What's it like to be THAT smart?

This is a great "laundry list" of what subjective experience of various IQ levels might be like: http://www.militaryphotos.net/forums/showthread.php?152765-I-think-therefore-I-am-a-wildly-clever-genius  The sourcing is from a talk by Garth Zietsman, a South African blogging amazing statistical results related to his "SmartVote" concept of pooling the intelligence of many people.  I don't know anything about the sourcing of this stuff: if you find it interesting enough you'll have to chase that down yourself!

The other thing I ponder as I read this: One in a million intelligence this guy puts at an IQ of 186.  The kinds of people he cites as being up there are pretty impressive.  He states that many people up in this neighborhood are very maladjusted and do not participate much in human culture.  BUT STILL: one in a million, 7 billion people on the planet, that's 7 million of these people out there.  Enough to populate a very large city.  Enough to provide a 70 person research tiger team to 100,000 organizations.

Where are these people?

Could there be an opportunity for one of us third-tier geniuses to systematically find these people and attempt to do something with them?

SmartVote: a really interesting idea

This blog post  http://garthzietsman.blogspot.com/2011/10/smart-vote-concept.html has a really cool idea in it. I saw this post referred from  http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/cwm/link_freakostats_and_cev/

To describe the idea, let me first mention another idea, which is prediction markets.  Here, you allow people to "buy" an interest in the outcome to some question, like "Romney will win the US presidential election in 2012" or "At the end of 2013, oil will be selling for more than $150/barrel."  Essentially you can buy a share that will yield some fixed amount, perhaps $10 if the answer is "yes."  You can also "sell" that same share (or conceptually, buy a share that the answer is no).  The market clears: if more people want to buy shares of yes than sell them, then perhaps the price rises to $8 a share before the buyers think it is too expensive to keep buying.  Then at any point, an external observer looking at activity in the market can declare that the market for an $8 price to get a $10 return on yes is saying "there is an 80% chance the answer is yes."  

The important idea with a prediction market is that the market is more correct on average than are any of its participants.  Of course its participants are making money only to the extent that they are more correct than are other participants in the market (as I have described it, it is a zero-sum market).  But the utility of the market is supposed to be for those who look at the "collective wisdom" there and get better estimates of how things will go than they could get if they just hired one or two of the smart participants in the market.  

Enter Garth Zietsman and his "SmartVote" concept.  Dr. Zietsman talks about research results showing that in a bunch of tests, he can get the correct answers by comparing "smart" (high IQ) voters against less smart voters.  In at least some of these tests, where even the smart people averaged 42% correct on these tests, the simple analysis of the multiple smart answers vs the multiple less smart answers gives 100% correct answers.  

Intuitively, this makes sense to me.  Products are much more complex than any one mind can comprehend, and they are all created by distributing the intelligence work across many people, and having many layers of abstraction and simplification in order to coordinate across parts off the product.  If human intelligence in design can be multiplied by ganging together many minds, than why couldn't many minds ganged together do better on a test?  

Very intriguing stuff in my opinion.  

Blindsight by Peter Watts

Blindsight is a 2006 science fiction book. It was mentioned in an Overcoming Bias blog and so I read it. The book is available in electronic form for free on the web. I read it for free from my local public library.

The quality of the ideas about consciousness and mind are outstanding. 5 stars, 2 thumbs up. You don't really get to the main punch line until page 325. What he has to say about consciousness and awareness and brains before then is merely excellent.

A quote: "... People aren't rational. You aren't rational. We're not thinking machines, we're --- we're feeling machines that happen to think." This is where I have been going in my own thinking about brains and consciousness. My model is Lucy, my Golden Doodle dog. In my opinion, you can't read about brains, biology, evolution, especially evolutional psychology, and not see it all laid out before you when you have your own dog. A highly pleasant way to reach your own conclusions about evolutionary psychology, get a dog. So in particular, and only sorta, you've got a lizard brain wrapped in a mammalian brain wrapped in a neocortex. Of course all mammals have a neocortex, but a dog's is a lot smaller than a human's. Whether I've got the anatomy right or not, most of what I think of as feeling is pretty similar between dogs and people.

And then you wrap it in a neocortex. With a sorta mini-dog neocortex you get a little bit of help figuring out what to be mad at, what to be hungry on, what to be horny on, what to be scared of. But mostly, if you are a dog, you are happy, sad, mad, glad, scared, excited etc., and these things dictate your actions. They also dictate your interactions. You can be a social animal without a lot of rationality. Just be loyal to what you love, angry at what seems to be frightening you and you have a pretty functional system.

Wrap it in a big-old human sized neocortex, and throw in nasty monkey emotions (have you seen chimpanzees interact?) and you get a deep need for psychiatrists, psychologists, and many other paid professionals, not to mention a significant and growing pharmacopia. Take the straight forward emotional reactions to things and graft a GIGANTIC rational model of the world, including all the people around you on to it, courtesy of your friendly local neocortex, and you have the basis of some great tragedies and comedies.

That which does not kill us, makes us stranger. -Trevor Goodchild

This is a quotation leading off a sectino of the book. I googled Trevor Goodchild, he is a character in a science fiction TV show that used to be on MTV. But I like the quote, it reminds me of Nietzsche.

I will talk more about consciousness after the "read more" link. SPOILERS about the book will be here. If you are thinking of reading the book, I recommend reading the book before reading the rest of this post.
WARNING SPOILERS! if you read the rest of this post.