Re:People Aren’t Dumb, the World Is Hard
by dahart on Friday July 13, 2018 @10:34AM
(#17523263)
> So we are literally at the dumbest, most intellectually feeble level of sentience required to get where we are, otherwise we'd have done it sooner.
I totally agree with you, and you have some interesting points. But, this is a subjective definition of “dumb” that is tautological. It ignores the possibility that it could have taken longer. For example, there are other sentient species on this planet for which it hasn’t happened yet.
You could also phrase what you said with the optimist’s glass-half-full phrasing: we are literally the smartest and most intellectually capable beings to get where we are, otherwise it would have taken longer.
Do you know of Sturgeon’s eponymous Law, “90% of everything is crap”? I didn’t realize at first (maybe because I’m dumb) that this isn’t a statement that things are bad. It’s a subjective and un-arguable proposed definition of what bad is. There’s a distribution of stuff, let’s just call the top 10% good and the bottom 90% crap. Sturgeon’s law applies to people as much as anything else.
> most of us are below that, because we get taken along for the ride by people who are at 1.0 or higher.
This thought has occurred to me before, and I think it’s super interesting to ponder. Today I’m not as sure as I once was that this paints an accurate picture of how progress works. History tends to over-inflate the importance of individual contributions and leave out the vast majority of context and help that luminary figures had. The progress we feel around us today takes immense commercial effort that involves uncountable numbers of people. The US launched first into modern computing because the political and economic conditions were right, not because we had more geniuses.
Perhaps it’s not the top sliver of civilization that is driving innovation at all, perhaps the it’s the average intelligence that hit a threshold, or perhaps it’s not much to do with intelligence but with economy and culture, or maybe it’s inevitable once written language happens. It’s hard to speculate about these things since we have no basis for comparison.
I totally agree with you, and you have some interesting points. But, this is a subjective definition of “dumb” that is tautological. It ignores the possibility that it could have taken longer. For example, there are other sentient species on this planet for which it hasn’t happened yet.
You could also phrase what you said with the optimist’s glass-half-full phrasing: we are literally the smartest and most intellectually capable beings to get where we are, otherwise it would have taken longer.
Do you know of Sturgeon’s eponymous Law, “90% of everything is crap”? I didn’t realize at first (maybe because I’m dumb) that this isn’t a statement that things are bad. It’s a subjective and un-arguable proposed definition of what bad is. There’s a distribution of stuff, let’s just call the top 10% good and the bottom 90% crap. Sturgeon’s law applies to people as much as anything else.
> most of us are below that, because we get taken along for the ride by people who are at 1.0 or higher.
This thought has occurred to me before, and I think it’s super interesting to ponder. Today I’m not as sure as I once was that this paints an accurate picture of how progress works. History tends to over-inflate the importance of individual contributions and leave out the vast majority of context and help that luminary figures had. The progress we feel around us today takes immense commercial effort that involves uncountable numbers of people. The US launched first into modern computing because the political and economic conditions were right, not because we had more geniuses.
Perhaps it’s not the top sliver of civilization that is driving innovation at all, perhaps the it’s the average intelligence that hit a threshold, or perhaps it’s not much to do with intelligence but with economy and culture, or maybe it’s inevitable once written language happens. It’s hard to speculate about these things since we have no basis for comparison.