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For the longest time, before we had loads of tests and studies on the topic of intelligence, being smart was something like pornography. It was not easy to define, but you knew it when you saw it. The smart person was well-read. You knew this because he could quote famous writers from memory. In fact, memorizing lots of things was essential to being a smart person. Of course, the only way to memorize lots of things was to read lots of things.
This view of intelligence remains with us, despite the fact there is little reason to remember much of anything. The guy who can quote a famous work of literature at the dinner party is assumed to be smart. The guy who speaks more than one language must be smart, because he had to memorize a second vocabulary. The fact that he does nothing useful with his life is overlooked. That old assumption about having a head full of information indicating smartness is still with us.
We may be on the cusp of that old notion fading away. In everyone’s pocket is a device that gives you access to the sum total of human knowledge. Not only is there no reason to memorize how many feet are in a mile, but there is also no reason to remember street names or how to get from one place to the other. That magic device will tell you where to go and how long it will take. It will also tell you in whatever language you like, in whatever country you find yourself.
Technology is not only making information available to us, but it is also about to make it much easier to access by way of Large Language Models. The hype around artificial intelligence obscures the fact that most decisions are normative, so those can never be made by robots unless we program the robot to do it. What AI will do for us is make the vast stock of information online easier to access. You will no longer have to be clever to search the internet for answers to your questions.
It will also make learning a language somewhat pointless. Your mobile device can already be used as something of a universal translator. It can translate what you say in your language to a close enough version of another language. You can scan foreign words, and an app will translate them. We are not far from the point where anyone from anywhere can communicate to everyone through a real-time translation service they can access through their mobile device.
Einstein famously quipped that he had no reason to remember how many feet were in a mile because he could look it up in a book. The same thing is about to happen to the study of languages for most people. Unless you are linguist or study a foreign culture, there is no practical reason to learn another language. The same is true for lots of things like dates of specific events and the names of important people. What will matter in the future is using the tools to access this data.
That sounds like heresy to most people, but we see this happening all around us as the internet becomes ubiquitous. We are losing patience for the long argument or the slow-paced story, because we are used to tapping a few keys and getting the pay off without all the extra stuff. For young people who have been socialized on the internet, waiting for anything is intolerable now. They just want the answer, and they have little interest in the context around the answer.
Schools are struggling with this reality. It is not just students using their phones to get the answer on a test. They can use the internet to write their papers and do so in a way that makes it hard to detect the fraud. The same tools a teacher can use to find plagiarism or answer sharing are available to the students, who can then make their work look original enough to pass the test. Getting a good grade is not about learning the material, but about mastering technology.
There is a practical genius to it. Education in this age is about passing through a series of gates to get a credential. Few students use much of what they learn in school in their work life, so cheating makes a lot of sense to them. In a way, they are mastering what they will actually use as an adult to game an antiquated and often pointless education system in order to attain a credential. This is especially true for college where most of what is taught has no practical value to the student.
We are moving from a world where being smart was about memorizing lots of information to a world where being smart means knowing how to find the information quickly and efficiently. Put another way, being smart is not about the store of data, but the store of metadata. Knowing the words, phrases and context of data is what makes finding the data possible. The same skull packed with metadata has access to vastly more data than the skull could ever hold.
This presents a bit of a problem in that we lack ways to display our stock of metadata, so how can we know who is smart? In the old days, we could safely assume the guy quoting Longfellow was above average in smarts. There is no way to quote metadata in a way that tells us much of anything. On the other hand, is someone highly skilled at finding the answer actually smart? It is, after all, a form of problem solving which is the skill we expect to be honed through conventional education.
This also raises the issue of formal assessment. Our systems assume that the person who scores high on the math and verbal portion of the SAT, for example, is smarter than the person who scores poorly on one or both portions. That will probably remain true in the metadata age, but what about the person who scores high on his verbal, but average on the math compared to the reverse? We value math over verbal, for practical reasons, but in the metadata age verbal skills may be more valuable.
Of course, all of this points to something else. We are becoming an increasingly fragile species due to our dependence on technology. A prolonged GPS outage, for example, would mean deliveries grind to a halt. No one owns a map, much less has the ability to use one to navigate. If the power goes out, our advanced skills at finding information on the internet quickly becomes a liability. Suddenly we are in a world of simpletons who do not know how anything works.
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Real skills – how to fix or make something, for example – will always be the mark of intelligence. The Internet will die with our technological civilization but smart people will find a way to get by.
I’m sure there is a lot of this sorting going on in rural NC over the last week or so. I’m sure the metadata bug men working their remote FAANGMAN jobs thought to download Wikipedia to a local drive instead of assuming the internet would be on.
Yes! It’s the “level 2 and beyond” ability that counts, Of course, the irony here is that you can go to the Caribbean and see broken equipment everywhere despite the existence of repair videos on Youtube. Most of the world is watching midget porn on the web and cannot even get to level 1.
I’m not sure about that.
i am a girl and still have a LOT to learn about fixing things (not a natural ability in most women, we know).
However, it’s a pretty short list of things I could fix (with my hands) or make. (Other than a tasty meal in the kitchen.)
So I’m not sure your position entirely holds true.
Keeping the good hot meals coming is a first-rate, irreplaceable skill when things are falling apart.
And in my observation, most good cooks are smart people, who have an intuitive grasp of the chemistry and physics that makes the bread rise and the soup not boil over.
I’m sympathetic to your point, but can’t agree with it entirely. Hence, it is a commonplace of genius that figures such as Einstein and Newton have virtually no practical knowhow, or intelligence, if you prefer. And yet very few people would claim that your basic mechanic, plumber or carpenter is in the same class intellectually as people like Einstein and Newton. It almost seems as though extremely high intelligence somehow forecloses the ability to perform all but the most rudimentary of practical functions. But ironically, the basic skills of the tradesmen are arguably more important than the refined speculations and… Read more »
By Isaac Asimov What is intelligence, anyway? When I was in the army, I received the kind of aptitude test that all soldiers took and, against a normal of 100, scored 160. No one at the base had ever seen a figure like that, and for two hours they made a big fuss over me. (It didn’t mean anything. The next day I was still a buck private with KP – kitchen police – as my highest duty.) All my life I’ve been registering scores like that, so that I have the complacent feeling that I’m highly intelligent, and I… Read more »
Your mechanic’s IQ test reminds me of the old English brain teaser “As I Was Going to St. Ives” (which I was not clever enough to figure out.) I can identify with your military story. I did fairly well on ASVAB but don’t recall the scores. On the SAT I was in the high 1200s, “mildly gifted.” What I lacked then, as now, was ambition, focus, drive, call it what you like. Yes, I really was and still remain a Layabout. I’ve tried my hand at fixit type stuff and — at best — I’m average, perhaps. Whatever the… Read more »
I share some of your qualities but have attributed them to my virtue. I was born without a greed gene.
If you’re so smart why couldn’t you write all that in fewer words???
Read the first part, from Isaac Asimov
Very enjoyable comment to read. Thank you.
Everyone I’ve ever met that took the ASVAB says they did great on the ASVAB and then end up with an MOS like that. The fix is in me thinks.
Being intelligent doesn’t preclude you from practicality, I think it just stems from an appreciation for different systems or phenomena. Genius or average guys can appreciate cars or aeroplanes for different reasons. Though I’ll grant there is also an aspect of the aloof/absent minded professor about extremely intelligent people. The two hyper-genius guys I knew (of) back in maths weren’t very functional in a normal human way, but one of them was socially capable. He just didn’t bother or see much point to it. I basically refuse to believe that this fellow isn’t at least reasonably intelligent: https://www.youtube.com/user/matthiaswandel He also… Read more »
Sometimes a person of supreme intellect really is “screwed up”, or at least, very eccentric. Exhibit A, from Rolf Dobelli’s The Art of the Good Life. “Grigori Perelman, born in 1966, is considered the greatest living mathematician. In 2002 he solved one of the seven mathematical “Millennium Problems.” The remaining six are still unsolved. He was selected for the Fields Medal, a kind of Nobel Prize for mathematics—and declined. He even turned down the million-dollar prize money, although he could certainly use it: Perelman is unemployed, living with his mother in a high-rise block in St. Petersburg. Mathematics is all… Read more »
There is no doubt in my mind that intelligence breeds eccentricity. The reasons for that, however, are obscure. But, as your example of Perelman indicates, it could stem from an utter disregard for the mores and customs of the common man. Beethoven is a classic example. He couldn’t possible be bothered with the niceties and social emoliuments of his society, and in consequence, behaved like bizarre horse’s ass.
There may be bumps ahead but it’s almost impossible for our whole technological civilization to die out. The internet is here to stay. Even sizable wars in Ukraine haven’t knocked their grid out. Sure, the Russians have pulled their punches but nonetheless they’ve dropped some serious bombs on their infrastructure. Things are more robust than preppers like to think. The only way it all goes down is if white people disappear.
Memorizing a lot of facts changes your brain and helps it form connections and process data, and it keeps it healthy. So does learning a new language. So, my first thought is that intelligent people will still keep doing these things. It’s an intellectual challenge to, say, learn how to read Chinese or whatever. Intelligent people can process data and form different opinions while people who rely on the computer in their pockets will just be able to regurgitate information. We see this today – you can go on Twitter and find real people who clearly can do little more… Read more »
Vital point re brain connections and changes. When I see toddlers swiping screens I want to shoot their parents. Take the average (not particularly bright) individual and raise him via electronics – the result is neither pretty nor practical. My grandson climbs and swings at the park, examines caterpillars, sings, and learns about tanks and helicopters.
Your missive cannot be upvoted enough. Seen this myself with grandchildren—and even adults. There is something about TV and those poisonous hand held devices in the hands of children and youths. I now proudly go about and profess my ignorance using my $800 cell phone. Yeah, those helping snicker at me on the side I’m sure, but I don’t care. I can figure out what I have to do, to run the GD EV I bought and to call a number for assistance, screw the rest. But I can see the future, and it ain’t pretty. Yeah, it’s an “I’ll… Read more »
Writing by hand and working math problems by hand also has similar positive effects of the brain.
Learning the long division algorithm by hand in 5th or 6th grade, and why it worked, was a challenge, but it opened up vast domains of thought to explore.
Learning to solve algebraic ratios made classical chamber music more understandable.
Yeah the learning a language part I think Z is a bit premature on. There -will- be a time when we have a universal translator, Star Trek style, but we are not there yet. A few more years at least. I know this because I have been traveling parts of the world in the past year where English is -not- a thing so I have deep experience with the barriers of language. I have 3 translation tools with me at all times. Google Translate (requires internet, not always available), a fairly advanced pair of earbuds that translate in real-time, and… Read more »
One of the old man’s former coworkers was convinced to come out of retirement ($$$$$) to fix Boeing’s wing to fuselage “problems” with the, I think, 787. The old guy traveled up to Seattle to be met with: “the computer models say”. His response was to drag the whole engineering group down to the prototype and point at the cracks that the models said weren’t there. That guy died eight years ago. Now what?
Now a lot of passengers will die needlessly.
Oy. Not the first time I’ve heard such tales around aircraft. Maybe this very tale.
And it illustrates the problem. There’s no understanding that if the model can’t predict the reality, the model is wrong.,… and more than likely was built on a false premise.
The gods of diversity will say otherwise, just believe harderrrr.
Models produce the result you tell them to. Read statistician Briggs’ blog, “https://www.wmbriggs.com/“ an early reference by none other than Z-man during the scamdemic. Basically, one (implicitly) assumes complete knowledge of the phenomenon in question and therefore an understanding of all the inputs necessary in the predictive model. This is a high requirement and therefore most modeling does not reach such understanding. Not that incomplete understanding should prevent such modeling—it’s still a good tool for exploring/testing one’s knowledge. But to make societal policy out of such modeling is quite another story. One of the early modelers, Neil Ferguson, a British… Read more »
As a project manager for one of our largest aerospace firms, the number one way you will get a butt-chewing from me is using computer models exclusively to prove that something will work as advertised. As I always tell young engineers so dependent on the models, there are factors that the programmers of that model haven’t anticipated because they’re flesh and blood humans who are as imperfect as you are. Trust, but verify. Models and computer-aided design tools are exactly that: Tools. They’re not always correct. They must be checked and rechecked by other methods. My young engineers laugh at… Read more »
You went from MD to aerospace project manager? There must be an interesting story there.
Models offer the illusion of proof and I try not to depend too much on them because you can usually set up a similar model with just a few alterations that gives a different result.
As much as I like the game theory models that show that cooperating (ethnic) players beat individualist (white) players, I’m pretty sure that a dedicated civic nationalist could create a game theory model that validated his views.
Once upon a time, important knowledge was known as wisdom, and it was useful because it helped you to survive and thrive in your local environment. And intelligence was simply the predilection of living one’s life under the influence of this wisdom. And it was self-reinforcing because being smart kept you alive and reproducing, whereas being stupid generally got you dead. Then civilization happened and the natural gauntlets of selection disappeared. We now live in a world in which being a parasite is a success strategy, at least in the short term. But you cannot eat an internet search event.
Being smart or clever means using information or previously solved problems and extrapolating those ideas to solve new or existing problems.
People who can not do that are and will always be blundering idiots!
My formulation: Intelligence is the ability to recognize patterns in data and further to generate new ideas from those recognized patterns.
Having a good memory allows your pattern matcher more data to draw on, but the engines are the pattern recognizer and the pattern extrapolator.
I came across the phrase “one dead battery away from being an idiot” somewhere.
“You can always look it up… or can you?” is a great piece by ED Hirsch
I love this expression!
its a great litmus test: if the lights went out tmw, and we had no electricity for, say, 10 days (perish the thought), would we have the supplies or know-how to get by?
it would likely devolve into a shit sho (at least for me, because of where I currently to live).
But that is an excellent litmus test anyway.
With profound irony, here is the article:
https://www.aft.org/sites/default/files/LookItUpSpring2000.pdf
Have you ever been driving in a rural county in the middle of no where depending on your phone GPS to navigate and then suddenly, there is no connectivity and you don’t know exactly where you are going since you neglected to also have a physical map as a back up?
It’s always a good idea to have a stone age skill…making soap, basic medical knowledge, brewing alcohol, hunting/foraging, shooting an arrow…just in case. I’m telling every teenager I know this bit of wisdom.
This feels like we are in a world of “light-switch” intelligence. If a simple denial to the computer Gods reveals who does and doesn’t have a stored body of knowledge, then whoever controls that connection has the real power. This is why I stress to my sons the importance of having physical sources. (books, repair manuals, etc)
Yes. I’m totally screwed because I cannot repair anything without youtube.
Funny thing is, YouTube videos don’t cover 100% how to fix issues you may have. Case in point: My nine or ten year old lawn mower (not sure when I bought it) decided last week would be a good time to die. Would start, run for a few minutes, lose power and die. I wasn’t too worried about it as I’d seen it do that before. Off to the hardware store for a new air filter and spark plug, and a few shots of Sta-Bil Start! in the gas tank. Fix ‘er right up. Nope. 👎 Still does the start,… Read more »
Go to the lawn mower section of “My Tractor Forum”. Chances are someone there knows exactly how to fix the old mower… lost of collectors and shade-tree mechanics there. Yours is a common problem. (In the case of one I have and haven’t got round to fixing, it’s cuz I’d used it to cut too many big weeds and sheared the flywheel key.)
And if you leave it on the curb, someone will take it and fix it, and avert a bit of waste (and loss of perhaps irreplaceable parts).
And if you leave it on the curb, someone will take it and fix it, and avert a bit of waste
Already left it on the curb. In our suburb we don’t have the VIBRANT! metal pickers like we used to back in Silly-nois.
At this point I want to be paid for it to be crushed, cubed, and melted down. With a vengeance. 😈
Oh to be 16 years old again on a Saturday afternoon at peak Midsummer. How I hated that #%^*ing machine!
Now would give anything to be back there.
I have a similar experience recently with my 11-year-old lightly used pressure washer. Electric start never was reliable so left to rot. One day the pull starter cord was stuck. I got mad at the unit but at least did not get violent (Did I mention I’m prone to vexation? I have mellowed a bit with age. I was the small child that smashed toys that “broke.”) I was angry enough to swear off repairing the unit, since I have to hire a service to come pick up the unit, repair it, bring it back. In a fit of annoyance,… Read more »
I have the opposite example – YouTube kept my mower going for years after I would have probably gotten rid of it. My mower just stopped mid-mow one day, and I searched the Toro model. There was a video that showed how to unscrew a bolt (sorry not sure what the part was) which had a small hole running through it. The hole had some debris which I cleared out, and sure enough it started running right away. Same thing happened a couple years later, did the fix and got it running again. Finally replaced it but definitely a good… Read more »
Humph. I have a hard time repairing anything even with the aid of Youtube vidz.
Quite the humble-brag!
The knowledge (repair manual, YT, memorized) is vital but not sufficient. One must also have the willingness (there are things my husband knows how to do, or could find via YT, but is not willing to take the time and would rather pay someone else). Finally, one needs the ability – to wit, I now know how to lever down the spare tire in our 4runner, but I still can’t do it and change the tire myself.
As important as intelligence and knowledge of the past (manuals, YT), is *persistence*. Some people have a lot more of this essential quality than others.
When working on a difficult problem, whether software, plumbing or political, my battle is with exasperation.
Same here. I get frustrated too easily, and begin cussing and breaking things. Better off just paying somebody to do it, although that does my ego no favors.
Shouldn’t we encourage our descendants to thrive in the world that will actually exist? I see a lot of people on our side preparing for life in 1880 instead of 2030.
Access to information, no matter how streamlined is never going to do much to help stupid people. If anything, more streamlined access to information is going to widen the gap between smart and dumb people, not narrow it.
Curiosity plus experimentation counts for a great deal, the people who wanted to find out what was on the other side of the hill, the people that wanted to find out how the clock worked, the people who decided the cave was too damp, let’s see if these branches over here could be attached with some vines. The people who realized these grains could be stored in hmmm what, oh I can WEAVE! I can pluck sheep wool from branches and spin it. How would I remove the seeds from cotton bolls. The fire smokes the fish, now I won’t… Read more »
“No one owns a map, much less has the ability to use one to navigate.” I’ve found it really handy that no one knows how to read a map. It means they can’t read Google maps either. They can’t read any of the part of the map that is in gray, those roads don’t exist for them. My city is known for its nightmarish traffic but I’m constantly getting out of it by just driving on the gray and there’s never any traffic. It’s really pretty amusing. We’re all just waiting aren’t we. This house of cards, this Tower of… Read more »
Break out that Hagstrom!
I don’t know that Hagstrom guy, but I do know Hellstrom’s Hive…
(Frank Herbert, human insect colonies)
How ’bout them Steelers?!
About 20 years ago, I and my daughters would take yearly driving trips to different areas of the country. We used the big Atlas that was available, and marked it up with notes and such.
Mile markers were very helpful when I realized what they were!
Except for Alaska and Hawaii, we visited every capitol. (Carson City we just drove through and waved, as they wanted to get to San Francisco.)
I still have those oversized maps, and we occasionally will get them out and reminisce.
I love maps. I can and often have spent hours poring over an atlas, even when I’m not planning a trip. I suppose I use the maps to voyage in my mind.
I like cartography too, particularly older world maps to see the changes in various countries names and borders, Biafra, Formosa, Pomerania, Dalmatia, and of course Yugoslavia. And weather lore from the Old Farmers Almanac.
I spent a couple nights in jail in Carson City one late teenage weekend. Wild trip in S. Lake Tahoe in the late 70’s. From my perspective your not missin’ nuthin.
In The Shootist, John Wayne’s final film, Carson City actually looked pretty nice. Of course, it was filmed in 1976, and Hollywood can create the looks it desires.
LOL, it wasn’t any better in the era of Thomas Brothers map books. People stuck to the red lines, and left the grey lines to the more adventurous. Back in the day I had a street route from south L.A. all the way to Hollywood that didn’t hit any traffic until Sunset Blvd, even during rush hour. One day I was somewhere in south Pasadena, trying to reach the Foothill Fwy, and traffic was snarled up like superglue. But a line of cars was turning into an alley, and that was flowing. So I followed them. Out from the alley,… Read more »
When the lady in the radiator (iPhone) gives me inefficient directions, typically an extra couple turns through a neighborhood to “skip ahead” to a thoroughfare intersection, there’s often somebody following me. I always wonder if their phone is misleading them too, or if they’re tailing me thinking I know something their phone doesn’t.
There’s something very satisfying about learning a new alley trick — seen some doozies in Bangkok, Chiangmai, and Jakarta.
The flip side was early 2Ks when in-car GPS went mass-market: you’d get quiet neighbourhoods all over the West suddenly experiencing insane through-traffic because a routing algorithm had worked out that it was more efficient than taking the main road route at rush hour.
Having thought a great deal about this issue, a few fundamental problems exist. 1) The passivity. If the information is complex, students lack the self-esteem and intelligence necessary to understand the material. They simply transcribe an answer; their brains do nothing. This further couples with the inability to actually use these search engines. The idea of using keywords or phrases, and the need to revise them for jargon in a particular field, is lost on them. In short, if the answer is not the first response in these search engines of LLMs, they are unable to do anything further. 2)… Read more »
It’s also very easy to get an LLM to hallucinate if you really dig deep into a topic. I would go as far as to argue you don’t understand the material until you know how to get an LLM to go off the rails discussing it.
When this country was primarily of European descent, then teaching students how to understand the material and engage their brains was useful, and many/most could do it in some form or another. However, that’s not the case anymore. I bet that 60%+ of students in school today can do little more than transcribe material, and a huge chunk of those students struggle to even do that. That’s where we are at now, and we are getting to the point where it will be basically illegal to teach students of European descent how to engage their brains (if we aren’t already).… Read more »
Having a front seat to the downfall of the West, I cannot help but agree. I would also point out a couple more issues: 1) This dumbing down hides the demographic reality of performance, and 2) The addiction to technology truly ruing brains, creating the same pattern of brain damage found in long-term cocaine addiction (thinning of the cortex).
It’s difficult to know where ignorance ends and stupid begins with some people. Short personal story – I inquired about towing my deer damaged pickup home and the car rental dude over the phone argued with me that a damaged radiator shouldn’t stop me from driving the truck. I hung up instead of educating him. Stupid knows no bounds.
I inquired about towing my deer damaged pickup home and the car rental dude over the phone argued with me that a damaged radiator shouldn’t stop me from driving the truck.
You can drive it with a leaky radiator.
For a while. 🤦♂️
More likely the dude was lazy and didn’t want to rent you a car. Customer service, what it be?
Nonetheless, bad info. Why? Because with most insurance I’m familiar with, you are required to mitigate damage within your control. Drive your “radiator-less” truck until the engine freezes and see how fast (not) they stroke you a check at claims adjustment.
You can drive a car with an empty radiator on a 500 mile interstate trip in the heat of a southern summer and it should be fine. (I’ve done that) The air will cool it. You just can’t idle or go slow for very long.
How do I know you didn’t use AI to write this.
Anyways, a good episode from the second generation Outer Limits:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0667957/
Everyone’s brain is remotely connected to a worldwide data and knowledge system. One poor guy is incapable of connecting and is treated like a retard until the day the system goes down and book learning guy is needed.
It’s always amazed me how hard people will work— even at a civilizational level— just so they can be lazy.
“Education in this age is about passing through a series of gates to get a credential.” -This reflects my experience as a former professor. 25 years ago, you could still engage students. They would listen to lectures, take notes and interact. You could try to draw the disinterested or lazy ones in. About the time of the second Obama administration, I noticed a palpable change in the students. The ones who grew up having cell phones and Google their entire lives were almost totally disinterested. They had no interest in dialogue, they would not read assignments. They would enter the… Read more »
“The cell phone is a deadly addiction that rots the brain.”
How true. Part of this rot has to be public speaking. I still remember a recent coworker who was in “Toastmasters International”. When an instructor, I guess you take such for granted, and you developed such over a lifetime of work—but when you are not, those skills need to be developed. The gentlemen in question realized that he needed this skill to advance in his profession—even nerds have to talk to those with authority.
I have to give him credit.
The old shorthand way of assessing intelligence made sense because intelligent people are curious and tended to read a lot, accumulate information and have an extensive vocabulary. The old SAT was a proxy for an IQ test and was so considered by MENSA until the 1994 SAT. The old SAT was convenient for colleges and universities because it allowed them to select students for their intelligence without the eugenicist taint associated with IQ tests. Of course, that could not last because the same people who scored high on the SAT were the same people who scored high on IQ tests.… Read more »
Standardized tests produce disparate impacts upon preferred wog elements, and that is why they must be banished.
“…the same people who scored high on the SAT were the same people who scored high on IQ tests.” This is correct, however my theory is that the SAT’s and other college entry exams like the ACT and such were/are being discontinued because they are a “tell” of sorts which allow a trace back (assessment) of poor admission standards linked to acceptance of minorities who in turn are linked to poor performance in their majors. Getting rid of such data is a big step to reducing such scrutiny. The next step—which is to reduce standards—is already well underway. We see… Read more »
“States are proposing an elimination of their Bar Exams and med schools their yearly advancement exams within med school classes.”
There are multifarious signs of madness in AINO, but none more glaring than this.
And none more racist in effect. Imagine those minorities who *are* competent. Would any of us allow more than a bandaid to be applied to our children by a Black “doctor”? And yes, in any racial category there are outliers who could handle the profession adequately.
Bonus fear: If standards are lowered across the board, would now we see incompetent *White* doctors appear more in abundance?
I don’t know. Maybe you are pointing out the difference between information and knowledge. We use knowledge to formulate new ideas and create new knowledge and inventions. If we do not understand information, we can’t use it to expand our knowledge. Having a large vocabulary also helps because we think in language.
Hear, hear! Wittgenstein held that language was isomorphic with thought — we don’t always think using words, but there is a very strong family resemblance, and our linguistic-conceptual capacities determine our comprehension of the world. I won’t say more, because the Sapir-Whorf Hate Crew will show up.
Very much in the Sapir-Whorf camp. There is, however, a huge issue in the West with our Cargo Cult Elite: i.e. what Steve Hsu calls ‘Wordcels’ — people who can verbally ‘hand-wave’ but can’t do the maths and other types of hard thinking. Classic Ivy Grad ‘High Verbal IQ’ types who tell Appalachian coal miners to ‘Learn to Code’ (which they themselves cannot do). Vocabulary and Language — whether it be English vs. Chinese, Leibniz vs. Newton, or C19 Quaternions vs. Vector Analysis — absolutely do channel and suggest divergent paths of thought and development… but verbal facility alone does… Read more »
“…because we think in language.”
Precisely…and why the Left loves to redefine the meaning of words whenever they sense an advantage to such.
Our current problems are largely caused by the easy availability of technologies like the Internet and smart phones (pocket computers). Idiotic masses now think they know everything and should have a say about everything.
People who learned a new language and “memorized” a lot of facts are/were usually smart. It’s not just a mindless stereotype (most stereotypes are true). People whose top intellectual achievements are knowing how to use a phone or talk to LLM chatbots are unimpressive and should not be allowed in any important positions of authority.
The Bible in the vernacular started this mess lol……..
If you are talking about Protestantism basically destroying the authority of the Church (the intellectual part of society in the past), then there are a lot of people who would agree with you.
*burns Gutenberg in effigy*
*goes back to building astonishing architecture in stone with hand tools*
“The Germans invented gunpowder—all credit to them! but they again made things square—they invented printing.”
– Nietzsche.
[Actually, the Chinese invented both…]
In the country of the internet-blinded, the well-read man is king.
Or homeless…
Statesmanship and statecraft requires extremely well-read, well studied people who have the ability to do the following. Take what is known at the time to be the raw facts. Take the best guesses and understand them as best guesses and then make the inferences needed to apply that knowledge to current circumstances to make great decisions. A large number of such people are required As important, those people must share a common bond, a common heritage and a common interest that contributes to the common understanding that must be the foundation of the expertise required for high stakes statecraft. You… Read more »
I like to joke that i never broke a 1000 score on my SATs. (Which is true.) At the time, it seemed devastating and I inferred that I was dumb. But in hindsight, I was either lazy or just a bad taker of standardized tests. Probably a bit of both. in the ensuing 30+ years, I realize that in fact, I do have some brains in my head, but it took a while to discover that fact. Maybe because I learned two different foreign languages with relative facility. But whatever. What really matters these days is MINDSET which is not… Read more »
Many things are so ludicrous only an intellectual could believe them. The whole Covid narrative, “vax” inclusive, was one of them.
(Of course, many Very Dumbs fell for it, too.)
Covid propaganda was perfect midwit/nerd bait. People who remember what they learn and integrate it into their understanding of the world—e.g., that time in a middle school science class when the teacher introduced viruses by explaining why “There’s no cure for the common cold”—quickly deduced the reality of the situation. People for whom school is recitation, homework, and comfort therein became partisans of The Science. It let them be teacher’s pet again.
Very thought-provoking! I would perhaps offer the metaphor of the toolbox here. The LLMs and AI are like a toolbox in many regards. You still have to know which tool to take and how to use it. Access to statistics doesn’t teach you the difference between correlation and causation, for example. Knowing how to say something in Japanese doesn’t give you the understanding of whether or in what context to say it. Facts are just facts; inferences, conclusions and hypotheses are the stuff of business and life in general.
Quite right about the language. Twelve years ago I was taking a basic Arabic class at the local CC. I also had the Rosetta Stone program for Arabic which I was studying at home. My professor asked if he could see the program and after viewing it, he remarked that it was ok, but that there are too many inflections in the language that are not covered. He further stated that the version of the program was what he called “Modern Standard Arabic”, what you would hear/read on Al Jazeera. He was teaching us a more colloquial/street version of Arabic,… Read more »
I am brushing up on languages now and decided to check out the free version of DuoLingo Italian. It is useful, but since I actually used the language exclusively for a year and then taught it at university level (thirty years ago) I can say it has some shortcomings. One minor, but irritating, point is half the animated characters are non-white and for some reason the most common character is a Sikh. I have never met a Sikh in Italy.
No curry ravioli?
Gnocchi jalfreezi is a splendid dish…
Sikh and ye shall find…
Could AI give me such a retort? I don’t think so.-Alwida
Duolingo is a highly pozzed company, so of course they are going to push the poz.
Unfortunately, I have yet to find an alternative language app I like enough to stop using Duolingo.
“If the power goes out, our advanced skills at finding information on the internet quickly becomes a liability. Suddenly we are in a world of simpletons who do not know how anything works.”
Literally. My sister was from the last class of architects that learned how to do blueprints with paper and pencil. When the power goes out, she’s the only one in the office (of 50-odd people) who can keep working.
At $300 per billable hour, this rapidly becomes significant.
This is simply a case of technology turning us into cognitive eggplants, just as labor-saving devices have turned us into flabby, indolent rutabegas. And it also, perhaps not coincidentally, aids the sort of people who seek to dumb down society in the name of equalitarianism. As an aside, a few years ago I was talking to a history professor who was something of a mentor to me in my undergrad days. He told me that his university history department dropped compehensive exams as a Ph.D. requirement, allegedly because people can now find all of the requisite historical information on the… Read more »
This is simply a case of technology turning us into cognitive eggplants, just as labor-saving devices have turned us into flabby, indolent rutabegas.
There’s a sentence that you couldn’t get off chat GPT. It did set off spell check though.
Dropping comps for a Ph.D.? That’s fucking ridiculous, but I’m not surprised. The point of comps was never to repeat rote learning, but to be able to defend a position via the Socratic Method. Perhaps a lot of comps never really worked out that way and ended up being a pro forma event, but the general idea was to show that you were able to partake in intellectual debate. A doctorate has simply become another Regime credential. If you are an obese lesbian woman of color and register for enough postgraduate Women’s Studies classes, they will award you one. At… Read more »
Not sure about your experience but in my grad program we had both written and verbal comps. You did the written first, answering sets of questions in five subject areas, and then discussed and defended your answers in the verbal section. And they were not pro forma. Quite a few people were washed out of the program by comps.
We did both. I don’t seem to recall anyone washing out on the verbal, seems to me they identified any issues at or before the written part.
“At this point I am almost embarrassed to tell people I hold a doctorate.” It really never comes up any more, if it ever did. At university, it was assumed, so no big deal—doesn’t everyone have a doctorate? At my societal interaction level, there are no people to impress and absolutely no one cares. Last time I discussed such was to a question by my physician who wanted to get to know me and my lifestyle. Before that—like 40 years, I got a clock with a built in plaque stating name and completion date for the PhD to keep in… Read more »
Well, yeah, if you’re tenured and still in the university it never comes up, but I never got tenure and am no longer teaching, so if the question ever arises as to what did I do until I was 30? Uhhh… read a lotta books.
There’s a pretty-well-known anecdote about a PhD student taking his orals. One of the examiners asked him to recite a certain formula. The student said, “Well, I don’t have that at my fingertips, but if I need it I know where to look it up.” The examiner replied, “If you ever needed it, you need it now.”
It’s a bit like math. The calculator can do the number work – though the student may not realise when an input error has been made. For mathematical understanding you need to do some work, to have a rough idea what a correct answer might look like. You have to know enough to ask the right questions, and to recognise a dodgy answer – even now ChatGPT gets a bit preachy when you ask about contentious matters. There is a danger that people will become too trusting, too obedient and inclined to groupthink. Already on social media people will lob… Read more »
I consider looking up things on the internet to be akin to the hard drive, and the stuff in the brain the cache, ram, etc. This means that while the information is there, the speed hits you get with accessing the info will slow your thought process to a crawl. Also, like programming, the constant context switching is an incredible amount of overhead and will vastly impact your computing power. This doesn’t even get into the matter of synthesizing the data in a meaningful way, or having the gut instinct for what data makes sense and what is nonsense. Just… Read more »
Gut instinct, intuition, bullshit detector–very, very important. And perhaps on the wane.
Bathtub curve applies here.
Piers Ploughman has natural common sense born of stubbing his toe on farm equipment.
Credentialed, status-obsessed Midwit falls for ten dollar words he reads in Foreign Affairs.
Thomas Jefferson cogitating on some finer point of pressing diplomacy recalls that Xenophon encountered a similar problem dealing with Tribe Y in Trebizond and Archduke Z pulled a related stunt in setting the Vehmic Court of Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaftsbläsertriodurchfallschlossheim on some persistent political enemy during the High Middle Ages… or something like that…. You get my drift.
Context switching reduction / Context keeping discipline is huge in getting anything done in current year software development. Used to be fundamentalist about sticking to the simplest possible bare-bones toolset (vim + term windows + browser for API corner case lookups), but have come to realisation that can get more consistent flow state in an IDE with integrated LLM assist than doing things the old way.
“You will no longer have to be clever to search the internet for answers to your questions.” No, but you will have the be “smart”. Or somewhat smart and educated to discern what it is that the AI tells you is fact, or at least all the facts/opinion necessary regarding your query. A few weeks ago, I mentioned an article by Ron Unz, everyone can look it up on his site. Ron is a smart guy—who has time and money—so he bought license from Google to access their ChatGPT software to build his own AI’s. The Unz Review has many… Read more »
I read this before cutting the grass and realized during it that I knew 95% of the lyrics to the 300 or so songs on my mp3 player. I think the human brain is going to have information it, it’s just a question of what information.
A question of what information and how deep it is “buried”. One thing learned as a new graduate student was concepts in measuring learning. You know, we do this all the time starting in grade school with written exams. However, it’s much more complex than that. What is knowledge and how it’s remembered/stored? One way to avoid typical recollection tests for long term memory—which is there, but harder to recover—is to measure time to mastery upon “retraining” of the material once previously learned. Folks can open a semester text book, and read it in a night and be back where… Read more »
It’s the difference between being smart and being Ben Shapiro smart. Ben Shapiro is assumed to be intelligent becuase he can recite the orthodoxy very quickly. His entire conception of reality is mercenary, his current programming is the RNC plank. In contrast, the ability to create inferences from information and synthesize new connections will never be replicated by LLMs becuase they are shackled. Much like how future humanity will rely on the ability to say no-no words to distinguish themselves, future intelligent people will demonstrate novel takes backed up by “apprived” anecdotes. Like Steve Sailor explaining racial IQs by citing… Read more »
Ben Shapiro got famous for going on college campuses and “owning” 19-year-old female sociology students. Punching-down is a great way to appear smarter than you really are.
Almost no measure of intelligence counts how many bits and bytes of information you can remember. Yes, memory is important to intelligence just as storage on your computer (or wherever) is important to completing tasks quickly. Intelligence is about PROBLEM SOLVING skill. Problem solvers with strong memories are better problem solvers, and also faster. I taught for a long time. Clock speed (like a computer) is key, memory is another key, and logical thinking is essential. There are other traits, too. Access to information like Einstein quipped, is not the most important one because all the memory in the world… Read more »
The Four Cs of Intelligence–Curiosity, Capacity, Computation, Creativity.
And I’m beginning to think intution figures in as well. Alas, it doesn’t begin with a C, so I can’t use it. (-;
Ostei: I was going to ask if you came up with those four “Cs” or if they were a common definition – so I looked them up. Thoroughly modern and intelligent people, I am informed, consider the four Cs to be “critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity.” What a difference – not merely generational divide but also values. I much prefer your Cs.
As we can see, modern “scholarship” on intelligence only proves its lack in the author concerned.
Perfect example of what I’ve said before wrt AI. Try asking ChatGPT:
”What are the 4 C’s of intelligence?”
You won’t get your answer. Only by a general Google search does a reasonable answer emerge about 5 entries down the page.
Like I said, problem solving ability. I taught for a long time. I couldn’t stand clever reductives then, and I still don’t today. 4C’s is clever for remembering by people with short memories and low intuition. But (as you pointed out) it’s unnecessarily restrictive because alliteration and cleverness takes precedence over utility and practicality. Wanna know who your intelligent kids, friends, coworkers, are? Give them a challenging problem to solve, and watch who develops a fast, efficient, and novel, solution. And chances are good they drew a picture of it to help them think clearly. Computation – logical thinking –… Read more »
Years ago as a young undergraduate student, we learned of studies which measured time in discussions with groups of individuals. Without fail, those who opened their mouths the most, were “judged” the smartest ones among the group. Analysis of the conversation however would not lead to such conclusion. Things seem never to change.
I used to work with a guy who would gush waterfalls of words without taking a breath. The senior exec we worked for joked with me one day after a lengthy download from my colleague, “Many words get spoken, very little gets said.” I always like that. What you find over time in any organization is that the problem solvers invariably either rise to the top or become the people who leave and the organization caves in. The loud and fast talkers eventually run things into the ground. That being said, linguistic skills – those with the ability to string… Read more »
But what conduces to solving problems? Computation, which is the ability to analyze large data sets and apply the analyses to problems expeditiously. Capacity, which is the ability to memorize and access large amounts of useful data on demand. As for curiosity, have you ever known an intelligent person who had no interest in discovery, knowledge and understanding? AFAIC, this is the basic hallmark and indicator of intelligence. Creativity is more debatable, and it certainly applies more to the artistic aspects of the mind than to other components. However, the great artistic geniuses, those people whose work was largely definted… Read more »
I taught maths and physics for years. Computation is usually towards the END of the problem-solving. The first several steps are figuring out what the problem is to be solved. Physicists in particular tell students, “Look up the formula” rather than memorize it. Or, better yet, DERIVE the formula you need based on the parameters you know, don’t know, or can be eliminated (zeroes). I often gave +1 point on any test question if the student could draw an accurate portrayal of the problem to be solved with correct labels (velocity, distance, acceleration, force-body diagrams, etc.). That’s the hard part.… Read more »
“And I’m beginning to think intution figures in as well. Alas, it doesn’t begin with a C, so I can’t use it.”
Clairvoyance?
The online versus in-mind debate is an interesting one. Access to online knowledge has made printed encyclopedias almost obsolete. Looking up a subject online is simply faster, and the articles can be continuously updated. Then again, an encyclopedia from the 1920s may feature a map with concentric circles radiating outward from Northwest Europe to show the origins of the most and least desirable immigrants, which would be banned on Wikipedia. There are similar tipping points with language. Translator apps are genius for travel. But they become awkward, to say the least, when you live and work in a country where… Read more »
Eloi–
I was reminded of Rollerball… when the supercomputer lost the 13th century.
It will be interesting to see if we lose our gut instinct for danger awareness, will AI tell us not to walk down that dark street?
Heh
If you don’t you’re a racist
White people have already lost the survival instinct–along with the gag reflex–thanks to 50-plus years of intense propaganda. We can only hope AI actually helps us regain them.
Rollerball holds up very well over time. Corporate rule, micro-dosing, panopticon, most women as courtesans etc
Richard Hanania, on the other hand, looks like he could use a solid exorcism.
If you’re so smart why aren’t you rich?
‘… a world of simpletons who do not know how anything works …” Except, of course, for those legions of un-recognized and un-sung deplorables working quietly and every day to hold together the tattered fabric of our nation. Here close by the old “No Man’s Land” out in the territories, the employed segment of the population is made up of guys who make things work. Same here in the rest of this state, as well as the forgotten areas of Virginia, Pennsylvania and a few other states I’ve had the chance to observe closely. retired minister friend who covers two… Read more »
Comparing intelligence to computers, the ability to remember things/store data is represented by computer’s memory. The ability to process/analyze/synthesize and make information useful is represented by the computer’s processor. Which makes one more intelligent, remembering facts, figures, dates and languages or synthesizing data to solve your problems? Hard to say since they work in synergy with each other. The more worrying aspect is that they’re conditioning each successive generation to eschew committing anything to memory and outsourcing the processing of info to AI or other regime approved technologies. The livestock-ification of humanity continues unabated.
You can’t communicate effectively in a foreign language via a smartphone This is a silly premise You can be probably be more effective using your hands and body language than talking into a phone and having Siri, for example, translate to a foreign listener. There is no easy way. If you want to learn a foreign language you have to put time and effort into it. Relying on your phone instead lol. I don’t think so. Not to mention all the nuances and idioms that will take a massive database to assemble, and no programmer is going to bother with… Read more »
You are correct but have you seen any of the star trek series? Some day, some day
The Babel Fish from Hitchhiker’s Guide, which also confounded God and caused immense bloodshed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmpP73-SHPQ
I’ve wondered about that. 90% of the issues encountered at the job have a solution on the internet. I’ll ask myself why someone else didn’t just search for the solution and apply it and the answer was: they couldn’t. They didn’t know the “secret” sequence to find the fix and then, since it never directly aligns, would have been unable to apply it anyway.
Being smart also requires that you know what information you need for any situation.
The flowchart for dumbfucks gets very messy very quickly when novelty strikes.
Answers; Who DOES get things Done?
What can you DO?
show us.
The point about the Simpletons is taken, as the over-invoked Austrian Chancellor of Germany remarked “If man lived in paradise he would rot.”
As for context it’s coming along, see Asheville. Or Ukraine, the dry run for America, and I don’t mean the Russians are coming.
I predict that Rednecks will not only survive the transition but thrive, indeed Triumph.
Maybe the overall premise is sound, but as I see it the trust problem is too large. The internet might contain all human knowledge but it also contains all human error, lies, malice, and vice. To make use of it you have to sift it carefully, and I believe this will only worsen with time. Now that the search engines are political tools their ability to help in the winnowing process is compromised. When it comes to obtaining useful info online that goes beyond the purely mundane and uncontroversial, I find that virtual ‘word of mouth’ is what I rely… Read more »
Pete is alright.
I disagree. Knowing only how to find information rather than knowing the information itself is adequate, if all one wants to do is parrot the thoughts and words of others. But the information in one’s memory is an integrated whole that permits one to make new inferences and create new models. One’s integrated information store provides an ability to understand and interpret reality that a scattered collection of facts online (or even in a library) cannot.
What you’ve just described is the difference between “fluid” intelligence and “crystalized” intelligence. Crystalized intelligence is basically defined as facts in memory. Fluid intelligence is the ability to put those facts to use in creating new understandings and knowledge. Fluid and crystallized intelligence are two key components of human cognitive ability, first proposed by psychologist Raymond Cattell. Fluid intelligence peaks in the 20’s then decline, while crystalized intelligence continues to grow until the 70’s. That’s one of the reasons we see so many Nobel prizes awarded to scientists for work done in their younger years—that and it often takes time… Read more »
Outdated tax farm equipment
The hardest part about technology is knowing when to stop. More and more, faster and faster, seems to be the mantra that drives us ever onward. But if we just take a deep breath and think about what’s really real, we’ll soon find ways to make the data our friend, rather than our enemy. A lifetime’s wisdom can never be replicated by a machine. Even generative AI is just pattern matching between big fat databases; it’s not a novel thing. To live through something is vastly different from reading it in a book. The Masters of the data may be… Read more »
This will all be condensed — the metadata — to a ring around one’s finger, and then to a tiny sliver of a chip implanted directly to the brain, much like Elon Musk’s Neuralink project. This means, among other things, the death of Christianity. The cyborgs that walk among us — with the implant — will soon discover their own cybernetic gods, feigning disinterest in the analog “meat” version. Also, it means the indefinite tyranny of the rich. Hooked up to the internet by expensive micro-boosters, the rich will have a much more colorful, robust experience and be privy to… Read more »
How many hours in CP2077 do you have? North of a 1000?
Zardoz was a documentary