[extropy-chat] Harvard president criticized over comments

[Eliezer Yudkowsky]

J. Andrew Rogers wrote:
> 
> 1.)  Really brilliant people are not brilliant because they were
> trained.  You cannot be trained to be brilliant, as the very definition
> generally asserts abilities that are far beyond what can be obtained by
> mere training.  And most of the really brilliant people I can think of
> in history had little or unextraordinary training in the fields their
> brilliance is noted in.

Definitions have no power over reality.  We could not alter reality, at 
colleges or elsewhere, by writing lines in dictionaries.  Whatever is 
asserted to be true "by definition" usually isn't, and it certainly isn't 
true "by definition", unless the domain be pure math.

To address the empirical issue (a state of affairs having nothing to do 
with the definitions used to describe it), I think smart people could be 
trained to be brilliant, but you'd have to be brilliant to invent the 
training, since no such training presently exists.

-- 
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky                          http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence