[ExI] maybe not intelligence

[William Flynn Wallace]

Seemingly everyone puts up IQ as the thing transhumans need more of.  Is it?

Just take a look at the actions of people who have high IQs:  perfect
reasoning?  Never make mental errors?  Lack of biases?

There doesn't seem to be a any correlation between IQ and cognitive
errors.  The confirmatory bias, among many others, is present in all of us.
 (see Wikipedia for cognitive biases).

So some things are interfering with the use of our intelligence.  As far as
I know, we don't even know the origins of the biases, whether they are
mostly built-in or most learned.

I favor innate to some extent.  We don't have to teach children to be
selfish, to judge everything by what it does for them, to consider oneself
the most important thing there is.  Asians do seem, with some success, to
turn that into personal humility and a strong urge to favor the group, not
the individual.

I am not an anthropologist, so I cannot knowledgeably compare
Eastern/Western societies, but the Eastern seems to work out OK most of the
time.  I also cannot say if the egotism common to Western society is gone
in Asians or just more hidden from public view, with private thoughts much
the same as ours.

So, how better to use our intelligence, getting rid of, or at least being
on strong guard for the intrusion of egotism in thinking, is what is needed
now.  Since we cannot at present up IQ with simple genetic techniques,
mostly because it is so incredibly complex, let's think of ways to get rid
of the biases that affect all of us, at every IQ range.

bill w
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