This seems to be a counterpoint to Eliezer’s old post Competent Elites, which posits that as you get to higher and higher levels, people do indeed get more and more competent.
Yeah, that post hasn’t much matched up with my experience. It feels like a relic of an older era, before the curtain went up on just how crazy things really can be at the top.
That’s not contradictory. It’s simply true that average and median competence get higher both over time for people (peaking in the 30s-50s depending on dimension of competence), and get higher as you look at more respected cohorts (Navy SEALs, CEOs, etc.). It’s _ALSO_ true that when compared to naive expectations, ain’t none of us worth a damn. It’s simultaneously true that nobody is ACTUALLY competent, and that some groups are impressively less incompetent than others.
It’s a question of how much of the Y axis you choose to look at. Pretty much all humans are in a very narrow band of capability when put on a gradient from free-floating hydrogen to a theoretical future galaxy-spanning AI. On that absolute scale, even comparing Iain Banks’ Ship minds to flatworms is only a minor gap. On the RELATIVE scale of median modern human to elite (top decile, say) modern human, it seems like a nearly qualitative difference.
Hmm. I read it as “understand that there are people significantly more competent than others”. What have I missed? In his closing, he writes:
But I’m pretty sure that, statistically speaking, there’s a lot more cream at the top than most people seem willing to admit in writing.
He didn’t talk about the other part of my comment (that humans are a very small range of competency spectrum and NO human is very smart compared to imaginary perfect minds). That idea was the taken from the current post, which I tried to show was NOT a counterpoint, but just a compatible observation.
I think you’re right. I had a memory of the post where Eliezer was trying to say something like “We’re all in good hands,” but after rereading I don’t see that as much.
This seems to be a counterpoint to Eliezer’s old post Competent Elites, which posits that as you get to higher and higher levels, people do indeed get more and more competent.
Yeah, that post hasn’t much matched up with my experience. It feels like a relic of an older era, before the curtain went up on just how crazy things really can be at the top.
That’s not contradictory. It’s simply true that average and median competence get higher both over time for people (peaking in the 30s-50s depending on dimension of competence), and get higher as you look at more respected cohorts (Navy SEALs, CEOs, etc.). It’s _ALSO_ true that when compared to naive expectations, ain’t none of us worth a damn. It’s simultaneously true that nobody is ACTUALLY competent, and that some groups are impressively less incompetent than others.
It’s a question of how much of the Y axis you choose to look at. Pretty much all humans are in a very narrow band of capability when put on a gradient from free-floating hydrogen to a theoretical future galaxy-spanning AI. On that absolute scale, even comparing Iain Banks’ Ship minds to flatworms is only a minor gap. On the RELATIVE scale of median modern human to elite (top decile, say) modern human, it seems like a nearly qualitative difference.
That doesn’t seem to be what Eliezer was implying though.
Hmm. I read it as “understand that there are people significantly more competent than others”. What have I missed? In his closing, he writes:
He didn’t talk about the other part of my comment (that humans are a very small range of competency spectrum and NO human is very smart compared to imaginary perfect minds). That idea was the taken from the current post, which I tried to show was NOT a counterpoint, but just a compatible observation.
I think you’re right. I had a memory of the post where Eliezer was trying to say something like “We’re all in good hands,” but after rereading I don’t see that as much.