[extropy-chat] Singularitarian verses singularity +HIGH IQS!

[Jack Parkinson]

>From: The Avantguardian <avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com>

>If high IQ people can be used as an
>indicator of the nature of super-intelligence, then we
>might very well be screwed. If we, being as human as
>we are, can be so apathetic about the survival of our
>own species, why would anyone believe that some mighty
>non-human intelligence would give a rat's ass about us?

This is a good point, and I believe we are right to be skeptical on the 
benefits of super intelligence. By way of illustration, a number of years 
ago, I received notification that my son (then aged 10) was being considered 
for a gifted children's program.

I attended an interview with the child psychologist who had conducted a 
variant of the Stanford test on my son. She told me that he had scored in 
excess of 145, but that IQ's over 145 were (in her opinion) meaningless 
numbers and refused to divulge to me the actual score.

I went into the interview feeling quite buoyant -only to be told that kids 
tested with this level of IQ were often troublesome, unsocialized students 
who were as likely to underachieve as over achieve!I was actually offered 
counseling for this problem!  (This was in Australia - and I was a single 
parent at the time) The upshot was, my son entered the gifted program and 
did very well academically at first - but it was a mixed-age group in which 
he was the baby. The others had more mature social skills and he became 
isolated and unhappy. His old friends drifted away. After a year I took him 
out of the program and put him back into a standard school environment. They 
jumped him two years ahead and then wanted to jump him again - I refused 
because he would have lost his friends and become the baby in the class all 
over again... So he stayed, was happier - but never academically challenged, 
he spent his spare time learning program languages, hacking Windows on his 
PC, and doing a little reverse engineering on games programs.

A couple of years later his mother got custody and he qualified to enter 
university at age only just 16 years to do a BSc in Computer Science, I 
urged a break - thought he wasn't ready for it, but his mother thought 
otherwise and he entered uni at 16 - the baby again... The first year he got 
poor grades and switched to an engineering/robotics major - before the end 
of the second year he dropped out and went surfing... now he surfs, lives 
with a bunch of dropouts and makes some money working in an Internet cafe. I 
hope I can persuade him later to return to study... We are still close - but 
he lacks any academic interest right now.

OK, sorry about the long-winded post, but my point is - we can easily 
confuse knowledge - and the raw data-processing power that enables us to 
manipulate that knowledge - as being the same as wisdom. This is most 
assuredly untrue and history is full of examples of persons of monstrously 
high IQ's who were eccentric failures at almost everything in life - except 
perhaps deliberating their own narrow speciality...

I submit: People with high IQ's are ultimately just as likely to be silly as 
the rest of the population. On AI, I am not informed enough to do more than 
guess that the same may be true.

No doubt there are better environments to develop the kind of precocious 
talent that a high IQ promises, but so far in this personal instance it has 
been pretty difficult to see much of an upside...
Jack Parkinson