on the relation between IQ and Warnock's dilemma

[pataphor]

Several decades ago I used to play billiards with a guy who was unable
to endure imagining different ways to play a position, for him it was
either take a shot or not. As I was asking him 'how would you play if
the balls are like this?' his answer always was 'like this!' while
actually taking the shot. There was no way to halt it as answering and
taking the shot were one and the same.

Now, decades later, I am still wondering what was going on, maybe he
was a remnant of that ancient bicameral type of people simply obeying a
voice in his head, never even conceiving of questioning what it said.

Recently I have been watching an anime 'bungo stray dogs', there is a
character there that notices many things, however not understanding
other people don't, and thus assuming they conspire against him somehow.

Even more recently I read a tweet from one of the rationalist movement's
early explorers, Eliezer Yudkovsky, where he asks the question whether
some people are even able to reason counterfactually or
hypothetically.

Add to this a recent post on Hacker News where people discuss Warnock's
dilemma, which is about all the possible reasons for not getting a
response to one's (usenet) postings, and the discussion there being
about how all this holds up in our new age of even more advanced
electronic communication media.

As I've been wrestling all my life with seeing more than other people,
and as a result being shut out and shut down many times, such
discussions peak my interest.

One of the explanations of my former billiard partner for his
'condition' was that he was simply 'seeing too much' all the time and
therefore he lacked the patience to make things even more complicated
by considering alternatives. I can sort of follow his reasoning when
imagining why I have such trouble cleaning up my room, as everything I
pick up to throw away or store somewhere potentially triggers a cascade
of memories, making the whole effort become very tiresome, so that it
quickly peters out. If I really, really, have to clean up, all I can do
is whip up some mood of utter ruthlessness and destroy all memories and
connections like a berserker that kills anything that sticks out or
raises attention. Maybe a few necessities will be spared, but that's
about it. Alternatively, if I have the space for it, instead of ripping
everything up and throwing it away, I can just put it in boxes for
later inspection and store those boxes somewhere else, practically
never to be opened again, if not for some accidental search for a lost
item in there, which invariably turns up more items, the use case of
which often greatly exceeds that of the item which I was originally
looking for, so that the chances are about equal between being
distracted by the new 'found' stuff, and finding or not finding the
searched item. I won't even go into the possible feedback loops such an
endeavor can cause.

Anyway, I can understand why people don't like to go into certain
hypotheticals and would not agree that this would be somehow related to
IQ, more favoring the hypothesis that there should be a balance between
seeing and categorizing, where moving a bit more to one side requires a
corresponding amount of letting go of the other.

In this dawning AI age we will be surrounded by artificial entities with
unlimited patience, and some people are already hypothesizing that just
having some entity always listening, and helping tirelessly to put
things to order, can by itself already have great therapeutical value.

I don't think it will be the ultimate solution, as these quantities seem
related to some kind of seemingly universal information theoretical
problem that exists between computation and memory, apart from the fact
that simply storing stuff is not the whole or real problem, it being
more about creating a meaningful and accessible, yet efficiently stored
representation, preferably also compressed so as to take up less
'space', a process which itself also requires computation and
processing.

But at least I have some hope now that instead of being hopelessly
surrounded by fools that can't or won't see anything, it will soon be
myself being the fool for a change, as general intelligence is on the
rise. The problem however is that most of this is not on the account of
humans, as we will more and more become dependent on artificial
assistance. And also the problem is, realizing the many ways I have
been held back and prevented from getting my ideas realized in the
world, that there will be few ways of stopping this process if backed
by artificial intelligence, so soon after I have moved from
misunderstood visionary to perplexed student, my 15 minutes of fame and
'I told you so' will be forever over.

I won't miss being a crying man in the desert though.

[worm food]

There is a third alternative to explain your friend's behavior: that he
already calculated the various theoretical answers, settled on what he
considered the most efficient one, and took the shot. To someone like
that, slowing down and explaining the answer, or why it is the correct
one, or bothering to debate alternatives, would be fruitless and
frustrating: a waste of time on his part. I know, and regularly observe,
several people like this. Professionals tend to classify them as having
intellectual issues, but if you observe them and learn to ask the right
questions, you will find them superior in many ways.

To be honest, though, the answer would depend on the average precision
and accuracy of your friend's shots. Data you did not provide.

Also, a simpler, and probably more correct, answer as to why no one
answers thoughtful usenet posts is that no one read them in the first place.

[pataphor]

On Sun, 12 Feb 2023 12:06:10 -0500
worm food <worm...@compostpunk.com> wrote:

> On 2/12/2023 6:11 AM, pataphor wrote:

[...]

> There is a third alternative to explain your friend's behavior: that
> he already calculated the various theoretical answers, settled on
> what he considered the most efficient one, and took the shot. To
> someone like that, slowing down and explaining the answer, or why it
> is the correct one, or bothering to debate alternatives, would be
> fruitless and frustrating: a waste of time on his part. I know, and
> regularly observe, several people like this. Professionals tend to
> classify them as having intellectual issues, but if you observe them
> and learn to ask the right questions, you will find them superior in
> many ways.
>
> To be honest, though, the answer would depend on the average
> precision and accuracy of your friend's shots. Data you did not
> provide.
>
> Also, a simpler, and probably more correct, answer as to why no one
> answers thoughtful usenet posts is that no one read them in the first
> place.

I feel like you're dodging the issue a bit, but of course it's usenet,
you can reply to whatever part you want. However my post was about the
relation between IQ and Warnock's dilemma, the point being that there
are some people not really wanting to go into hypotheticals and others
maybe a bit too much.

The fact that you bring up actual 'objective' skill levels as relevant
kind of indicates that you're missing my point, which is about how
people balance their underlying capacities, and that IQ is more like
some social evaluation tool, however unfair and culturally relative,
though one might claim that since the bicamerals haven't had a 'voice'
in things for a very long time, their 'culture' doesn't matter anymore,
even if they would still silently exist.

The role of IQ in this, apart from the judgmental thing, would be that
changes in available information technological assistance affect the
different cognitive accents, or however one would call it, differently.

[maybe I should add that gpt stuff would maybe become the new bicameral
'voice']

So, to put it all together, as the theory is now, the more a post
requires investigating hypotheticals, counterfactuals and
controversies, the more your pool of people who would possibly answer
skews to the non-bi-camerals, even to the point that some posts aren't
even read because people already think they know it would be too much
of an effort.

That, and low numbers of eyeballs and outright avoidance strategies
where people don't even have the software installed to read the stuff.

[worm food]

In the case of usenet posts specifically, I think your last statement is
the most likely.

Consider posting pithy content as both a private and public service,
regardless of the response you get. 1) It allows you to think through
the subject, improving your cognition. 2) It may eventually be seen by
someone else who, even if they do not reply, may think about what you
have said, improving their cognition.

It is to end #2 for which I "reply for posterity".