DEAR NORMIES

That’s not what intelligence does for you.

Available intelligence vs demonstrated intelligence. You can have it, you must be willing to and enjoy using it, and you must be wiling to and enjoy using it competitively, and using it competitively by working harder and longer than your peers.

Intelligence is the rate at which you learn by identifying patterns of constant relations (opportunities) and inconstant relations (errors, falsehoods, costs)

As IQ increases from todays ~105/106 – the point at which you can follow instructions, repair a machine, learn by reading (build a world model from written instructions instead of being instructed), the rate at which you can learn and detect errors increases (the scope of the world model you can construct from facts outside direct physical experience).

About every seven points (half a standard deviation) we can distinguish differences in ability.

At about every fifteen (one full difference) we have distinct advantages over one another. As we increase in that difference we have increasing difficulty talking to one another because our frames (world models) vary in complexity: meaning degrees of abstraction.

At thirty points (two standard deviations) it is quite difficult to communicate to one another.

95 is about the requirement for working in a medical office. By 85 you are all but untrainable. Below 85 even the military can’t find anything you can do without endangering others.

So when a person believes he or she is intelligent and that intelligence doesn’t matter, he correctly identifies that for the scope of problems he is aware of, that if he is given time he will figure it out. For the 2/3 of people under the ‘average’ bell curve this is true.

The problem is, y’all haven’t tried to teach anyone with a 80-90 iq to even flip a burger or reliably not break the equipment. And you have no experience with anything even vaguely difficult. Which is why you’re ‘average’, and struggle with these (relatively simple) concepts. And it’s why people like me found a dozen companies and solve the great problems of the age, and people like my current hero stephen wolfram solves the problem of mathematics of the age.

In other words, you aren’t competent to get access to the people who run the world because your very presence makes everyone in the room dumber.

There are rooms in this world I’m not competent to get access to because I lack interest in political and commercial power, compared to intellectual and wealth power.

THe difference is that I could if I want have chosen that path. Average people can’t choose those paths. And they can’t even comprehend what the mind of people with much larger world models in mind, changing daily, adapting daily, think like or feel.

The world above normals is purely empirical. We search for opportunities, and we have the power to act on them – because people trust us not to ‘break the machinery’.

That’s what’s hard to grasp.

I know how a bill gates, steve ballmer, steve jobs, the leadership at goldman sachs, the president and senate, any given general, and the top tenth of a percent of intellectuals in the world, see the world.

It is not ‘unknowable’. It’s uncontrollable. Because it takes those very capable people to run the world, with all the technology and knowledge, institutions available to us.

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(FWIW: 106 is the sort of ‘minimum average iq’ for a democratic polity – which is why they’re failing. About 115 is the target, and I assume 120 would be the optimum possible.)