What I meant was: (1) empirically it seems that very few human beings are good at proving theorems (or even following other people’s proofs), (2) being good at proving theorems seems to correlate somewhat with other things we think of as cleverness, (3) these facts are probably part of why it seems to orthonormal (and, I bet, to lots of others) as if skill in theorem-proving would be one of the hardest things for AI to achieve, but (4) #1 and #2 hold to some extent for other things, like being good at playing chess, that also used to be thought of as particularly impressive human achievements but that seem to be easier to make computers do than all sorts of things that initially seem straightforward.
All of which is rather cumbersome, which is why I put it in the elliptical way I did.
What I meant was: (1) empirically it seems that very few human beings are good at proving theorems (or even following other people’s proofs), (2) being good at proving theorems seems to correlate somewhat with other things we think of as cleverness, (3) these facts are probably part of why it seems to orthonormal (and, I bet, to lots of others) as if skill in theorem-proving would be one of the hardest things for AI to achieve, but (4) #1 and #2 hold to some extent for other things, like being good at playing chess, that also used to be thought of as particularly impressive human achievements but that seem to be easier to make computers do than all sorts of things that initially seem straightforward.
All of which is rather cumbersome, which is why I put it in the elliptical way I did.
Heh, I missed the irony :-)
I didn’t, but realized someone could, hence why my other comment started off with the words “more explicitly” to essentially unpack gjm’s remark.