Despite all fallibility of memory, I would be shocked to learn that I had ever claimed that a logical paradox would make an AI go gaga. Where are you getting this from?

Ben's never said anything like that to me. The comment about going to college was from an earnest ordinary person, not acquainted with me. And no, I didn't snap at them, or laugh out loud; it was well-intentioned advice. Going to college is a big choice for a lot of people, and this was someone who met me, and saw that I was smart, and thought that I seemed to have the potential to go to college.

Which is to imply that if there's a level above Jaynes, it may be that I won't understand it until I reach Jaynes's level - to me it will all just look like "going to college". If I recall my timeline correctly, I didn't comprehend Jaynes's level until I had achieved the level of thinking naturalistically; before that time, to achieve a reductionist view of intelligence was my whole aspiration.

Your faith in math is misplaced. The sort of math smarts you are obsessed with just isn't that correlated with intellectual accomplishment. For accomplishment outside of math, you must sacrifice time that could be spent honing your math skills, to actually think about other things. You could be nearly the smartest math type guy anyone you meet know, and still not accomplish if math is not the key to your chosen subject.

In a few years, you will be as embarrassed of these posts as you are today of your former claims of being an Algernon, or that a logical paradox would make an AI go gaga, the tMoL argumentation you mentioned the last days, the Workarounds for the Laws of Physics, Love and Life Just Before the Singularity and so on and so forth. Ask yourself: Will I have to delete this, too ?

And the person who told you to go to college was probably well-meaning, and not too far from the truth. Was it Ben Goertzel ?

Unfortunately for my peace of mind and ego, people who say to me "You're the brightest person I know" are noticeably more common than people who say to me "You're the brightest person I know, and I know John Conway". Maybe someday I'll hit that level. Maybe not.

Until then... I do thank you, because when people tell me that sort of thing, it gives me the courage to keep going and keep trying to reach that higher level.

Seriously, that's how it feels.

There's another aspect of the shortcomings of IQ tests that people might not be aware of. Cognition is quite flexible, and abstract problem-solving ability can be met by many combinations of underlying, modular capacities. A person lacking in certain respects can make up for the lack, at the price, perhaps, of thinking a little more slowly.

Take me for an example. On the WISC-III IQ test, my combined score is 145. There are two composite scores that the combined score is made up of, the verbal score (I got 155, the maximum possible on that test) and the performance score (I got 125). There are also a number of different individual capacity scores. On most, I scored above the 95 percentile. On two or three, I scored right in the middle, and in one (visual short term memory) I scored in the first percentile.

Let me repeat that. I scored in the first percentile for the capacity to keep visual information in my short-term memory. (I scored in the 97th for aural short term memory, and 99.9th for linguistic.) How does that change how I solve problems, how I think about the world? Well, I perform many tasks about twice as slowly (but just as accurately) as others with my composite IQ. I have to use other circuits than most people do to solve the same problems, circuits that aren't as efficient. Circuits that may even work slightly differently, giving me a different perspective on problems, which may be superior or inferior, I don't know (likely depending on the individual problem). I strongly suspect that this is a large part of the cause of my intense dislike of school.

(BTW, people with a large difference between performance and verbal IQ are classified as having non-verbal learning disorder. That's right, even really smart people can have learning disorders.)

IQ is not a single number. Even IQ recognizes a large part of the complexity of human intelligence. It's not the psychologists that make the mistake of reducing it to a single number.

Why did I write this long comment on a dead thread? Dunno.

Of course I want there to be someone smarter than me to take over, from an altruistic perspective. Or even from just a selfish perspective of being scared, wanting a vacation, and feeling a bit isolated.

And of course if that actually happened, it would be a severe blow to my ego.

And so long as I can do the expected-utility-maximizing thing and invest the appropriate amount of effort into preparing for the possibility without betting the whole farm on it, I have no intention of hacking at my emotions on either score.

I definitely see the "levels" phenomenon very often. Most people I meet who see me play a musical instrument (or 5 or 10 different ones) think I must be a genius at music - unless they're a musician, then they recognize me as an amateur with enough money to buy interesting instruments and enough skill to get a basic proficiency at them quickly.

And even with standard measures of intellect like rationality or math... I don't know that many of my friends who have read any of this blog would recognize you as being smarter than me, despite the fact that you're enough levels above me that my opinion of you is pretty much what "Not You" said above.

I can keep up with most of your posts, but to be able to keep up with a good teacher, and to be that good teacher, is a gap of at least a few levels. But aspiring to your level (though I may not reach it) has probably been the biggest motivator for me to practice the art. I certainly won't be the one who zips by you, but you've at least pulled me up to a level where I might be able to guide one who will down a useful path.

Manuel, "enroll in a grad program for AI" != "you're smart, you should go to college".

Kragen, the short answer is, "It's easy to talk about the importance of effort if you happen to be Hamming." If you can make the ante for the high-stakes table, then you can talk about how little the ante counts for, and the importance of playing your cards well. But if you can't make the ante...

Robin, it's not blind faith in math or math for the sake of impressiveness, but a specific sense that the specific next problems I have to solve, will require more math than I've used up to this point. Not Andrew J. Wiles math, but Jaynes doesn't use Wiles-math either. I quite share your prejudice against math for the sake of looking impressive, because that gets you the wrong math. (Formality isn't about Precision?)

Ken, it's exclusively my work that gives me the motivation to keep working on something for years, but things like pride can give me the motivation to keep working on something for the next minute. I'll take whatever sources of motivation I can get (er, that aren't outright evil, of course).

Douglas, yes, my father changed at 40. But one of my primary sources of hope is that people have been known to do basic research later than this if they changed fields late in life, which suggests that it actually can be a matter of approach/outlook/methodology and avoiding serving on prestigious committees.

Retired, I don't understand the apparent contradiction you see. I participated in the Midwest Talent Search at a young age (not "Northwestern" anything, maybe you're confusing with Northwestern University?) and scored second-best for my grade category, but at that point I'd skipped a grade. But I think I can recall hearing about someone who got higher SAT scores than mine, at age nine. That would be decisive, if the SAT were a perfect noiseless measurement of ability to work on AI.

Vassar: You see, for many many people it is possible to choose a weighting scheme among a dozen or so factors contribute to intellectual work such that they are the best.

Yes, this is the well-known phenomenon where asking someone "How dumb are you?" produces a different answer than "How smart are you?" because they recall a different kind of evidence. But the question I'm trying to answer is "How much potential do you have to solve the remaining FAI problems you know about?" As I said to Robin, I do think this is going to involve taking a step up in math level.

To all commenters who observed that I don't seem to stand out from 10 other smart people they know, either you didn't comprehend the entirety of today's post, or you have very high confidence that you occupy the highest possible rank of human ability.

Eliezer, I've been watching you with interest since 1996 due to your obvious intelligence and "altruism." From my background as a smart individual with over twenty years managing teams of Ph.D.s (and others with similar non-degreed qualifications) solving technical problems in the real world, you've always struck me as near but not at the top in terms of intelligence. Your "discoveries" and developmental trajectory fit easily within the bounds of my experience of myself and a few others of similar aptitudes, but your (sheltered) arrogance has always stood out. I wish you continued progress, not so much in ever-sharper analysis, but in ever more effective synthesis of the leading-edge subjects you pursue.

So how does it work, in your opinion? Because “I may not be as brilliant as Jaynes or Conway, but that doesn't mean I can't do important things in my chosen field,” sounds suspiciously similar to how Hamming asserts that it works in “You and Your Research.” I guess you have a different belief about how doing important things in your chosen field works, but I don't see that you've explained that belief here or anywhere else that I've seen.

I don't suppose Marcello is related to Nadja and Josh Herreshoff?

I don't know if it helps, but while I've appreciated the things I've learned from you, my limited interaction with you hasn't made me think you're the brightest person I know. I think of you as more or less at my level — maybe a couple of standard deviations above or below, I can’t really tell. Certainly you're sharp enough that I'd enjoy hanging out with you. (Let me know the next time you're in Argentina.)

P.S. the impugnment of your notability has now been removed from your Wikipedia page, apparently as a result of people citing you in their papers.

While Conway has a huge jump on you in mathematical ability, and I'm pretty sure you're not going to catch up to him, rest assured that you are not strictly dumber than Conway in every respect.

You should bear in mind how the statement "Maybe anything more than around one standard deviation above you starts to blur together, though that's just a cool-sounding wild guess" might apply to me. If your guess is literally true, then, because math is my strong-suit, high mathematical ability is the smartest kind of smart that I can detect at all. For me, philosophical ability and the like would blur into "go to college"-land sooner.

In terms of philosophical intuition, you are head and shoulders above Conway. Remember Conway's "Free will theorem" (a brilliant piece of math to be sure, but very misleadingly named.) Yet, you report never having been confused about free will. My sense of awe at your philosophical intuition has only increased after reading the overcoming bias posts. It's doubly impressive to me, because I keep realizing that you are making explicit more of the helpful little nudges you gave me over the course of our work together, and I am impressed at how helpful some of these things were in practice, and your ability to communicate things which seemed so elusive so clearly. I'm not sure how much of that was native intelligence and how much was starting with a good ideas in your mental toolbox, but I could ask the same thing about Conway.

Wow, chill out, Eliezer. You're probably among the top 10, certainly in the top 20, most-intelligent people I've met. That's good enough for anything you could want to do. You are ranked high enough that luck, money, and contacts will all be more important factors for you than some marginal increase in intelligence.

@EY: We are the cards we are dealt, and intelligence is the unfairest of all those cards. More unfair than wealth or health or home country, unfairer than your happiness set-point. People have difficulty accepting that life can be that unfair, it's not a happy thought. "Intelligence isn't as important as X" is one way of turning away from the unfairness, refusing to deal with it, thinking a happier thought instead. It's a temptation, both to those dealt poor cards, and to those dealt good ones. Just as downplaying the importance of money is a temptation both to the poor and to the rich.

How could the writer of the above words be the writer of today's post? Apparently (as I'm told) you knew from the days of the Northwestern Talent Search that you weren't the smartest of those tested (not to mention all those who were not tested), but certainly one of the smartest. Apparently, you were dealt a straight flush to the king, while some in history received a royal flush. What difference does it make whether someone thinks you are the smartest person they have known, unless you are the smartest person? Does a straight flush to the king meet the threshold required to develop a method for "saving humanity"? If not, why aren't you in the camp of those who wish to improve human intelligence? awaits clap of thunder from those dealt better hands

Some else wrote

"
This is a youthful blog with youthful worries. From the vantage point of age worrying about intelligence seems like a waste of time and unanswerable to boot.
"

and I find this observation insightful, and even a bit understated.

Increasingly, as one ages, one worries more about what one DOES, rather than about abstract characterizations of one's capability.

Obviously, one reason these sorts of questions about comparative general intelligence are unanswerable is that "general intelligence" is not really a rigorously defined concept -- as you well know! And the rigorous definitions that have been proposed (e.g. in Legg and Hutter's writing, or my earlier writings, etc.) are basically nonmeasurable in practice -- they're only crudely approximable in practice, and the margin of error of these approximations is almost surely large enough to blur whatever distinctions exist between various highly clever humans.

I have no doubt that you're extremely smart, and especially talented in some particular areas (such as mathematics and writing, to give a nonexhaustive list) ... and that you're capable of accomplishing great things intellectually.

As an aside, the notion that Conway, or von Neumann or any other historical math figure is "more intelligent than Eliezer along all dimensions" seems silly to me ... I'm sure they weren't, under any reasonable definition of "dimensions" in this context.

To take a well-worn example: from my study of the historical record, it seems clear that Einstein and Godel were both less transparently, obviously clever than von Neumann. My guess is that von Neumann would have scored higher on IQ tests than either of those others, because he was incredibly quick-minded and fond of puzzle-type problems. However, obviously there were relevant dimensions along which both Einstein and Godel were "smarter" than von Neumann; and they pursued research paths in which these dimensions were highly relevant.

"General intelligence" has more and more meaning as one deals with more and more powerful computational systems. For humans it's meaningful but not amazingly, dramatically meaningful ... what's predictive of human achievement is almost surely a complex mixture of human general intelligence with human specialized intelligence in achievement-relevant domains.

Pragmatically separating general from specialized intelligence in oneself or other humans is a hard problem, and not really a terribly useful thing to try to do.

Achieving great things seems always to be a mixture of general intelligence, specialized intelligence, wise choice of the right problems to work on, and personality properties like persistence ...

-- Ben G

I have no idea if it's a natural human quality. It's surely one of my qualities. It's not that I would permit my mind to think verbal thoughts like "How good it is to be above others." But there's a zest in being the best. It feels good to complete a difficult race and it feels good to win a gold medal; they are separate, different good feelings. I can imagine people who would only care about having completed the challenge, but they wouldn't be me.

Since my mind doesn't want whatever I choose it to want, I accept that both desires are a part of me and that both desires keep me motivated to continue studying. Though even the desire to solve hard problems for yourself, is not without its dangers.

Doesn't fit the stereotype of Deep Wisdom, I know. I would be prouder if I was Gandalf, because that would be, you know, cool. But you see, this isn't about my pride.

"Most intelligent people I've met" is not informative, we need to give quantitative estimates. My estimate is calibrated based on knowing people who passed various screenings, such as math, physics and programming contests (including at international level), test results on screening exams to top universities, performance in hard university courses, people starting to grasp research and programming, etc. Based on population of regions covered by various screenings, and taking age, gender and different background into account, I can approximately rate these people on the "1 in XXX" scale. I'd say that you need to be at a level of 1 in 300 or so to be able to deeply understand any technical field of human knowledge given reasonable effort, and 1 in 100 to be a competent technical specialist. There is a significant difference (which can cash out as, say, 3x speedup at obtaining given level of aptitude) between people who are 1 in 1000 and 1 in 10000. I know too few people beyond 1 in 10000 (about top 30 in a contest over population of 20 million within a 3-year age interval, given average lifespan of 60 and background selection of 1 in 3 top people to enter the contest) to say whether there is a general enough advantage of being there, or if the performance levels off and more rarely occurring extraordinary ability only presents itself on very narrow task, like blasting through programming contests.

People at all levels are stupid at unknown domains, it takes much effort to start demonstrating "raw intelligence" at anything (although in many things skills partially translate between domains). You can't learn to be creative enough if you don't pass a necessary threshold, but on the other hand if you are past it, sufficient effort will make you able to solve any problem other people can solve, although it'll take more time to attain that level and to solve problems once you did that.

The main problem for getting results is that it's very hard to port smart people on a new field of expertise, to convince them to start thinking about something or to actively work on improving their performance in a given domain. So, it seems that the main problem with seeing (or finding) enough brilliant people in any given field or group is not in the rarity of talent, but in the roads they all took, too few of which lead where you look.

People won't risk working on hard important problems or even think too much about exploring which problems could be important, they choose convenient, safe or enjoyable paths, they choose intellectual dynamic, the process, rather than proper understanding of results or appearance. People you hear from are not the smartest there are in a given subject.

I estimate myself to be around 1 in 1000, more specifically a somewhat blinder, slower and faulty-memory version of 1 in 5000 (as I understand, it's not how many other people perceive their limitations). I clearly see the advantages that people with clearer minds get, but as far as I can tell I'm still able to excel at anything if I devote enough attention to it, given enough time. Extraordinary intellectual productivity is a result of taking the right road, which may depend on happenstance beyond your control. Digging yourself from the pit of blind stupidity (relatively), of seeing only a surface level and stopping the investigation there, is the most important thing (which is what the art of rationality is about, not being stupid, using what you've got, while it falls short of understanding intelligence deeper).

From what I've read, I think that Eliezer is somewhere at 1 in 5000 on this scale, given time he devoted to the study of the subjects and results he produced. He stands out in comparison mainly because too few smart enough people engage in the questions he addresses from the same side, and of those who do hardly anybody devoted much serious thought to them and at the same time didn't get lost on a false road. You don't see the absence of talent, but the initial stupidity in unfamiliar domain or entrenched mistakes where there isn't a solid body of knowledge and authority to force them out.

So, I think that his estimate of 1 in 10000-100000 is too high. The problem is more of convincing the right people to work on the problem and pointing them to the right path, rather than of finding the right people at all. Having an introductory text showing the path is a huge asset, so the decision to compose this book might be a fruitful one.

You come across as very intelligent when you stick to your areas of expertise, like probability theory, AI and cognitive biases, but some of your more tangential stuff can seem a little naive. Compared to the other major poster on this blog, Robin, I'd say you come across as smarter but less "wise", if that means anything to you. I'm not even a huge fan of the notion of "wisdom", but if there's something you're missing, I think that's it.