I'm not smart enough to understand this article on IQ
Mark Spahn
http://www.unz.com/akarlin/intro-apollos-ascent/
makes some interesting assertions. Excerpts…
An extreme example today would be the work 0f Japanese mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki. At least Grigory Perelman’s proof of the Poincare Conjecture was eventually confirmed by other mathematicians after a lag of several years. But Mochizuki is so far ahead of everyone else in his particular field of Inter-universal Teichmüller theory that nobody any longer quite knows whether he is a universal genius or a lunatic.
In math, I would guesstimate roughly the following set of thresholds:
Mastery | Discovery | |
Intuit Pythagoras Theorem (Ancient Egypt) | 90 | 120 |
Prove Pythagoras Theorem (Early Ancient Greece) | 100 | 130 |
Renaissance Math (~1550) | 110 | 140 |
Differential Calculus (~1650+) | 120 | 150 |
Mid-20th Century Math (1950s) | 130 | 160 |
Prove Poincare Conjecture (2003) | 140 | 170 |
Inter-universal Teichmüller theory (?) | 150 | 180 |
So to be as smart as Shinichi Mochizuki (hey, what ever happened to Minoru Mochizuki?),
you have to have an IQ of 180. With mean IQ = 100, standard deviation 15, the
proportion of the population with IQ 180 or above is
normalcdf(180,9E99,100,15) = 4.83E-8, which is one person
in 20,700,000. In the 7-billion-people world, there are
only 7E9/20.7E76 = 338 people who are that smart.
This accounts for the paucity of people who can check Shinichi Mochizuki’s work.
One critical consideration is that not all writing systems are equally suited for the spread of functional literacy. For instance, China was historically one of the most schooled societies, but its literacy tended to be domain specific, the classic example being “fish literacy” – a fishmonger’s son who knew the characters for different fish, but had no hope of adeptly employing his very limited literacy for making scientific advances, or even reading “self-help” pamphlets on how to be more effective in his profession (such as were becoming prevalent in England as early as the 17th century). The Chinese writing system, whether it arose from QWERTY reasons or even genetic reasons – and which became prevalent throughout East Asia – surely hampered the creative potential of East Asians.
After 1800, the world globalized intellectually. This was totally unprecedented. There had certainly been preludes to it, e.g. in the Jesuit missions to Qing China. But these were very much exceptional cases. Even in the 18th century, for instance, European and Japanese mathematicians worked on (and solved) many of the same problemsindependently.
And what had previously been but a big gap became an awning chasm.
(But at least the chasm was well shaded.)
While there are very good reasons – e.g., on the basis of animal breeding experiments – for doubting Steve Hsu’s claims that genetically corrected designer babies will have IQs beyond that of any living human today, increases on the order of 4-5 S.D.’s are entirely possible. If even a small fraction of a major country like China adopts it – say, 10% of the population – then that will in two decades start to produce an explosion in aggregate global elite mindpower that will soon come to rival or even eclipse the Renaissance or the Enlightenment in the size and scope of their effects on the world.
The global balance of power would be shifted beyond recognition, and truly transformational – indeed, transhuman – possibilities will genuinely open up.
“Transhuman”? Isn’t that the T in GLBT?
-- Mark Spahn (West Seneca, NY)
P.S. This is interesting:
http://projectwordsworth.com/the-paradox-of-the-proof/
On August 31, 2012, Japanese mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki posted four papers on the Internet.
The titles were inscrutable. The volume was daunting: 512 pages in total. The claim was audacious: he said he had proved the ABC Conjecture, a famed, beguilingly simple number theory problem that had stumped mathematicians for decades.
Then Mochizuki walked away. He did not send his work to the Annals of Mathematics. Nor did he leave a message on any of the online forums frequented by mathematicians around the world. He just posted the papers, and waited.
…
Why does this article contain no links to Mochizuki’s website, or to anywhere else?
And why does his Wikipedia article
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinichi_Mochizuki
not make a bigger deal of his alleged proof?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abc_conjecture