Sunday, October 03, 2010

Clever individuals do not make the group smarter

This post is a reaction to the recent article (more details) in which individual brainpower contributes little to collective smarts. Instead, it’s social awareness -- the ability to pick up on emotional cues in others -- that seems to determine how smart a group can be.

When we write something new in internet discussion, we just get negative voting usually, because people aren't prepared to get new generally valid information from individuals at all. Instead of this, the more irrelevant and widespread is the internet meme in your answers, the higher score you get - because it's considered "witty". Actually you're just repeating things, which most of people are already expecting to listen unconsciously. Most of people don't expect to hear some revolutionary ideas at all - instead of this, they're feeling confounded, if not confused when being confronted with them. It should be pointed out, the poor language skills are making the sharing of emotions much more difficult, then the sharing of logical information. In addition, socially successful people tend to ignore logical arguments.

In another words, if you want to convince people for something clever or good, you have to manipulate them for it emotionally... Emotions, emotions, emotions...

Unfortunately it works in both directions, as Joseph Goebels knew already.

Actually, in dense aether theory a rather simple wave spreading model can be applied to this situation. This model renders human society like particle system, where every particle exhibits it's own surface gradient of information density, i.e. the intelligence. Theories, i.e. well accepted paradigms of human thinking correspond the density gradients at the water surface and the intelligent ideas are corresponding causual, i.e. tranverse waves in causual space, similar to ripples at the water surface. The emotional feelings correspond the longitudinal waves instead, similar to underwater sound waves.

The underwater waves are weaker but they're spreading in much faster way - whereas surface waves tend to bounce from every gradient of information density (i.e. intelligence). Very bright people are behaving like black holes in this model - they're collecting all informations freely, but their experience cannot be shared easily, because of total reflection mechanism at their surface gradient of intelligence density. With compare to it, very dumb people are behaving like mirror-like bubbles with respect to transverse waves instead: they're empty and they're even reflecting all causal information coming from outside.

A well known kind of symmetry between formal (IQ) and nonformal intelligence (EQ) exists here, though: dumb people are often quite sensitive emotionally and they can be manipulated easily in this way, whereas logical argument doesn't count very much for them. Instead of it, formally bright people are rather emotional nuts and they lack EQ and social skills often - compare the Sheldon Cooper character from The Big Bang Theory sitcom.

The only way, in which black hole can radiate it's information to outside is the gravitational waves, which appear like Howking radiation. This mechanism is relatively subtle though, which explains, why really intelligent ideas are propagating slowly to the rest of society. Nevertheless, they can be supported with sufficiently emotional propaganda. For example, string theory (which is actually quite incomprehensible for laymans) is promoted with shots of beauty violinists in play at Nova TV show.

10 comments:

Analogue Meters said...

Definitely agree with just repeating things, which most of people are already expecting to listen unconsciously.

Zephir said...

Scientific realists argue that we have good reasons to believe that our presently successful scientific theories are true or approximately true, where approximate truth means a
theory is able to make novel predictions and that the central terms of such theories genuinely refer. The pessimistic
meta-induction
undermines the realist's warrant for his epistemic optimism via historical counterexample. Larry Laudan argues that the history of science is a "graveyard" of
once empirically successful theories whose central terms have been found not to refer. For example, 18th century optical aether theory and the humoral theory of medicine were
incredibly successful, and yet we no longer believe in the existence of aether, nor would we want to label such theories as having been approximately true. Using meta-induction,
Laudan then argues that if past scientific theories which were successful were found to be false, we have no reason to believe the realist's claim that our currently successful
theories are approximately true. The pessimistic meta-induction argument was first fully postulated by Laudan in 1981 and survives to this day as one of the strongest arguments
against scientific realism.

Zephir said...

Steve Hsu has found a table with the average GRE scores computed for various proffesions.

130.0 Physics
129.0 Mathematics
128.5 Computer Science
128.0 Economics
127.5 Chemical engineering
127.0 Material science
126.0 Electrical engineering
125.5 Mechanical engineering
125.0 Philosophy
124.0 Chemistry
123.0 Earth sciences
122.0 Industrial engineering
122.0 Civil engineering
121.5 Biology
120.1 English/literature
120.0 Religion/theology
119.8 Political science
119.7 History
118.0 Art history
117.7 Anthropology/archeology
116.5 Architecture
116.0 Business
115.0 Sociology
114.0 Psychology
114.0 Medicine
112.0 Communication
109.0 Education
106.0 Public administration

Zephir said...

Yet astrophysicists in the US have observed such superluminal speeds in space in the form of radio pulses from a pulsar.

Zephir said...

Ashkenazi Jews intelligence theory: genetic sphingolipid metabolism disorders (Tay-Sachs, Gaucher, Niemann-Pick, ML IV)  may confer higher intelligence. In the Middle Ages, this population was very restricted in terms of occupations - basically finance and trade. These occupations involved manipulating a lot of numbers and abstract symbols, and it's plausible that higher intelligence might make you better at them... and then more successful bankers/loansharks/whatever were likely to be wealthier and have more surviving children. This created selection for high intelligence in this population, and the result was an increase in the frequency of a few rare alleles that cause higher intelligence in heterozygotes, but devastating diseases in doubly rare homozygotes. The proponents point out that Ashkenazi Jews have the highest average IQ of any ethnic group that's been well-tested, 112-115, and they work out that 59% of Ashkenazi Jews should have at least one allele from one of the putatively intelligence-increasing disorders. Criticism of every part of that paper. A population-genetics analysis showing that genetic drift, rather than selection, is sufficient to explain these alleles (except the coincidence that they target the same pathways). A book by the proponents of the hypothesis about this and several other possible examples of very rapid evolution in recent human history, most of them better supported than this one.
Editorial: Are Jews Smarter?

Zephir said...

Steven Gimbel, the chairman of the philosophy department at Gettysburg College in his original new book, "Einstein’s Jewish Science: Physics at the Intersection of Politics and Religion," considers the possibility that the Nazis were on to something and “maybe relativity is ‘Jewish science’ after all.” There might have been elements of Jewish thinking that gave rise to what is now recognized as one of the deepest insights of all time.

Zephir said...

It is hard to believe how incredibly stupid he is. Stupid as a stone that the other stones make fun of. So stupid that he has traveled far beyond stupid as we know it and into a new dimension of stupid. Meta-stupid. Stupid cubed. Trans-stupid stupid. Stupid collapsed to a singularity where even the stupons have collapsed into stuponium. Stupid so dense that no intelligence can escape. Singularity stupid. Blazing hot summer day on Mercury stupid. He emits more stupid in one minute than our entire galaxy emits in a year. Quasar stupid. It cannot be possible that anything in our universe can really be this stupid. This is a primordial fragment from the original big stupid bang. A pure extract of stupid with absolute stupid purity. Stupid beyond the laws of nature.

Zephir said...

Sidetrack opponents with name calling and ridicule. This is also known as the primary 'attack the messenger' ploy, though other methods qualify as variants of that approach. Associate opponents with unpopular titles such as 'kooks', 'right-wing', 'liberal', 'left-wing', 'terrorists', 'conspiracy buffs', 'radicals', 'militia', 'racists', 'religious fanatics', 'sexual deviates', and so forth. This makes others shrink from support out of fear of gaining the same label, and you avoid dealing with issues.

Zephir said...

http://milesmathis.com

Zephir said...

http://www.applet-magic.com