Topic Summary:
Goal: Test how much knowledge I can get from audio while multitasking.
CF relevance: Theory of Intelligence, evolution, epistemology.
Do you want unbounded criticism? (A criticism is a reason that an idea decisively fails at a goal. Criticism can be about anything relevant to goal success, including methods, meta, context or tangents. If you think a line of discussion isn’t worth focusing attention on, that is a disagreement with the person who posted it, which can be discussed.)
Sure, if anybody wants to give unbounded criticism, but no pressure.
Ok, so I wanted to explore how much information I could retain/understand listening to a podcast while I multi tasked (did chores around the house and exercised). I listened to Elliot’s Youtube video titled “intelligence [Fallible Ideas Podcast]” where Elliot was able to explain the complex topic in a really simple way.
I listened on normal speed and had to rewind a few parts here and there when I felt myself starting to lose focus on the podcast because my focus would occasionally switch to the chore I was doing. Everything I write down will be things I think I understand reasonably well now, not just rote memory of what was mentioned. I waited two hours after I finished the video before I started to write this, to let time go by and test what I remember/learned. I also wanted to try to not edit my post here or at least severely limit my edits, to see what thoughts comes out on a rough draft.
Disclaimer: This theory on intelligence isn’t new to me. I’ve read and listened to Elliot explain this multiple times in different essays over the years, and have also read some Karl Popper and David Deutsch. However, I’ve never been super confident I could answer the question “what is intelligence?” in a simple, clear way, and with a sufficient amount of detail. The following is me trying to write down what I remember Elliot saying in the video and making sure it makes sense to me. By default, just assume none of my phrases or wording are original. It’s more of a summary of what I heard Elliot say. I’m not using quoting because that would require me to go back to the video transcript and reread it to find the quotes, which would defeat the purpose of exploring how much I can learn from an audio while doing other activities simultaneously.
So what is intelligence? In order to answer that, it’s important to know what knowledge is. Knowledge is information that is useful for a purpose or solves a problem. There being 1 billion grains of sand on a beach vs 1 billion and one grains of sand on a beach is information, but not knowledge.
So when we look at a human eye or an animal eye, we can see there is the appearance of design there. The eye has a purpose, there’s useful knowledge there. How did this come about? There used to be no good explanations. The most popular answer was that God created it. But, that doesn’t answer the question, that just moves the goal post. Because God would also be a complex being with intelligence/knowledge, so the question would shift to how God came about and how God has seemingly supernatural abilities that defy the laws of physics.
Then Darwin came along and came up with the theory of evolution, the first and only good explanation. Replication, variation and selection. There is knowledge in animal genes because of evolution. However, animals aren’t creative. They don’t create new knowledge that can’t be explained by their genes. Humans can create new knowledge that can’t be explained by their genes, and that is what intelligence is. Intelligence is binary, you’re either intelligent or not. And the way we create new knowledge is literally through evolution, it’s not a metaphor. We use replication, variation and selection. When we conjecture/guess that’s replication and variation, and when we refute/criticize, that’s selection.
There’s another definition of intelligence, which is basically how good you are at using your intelligence (how smart you are). The major reason some people are smarter than others is because of knowledge they learned throughout life. Things like rationality, philosophy and other useful skills. A lot of which they learned so well that it’s become subconscious, but it’s still software. Processing information faster or having more memory (better hardware) isn’t the decisive reason some people are smarter than others irl.
Just because some things you do or errors you make are because of software knowledge and not from your genes, doesn’t mean they’re easy to change. There’s so many layers of knowledge in your mind that connect and an error can be so ingrained in you. For example, let’s say you have something explicit you want to change, and that error is layer 100, maybe the root cause of that issue is on layer 50. You have to change a lot of other things to change the layer 100 problem. Elliot give the analogy of a bank having old software, but its hard to update the software because there’s so many layers of code and processes, and if you edit or try to change one thing, it may break there or somewhere else in the software. That’s similar to how hard it can be to change our minds or certain things about us. But, humans are even more complicated than that bank software analogy. Elliot has also used the example of changing your hair color by dyeing it to show that changing genes/biology can be easier than software changes.
That’s all I remember at this point. I may try this again, listening to a video or podcast while I multitask, but next time listen to something new I know nothing about and see how much I retain and understand. Maybe because I’ve read some stuff about this theory of intelligence already, my brain was able to connect the ideas and I could follow along and recall what Elliot said easier.