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Assuming a button that, every time you push it, your intelligence goes up. The obvious and sane thing to do is to push the button all day. Yes? No? Maybe? Is there something that I'm missing here?
Unless you’re also truly a clinical sociopath, high intellect amongst mass ignorance, with those in power totally drunk on intransigent, animalistic selfishness your intellect can do nothing about either means living in perpetual torment, or perpetual resignation. In the land of willfull ignorance and boastful stupidity, intellect is pain.
If it is true that “with wisdom comes much sorrow”, then at some point you would come to an equilibrium point (or maybe… a cliff) beyond which doing so might endanger your own life/mental-health, and probably be smart enough to recognize that and stop using the button. Kind of a corollary or converse of “ignorance is bliss”…
i’d argue that pressing the button tooo much would make a person so smart that they couldn’t friend with the average person. Their inteligence level would be so high.
Can I have the button forever, and just use it to stave off dementia? I think that’s how I’d use it. Grew up an alienated kid because I was, I’d say precocious more than hyperintelligent. As an adult I feel more settled, there are so many people smarter than me. So like with height, sure, I’d like to be a little smarter and maybe one inch taller. But would I like to have cosmic level insight, or even go through life always being the smartest person in the room? No I don’t think so, in my experience it’s incompatible with mental health.
But I would very much like to keep at least my current level of intelligence for my whole life. So I’d want that button, yes.
I do wonder if it would feel like a drug though. Would it be addictive?
And it doesn’t cause other problems like outsmarting the brain systems that are supposed to be attaching your intelligence to the interests of your body? Or the people inconveniently stopping you from snorting cocaine constantly until you die? And there’s no level of intelligence you reach where you note that higher levels are unlikely to be any more use to you in achieving your actual goals, versus spending that button-pushing time on other tasks? And all this intelligence is free and doesn’t require any energy input to run in your head? And at some level you become intelligent enough to impart these abilities to your descendants or to just never die? And you reach a level of intelligence where you can fight off the CIA before you reach a level of intelligence where you interest the CIA?
People don’t generally reason about things like “intelligence” as an abstract value from zero to infinity, because we don’t encounter such things very often. What we do encounter is people trying to scam us. If you present someone with something that appears to be a 100% obvious perfect move with absolutely no drawbacks whatsoever, they mostly correctly conclude that they just aren’t smart enough to understand the catch.
I would say no. Lots of the super smart people become eccentric. I suspect any smarter and they’d just end up flat crazy. Dealing with being the only one in the room who understands what you’re saying can be lonely.
I’m working with a group of people, some 10 years younger than me, who don’t really understand technology. It feels weird.
A 100%. If you become the most intelligent person in the world, it will be hard to create connection with people because very few people would truly understand how you are.
We tend to make friends with like minded people and similar intelligence and pressing that button would disrupt that.
Nah, your just use your increased intellect to get other people to push the button for themselves, increasing the pool of intelligent potential friends available to you.
Actually this reminds me of a story I read last year where two people are in a race to massively increase their intelligence. Neither can tolerate the potential threat the existence of another hyper-intelligent person holds so it’s a struggle to the death. If I remember correctly they gain there ability to effectively read people’s minds by reading body language, micro expressions, etc., develop new systems of logic and hyper-efficient language to think in and have an entirely mental showdown at the end.
Unfortunately I’m too stupid to remember the title.
I’m very interested in understanding. But I don’t want to always be the smartest person in the room. I’m already the smartest in most situations I’m in IRL. If it was always like that, I’d definitely go crazy.
That sounds nice and all, but is useless as a definition. The way I see it used, wisdom is knowledge and intuition that is gained from experience, whereas intelligence is a property of a person that allows them to learn quickly.
Sorry, couldn’t help myself on that one. They had to push a button every 108 minutes, which is the sum of “the numbers”, and they had to enter that code. If they don’t enter the code, the world will end. 😁
It depends on the definition of intelligence as there are many kind/type/sort/category of intelligences and every psychologist, neuroscientist, philosopher, linguist, ethnologist, educator and a multitude of other specialist will all have their own preferred way to differentiate, categorize, regroup and make hierarchies or diagrams of all matter of intelligence and the different aspects of cognition.
Then there is general intelligence( which counterintuitively affects “intelligence” less as it increases, coined as Spearman’s law of diminishing returns (SLODR):
Tucker-Drob (2009) found that a general factor accounted for approximately 75% of the variation in seven different cognitive abilities among very low IQ adults, but only accounted for approximately 30% of the variation in the abilities among very high IQ adults.
Hence, very loosely akin to current CPUs/GPUs limits (terrible comparison, I know), there’s only so much Gigahertz we can push silicon based CPUs, there is only so many transistors we can smash together into a smaller and smaller space, there is only so much distance/area to carry tiny and fragile signals from one end of the CPU to another before it become undistinguishable from background noise, there is only so much power we can feed a tiny CPU before it reaches thermal saturation and there’s only so many cores and/or modules we can add before most of it remain dormant/barely used in day to day operations.
Now, concerning your hypothetical button, let suppose there is no such “diminishing return”, one could gladly continuously sit/walk/sleep on the button for more “intelligence”, but to keep up the brain and entire nervous system will have to drastically change just to handle all this increased intelligence. At some point even the brain volume will start to be affected and the brain would outgrow its cranium. All of it will probably excruciatingly painful and accompanied with a cocktail of neurological disorders since the brain keeps rewiring itself as it evolves.
A lot of it is very clearly an ego thing, they’re all saying ‘I’m smarter than most people who need to push the button and anyone smarter than me is also worse off…’ it’s the same thing people do with the age they were born ‘older generations don’t understand, newer generations have been ruined’
I think it’s partly because no one wants to admit if they were smarter then they’d make better choices because then there might be someone smarter who suggests that change their mind on something and that’s never going to happen.
Like all the comments ‘i know things are bad, if don’t want to understand how bad they are’ it’s inconceivable that they could understand their misthinking on a subject and change their opinion, they see it as any extra intelligence will just make them more sure they’re right.
Personally I’d hammer that button for a few days then spend some time trying to work out solutions to my problems and the world’s problems - if I can’t do it I’ll go back to the button until I’m able to