In Paul Fussell’s book on class (I think), he says that people are really worried about differentiating themselves from the class immediately below them, but largely ignorant of the customs and sometimes even existence of the classes above them. When I found SSC, and then The Motte, and stuff like TLP, I was astonished to find a tier of the internet I had had no idea even existed. The quality of discourse here is . . . usually . . . of the kind that “high brow” (by internet standards) websites THINK they are having, but when you see the best stuff here you realize that those clowns are just flattering themselves. My question is, who is rightly saying the same thing about us? Of what intellectual internet class am I ignorant now? Or does onlineness impose some kind of ceiling on things, and the real galaxy brains are at the equivalent of Davos somewhere?
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I have long been in a quest of finding the smartest people on earth.
I have come to the solid conclusion that such people do not in fact, exists.
Or if they do, they are not present on online forums and their only observable content on the internet would be via their academic papers.
But even so, academic papers are for the major part very rarely brilliant/maximally salient/exhaustive.
Scott Alexander, Yudkowsky and other "superstars" are extremely flawed human beings that have both a deficit of fluid intelligence and an extreme deficit of crystallized intelligence. If they appear sometimes markedly above the average "rationalist", it doesn't change the fact they are extremely deficient compared to what a Homo logicus can achieve.
I have many key data points that proves that the ideal human being has not manifested yet on this earth and most importantly no non-crazy human being has manifested on this earth.
As I am the human that has collected the most signals towards maximal saliency/bypassing natural crazyness, I believe to be the least intellectually dysfunctional human being of this timeline, a finding I should bring a demonstration for in a future blog.
So you have concluded that people can't be ordered by intelligence? Because if they can, surely there will be some that will be "the smartest", regardless if they conform to some preconceived notion of "being the smartest".
No, of course, I didn't litterally mean that there isn't a smartest human on earth (although here I specifically mean maximal debiasing, not about other heterogeneous cognitive abilities), there is one by design, however my point was that human being is sadly not significantly above the other ones in the top. In fact they're quite mediocre and most must reach a deceiving plateau.
Yes, I more or less agree with that. I also think that IQ is just part of the story. It's probably a fundamental ingredient, but it's far from being enough to define an intellectually extraordinary person.
I find IQ tests deeply inept there must be a lesser known better set of tests.
The simple fact among many that we don't even test for the detection of cognitive biases and logical fallacies in ourselves and in others is remarkably degenerate.
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It's hard to know for sure, but any list of smartest people must include Field's Medalists. Certain math and physics doctorates, like pure math or theoretical physics, and also child prodigies. The amount of abstract 'stuff' that must be assimilate to understand those topics is significant.
Indeed that is a nice heuristic but I feel if this was true for past geniuses (e.g. Euler) however this should be less and less true.
Mathematics have reached a plateau and for all matters has been replaced via the curry Howard correspondence by computer science and software engineering and to some extent machine learning.
There are very few important open problems left and the ones that are left are either non-computable, non provable or false, or are long known, conjectured to be true but can't be proven for all cases because of contrived details.
And that is what mathematics are increasingly, an interest in deeply contrived things.
Many of those contrivations are contingencies, but there's also a lot that shouldn't even exist in the first place under a proper finitist framework.
Do you see genius in the last major proofs?
IIRC what has allowed the Poincaré conjecture millennium prize to be solved for all cases even the many contrived ones, has "simply" or at least essentially been a new way to bruteforce the problem, essentially via a specific software made for it.
Most of the genius we attribute to mathematics is a derivation of a few factors:
Obscurantism as a culture, especially elite notations for denoting trivial things. Notation which mostly have no IDE support btw.
as said lack of IDE tooling/culture
the desire of having fun/ideology such as rejecting finitism. See e.g rational trigonometry. There is a semi-similar parallel with the quantum physics culture.
many historical accidents which alter how we teach maths.
Learning data structures and algorithms in computer science should be enough for someone to demysticize mathematics.
Mathematics have changed the world for the better and many of its concepts are useful for a rationalist mind's, however I'm afraid the lack of non-contrived nor real-world impacting challenges combined with the semi-anti intellectual/contrived culture would limits/bottleneck someone intellectual development instead of strengthening it, as a life main occupation.
Of course this is only a generalization.
Note however that regardless of that, fields medals are like Nobel prizes, a weak signal since they do a very poor job at representing who drove the most progress in a question and only show, allegedly, the last person in the problem solving chain.
IIRC the Russian that solved the millennium problema didn't reject the monetary prize because he was hermit weirdo as depicted by some medias, but as a political act since he didn't deserved most of the recognition.
It's imperfect, sure, but a good starting point if one seeks to compile such a hierarchy. Better than the Nobel Prize, at least, except for maybe physics. The politization of the Nobel Prize has long tainted it.
The prior art in mathematics is enormous. To make progress you have to assimilate all this difficult information, which in and of itself, is indicative of having very high with IQ. Whether or not the results are useful is another matter. Major findings are now on the margins, which I think raises the IQ barriers to entry.
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I would hope the smartest individual in this timeline wouldn't be wasting valuable time justifying their intelligence to lesser wits.
Solving actual problems seems a better use of their time.
Contrary to popular belief, time isn't a scarce resource, what is however very scarce, is the amount of time we maximally meaningfully allocate.
Being the least irrational mind on earth is mostly contingent/hortogonal to being a "functional" human being.
In fact maximizing someone's rationality necessarily ultimately leads to a strong dissonance between your thoughts and your actions.
Having a maximal impact on the world is not something I can easily achieve via the use of my physical body. It is much more efficient to design solutions in the realm of ideas than to implement them physically.
In fact to maximally alter the world, one must either communicate his ideas/world's actionable roadmap via the internet and/or accumulate power including via external recognition.
So in fact defending the case that I could informatively disrupt this world should be one of my top priorities and in an ideal world the rationalist/effective altruist diaspora would leverage it and share to me funding, visibility and other kinds of effectors to reality.
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