Among humans +6 SD g factor humans do not seem in general as more capable than +3 SD g factor humans as +3 SD g factor humans are compared to median humans.
The smartest humans might be more likely to be mentally ill, the smartest monkeys may be more likely to be mentally ill.
There is no reason to think human intelligence is normally distributed. But if we go with that assumption, +3 SD is 1 in a thousand. Fairly common in intellectual circles. +6 is 1 in a billion. There should be 8 people worldwide that are +6 SD. Even if you knew who those people were (it isn’t like the world has a standardized global g factor test that is applied to all humans), you would still have only 8 datapoints, leaving a lot of room for chance. Subjective impressiveness is a subjective measure.
Discovering something like relitivity takes around +3SD, plus a fair bit of “luck”. Some of that luck is being born in a position where you get maths lessons and time to think. Some is deciding to focus your intelligence on physics. Some is all over the place. Like whether or not you read a particular textbook, whether your thinking style is more geometric or formal symbolic. Whether an apple falls on your head. Neurochemical noise.
When general relativity was discovered, there was probably 1 +6SD human, (smaller population) And statistically they were a peasant farmer never taught anything beyond arthritic, who may well have been conscripted into some war and shot at. Saying “this +6 human failed to invent relativity” is putting an extremely weak upper bound on the capabilities of +6 SD humans.
If we go into the logic of evolution, selection pressure applies mostly near median. +3SD is already getting to the region where selection pressure is minimal. Anything beyond that is just getting lucky on the genetic dice. Consider a model where there are 650 genes, each 99% likely to have the correct version, and with a 1% chance of having a deleterious mutation. A +3SD human has all the genes correct. Thus the only way to go beyond that is to not only have all the genes correct, but for randomness to produce a new gene that’s even better. The average human has 6.5 bad genes, so in this model, you would need 6.5 beneficial mutations (and no deleterious ones) to get the +6SD human. This is far too unlikely to ever happen.
So without hard data, we can’t put reasonable upper bounds on what a +6SD human is capable of. Even with any data you might gather, I don’t think it would be easy to learn much about the limits of intelligence. Any signal is mostly about the upper tail produced by evolution. And possibly about who is best at goodhearting your g test.
we can’t put reasonable upper bounds on what a +6SD human is capable of.
We know they still think using neurons connected by axons that have a max propagation velocity. (and this person has the best variant available). They have 1 set of eyes, hands, and mouth.
These put a hard limit on what they could be capable of regardless of their gifts.
The smartest humans might be more likely to be mentally ill, the smartest monkeys may be more likely to be mentally ill.
There is no reason to think human intelligence is normally distributed. But if we go with that assumption, +3 SD is 1 in a thousand. Fairly common in intellectual circles. +6 is 1 in a billion. There should be 8 people worldwide that are +6 SD. Even if you knew who those people were (it isn’t like the world has a standardized global g factor test that is applied to all humans), you would still have only 8 datapoints, leaving a lot of room for chance. Subjective impressiveness is a subjective measure.
Discovering something like relitivity takes around +3SD, plus a fair bit of “luck”. Some of that luck is being born in a position where you get maths lessons and time to think. Some is deciding to focus your intelligence on physics. Some is all over the place. Like whether or not you read a particular textbook, whether your thinking style is more geometric or formal symbolic. Whether an apple falls on your head. Neurochemical noise.
When general relativity was discovered, there was probably 1 +6SD human, (smaller population) And statistically they were a peasant farmer never taught anything beyond arthritic, who may well have been conscripted into some war and shot at. Saying “this +6 human failed to invent relativity” is putting an extremely weak upper bound on the capabilities of +6 SD humans.
If we go into the logic of evolution, selection pressure applies mostly near median. +3SD is already getting to the region where selection pressure is minimal. Anything beyond that is just getting lucky on the genetic dice. Consider a model where there are 650 genes, each 99% likely to have the correct version, and with a 1% chance of having a deleterious mutation. A +3SD human has all the genes correct. Thus the only way to go beyond that is to not only have all the genes correct, but for randomness to produce a new gene that’s even better. The average human has 6.5 bad genes, so in this model, you would need 6.5 beneficial mutations (and no deleterious ones) to get the +6SD human. This is far too unlikely to ever happen.
So without hard data, we can’t put reasonable upper bounds on what a +6SD human is capable of. Even with any data you might gather, I don’t think it would be easy to learn much about the limits of intelligence. Any signal is mostly about the upper tail produced by evolution. And possibly about who is best at goodhearting your g test.
we can’t put reasonable upper bounds on what a +6SD human is capable of.
We know they still think using neurons connected by axons that have a max propagation velocity. (and this person has the best variant available). They have 1 set of eyes, hands, and mouth.
These put a hard limit on what they could be capable of regardless of their gifts.