No, classifying Aumann as smart doesn’t adequately capture my intuition as to what the word “smart” means. Suppose, for example, that Grigori Perelman literally believed in the existence of the flying spaghetti monster, and believed that drinking a mixture of his own urine and rats blood every morning would allow him to fly through space. Well, Perelman can certainly own your ass at algebraic topology and differential geometry, but I don’t quite think that you’d be prepared to call him smart if he held the beliefs I described above. Perhaps “seriously good at some specialized subject but overall quite messed up” would capture your intuition. What do others think? Am I misusing the word “smart”?
The Aumann situation seems analogous to me. Indeed, the fact that Aumann supposedly studies rationality, yet still cannot see that religion is false makes me worry about his sanity even more than I would worry about the sanity of the fictional Perelman above.
My definition of “smart” is not equivalent to “is an atheist”, but in the background of the overwhelming evidence available to someone like Aumann, I would list atheism as a necessary condition.
Roko, do you think someone who is raised a theist but has all of your other necessary and (otherwise) jointly sufficient conditions for smartness, and then deconverts, becomes smart in that moment?
If we model the human mind as a consistent logical system with empirical input from reality, this is impossible. Why? Well, the religious claim is incompatible with our observations—wildly so.
For example, I’d list conditions for smartness as: a good grasp of logical thinking, avoidance of fallacies and contradications, ability to make plans, incorporate what you see around you into your worldview, spot when someone is pulling some trick of sophistry on you (i.e. not be easily fooled), understand what you want out of life and go about getting it in a sensible manner, etc.
A person with all these qualities cannot look at the world we see around us, be exposed to evolutionary theory, modern science (including cognitive science), the history of religion, etc and believe in a loving God.
What tends to happen, I think, is that someone picks up almost all of the above traits with the exception of the “a good grasp of logical thinking, avoidance of fallacies and contradictions” bit. Then something pushes them a little bit on the “clear, logical thinking” axis, and they deconvert.
Now that Roko’s actually explained Roko::smart, we don’t need to keep arguing about what counts as “smart” vs. Roko::smart. It’s enough to note that when Roko uses the term, the above nonstandard definition is what is meant. Let’s not argue over semantics if we don’t have to.
It would seem to follow from this that you don’t think the following people can be “smart”:
children
people who have not been educated on the subjects you mention
people who are good at partitioning, possibly because of a considered belief in fideism
people who have conflicting desires and have not worked out which they prefer to endorse on a second-order level
people who self-deceive on some level, or avoid thinking about the subject of religion very hard, in order to achieve a good quality of life, after having established that they consider the quality of life their top priority
As for children, we tend to judge them in relation to other children. A child can be relatively smart, but not smart. For example, if you want to insult the intelligence of an adult, you say that they display “child-like naivety”.
people who have not been educated on the subjects you mention
Typically one picks these things up. Very few people have actually been educated in “not being easily fooled”, for example.
possibly because of a considered belief in fideism
Wikipedia: “Fideism is an epistemological theory which maintains that faith is independent of reason, or that reason and faith are hostile to each other and faith is superior at arriving at particular truths”
If you think that blindly believing something is a good way to get to the truth, then in my book you are an idiot. “Not smart” isn’t even strong enough.
people who self-deceive on some level, or avoid thinking about the subject of religion very hard, in order to achieve a good quality of life, after having established that they consider the quality of life their top priority
This is a good one. But if you realize that you’re deceiving yourself, but not that this weakens your belief in the thing you are deceiving yourself about, then you must be pretty slow, really?! Sure, it’s great if you can get this to work, but if you can get it to work then you have to be a bit dumb.
When I am inclined to call someone childish, it’s because I want to express an opinion about their maturity, not their intelligence. Smart people can be immature and mature people can be pretty dim.
Some people really seem to be able to self-deceive without obviously weakening the belief they’re deceiving themselves about. It’s not a skill I have, but I shouldn’t assume that no one has it. I don’t think it’s obvious at all that these people are necessarily dumb.
Strongly believing X, whilst at the same time believing that you are deceiving yourself into believing X and ignoring the evidence, with the background assumption that randomly formed beliefs are not likely to be true, is a logical contradiction.
Yup. In general usage, “smart” means “good at one or some mental tasks”. (Your hypothetical example of Grigori Perelman is roughly analogous to the real example of Srinivasa Ramanujan.)
Isn’t that why we have the smart/rational distinction? One way you might see it: smart = generates relevant logical information at a high rate, rational = processes this information in the right way so as to come to true beliefs. (This is vague but I hope you can see the intuition.) Aumann and hypothetical-Perelman both seem able to generate interesting pieces of reasoning better than almost all people, but seem to sometimes have trouble fully stitching together and accepting the implications of the interesting true ones when not disciplined by standards of mathematical proof.
I’ll agree to that, perhaps taboo’ing “smart” and replacing it with “clever”. Smart has too many connotations of “rational” to me. It is generally accepted that you can be “very clever but not very smart”
No, classifying Aumann as smart doesn’t adequately capture my intuition as to what the word “smart” means. Suppose, for example, that Grigori Perelman literally believed in the existence of the flying spaghetti monster, and believed that drinking a mixture of his own urine and rats blood every morning would allow him to fly through space. Well, Perelman can certainly own your ass at algebraic topology and differential geometry, but I don’t quite think that you’d be prepared to call him smart if he held the beliefs I described above. Perhaps “seriously good at some specialized subject but overall quite messed up” would capture your intuition. What do others think? Am I misusing the word “smart”?
The Aumann situation seems analogous to me. Indeed, the fact that Aumann supposedly studies rationality, yet still cannot see that religion is false makes me worry about his sanity even more than I would worry about the sanity of the fictional Perelman above.
My definition of “smart” is not equivalent to “is an atheist”, but in the background of the overwhelming evidence available to someone like Aumann, I would list atheism as a necessary condition.
Roko, do you think someone who is raised a theist but has all of your other necessary and (otherwise) jointly sufficient conditions for smartness, and then deconverts, becomes smart in that moment?
If we model the human mind as a consistent logical system with empirical input from reality, this is impossible. Why? Well, the religious claim is incompatible with our observations—wildly so.
For example, I’d list conditions for smartness as: a good grasp of logical thinking, avoidance of fallacies and contradications, ability to make plans, incorporate what you see around you into your worldview, spot when someone is pulling some trick of sophistry on you (i.e. not be easily fooled), understand what you want out of life and go about getting it in a sensible manner, etc.
A person with all these qualities cannot look at the world we see around us, be exposed to evolutionary theory, modern science (including cognitive science), the history of religion, etc and believe in a loving God.
What tends to happen, I think, is that someone picks up almost all of the above traits with the exception of the “a good grasp of logical thinking, avoidance of fallacies and contradictions” bit. Then something pushes them a little bit on the “clear, logical thinking” axis, and they deconvert.
Now that Roko’s actually explained Roko::smart, we don’t need to keep arguing about what counts as “smart” vs. Roko::smart. It’s enough to note that when Roko uses the term, the above nonstandard definition is what is meant. Let’s not argue over semantics if we don’t have to.
So it is kind of important that I use words in a standard way. I’ll stop saying “smart” and just use “narrowly-clever” and “rational”
I’d say that’s an eminently rational policy.
It would seem to follow from this that you don’t think the following people can be “smart”:
children
people who have not been educated on the subjects you mention
people who are good at partitioning, possibly because of a considered belief in fideism
people who have conflicting desires and have not worked out which they prefer to endorse on a second-order level
people who self-deceive on some level, or avoid thinking about the subject of religion very hard, in order to achieve a good quality of life, after having established that they consider the quality of life their top priority
Am I reading you incorrectly?
As for children, we tend to judge them in relation to other children. A child can be relatively smart, but not smart. For example, if you want to insult the intelligence of an adult, you say that they display “child-like naivety”.
Typically one picks these things up. Very few people have actually been educated in “not being easily fooled”, for example.
Wikipedia: “Fideism is an epistemological theory which maintains that faith is independent of reason, or that reason and faith are hostile to each other and faith is superior at arriving at particular truths”
If you think that blindly believing something is a good way to get to the truth, then in my book you are an idiot. “Not smart” isn’t even strong enough.
This is a good one. But if you realize that you’re deceiving yourself, but not that this weakens your belief in the thing you are deceiving yourself about, then you must be pretty slow, really?! Sure, it’s great if you can get this to work, but if you can get it to work then you have to be a bit dumb.
When I am inclined to call someone childish, it’s because I want to express an opinion about their maturity, not their intelligence. Smart people can be immature and mature people can be pretty dim.
Some people really seem to be able to self-deceive without obviously weakening the belief they’re deceiving themselves about. It’s not a skill I have, but I shouldn’t assume that no one has it. I don’t think it’s obvious at all that these people are necessarily dumb.
Well it depends what you mean by “dumb”.
Strongly believing X, whilst at the same time believing that you are deceiving yourself into believing X and ignoring the evidence, with the background assumption that randomly formed beliefs are not likely to be true, is a logical contradiction.
Roko, could you give more detail in your reasoning here? Is any religious claim incompatible with observations, or are you thinking of a specific one?
This is false, wildly so. Or what do you mean by ‘the religious claim’?
Yup. In general usage, “smart” means “good at one or some mental tasks”. (Your hypothetical example of Grigori Perelman is roughly analogous to the real example of Srinivasa Ramanujan.)
Isn’t that why we have the smart/rational distinction? One way you might see it: smart = generates relevant logical information at a high rate, rational = processes this information in the right way so as to come to true beliefs. (This is vague but I hope you can see the intuition.) Aumann and hypothetical-Perelman both seem able to generate interesting pieces of reasoning better than almost all people, but seem to sometimes have trouble fully stitching together and accepting the implications of the interesting true ones when not disciplined by standards of mathematical proof.
I’ll agree to that, perhaps taboo’ing “smart” and replacing it with “clever”. Smart has too many connotations of “rational” to me. It is generally accepted that you can be “very clever but not very smart”