Being highly intelligent comes with it’s own opportunities and pitfalls.
Yes. The question is whether those disadvantages of high intelligence are intrinsic, or merely a consequence of incompatibility with the majority which is of the average intelligence. In other words, if the people with higher intelligence could create a society (or a sufficiently supportive subculture) where they would be the norm, whether they would still have some disadvantages compared with the average people, or whether all their disadvantages would then disappear.
A naive argument for the intrinsic disadvantages is the just-world hypothesis: people believing that when the Creator Fairy creates a new soul with higher IQ, the sense of justice makes the fairy balance it with less health or less happiness, because not doing so would simply be too unfair.
A more convincing argument called Algernon’s law says that if intelligence would be a pure advantage, evolution would have already made us smarter, up to the level where there is some tradeoff in fitness. A possible counter-argument is that our environment changes faster that human biology. The fittness tradeoff for higher intelligence could be something that was a huge problem thousands of years ago, but is not a problem now: for example needing more calories.
On the other hand, if highly intelligent people are successful as long as they have highly intelligent families and friends, that would be an evidence that the disadvantages mostly come from incompatibility with the majority. Which means, the disadvantages could be solved if the highly intelligent people managed to cooperate at overcoming them.
On the other hand, if highly intelligent people are successful as long as they have highly intelligent families and friends, that would be an evidence that the disadvantages mostly come from incompatibility with the majority.
A human will be a greater success in a human tribe than a chimpanzee tribe.
At climbing trees, a human in a primitive human tribe will still be less successful than the chimps.
So, are there any tree-climbing equivalents for highly intelligent people? Or is everything merely a question of having the right tribe?
(Note: I am totally “yay, smart people!” However, if there is some intrinsic weakness we have, I want to know about it, so that I can think strategically about overcoming it.)
At climbing trees,a human in a primitive human tribe will still be less successful than the chimps.
It’s not whether he is more or less successful than chimps, it’s what environment he will be most successful in.
From your comments, I took it as the usual career status and money scale. On a first approximation, being able to produce more intellectual product quickly should be an advantage, if used in accordance with the reward structure of the environment.
On advantages/disadvantages relative to less intelligent people, each in their best environments, I see a few issues.
Being on the tail of the human distribution likely means that the genes aren’t as robust as more central genotypes. Less testing. I wouldn’t be surprised if biologically based mental illness is more likely.
It is likely that there is some trade off between intelligence and other brain functions, some functional cost to more intelligence, depending on how you want to slice and dice brain function.
But in the current environment, I think the environmental disadvantages are so huge that I’m not losing sleep over the intrinsic disadvantages.
For starters, being shuttled through the usual factory school system is easily crippling for a smart kid. Not only does it fail to teach a kid what every kid most needs to learn—how to focus and apply himself, it rewards a smart kid just for being smart, which is about the most dysfunctional lesson he can learn.
I agree with this. All kids would benefit from a better system, but smarter kids could get greater benefits. In addition to the generally useful stuff, they could also learn about how to live specifically as a person more intelligent than others. Not just signalling their intelligence to the teacher.
Without systematical support, some of them will get the information from their family and friends… some will have to learn the hard way… and some will never learn.
An incorrect inference may, under rare circumstances, lead to a useful and coincidentally correct conclusion that just happens to be hard to reach without the incorrect inference. (Of course, it requires being very lucky as well. People make incorrect inferences all the time, but there are very few well-known examples of it working).
For example, viewing heat as a liquid might result in designing a stove that transfers heat to a pot very well, despite heat not being a liquid.
An incorrect inference can be considered basically random—this can, I think, be imitated more efficiently and more reeliably in many cases by considering an evolutionary-algorithm approach to design, in short making random design choices and testing them extremely quickly. This also has the advantage that instead of needing to be lucky enough to hit the right inference first, it can keep going until a suitable design is achieved.
I don’t really know if this counts as an intrinsic weakness...
Yes. The question is whether those disadvantages of high intelligence are intrinsic, or merely a consequence of incompatibility with the majority which is of the average intelligence. In other words, if the people with higher intelligence could create a society (or a sufficiently supportive subculture) where they would be the norm, whether they would still have some disadvantages compared with the average people, or whether all their disadvantages would then disappear.
A naive argument for the intrinsic disadvantages is the just-world hypothesis: people believing that when the Creator Fairy creates a new soul with higher IQ, the sense of justice makes the fairy balance it with less health or less happiness, because not doing so would simply be too unfair.
A more convincing argument called Algernon’s law says that if intelligence would be a pure advantage, evolution would have already made us smarter, up to the level where there is some tradeoff in fitness. A possible counter-argument is that our environment changes faster that human biology. The fittness tradeoff for higher intelligence could be something that was a huge problem thousands of years ago, but is not a problem now: for example needing more calories.
On the other hand, if highly intelligent people are successful as long as they have highly intelligent families and friends, that would be an evidence that the disadvantages mostly come from incompatibility with the majority. Which means, the disadvantages could be solved if the highly intelligent people managed to cooperate at overcoming them.
A human will be a greater success in a human tribe than a chimpanzee tribe.
At climbing trees, a human in a primitive human tribe will still be less successful than the chimps.
So, are there any tree-climbing equivalents for highly intelligent people? Or is everything merely a question of having the right tribe?
(Note: I am totally “yay, smart people!” However, if there is some intrinsic weakness we have, I want to know about it, so that I can think strategically about overcoming it.)
It’s not whether he is more or less successful than chimps, it’s what environment he will be most successful in.
From your comments, I took it as the usual career status and money scale. On a first approximation, being able to produce more intellectual product quickly should be an advantage, if used in accordance with the reward structure of the environment.
On advantages/disadvantages relative to less intelligent people, each in their best environments, I see a few issues.
Being on the tail of the human distribution likely means that the genes aren’t as robust as more central genotypes. Less testing. I wouldn’t be surprised if biologically based mental illness is more likely.
It is likely that there is some trade off between intelligence and other brain functions, some functional cost to more intelligence, depending on how you want to slice and dice brain function.
But in the current environment, I think the environmental disadvantages are so huge that I’m not losing sleep over the intrinsic disadvantages.
For starters, being shuttled through the usual factory school system is easily crippling for a smart kid. Not only does it fail to teach a kid what every kid most needs to learn—how to focus and apply himself, it rewards a smart kid just for being smart, which is about the most dysfunctional lesson he can learn.
I agree with this. All kids would benefit from a better system, but smarter kids could get greater benefits. In addition to the generally useful stuff, they could also learn about how to live specifically as a person more intelligent than others. Not just signalling their intelligence to the teacher.
Without systematical support, some of them will get the information from their family and friends… some will have to learn the hard way… and some will never learn.
An incorrect inference may, under rare circumstances, lead to a useful and coincidentally correct conclusion that just happens to be hard to reach without the incorrect inference. (Of course, it requires being very lucky as well. People make incorrect inferences all the time, but there are very few well-known examples of it working).
For example, viewing heat as a liquid might result in designing a stove that transfers heat to a pot very well, despite heat not being a liquid.
An incorrect inference can be considered basically random—this can, I think, be imitated more efficiently and more reeliably in many cases by considering an evolutionary-algorithm approach to design, in short making random design choices and testing them extremely quickly. This also has the advantage that instead of needing to be lucky enough to hit the right inference first, it can keep going until a suitable design is achieved.
I don’t really know if this counts as an intrinsic weakness...