famous Historical Hero-level science. There seem to be lots of other things going on.
I remember a time I saw a newsreport about a little girl who “miraculously” survived some terminal disease. Later in the report, it was mentioned that the recovery rate for said disease was something like 2%, and I laughed out loud that 1 in 50 was not a miracle.
You know well that raw intelligence doesn’t predict success as much as good circumstances and a hell of a lot of work-ethic. Einstein’s sum-total qualities may have been extremely rare, but I would never bet that he was just that neurologically different from the rest of us merely very smart people.
Why would you need any g to contribute money?
I believe that was meant to be: those with 1 in 1000 g or below...