I realised something a few weeks back which I feel like I should have realised a long time ago.
The size of the human brain isn’t the thing which makes us smart, rather it is an indicator that we are smart.
A trebling of brain size vs a chimp is impressive but trebling a neural network’s size doesn’t give that much of an improvement in performance.
A more sensible story is that humans started using their brains more usefully (evolutionarily speaking) so it made sense for us to devote more of our resources to bigger brains for the marginal gains that would give.
As I said, I feel like I should have known this for ages. I had a cached thought that human’s big brains (and other things) cause us to be smarter and had never re-examined the thought. Now I think that the “and other things” is doing almost all of the heavy lifting and the size is more incidental to the process.
I realised something a few weeks back which I feel like I should have realised a long time ago.
The size of the human brain isn’t the thing which makes us smart, rather it is an indicator that we are smart.
A trebling of brain size vs a chimp is impressive but trebling a neural network’s size doesn’t give that much of an improvement in performance.
A more sensible story is that humans started using their brains more usefully (evolutionarily speaking) so it made sense for us to devote more of our resources to bigger brains for the marginal gains that would give.
As I said, I feel like I should have known this for ages. I had a cached thought that human’s big brains (and other things) cause us to be smarter and had never re-examined the thought. Now I think that the “and other things” is doing almost all of the heavy lifting and the size is more incidental to the process.