[HN Gopher] Why Is the Human Brain So Efficient?
___________________________________________________________________
Why Is the Human Brain So Efficient?
Author : ofou
Score : 64 points
Date : 2022-08-04 17:23 UTC (5 hours ago)
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(TXT) w3m dump (nautil.us)
| atlasunshrugged wrote:
| I'm curious for the other folks reading this post and interacting
| with this thread- do you believe that the logical pathway for
| expanding human intelligence is with A) Brain-Computer
| interfaces, B) Through AGI, C) Playing with our genes (e.g.
| designer babies), D) Something else (and I'd love to hear
| thoughts)
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| C) you don't even have to know which genes boost intelligence
| to know that kids from smart parents are more likely to be
| intelligent. Akademgorodok was a concentration of very smart
| Russian scientists and turned into an (accidental?) eugenics
| program producing a new generation of smart kids. Some of the
| smartest people I've ever met were born there. But once IQ
| boosting genes are known they can be selected for by sequencing
| embryos, I.e. pick the smartest 2 embryos from a candidate pool
| of 100. An average couple with average variance could still
| produce 130 IQ kids.
| narag wrote:
| I won't be the one to disagree on the effectivity of that
| approach, but not sure what would be the _goal_.
|
| To ellaborate: aren't there unintended consequences of very
| high intelligence?
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| I would prefer to live in a society with more intelligent
| people.
| narag wrote:
| That reminded me of Groucho: "I drink to make other
| people interesting" :)
| tsimionescu wrote:
| IQ is much more a measure of prosperity/conformity than
| anything else, past 90-100.
| mlyle wrote:
| This isn't really true. The heritability of IQ is pretty
| high. We know this from twin studies. Beyond this, adopted
| siblings, have a very low correlation coefficient of IQ by
| adulthood, but genetic siblings have a very high one.
| [deleted]
| dwringer wrote:
| Genes don't even have to boost intelligence for kids from
| smart parents to be more likely to be intelligent.
|
| Just think of a kid adopted out of the nursery by two smart
| parents. Is that kid: A) more likely to score higher on
| tests, B) more likely to score lower on tests, or C) exactly
| as likely to score high/low on tests no matter who his
| adoptive parents are?
| gwern wrote:
| > Just think of a kid adopted out of the nursery by two
| smart parents. Is that kid: A) more likely to score higher
| on tests, B) more likely to score lower on tests, or C)
| exactly as likely to score high/low on tests no matter who
| his adoptive parents are?
|
| Approximately C. See IQ adoption studies like
| https://www.gwern.net/docs/iq/2021-willoughby.pdf#page=6
| for the scatterplot for adoptive parental IQ vs adoptee.
| dwringer wrote:
| It is quite possible that the standards for adoption are
| such that only couples able to raise children in a
| nurturing environment capable of fostering intellectual
| growth are typically allowed to adopt and raise children.
| They are not an accurate cross-section of all potential
| parents by any means.
|
| I am imagining if _any_ couple could adopt; taking the
| _same kid_ (which of course we cannot do) and having them
| raised by a couple of college professors vs. a couple of
| meth addicts living in a drug den - I would be absolutely
| stunned if there were no difference in what kind of test
| scores the kid would get growing up.
| PeterisP wrote:
| > taking the same kid (which of course we cannot do)
|
| There were a bunch of studies on identical twins who were
| adopted in different families, so it can be tested. I
| _think_ they showed the same thing (kids parents more
| important than adoptive parents) but I 'm not certain and
| can't quickly find the studies to verify.
| dwringer wrote:
| Twin studies are a good way to get another angle on this.
|
| Here, unfortunately that doesn't get around the
| confounding factor that only parents deemed suitable
| candidates by adoption agencies are able to adopt and
| raise children, so they are not an accurate cross section
| of all possible parents. I don't dispute that there may
| be a threshhold at which some innate traits take over (or
| fail to do so) from the benefits of a nurturing
| environment (which may have diminishing returns past a
| certain point).
| mlyle wrote:
| Terrible neglect results in low IQ. No one is arguing
| that. Obviously, whacking the kid on the head with a
| hammer, giving her terribly insufficient food, or never
| exposing her to language will depress IQ. These are all
| things that parents sometimes do.
|
| Not only do we have evidence that the heritability of
| intelligence is high, from twin studies, but also:
| adopted siblings' intelligence is only slightly
| correlated-- barely better than strangers. Biological
| sibling intelligence raised in the same house are very
| closely correlated.
|
| This seems to imply once parenting is "good enough",
| these types of environmental effects don't affect IQ in
| adulthood to a significant degree.
|
| Perhaps the most interesting finding: parenting _does
| seem to affect IQ scores in early childhood more than
| genetics_ , but by adulthood the strengths of these
| relationships have completely reversed.
| dwringer wrote:
| I appreciate your well reasoned and thoughtful reply and
| I would like to add that I find your assessment
| completely plausible and I myself tend to agree with it.
| Although, I still question the validity of using IQ as a
| universal objective measurement of intelligence. At best
| I can see there being a fairly wide pareto front of
| optimal intelligence for most situations. But who can
| ultimately judge?
|
| Into adulthood I find it very difficult to say whose
| intelligence is "better" in anything close to an
| objective way. While the results of genetic influence may
| become evident in some kinds of tests, it is just as easy
| to conceive tests at which the same candidate would fail
| yet someone else with a lower IQ might do very well. The
| possibilities are endless and I really don't think
| outside of cases of abuse or neglect creating specific
| developmental deficiencies as you mentioned that we can
| meaningfully quantify intelligence generally. If we could
| better do so I think the influence of parenting might
| still become more evident than what we see in IQ tests.
|
| > No one is arguing that.
|
| Well, my initial comment was simply an attempt to make
| the point that parenting can have an effect whether or
| not genetics do and the reply I got was "look it up".
| mlyle wrote:
| > Into adulthood I find it very difficult to say whose
| intelligence is "better" in anything close to an
| objective way.
|
| Intelligence is difficult to quantify and define. BUT:
| peoples abilities on a wide variety of tasks are
| positively correlated. This strongly implies there is
| some kind of underlying factor that makes you better at
| "all things", and this is what IQ tests attempt to
| measure.
|
| e.g. see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychom
| etrics)#/medi...
|
| Of course, the correlation coefficients are not 1; so of
| course someone can have a lower IQ than you but far
| outperform you in one of these tasks.
|
| The results from IQ tests seem to be very strong
| predictors of _many_ outcome measures later in life--
| indeed, more than parenting seems to predict these
| things.
|
| edit: from the wikipedia article on g factor:
|
| " Research indicates that tests of g are the best single
| predictors of job performance, with an average validity
| coefficient of .55 across several meta-analyses of
| studies based on supervisor ratings and job samples. The
| average meta-analytic validity coefficient for
| performance in job training is .63.[76] The validity of g
| in the highest complexity jobs (professional, scientific,
| and upper management jobs) has been found to be greater
| than in the lowest complexity jobs, but g has predictive
| validity even for the simplest jobs. Research also shows
| that specific aptitude tests tailored for each job
| provide little or no increase in predictive validity over
| tests of general intelligence."
| sbierwagen wrote:
| >having them raised by a couple of college professors vs.
| a couple of meth addicts living in a drug den
|
| The usual analogy is that you can always lower the IQ of
| a child by hitting them on the head with a hammer or by
| lacing their food with lead powder. But no intervention
| has been found that _raises_ IQ.
| baja_blast wrote:
| I read recently of two identical twins separated at birth
| with on growing up in South Korea and the other in the
| United States, the twin who grew up in SK had an IQ 15
| points higher than her identical sister. The connections
| in the brain either degrade or strength depending on how
| it's used and I can absolutely see a person's IQ being
| increased by engaging in subjects/tasks adjacent to what
| most IQ tests measure.
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| Unfortunately intelligence is mostly genetic, look it up...
|
| Edit: This is my opinion on what I consider a fact based on
| a fair bit of research and first hand observation. People
| are free to disagree with this but if they've made it to
| this point still holding that opinion then I think it's
| unlikely anything I could say would change their minds.
| [deleted]
| dwringer wrote:
| Are you suggesting, then, that the answer is C? I would
| hypothesize A is more likely, even assuming intelligence
| _is_ genetic. Thus, my only point was there 's a
| confounding variable if we try to use the relative tested
| levels of intelligence between parents an children as a
| basis to say whether intelligence is genetic. That's not
| to say there aren't potentially ways around that by
| designing studies carefully.
| bee_rider wrote:
| If you want to make a claim, source it.
|
| Given the difficulty of defining an objective measure for
| intelligence and the confounding factors of upbringing, I
| think it is almost impossible to find a good source on
| this sort of thing. Why should we go on a snipe hunt to
| prove your point?
| mlyle wrote:
| > difficulty of defining an objective measure for
| intelligence
|
| IQ is not a perfect metric, but it is a decent predictor
| of many outcomes.
|
| > the confounding factors of upbringing
|
| This is why you do twin studies and studies using
| adoption as a control. We have quite a wealth of them. A
| good critical review of the evidence on both sides is
| here: https://humanvarietiesdotorg.files.wordpress.com/20
| 13/05/the...
|
| * Identical twins have a much higher correlation
| coefficient of intelligence than fraternal twins (table
| 5).
|
| * Identical twins raised apart have a correlation
| coefficient for intelligence of around .73 (MZA studies).
|
| * Correlation coefficients of IQs of biologically
| unrelated siblings raised in the same adoptive
| environment are approximately 0.
|
| There are obvious confounds the paper mentions:
|
| * Fraternal twins may not have identical environments.
|
| * Adoptive environments may not represent typical
| parenting environments.
|
| * Some of these studies have had poor controls and
| practices.
|
| * Distribution of results from studies looks bimodal
| which indicates something weird is going on.
|
| Still, even if you take the most critical view I think
| you have to accept that there is still substantial
| heritability of intelligence. These results cannot be
| convincingly explained any other way.
| hedgedoops2 wrote:
| Education
|
| Basic Income and Basic Capital (so you can use education)
| mlyle wrote:
| The question is ill-posed.
|
| What exactly is "human intelligence"?
|
| Are you asking me for a normative judgment (e.g. which one is
| morally correct?) or some kind of positive one (e.g. which one
| will improve outcome measure X most?)
|
| Why are you assuming that it's just one? These choices don't
| seem mutually exclusive.
| atlasunshrugged wrote:
| Human intelligence = the standard intelligence we exhibit
| today as humans vs. machine intelligence from something like
| ML
|
| Not asking for a normative judgement or a positive one, I
| asked about what you thought would be the logical progression
| (under the assumption that humanity would like to continue to
| evolve and become more prosperous and becoming more
| intelligent or building more intelligent tools seems and
| obvious way to help enable that)
|
| Could be more than one, was just trying to give some large
| buckets, that's why I added D and asked for people to add
| their thoughts.
| mlyle wrote:
| > Human intelligence = the standard intelligence we exhibit
| today as humans vs. machine intelligence from something
| like ML
|
| Yah, but what is that?
|
| Are you talking about an IQ score? Ability to do the tasks
| that ML is not currently good at isn't a great measure (a
| few years ago, Go or creating high quality paintings would
| have qualified).
|
| E.g. one example of "D" is "rigorously studying and
| improving human education". But there's infinite
| clarification on what the problem you're trying to solve
| before we agree what improvement is:
|
| * Mean, median, or peak outcomes?
|
| * Performance on a given curriculum, or on a given abstract
| class of problems? Does creativity count? Is an education
| system that improves various kinds of quantitative metrics
| by 20% but results in a 5% less creative and flexible
| population a "win" or not?
|
| Pretty much all the same arguments apply no matter which
| approach you consider.
|
| > Not asking for a normative judgement or a positive one,
|
| Well, normative considerations are important. If
| experimenting with brain-computer interfaces for quick
| advancement harms humans, is it a "good path"? How do we
| compare these paths? Quickness, magnitude of results,
| "best" resulting society, least harms, some kind of cost
| measure?
| chongli wrote:
| _Are you talking about an IQ score?_
|
| An IQ score is a measure of intelligence, it's not
| intelligence itself. Just as the temperature you read off
| a thermometer is only a measure of the heat in the room.
| The thermometer tells you very little about the position
| and momentum of the gas particles in the room, only that
| higher temperatures correlate with more momentum.
|
| The value of IQ scores for measuring human intelligence
| is that they correlate with all sorts of life outcomes.
| The hypothesis behind the research is that both the life
| outcomes and the IQ scores are caused by a single factor,
| known as _g_ , for general intelligence.
|
| Obviously, if we train some model on IQ tests we can
| probably get a machine to ridiculously high IQ scores.
| Does that mean we have created intelligence? No. The
| machine is not going to show any of the life outcomes we
| expect from a human with high IQ. It's not going to _do_
| anything! That 's why none of these machines are
| intelligent.
| mlyle wrote:
| Yes, I understand all that (and have talked about and
| mentioned _g_ in other comments in this thread).
|
| The point is, what's "improving intelligence"? It's
| something that we have a hard time quantifying on a
| linear, agreed axis. As you point out, IQ scores are a
| somewhat flawed measure of g, which itself is a somewhat
| handwavy observation of a underlying factor that is a
| strong correlate to human performance in a broad set of
| areas.
|
| And even if you could put that human performance in a
| linear measure, there's still a question of how you value
| different changes in that distribution. Which is better--
| raising everyone by .1 standard deviations, or boosting a
| few people near the top by 1 standard deviation?
| sinenomine wrote:
| Why should this discussion play out again and again in
| this exact form is beyond me. It's always the same troupe
| of beaten up arguments trying to pass while being
| expressed in academia-flavored rhetorics, is it the canon
| critical thinking essay tone they teach in the US?
| Insofar as the grandparent post contained some useful
| inquiry this should amount to uncharitable derail.
|
| So often this blows up when anything related to IQ is
| brought up, a profound generational trauma of american
| intellectualism gets a small scene to replay its
| discourse in suffocating detail.
|
| Maybe this is as close to the _root cause_ as we can
| publicly get? Our insane tendency to avoid productive
| discussion and stifle true creative activity, all in
| favor of hollow wordplay (quasi-statistical if the
| situation requires, not less hollow). Our education - a
| glorified daycare with rote-learning for line-workers, of
| which we somehow expect intelligence gains if only we
| could spend more time instilling it (going against all
| solid evidence to the contrary, because the doctrine of
| never having enough education has to be preached).
|
| There is a word for this, and it is a neologism:
| https://roonscape.substack.com/p/a-song-of-shapes-and-
| words
| mlyle wrote:
| I don't like the way you are talking to me, and I
| especially don't like that you may not have read
| carefully enough to understand that parts may be agreeing
| with you.
|
| > a glorified daycare with rote-learning for line-
| workers, of which we somehow expect intelligence gains if
| only we could spend more time instilling it
|
| Drilling tons of math in rigorous ways for excessive
| amounts of time clearly improves various kinds of outcome
| measures. It also tends to cause other harms.
|
| If we want to improve intelligence, first we need to
| _agree what intelligence is_. Then we can talk about what
| measures are appropriate or ethical to use to try and
| improve it.
|
| Even if we just take a somewhat stupid measure, and say
| "all we care about is a hybrid of IQ and SAT-I scores at
| age 16"-- there's still the question of whether we care
| more about moving the top performance upwards or the
| entire distribution.
|
| If we don't agree what intelligence is, we can't answer
| questions like this. If we use a traditional measure like
| IQ as a measure of G factor-- I don't think brain-
| computer interfaces are going to swing things much and
| they may even make it worse. (But they could also allow
| explosions in human productivity or quality of life that
| are not measured on that scale).
|
| e.g. Smartphones have not made us smarter, but they may
| sometimes allow us to do smarter and better things.
| 2snakes wrote:
| Psychologist Robert Sternberg defined intelligence as
| "mental activity directed toward purposive adaptation to,
| selection, and shaping of real-world environments
| relevant to one's life."
| mlyle wrote:
| One definition of many.
|
| First, it's hard to rigorously reason about and convert
| to a quantitative metric.
|
| Second, it would seem to imply that many geniuses in the
| math and sciences are not very intelligent.
|
| Figuring out what we really mean is _really hard_.
| NhanH wrote:
| Just to expand on the part of "ill defined question".
| "Human intelligence" might not be a scale that goes up and
| down, so it's a bit hard to say for sure. There is probably
| at least a tradeoff of flexibility vs specialization. There
| is also physical constraint where intelligence might be
| limited due to the whole brain/ machine becoming a
| distributed system (and you can't have proper single point
| consciousness, for example). Though we don't even know if
| consciousness is related to intelligence.
| mlyle wrote:
| I'll go and play along with my own definitions, even though I
| think the question is hard to answer because we may not agree
| what it means at all.
|
| Improving the development and deployment of existing human
| intelligence is the strongest logical pathway for expanding
| human intelligence.
|
| 1. Most humans don't develop to anywhere near their full
| potential.
|
| 2. It's unclear whether even the "best" humans are anywhere
| near actual limitations.
|
| 3. Most humans spend large amounts of time doing drudge,
| unrewarding work below their full developed potential that
| could be better accomplished in other ways.
|
| Things like efforts to expand AI potentially chip away at 3.
| Shish2k wrote:
| The industrial revolution was supposed to completely negate
| #3, and look where that got us...
| mlyle wrote:
| > > 3. Most humans spend large amounts of time doing
| drudge, unrewarding work below their full developed
| potential that could be better accomplished in other ways.
|
| Most of us have more interesting work that more fully uses
| our intellectual potential than typical people had a few
| hundred years ago.
|
| And most of us also get more time in leisure, now, than
| people a few hundred years ago.
|
| I think there's progress, but it's uneven. Look at what
| step changes of using a little more human creativity and
| intelligence-- the Renaissance, Enlightenment, Industrial
| and Information revolutions-- completely upending our
| society each time.
| eternityforest wrote:
| The industrial revolution was kind of horrible, but we are
| finally starting to see the benefits in the digital age.
|
| We really do have more people working stem and less need
| for physical resource use, at least in some areas.
| kshacker wrote:
| > 3. Most humans spend large amounts of time doing drudge,
| unrewarding work below their full developed potential
|
| Imagine all humans working at their full potential. Would we
| have fewer people because we do not need that much potential?
|
| Would this have caused world wars decades, centuries, or
| millennia earlier?
|
| What will be the cost of making all humans work at their full
| potential?
|
| Maybe a hard problem to solve.
| fractallyte wrote:
| This speculation is addressed in the novel Brainwave, by
| Poul Anderson (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_Wave)
|
| It's pretty dated regarding the roles of women and men, but
| the ideas are very interesting nevertheless. One of the big
| insights is that many people might not be ready to operate
| at full potential - they would succumb to various forms of
| insanity.
|
| Look how the Internet's 'network effect' amplified the
| voices of conspiracy theorists all over the world. Now
| imagine an enhancement of that kind of paranoia: this is
| what the super-rationalist protagonists had to deal with in
| Brainwave...
| WJW wrote:
| I kinda depends if they can agree on what needs to be done
| I suppose, just like in the real world. But TBH it sounds
| like it would quickly devolve into NIH, a bit like a team
| with too many seniors.
| mlyle wrote:
| Imagine monarchs and elites in the 1200s picturing what
| would happen if the commoners were educated and able to
| pursue intellectual pursuits en masse.
|
| They'd have similar arguments. And I mean, they wouldn't
| be wrong: we're wasteful; we duplicate effort; things are
| scattershot and disorganized.
|
| But we live in an amazing world of progress, creative
| expression, and wealth, too.
|
| Imagine taking another small step in the direction
| towards developing and exploiting human talent and
| allowing for self-actualization.
| WJW wrote:
| Oh I don't disagree that we should allow as many humans
| as possible to do self-actualize. It is clearly the right
| thing to do just from a moral standpoint. I just think
| that most of the people who fully "self-actualize to
| their full potential" as, say, a lobbyist or a conspiracy
| theorist podcaster would not be of as much benefit to the
| world as some of the enlightenment era scientists.
|
| That was what I was getting at in my previous post:
| having everyone at peak potential is great when everyone
| is aligned. If there is internal strife, peak potential
| just means bigger conflicts. Taken to the extreme, that
| means bigger wars and billions of dead people. Until we
| can figure out the coordination problem, human
| limitations are not the biggest problem IMO.
| mlyle wrote:
| Yah-- I get you.
|
| My counterpoint is that even without people being
| aligned, we're far outperforming the past and what people
| hundreds of years ago thought we might do with increased
| privilege. Indeed, we even have less strife overall, even
| if we have many more axes of disagreement and fewer
| shared values.
| [deleted]
| cercatrova wrote:
| Perhaps the movie/book Limitless was ahead of its time. I do
| believe that there is much more potential in the human brain
| than we use currently.
| [deleted]
| narag wrote:
| The main obstacle to a happy life for most of Humanity is not
| lack of intelligence but irrational or selfish impulses. That
| would be my D. Make a more liveable world and no, we won't get
| there with more emotions/drama. More like live and let live.
|
| B won't expand _human_ intelligence.
|
| C is paved with unintended consequences. Wait until it's not
| playing.
|
| So, IMHO, mostly A.
| causi wrote:
| C is the most practical in the short term, because we don't
| have to understand the brain all that well to find out how to
| tell an embryo to make it bigger and denser. It will involve a
| lot of failures.
| kbelder wrote:
| I think in the medium term, probably genetics, because that's
| partly a trial-and-error approach. I feel like brain-computer
| interfaces, and other technology that relies on actually
| _understanding_ details of how the brain works, are quite a
| ways off.
|
| But... in the short term, I think we could still make massive
| gains purely by improving education and child-rearing _. If our
| schools and families actually raised and educated kids
| _properly_ (whatever 'properly' is), we'd see huge improvements
| in average IQ.
|
| _Real improvements that may be culturally infeasible, and also
| could be very damaging if they are done wrong.
| whatever1 wrote:
| IQ is something very narrow. The fact that you can do some
| symbolic inference on paper does not mean that you will be
| more successful in life
|
| From my school mates I have seen many of them who had on
| paper low IQ to have great careers as entrepreneurs,
| salesmen, athletes, craftsmen. I have also cases with top
| students who did not go anywhere.
|
| So I am not sure whether an average increase of IQ would help
| the society.
|
| Literacy for sure helps, but I am not convinced about IQ.
| jlawson wrote:
| This is false: "The fact that you can do some symbolic
| inference on paper does not mean that you will be more
| successful in life"
|
| IQ, more than any other psychometric measure, predicts a
| wide variety of positive life outcomes including income,
| health, longevity, not being incarcerated, etc.
|
| Here [0] is a simplistic article about it, but there are
| endless studies and discussions about this, all with the
| same clear and uncontroversial result.
|
| [0] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/11/does-iq-determine-
| success-a-...
|
| Further reading:
|
| [1] https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2019/07/massive-danish-
| sibling-...
|
| [2] https://www.google.com/search?q=iq+predicts+success
| lamp987 wrote:
| >IQ isnt meaningful because i know counter-examples.
|
| That doesnt mean anything.
| pjscott wrote:
| How? There's a long history of failure at raising people's
| IQs by environmental changes, and it doesn't seem to be for
| lack of trying.
| scotty79 wrote:
| You can however lower IQ with environmental changes very
| effectively.
|
| Getting rid of parasites improves educational outcomes of
| children. Possibly their IQ as well.
|
| Who knows how much smarter would we be if flus, colds and
| other duseases didn't ravage bodies of our children.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I would say probably A. Computers complement humans well, they
| are good at the things we suck at, and bad at the things we're
| good at. Lots of progress in computers nowadays is made by
| hanging problem-specific accelerators off the side of
| conventional CPUs, so either we can be "creativity
| accelerators" hanging off the computers, or they can be
| "computational accelerators" hanging off us.
|
| It should also improve human-to-human communication speed. The
| whole trick of humans is that we can put our heads together and
| work as a super-brain. As a side-effect, the normal-humans have
| distill their work-product into 'ideas' that fit into the heads
| of other normal humans. It seems unlikely that we'll ever
| genetically engineer the whole human race, so continuing to
| produce normal-human-compatible ideas seems like a big win.
|
| If we have genetically engineered super-humans going around,
| they might have some ideas that are just too big to fit in our
| normal brains. Breaking compatibility like that seems risky,
| don't want people out there whose word we just fundamentally
| have to take on some things.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| Paedor wrote:
| I'm doing a comp-bio PhD right now, and the more I learn about
| the process of playing with genes, the further I think we are
| from expanding intelligence with them.
|
| In the current state of the field, we simply don't know how
| cells work (in enough detail). We can't predict what cells do
| when genes are mutated, we definitely can't manufacture new
| genes that slot into the cell's existing machinery, and, for a
| lot of the proteins related to neurons in particular, we don't
| even know what they do.
|
| If there is a breakthrough, it'll take luck at this point, and
| probably be something stupid, like realizing we can double
| production of some cell type without hurting the child *too*
| much. We're really not close to engineering anything, which
| might be a requirement for producing more intelligence without
| some very clumsy side effects.
|
| Given the level of trial and error required for a lucky
| breakthrough, and the human cost of that error, we might just
| give up on this until the singularity anyways. That said,
| there's so much undiscovered now that there could be a perfect
| mechanism that just isn't known yet. And, indirectly, by just
| making sure people don't have allergies or a pre-disposition to
| heart disease... we might increase intelligence just by making
| people healthier.
| mlyle wrote:
| Heritability of intelligence is high, and there's a few genes
| already existing in the human population that are well
| correlated with intelligence.
|
| You could just try turning a few known knobs and see what
| happens. The efficacy is probably moderate-- maybe 7 IQ
| points or so with the currently known genes. But a change of
| mean IQ by 7 is actually a pretty substantial advantage--
| it's half a standard deviation, and predicts about $4k more
| income per year.
|
| Yes, it's unethical and there's probably substantial human
| cost.
|
| Or, there's even a shortcut of just testing for people with
| high IQs that also possess the best known genotypes (i.e.
| test both genotype and phenotype) and forcing them to breed.
| eternityforest wrote:
| Something else.
|
| All the other ones will happen to the best of our ability, but
| only for specific groups, and people(Or at least people like
| me) could wond up seeing them as almost cults, for a long while
| until it is totally proven safe and beneficial.
|
| The rest of us, at least for now without major cultural change,
| will just do more and more of our "thinking" outside our heads.
|
| Unless you can prove, via decades long studies, that your
| enhancements are totally safe and side effect free, with not
| even some headaches or 1 in 10000 complications, I'll just...
| use google.
|
| Even if you did have the studies I'd still want to personally
| meet enhanced people and see for myself if it altered their
| personality or caused some random aches and pains, or had some
| other regrettable thing they didn't bother to do a study for.
|
| Even after all that, there could still be social
| discrimination. If cyborgs were disliked my most people, I'll
| probably leave it to the people who are passionate about
| enhanced intelligence.
|
| Sure, _maybe_ I could get a better job. Maybe I would even be
| able to understand 3D space well enough to do things like
| driving and not occasionally walking directly into door jambs.
|
| But by the time you have the enhancements cars will be self
| driving and computers will be able to do even more of the math
| I'd want to do.
|
| I don't think I have any close friends who want a Neuralink.
|
| CAD programs are essentially already a primitive form of neural
| prosthesis. We can work with shapes we couldn't work with
| mentally, and workflows outside of the traditional "Imagine,
| understand, write it down" are possible.
|
| Even if ALL the problems are solved, it probably will only be
| useful to people working in specific cutting edge sectors, and
| for committed philosophers(Professional or amateur) who belong
| to a school that is not against enhancements in the first
| place.
| colechristensen wrote:
| If you didn't suffer from the presence of a moral code, gene
| editing babies for intelligence is something you could do
| today, or if not, with a month or two of preparations and
| waiting for suppliers.
|
| I would bet that it is possible to expand actual consciousness
| into connected hardware (silicon or engineered nervous tissue),
| and have that hardware expand a metric you would call
| intelligence.
|
| The most reasonable thing in a third direction would be
| improving brain development through specific training in
| childhood and training as an adult. A lot of intelligence comes
| down to how the brain organizes itself in response to inputs,
| and a scientific discipline to optimize this could make a lot
| of progress. Not that work isn't being done along these lines
| but I think there is a lot of room to grow here.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| If you eliminate the "G" in AGI to include any mechanical,
| electrical, or otherwise automated non-human computational
| processes we can use to augment our own brain's limitations,
| i.e. calculators, slide rulers, all the way up to Wikipedia,
| then AI is clearly the answer so far. Even just books and
| language, augmenting human intelligence by parallelizing
| thinking across many humans and not losing knowledge upon
| death, are huge wins.
|
| But for the far future, all of the above seems like a good
| answer. At least one "something else" is the possibility of
| nutritional, electrical, or biochemical interventions that can
| increase brain function without needing to change our genes.
| Caffeine and beta blockers seem like the best things we've got
| so far, along with not being in a state of persistent
| starvation, but there are presumably ways we can do better.
| saeranv wrote:
| > Another salient property of the brain ... is that the
| connection strengths between neurons can be modified in response
| to activity and experience--a process that is widely believed by
| neuroscientists to be the basis for learning and memory.
| Repetitive training enables the neuronal circuits to become
| better configured for the tasks being performed, resulting in
| greatly improved speed and precision.
|
| This seems like a clear description of a bayesian process. The
| new connections are a posterior updated from the likelihood
| informed from input sensory data. But the fact that they don't
| describe it as such makes me wonder if there's other reasonable
| ways to model this learning behaviour.
|
| I am familiar with Karl Friston's work (as a layperson) of animal
| behaviour and learning as a form of bayesian update via
| variational inference. Does anyone know if his ideas, or the
| general idea of learning as a bayesian process well accepted in
| the neuroscience industry?
| EricMausler wrote:
| Neurons that fire together, wire together
| scotty79 wrote:
| Is this observation used in any modern artificial neural
| networks?
| LesZedCB wrote:
| it's the basis of the HTM from numenta
| eli_gottlieb wrote:
| The general idea of a Bayesian brain is fairly well-accepted.
| Not everyone agrees that oh, this must be _the_ way the brain
| works, but there are definitely experiments demonstrating set-
| ups in which you can get a good approximation of a Bayesian
| posterior distribution out of subjects.
|
| The question is _how_ the brain might do Bayesian inference in
| a very broad class of generative models (not just affine-
| Gaussian!), and what _else_ it might be doing inference in
| service to.
| saeranv wrote:
| > This latter property is particularly useful for enhancing the
| precision of information processing. For example, information
| represented by an individual neuron may be noisy (say, with a
| precision of 1 in 100). By taking the average of input from 100
| neurons carrying the same information, the common downstream
| partner neuron can represent the information with much higher
| precision (about 1 in 1,000 in this case).
|
| What does precision mean here, mathematically? Precision as in
| precision/recall doesn't seem to work, as precision in that
| context means TP / (TP + FP), and going from 1/100 to 1/1000
| would mean worse precision.
|
| Does it mean something like floating point precision, where
| increasing bits can increase information represented, i.e. 2 bits
| represent max of 11=3, 3 bits represent maximum of 111=7 and so
| on? I can't quite this to work...
| eli_gottlieb wrote:
| They mean signal-to-noise ratio.
|
| Let's say you want to estimate some quantity, so you put a
| Gaussian prior over it. You then have a bunch of different
| sensors subject to white (Gaussian) noise, and some link-
| function connecting the latent value to the mean of the sensor
| reading with fixed precision. Gaussian with Gaussian is a
| conjugate prior-likelihood pair, so you can calculate the
| posterior parameters in closed form.
|
| Your posterior mean is going to be a precision-weighted average
| of your sample mean and your prior mean, while your posterior
| precision (signal-to-noise) is going to be proportional to the
| number of sensors you used.
| saeranv wrote:
| Thank you, that's a very clever explaination. Even though I
| can't grok the mathematics off the top of my head (I would
| have to look up the conjugate gaussian-gaussian formula and
| work this out) I think converting this to a posterior
| probability calculation is much more intuitive, then the
| article's explaination.
|
| So, my crude understanding is that therefore the signal and
| noise is the mean and variance of the Gaussian, respectively.
| The posterior uncertainty in this is case is thus a function
| of a weighted average of the sample data, weighted by the
| priors, normalized by the data, which results in a higher
| signal-to-noise ratio, or lower uncertainty.
| seydor wrote:
| BCI. We still interact with keyboards, which is a very cumbersome
| and roundabout way to talk to each other and to the machine. BCI
| will connect our intelligence in unprecedented ways, and
| hopefully will allow 'uploading' so that there's continuity even
| after death. Genetics is not the right way to go about it -
| carbon and protein chemistry was a very slow 'minecraft' way to
| build intelligence , and each of our senses and motors can be
| replaced with much much simpler electronic devices.
|
| I don't know what AGI means in this context. Surely a BCI can
| upload itself to a brain-simulator and live there. No need for
| 'artificial' persons, although it is in principle possible (why
| not after all).
| thatguy0900 wrote:
| Just think, some day instead of choosing between religions
| you'll get to decide between the alphabet afterlife or the meta
| heaven. Hopefully you don't commit some cardinal sin in life
| and get yourself shadowbanned first before you die.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| One will eventually come to believe that the other's
| afterlife is a crime against the dignity of the soul, and
| attempt to destroy it. In this way we will fulfill the
| prophecy we created ourselves by waging war in heaven.
| feet wrote:
| Frankly, that is quite improbable. Unless you can work over
| time to replace the brain piecewise so it integrates with non
| biological parts, transfer of consciousness is not happening
| retrac wrote:
| > Surely a BCI can upload itself to a brain-simulator and live
| there.
|
| I'm not sure. I have a strong suspicion that we can make a
| useful brain-computer interface, without any idea how the brain
| really works. And I kind of expect that's how it will go. I
| think this because, in a technical sense, we already have
| brain-computer interfaces. Cochlear implants. They are used to
| restore hearing. The auditory nerve and cochlea are,
| anatomically speaking, actually part of the brain.
|
| A long, extremely thin wire probe is inserted into the cochlea
| and auditory nerve. The probe has electrical contacts which are
| driven by the cochlear implant speech processor. The probes
| themselves are interesting in their own right; early ones only
| had a few electrical contacts, while modern ones have dozens or
| hundreds of electrodes spaced out along the length, each of
| which can be individually controlled, providing an almost
| infinite variety of possible inputs which the brain can
| distinguish.
|
| So here's the wild bit. We have only a vague idea how auditory
| signals are encoded by the cochlea and sent down the auditory
| nerve. This was even more true when cochlear implants were
| first devised, in the 1970s.
|
| It turns out that doesn't matter. If you start applying varying
| voltages at different electrodes along the probe, that
| correspond with activation of various frequency bands at
| varying intensities, in the vaguest mimicry of auditory nerve
| signalling, the brain pretty quickly figures it out.
|
| A person who previously had natural hearing and lost it can
| learn to understand speech this way sometimes in a matter of
| days. People who were born profoundly deaf and were not
| implanted in infancy often regret the decision to be implanted
| and usually do not learn to decode sound in a useful way.
| Children who are implanted in infancy usually do. As an aside,
| the accounts given by people who have had this generally
| unpleasant experience, suddenly given an extra sense but with
| no neural structures developed life-long to process it, are
| both fascinating and harrowing.
| seydor wrote:
| As you pointed out, the brain is very plastic and it will
| learn the mapping of its input, like it learns to read those
| squiggles we call letters.
|
| We don't need to know how the brain works, just how its
| neurons work and its anatomy. Hopefully those will be enough
| to build the simulator, and the rest of the work of wiring
| itself up, will be done by the simulator itself.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| How deep do we have to simulate before we capture what the
| brain computes? If we have to model particle interactions
| then there's not going to be much hope of accurately
| "uploading" a person.
| seydor wrote:
| we don't necessarily need to "copy" the existing brain. I
| guess by communicating with a "brain extension" it will
| gradually learn everything i know , enough to be a
| fascimile of my person. I don't need to know how it did
| it, just like i dont need to know all the weights of an
| artificial neural network.
| daoist_shaman wrote:
| Because it's had millions of years to converge on a near-optimal
| solution for the environment that it's in. In fact, this is true
| for all organs within all extant species.
|
| Nature is far more advanced than technology, and I don't believe
| that we'll ever quite be able to one-up her. Most efforts to do
| that have seriously harmed us.
|
| We think we know everything, but this dangerous hubris can
| destroy all planetary life in the blink of an eye.
| [deleted]
| cm2012 wrote:
| I'll take the other side of that bet. We've one upped nature on
| hundreds of things, eventually we will be able to improve on
| nature in every respect.
| ff317 wrote:
| I'll take the third side of that bet: we've already so
| fundamentally altered "nature" to our whims, often in very
| destructive and short-sighted ways, that we're well past the
| point of trying to pretend like we're preserving any
| "natural" state of affairs ( https://xkcd.com/1338/ !). The
| best we can hope for at this point, barring a severe and
| abrupt population decline, is to continue engineering our way
| out of this mess as best we can, with the long-term interests
| of humans at the forefront.
| [deleted]
| uoaei wrote:
| Trust Nature's engineers -- they've been at it for billions of
| years!
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Except nature's engineers are also working in the bounds and
| constraints of their system, and occasionally end up building
| things such as: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recurrent_laryn
| geal_nerve#Evid...
| witherk wrote:
| Modern humans in the developed world have access to insane
| quantities of calories. Too bad that evolution is still scared of
| us starving to death so we store the calories as fat. I think
| over evolutionary time, our brains could do some unbelievable
| things using all those calories.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| Probably not by natural pressures, though. We're more than
| intelligent enough to outcompete any species that might try to
| fill the same ecological niche as humanity. No benefit to even
| more brain power. It would more likely take intentional
| selective breeding if we wanted to go that route.
| dmurray wrote:
| Most evolutionary progress comes from outcompeting inferior
| members of your own species, not others. But it's also true
| that in modern society, intelligence doesn't seem to confer
| reproductive fitness.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| The other kinda dumb constraint is that our heads are roughly
| as large as they can be and still survive vaginal delivery.
| [deleted]
| MarkSweep wrote:
| Caesarean-section removed this constraint. Since it was
| introduced, the number of births requiring a C-section due to
| size have increased:
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-38210837
| uoaei wrote:
| > number of births requiring a C-section
|
| Slippery metric. "Requiring" seems hard to isolate vs other
| options like "elected to use".
| Normille wrote:
| >... other options like "elected to use"...
|
| Supposedly more common as a choice amongst higher income
| women. Hence the phrase "Too posh to push"
| ColanR wrote:
| Yeah. If there's an evolutionary aspect to the increase,
| we should expect to see c-sections as a generational
| phenomena, and correlated with cranium size. I wonder if
| that study has been done.
| monocasa wrote:
| Evolution got around that by birthing what are essentially
| still fetuses compared to most other non-marsupial mammalian
| newborns and then continuing the base development process of
| the brain after birth. See how a lot of other newborn animals
| are already walking around just minutes after being born.
| harperlee wrote:
| Eyeballing based on my children development against other
| mammals, I'd say pregnancy should take about 2 years.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| A lot of animals come out walking! Imagine squeezing out
| a 30 something pound walking toddler!
| yrgulation wrote:
| This sounds as if people in the less developed world are
| somehow mentally challenged. What an odd comment tbh.
| [deleted]
| fsckboy wrote:
| I think you're reading it wrong: GP is saying if the brain
| could use as many calories as were available, then people
| with access to fewer calories would be at a handicap; but
| such is not the case.
| yrgulation wrote:
| I stand corrected.
| seiferteric wrote:
| Not how I read it. Thought they were saying that our brains
| could evolve to use more calories since they are abundant
| now, instead of storing the calories as fat as our bodies
| currently do. Basically what if you could make your brain 50%
| more powerful at the expense of needing more calories, it
| would seem like a pretty good trade off today since many of
| us eat more calories than we need anyway.
| yrgulation wrote:
| A good point. Incidentally i need to eat like a whale
| despite sitting on a chair all day long. Brainpower is a
| hungry business but i dont get it my body needs to store
| some of that food as fat. I eat all day long! Perhaps we
| are feeding it the wrong stuff and what we are used to
| eating is no longer suitable for how we use our bodies in
| the modern day? But what about the super developed
| countries of east asia where people appear to be skinny? Is
| there something wrong with our diet in the european and
| american world?
| eternityforest wrote:
| Other than genetics I'm pretty sure there's a lot of
| things that make people less hungry.
|
| I've heard sugar makes people want to eat more. I'm
| pretty sedentary, so when I cut back on sugar, I can
| easily just kind of forget to eat.
|
| Evolution doesn't know about fridges and thinks people
| still need to store energy, like as if we are going to
| walk 10 miles after a day long fast at any moment. So
| many constraints no longer exists, seems like we should
| definitely be able to eat better than before.
|
| Who knows how many things no longer apply to most people.
| Maybe some foods enhanced fertility and that preference
| was selected for, but most people don't need them now.
| Maybe some things helped people heal from specific blunt
| trauma injuries that are now rare, but at the cost of
| causing some extra heart disease.
|
| Almost every overweight person could kick my ass just by
| falling on me. They can probably lift more than me. Many
| would do 200% better in the wild than me, but
| statistically they are at risk for heart problems and
| many already have assorted aches and pains.
|
| The whole concept of health in popular culture is way too
| tied to strength and survival and naturalness. Why do we
| seem to pay more attention to who can climb a mountain
| and lift 400lbs than we do to which populations live the
| longest and have the least illnesses?
| Ekaros wrote:
| Energy budget of brain compared to rest of the body is
| already very substantial I wonder if we would face some
| issues if it was higher. Like maybe overheating.
| seiferteric wrote:
| I'm willing to install a water cooling system if it means
| I can OC my brain.
| xwdv wrote:
| Although this sounds like a good idea for an individual,
| there's really no point, because a group of well educated
| humans focused on a specific goal can easily have far more
| brain power than a single individual, and with far great
| redundancy. Therefore making one single individual far more
| intelligent and powerful at thinking has little use to
| society, unless they are focused on tasks that inherently
| can only be done effectively by a single individual, and
| which are becoming fewer as our tools for collaboration
| grow. It's cool to have someone be like an Einstein figure,
| but Einstein alone could never match the combined
| brainpower and output of NASA for instance.
| seiferteric wrote:
| Hmm, I don't agree because I don't think intelligence
| scales out like that. Certainly a group of people can do
| more than a single person but I personally think things
| like increasing a persons short term memory could have
| pretty profound impact on our ability to have bigger
| ideas simply because you could hold more things in your
| head at once for example.
| retrac wrote:
| To be blunt, yes. People with poor nutrition, particularly in
| childhood, experience both physical and mental stunting, some
| of which is irreversible. Certain diseases which have been
| curtailed or eradicated in developed countries inflict a
| similar toll.
|
| I'll give a concrete example that combines both effects.
| Hookworm is an intestinal parasite that causes nutritional
| deficiencies in the host. Children with hookworm are impaired
| across the board, mentally and physically. They can't run as
| fast or read as well as their hookworm-free peers. If we
| compare two otherwise comparable populations, one with
| hookworm and one without, we would expect the hookworm-
| infected population to be less intelligent on average.
|
| I'm not saying this to look down on anyone. Human populations
| always show enormous variation, anyway, so it says nothing
| much about any _individual_. But that burden, of physical and
| mental impairment and chronic illness, due to poor nutrition
| and infection, is a significant barrier to development, and a
| major part of why parts of the less developed world remain
| less developed. And it 's why I believe childhood
| vaccination, disease eradication and nutrition programs in
| poorer countries are some of the best things we could spend
| our resources on, in terms of furthering human development.
| eptcyka wrote:
| >To be blunt, yes. People with poor nutrition, particularly
| in childhood, experience both physical and mental stunting,
| some of which is irreversible.
|
| I don't disagree, but I was trying to substantiate this
| point once and I couldn't find any one good source that
| would confirm such a statement. Would you mind sharing a
| reference to some good source material approving the
| conjecture that poor nutrition in the childhood causes
| mental and physical stunting?
| retrac wrote:
| This study [1] deals specifically with brain imaging in
| the malnourished, but it starts off with a pretty good
| literature review in section 1 and 2 that may offer you
| some pointers. This [2] is a review of the literature on
| the question of childhood nutrition and brain
| development, see particularly the section "long-term
| consequences of undernutrition in early life":
|
| > Many studies have compared school-age children who had
| suffered from an episode of severe acute malnutrition in
| the first few years of life to matched controls or
| siblings who had not. These studies generally showed that
| those who had suffered from early malnutrition had poorer
| IQ levels, cognitive function, and school achievement, as
| well as greater behavioral problems. [...]
|
| > Chronic malnutrition, as measured by physical growth
| that is far below average for a child's age, is also
| associated with reduced cognitive and motor development.
| From the first year of life through school age, children
| who are short for their age (stunted) or underweight for
| their age score lower than their normal-sized peers (on
| average) in cognitive and motor tasks and in school
| achievement. Longitudinal studies that have followed
| children from infancy throughout childhood have also
| consistently shown that children who became stunted
| (height for age < -2 SD below norm values) before 2 years
| of age continued to show deficits in cognition and school
| achievement from the age of 5 years to adolescence.
|
| [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S10
| 5381192...
|
| [2] https://academic.oup.com/nutritionreviews/article/72/
| 4/267/1...
| yrgulation wrote:
| This is just one of the many ways of "proving" that people
| in developing nations are somehow inferior. The same people
| that grew up with poor nutrition perform quite well when
| relocated to other countries. While in developed regions
| there are people with access to food yet dumb like a kite.
| I think we should be careful with the conclusions we draw.
| Certainly nutrition, let alone disease or parasites, can
| lead to reduced mental performance, but deriving the fact
| that the developing world is somehow suffering from reduced
| mental power, because of food, as a whole is wrong and in
| my view dangerous.
| mlyle wrote:
| You hardly address his point.
|
| You say:
|
| > While in developed regions there are people with access
| to food yet dumb like a kite.
|
| But he explicitly said:
|
| > > I'm not saying this to look down on anyone. _Human
| populations always show enormous variation, anyway, so it
| says nothing much about any individual._
| retrac wrote:
| A nice thing about the hookworm example is it applies
| within the United States. It was common historically in
| the South, but not the North. This may well account for
| some of the stereotypes about the lazy, stupid
| Southerner, as well as the gap in economic development
| and educational attainment. [1]
|
| > How much credit, if any, hookworms can take for those
| lingering economic challenges and misconceptions,
| however, is nearly impossible to measure, although some
| have tried. Hoyt Bleakley, an associate professor of
| economics at the University of Michigan, used early to
| mid-20 th century census data and records from the
| Rockefeller Sanitary Commission to compare educational
| and economic gains in places where hookworm eradication
| did and did not take place. He found an increase in
| school attendance and literacy in relation to hookworm
| reduction and also discovered that those effects seemed
| to extend into adulthood, with better-educated children
| growing up to be higher-earning adults. This suggests,
| Bleakley writes , "that hookworm played a major role in
| the South's lagging behind the rest of the country."
|
| > "If you compare places in the South with the worst
| versus the least hookworm problem, you're talking
| differences in income of maybe 25%," he says. "There are
| lots of reasons why the South had a different
| developmental path than the rest of the country, and
| while disease is not the whole story, it was certainly
| part of it."
|
| [1] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/how-a-worm-
| gave-the-so...
|
| Is it so wild to generalize this to the rest of the
| world?
| yrgulation wrote:
| Generalising about the south in the us is as wrong as
| generalising about the rest of the world.
|
| Incidentally in most european countries you find jokes
| about the south of the same countries as in the us. Its
| just something we do with people far and different we
| look at their ways and call them dumb.
|
| The article tho has made an attempt at proving it with
| science. Correlation does not imply causation.
|
| You cant simply draw the conclusion that a mass of people
| are dumb and then make up the science to prove it. Sure
| there individual and small localised groups affected by
| it but not whole nations or even massive areas of a
| country.
|
| Edit: even here on this forum, there is anecdata from
| people that grew up in poverty with little to eat or poor
| nutrition yet they perform well given the opportunity.
| Some from the west, some from asia.
| User23 wrote:
| It's interesting, because in Germany the southerners are
| observably much more technically accomplished than the
| northerners. But there's still that you don't speak High
| German prejudice.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Anecdata can be a distraction from general principles.
|
| There are disabled people who climbed Mount Everest, but
| that does not mean that disability is irrelevant for your
| chances.
| User23 wrote:
| > There are disabled people who climbed Mount Everest,
| but that does not mean that disability is irrelevant for
| your chances.
|
| More accurately, there are disabled people who have had
| sherpas drag them up Mount Everest. To be fair, that's
| what most so-called mountaineers do these days.
| [deleted]
| plushpuffin wrote:
| In Alastair Reynold's
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revelation_Space_universe there
| is a genetically and cybernetically engineered subspecies of
| humans called Conjoiners who do just that. They take it to such
| an extreme that they eventually need to engineer their skulls
| to grow heat-dissipating fins, because otherwise their brains
| would cook from the waste heat.
| eptcyka wrote:
| I think the brain might be thermally limited so adding more
| fuel to the fire could only do so much. Maybe future humans
| will have to take up a lot more copper to deposit in the
| cooling veins.
| kevincox wrote:
| If you beat the heart a lot faster you probably get pretty
| good cooling. Vent that in the extremities and start
| sweating. There is obviously still a limit but in day-to-day
| life we don't even really come close to the brain's cooling
| capacity.
| saeranv wrote:
| That's an interesting idea. Do we know what is different about
| the brains of geniuses that could be replicated by changing how
| the brain grows or consumes fuel in a normal pereson? I know
| descriptions of "high-IQ" and "normal" are extreme
| simplifications of a complex, multidimensional concepts, but I
| have to imagine someone like John Von Neumann who apparently
| never forgot anything he read, has had to have had something
| physically different in his brain.
|
| For example, do we know if high IQ/abilities are associated
| with more neural connections in the same brain volume?
| nitwit005 wrote:
| > For example, a professional tennis player can follow the
| trajectory of a tennis ball after it is served at a speed as high
| as 160 miles per hour, move to the optimal spot on the court,
| position his or her arm, and swing the racket to return the ball
| in the opponent's court, all within a few hundred milliseconds.
|
| I suspect if you made a perfectly invisible ball, you'd find
| people would manage to hit it back quite often. There's a lot of
| signal from the opponent's body motion.
| nh23423fefe wrote:
| I disagree, and think it would nearly never be hit. Servers use
| false movement to disguise the serve.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| They do, but within limits. You can't make any random
| movement and hit the ball somewhere useful.
|
| The existence of feints is why I knew people were using the
| body motions as a strong signal in the first place.
| okwubodu wrote:
| This is most obvious in soccer and basketball where you'll
| see two similarly skilled players almost get stuck in place
| trying to predict the other's next move.
| mulvya wrote:
| Well, Ronaldo could hit a soccer ball after lights are cut.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoScYO2osb0
| nh23423fefe wrote:
| close but not really. the lights were on at the kick. he
| couldn't make contact with an invisible ball
| mseepgood wrote:
| > For example, a professional tennis player can follow the
| trajectory of a tennis ball after it is served at a speed as
| high as 160 miles per hour, move to the optimal spot on the
| court, position his or her arm, and swing the racket to return
| the ball in the opponent's court, all within a few hundred
| milliseconds.
|
| This doesn't seem to be specific to the human brain. My cat is
| probably quicker.
| mlyle wrote:
| Sure. The point is, biological brains are quite good at this
| compared to machines, despite it being a composition of
| trivial mechanics and kinematics problems, and a vision
| problem that is similar to ones that computers are pretty
| good at. We seem to do better at it and in a fraction of the
| power budget of computing.
| revolvingocelot wrote:
| I think that's the answer to the question TFA poses: because
| your cat's enormous ancestors also had efficient, fast
| brains. In order to not get got, we needed to be similarly
| equipped, reaction-wise, and optimized for fuzzy analysis of
| high-speed, blurry objects.
|
| This, of course, shunts the question one level of abstraction
| away, but the standard evolutionary arms-race handwaving
| suffices here. So long as one side does it, by random chance
| or a side effect of sexual selection or whatever, the other
| side eventually does, too.
| [deleted]
| HeyItsMatt wrote:
| Speak for yourself.
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