The thing is, there are different kinds of intelligence.
“Genius” is a vague and nebulous term that gets thrown around way too easily. We might call the world’s greatest pianist a genius, but we wouldn’t expect them to be able to lead an army, run an economy, reform a legal system, et cetera.
“Genius” should ALWAYS be precisely qualified. “He’s a musical genius”, or “She’s a mathematical genius”, et cetera.
Because if you don’t specify the field in which someone is good, people just understand “genius” to mean “super duper smart about everything”, which is completely unrealistic and untrue.
Intelligence is often thought of as your capacity for “book-learning”, and yet two different types of “book-learning” can diverge wildly in how easily someone can learn them.
The classic grade school example is Geometry and Algebra. A great many students are good at either one or the other, but not both. It’s not a question of being more or less “intelligent” than someone else, it’s a question of differing mental wiring and excelling in certain areas but not others.
Some people are good with spatial sense and imagining shapes in their head, while other people are good with abstract numerology and variables. It’s not a matter of “high intelligence, low wisdom”, it’s a matter of there being many different -kinds- of intelligence.
You can be both very “wise” and very “intelligent”, and still struggle with a certain concept or field of study. Sometimes, no amount of practice, experience, or study can make up for a lack of natural aptitude. Sometimes, your brain just isn’t wired to make a certain thing easy to understand compared to other things.
But when you get right down to it, everything meaningful can be expressed in lambda calculus, so get good enough at that and you can simulate the other, lesser sorts of genius.
Short version – some people can’t form pictures in their heads. Other people think entirely in pictures and images (some with and some without a soundtrack).
There’s some definite weirdness going on with aphantasia. So many examples of aphantasiacs excelling in very visual fields. And iirc, aphantasiacs still exhibit human-normal response times on “mental rotation” tasks where you compare rotated pictures with one another. So they’re still using some sort of visual workspace to rotate objects (and they have the human-normal rotation speed in that workspace). Overall, then, it seems possible that visual thinking is still present, and may actually be more effective in some ways; it’s just not accessible to consciousness.
Our understanding of mental stuff is very poor, and we don’t have the concepts necessary to notice most differences between people. Words like “genius” refer to symptoms, and we don’t have direct access to the core phenomenon.
I have aphantasia. My wife was flabbergasted when I first told her that, except for rare flashes, my mind’s eye is blind. She was even more amazed when, in a text message, I told her I could hear her giggling at an earlier message in the thread.
I’m aurally oriented where she is visual. She is never without mental imagery, I have a continuous soundtrack in my head. And yes, I can recognize an image rotated, unfolded, mirrored, etc. I got a perfect score on that portion of the ASVAB.
I also have vivid, full-color dreams. So some part of my brain **can** activate the visual system.
Yet if I try to visualize an object or a scene all I can “see” is a gray fog.
DonRCamp: could you play out a tic-tac-toe game in your head?
I’ve wondered how much of aphantasia is people differing on what to call our subjective experiences. Functionally, I have at least decent imagery: I can play blindfold tic-tac-toe, placing Xs and Os in a mental space and ‘seeing’ if a row is completed; do long division on a mental scratch space the same way I would on paper; come up with geometry proofs; run a simple orrery to figure out moon phases. It’s measurably productive visualization! At the same time, compared to having my eyes open, it’s all a “gray fog”, albeit enhanced by an awareness of object presence and positioning.
If you look at a cup to the left of your computer then close your eyes, is there just nothing, or do you still have a memory and awareness of the cup and computer? Can you then ‘move’ the cup to the right of the computer?
No, I can’t play tic-tac-toe in my head. Absent a visual cue, I can’t keep track of the board. I *can* see several moves ahead when I play solitaire, or play Rummikub with my wife – but my eyes are open and I can see the current state of the board. With that aid, I can imagine (mostly) what it will look like if I move something.
If I have a grid to look at, I can mentally fill it. But with eyes closed, that goes away.
As an analogy, I think of it as the difference between a multiple choice test and an essay test. Visual (recognition) memory vs non-visual (recall) memory.
Interesting, and thank you! I’d tried asking on another forum, and had gotten frustratingly vague replies to what I thought was an advance in specificness (vs. people talking about how vivid their imaginations are, which is pretty useless). Not being able to play blindfold tic-tac-toe is definitely more than a difference in labeling our experiences.
I can play tic-tac-toe in my head, and I only get rare flashes, but I do it through memorizing coordinate pairs or numbering the squares, rather than through actual visualizations of the board. I’m not sure if I have aphantasia, but I suspect I’m at least closer to it than you are.
In my case I can picture images, but they must be directly retrieved from my personal memory. So I can’t picture an arbitrary tic-tac-toe board, but I can picture a tic-tac-toe board at random from memory… with random configuration.
And that’s how you get situations where kids are told they’re “geniuses” and the result is a sense of constant anxiety and a disinclination to persevere with anything they find hard, because they’re supposed to be a genius, and if they tell the people who labelled them that that they don’t understand something, what happens then?
I was the irritating nerd who dressed in a 3-piece suit (including tie and vest) and carried a briefcase in 3rd. grade, telling everyone *else* I was a genius.
Then the mercury amalgam fillings provided by the school dentist kicked in… 😉
I can’t remember that mental clarity, but I remember remembering, if that makes any sense?
Actually, this attitude of Artie’s is shared by a few allegedly human teachers I’ve known. Perhaps I should ask them if they’re actually super-intelligent gerbils…
If Artie wanted the world to change he would only have to let either AnaSigma or H.T. do what they choose without interference. Quite clearly he is like Vlad In Zelazny’s ” A Night In The Lonesome October” and has chosen to uphold the Status Quo because he likes the world just as it is. As a fellow Closer I approve.
Preventing catastrophic change isn’t quite the same as upholding the Status Quo.
Not wanting the entire world to be consumed by a ravening plant hivemind bent on mass global xenocide is not the same thing as “liking the world just as it is”.
You can very much dislike the world as it is, and still dislike another option -even more- and fight to prevent that even worse possibility from coming to pass.
Being shot in the foot is a lot better than being shot in the head, but you wouldn’t say someone who chooses the former over the latter “likes to be shot in the foot”.
Artie is approching ‘changing the world’ from a more pragmatic standpoint than just murdering the people causing problems. He (I would hope) understands that there’s always a Napoleon Bonaparte or Joseph Stalin ‘waiting in the wings’ to swoo in and seize power in such situations. So he’s going about this the longer route and teaching the kids to be better people in the hopes that they’ll change the world once it’s time for a ‘change of the guard’.
[Glares at baby-boomer politicians who won’t just goddamn retire already]
Unfortunately, Artie tends to neglect important factors in his ideas. He is correct in thinking that to change the world, you have to change the children. But trying to change the world by teaching first-graders in one school isn’t going to accomplish anything.
One: that’s only a miniscule fraction of the first-graders in the country, and two: they’re still going to be getting brainwashed for the next 11 years, so what little they learn from Artie will have been overwritten many times over by the time they graduate.
He would have been much smarter to start a private school (he is a minister, after all), so he could oversee the overall education of kids in all 12 grades.
OTOH Artie could change things greatly by publishing a treatise on the teaching of first graders, even he can’t predict the result.
Artie may be wiser than we think. We have examples of profound changes in the way things are done. One example is that it was two Jewish graduate students working under Leo Szilard who figured out the atomic bomb was practical. Another was an entrepreneur who knew about the hallmark punch and low temperature metal casting who invented moveable type. Arguably Johan Gutenberg wasn’t any kind of genius, just someone out to make a pfenning or two, but ultimately the printing press is the foundation of the modern world, breakneck rate of change and all.
Artie is an idealist first and a Madboy (and madtech, if you get down to it) second. This is why he causes the havoc he does – his plans tend to hinge on an ideal of how people will react, rather than what they’d actually do. This is should be considered a blessing, really. Can you imagine the chaos that would ensue if he ever became cynical?
Artie practices “Enlightened Self Interest”. His altruism has a triple benefit: not only win-win for himself and his clients, but microloans enrich diverse communities around the world, fostering decentralized capitalism.
I’m certain his market forecasting considers overall economic impact, e.g. a loan for home improvements supporting local builders (client or not).
Say I’m no bunny, a gerbil am I.
I can’t use what money can buy
Birds and some bees told me things could go wrong.
Why can’t we all get along?
I’m saddened by today, though I’ve got a lot.
How could it work this way? Did it go to pot?
Algorithms,
Guitar music,
I’ve got nothing.
Should I ask for anything more?
Microloaning,
Keeps me solvent,
I’ve got nothing.
Should I ask for anything more?
Anasigma,
Sent assassins.
Let them shoo me from my door.
I teach children,
I had big plans,
I’ve got nothing.
Should I ask for anything more?
Algorighms,
Guitar music,
I teach children,
I had big plans,
I’ve got nothing.
Should I ask for anything more?
Yeah. He once gave away a million dollars to a bunch of hamsters.
Evil hamsters. And then he was shocked when they used it for evil. For a supergenius, Artie sometimes isn’t very smart.
The thing is, there are different kinds of intelligence.
“Genius” is a vague and nebulous term that gets thrown around way too easily. We might call the world’s greatest pianist a genius, but we wouldn’t expect them to be able to lead an army, run an economy, reform a legal system, et cetera.
“Genius” should ALWAYS be precisely qualified. “He’s a musical genius”, or “She’s a mathematical genius”, et cetera.
Because if you don’t specify the field in which someone is good, people just understand “genius” to mean “super duper smart about everything”, which is completely unrealistic and untrue.
High intelience, low wisdom
“High intelligence, low wisdom”
Not even that.
Intelligence is often thought of as your capacity for “book-learning”, and yet two different types of “book-learning” can diverge wildly in how easily someone can learn them.
The classic grade school example is Geometry and Algebra. A great many students are good at either one or the other, but not both. It’s not a question of being more or less “intelligent” than someone else, it’s a question of differing mental wiring and excelling in certain areas but not others.
Some people are good with spatial sense and imagining shapes in their head, while other people are good with abstract numerology and variables. It’s not a matter of “high intelligence, low wisdom”, it’s a matter of there being many different -kinds- of intelligence.
You can be both very “wise” and very “intelligent”, and still struggle with a certain concept or field of study. Sometimes, no amount of practice, experience, or study can make up for a lack of natural aptitude. Sometimes, your brain just isn’t wired to make a certain thing easy to understand compared to other things.
Yeah, for an alleged super-genius, Artie is frequently really dumb.
But when you get right down to it, everything meaningful can be expressed in lambda calculus, so get good enough at that and you can simulate the other, lesser sorts of genius.
Look up ‘aphantasia’ sometime. It’s a stunning example of just _how_ different the insides of some people’s heads can be.
Or take a look at this 1880 paper by Francis Galton: https://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Galton/imagery.htm
Short version – some people can’t form pictures in their heads. Other people think entirely in pictures and images (some with and some without a soundtrack).
There’s some definite weirdness going on with aphantasia. So many examples of aphantasiacs excelling in very visual fields. And iirc, aphantasiacs still exhibit human-normal response times on “mental rotation” tasks where you compare rotated pictures with one another. So they’re still using some sort of visual workspace to rotate objects (and they have the human-normal rotation speed in that workspace). Overall, then, it seems possible that visual thinking is still present, and may actually be more effective in some ways; it’s just not accessible to consciousness.
Our understanding of mental stuff is very poor, and we don’t have the concepts necessary to notice most differences between people. Words like “genius” refer to symptoms, and we don’t have direct access to the core phenomenon.
I have aphantasia. My wife was flabbergasted when I first told her that, except for rare flashes, my mind’s eye is blind. She was even more amazed when, in a text message, I told her I could hear her giggling at an earlier message in the thread.
I’m aurally oriented where she is visual. She is never without mental imagery, I have a continuous soundtrack in my head. And yes, I can recognize an image rotated, unfolded, mirrored, etc. I got a perfect score on that portion of the ASVAB.
I also have vivid, full-color dreams. So some part of my brain **can** activate the visual system.
Yet if I try to visualize an object or a scene all I can “see” is a gray fog.
DonRCamp: could you play out a tic-tac-toe game in your head?
I’ve wondered how much of aphantasia is people differing on what to call our subjective experiences. Functionally, I have at least decent imagery: I can play blindfold tic-tac-toe, placing Xs and Os in a mental space and ‘seeing’ if a row is completed; do long division on a mental scratch space the same way I would on paper; come up with geometry proofs; run a simple orrery to figure out moon phases. It’s measurably productive visualization! At the same time, compared to having my eyes open, it’s all a “gray fog”, albeit enhanced by an awareness of object presence and positioning.
If you look at a cup to the left of your computer then close your eyes, is there just nothing, or do you still have a memory and awareness of the cup and computer? Can you then ‘move’ the cup to the right of the computer?
No, I can’t play tic-tac-toe in my head. Absent a visual cue, I can’t keep track of the board. I *can* see several moves ahead when I play solitaire, or play Rummikub with my wife – but my eyes are open and I can see the current state of the board. With that aid, I can imagine (mostly) what it will look like if I move something.
If I have a grid to look at, I can mentally fill it. But with eyes closed, that goes away.
As an analogy, I think of it as the difference between a multiple choice test and an essay test. Visual (recognition) memory vs non-visual (recall) memory.
“No, I can’t play tic-tac-toe in my head”
Interesting, and thank you! I’d tried asking on another forum, and had gotten frustratingly vague replies to what I thought was an advance in specificness (vs. people talking about how vivid their imaginations are, which is pretty useless). Not being able to play blindfold tic-tac-toe is definitely more than a difference in labeling our experiences.
I can play tic-tac-toe in my head, and I only get rare flashes, but I do it through memorizing coordinate pairs or numbering the squares, rather than through actual visualizations of the board. I’m not sure if I have aphantasia, but I suspect I’m at least closer to it than you are.
In my case I can picture images, but they must be directly retrieved from my personal memory. So I can’t picture an arbitrary tic-tac-toe board, but I can picture a tic-tac-toe board at random from memory… with random configuration.
+1
And that’s how you get situations where kids are told they’re “geniuses” and the result is a sense of constant anxiety and a disinclination to persevere with anything they find hard, because they’re supposed to be a genius, and if they tell the people who labelled them that that they don’t understand something, what happens then?
That was me.
That was both my brother and I.
I was the irritating nerd who dressed in a 3-piece suit (including tie and vest) and carried a briefcase in 3rd. grade, telling everyone *else* I was a genius.
Then the mercury amalgam fillings provided by the school dentist kicked in… 😉
I can’t remember that mental clarity, but I remember remembering, if that makes any sense?
So, based on this and the cougar from an alternate timeline joke, I take it one of the authors here is an ex school teacher.
Actually, this attitude of Artie’s is shared by a few allegedly human teachers I’ve known. Perhaps I should ask them if they’re actually super-intelligent gerbils…
If Artie wanted the world to change he would only have to let either AnaSigma or H.T. do what they choose without interference. Quite clearly he is like Vlad In Zelazny’s ” A Night In The Lonesome October” and has chosen to uphold the Status Quo because he likes the world just as it is. As a fellow Closer I approve.
I salute a fellow fan of the greatest October book.
I should read that book again. And maybe some Bradbury. Fall is coming, after all.
Reading (or rereading) it at a one day(chapter) per day pace is (a) a test of willpower not to read ahead, and (b) an interesting effect, pacing-wise.
Hmm. I’m about due for a reread of it too. Let’s see if I can find my copy by the end of the month.
Preventing catastrophic change isn’t quite the same as upholding the Status Quo.
Not wanting the entire world to be consumed by a ravening plant hivemind bent on mass global xenocide is not the same thing as “liking the world just as it is”.
You can very much dislike the world as it is, and still dislike another option -even more- and fight to prevent that even worse possibility from coming to pass.
Being shot in the foot is a lot better than being shot in the head, but you wouldn’t say someone who chooses the former over the latter “likes to be shot in the foot”.
Agreed.
Artie is approching ‘changing the world’ from a more pragmatic standpoint than just murdering the people causing problems. He (I would hope) understands that there’s always a Napoleon Bonaparte or Joseph Stalin ‘waiting in the wings’ to swoo in and seize power in such situations. So he’s going about this the longer route and teaching the kids to be better people in the hopes that they’ll change the world once it’s time for a ‘change of the guard’.
[Glares at baby-boomer politicians who won’t just goddamn retire already]
Unfortunately, Artie tends to neglect important factors in his ideas. He is correct in thinking that to change the world, you have to change the children. But trying to change the world by teaching first-graders in one school isn’t going to accomplish anything.
One: that’s only a miniscule fraction of the first-graders in the country, and two: they’re still going to be getting brainwashed for the next 11 years, so what little they learn from Artie will have been overwritten many times over by the time they graduate.
He would have been much smarter to start a private school (he is a minister, after all), so he could oversee the overall education of kids in all 12 grades.
OTOH Artie could change things greatly by publishing a treatise on the teaching of first graders, even he can’t predict the result.
Artie may be wiser than we think. We have examples of profound changes in the way things are done. One example is that it was two Jewish graduate students working under Leo Szilard who figured out the atomic bomb was practical. Another was an entrepreneur who knew about the hallmark punch and low temperature metal casting who invented moveable type. Arguably Johan Gutenberg wasn’t any kind of genius, just someone out to make a pfenning or two, but ultimately the printing press is the foundation of the modern world, breakneck rate of change and all.
Artie is an idealist first and a Madboy (and madtech, if you get down to it) second. This is why he causes the havoc he does – his plans tend to hinge on an ideal of how people will react, rather than what they’d actually do. This is should be considered a blessing, really. Can you imagine the chaos that would ensue if he ever became cynical?
I also salute a fellow fan.The one writer I would buy in hardcover instead of waiting for the paperback. Dang, now I need to reread it.
He doesn’t want it to simply change, he wants it to change in a particular way In the way he sees as better. .
So…. he’s Dumbledore
I’ve been thinking Rollin Hand.
The algorithm is in the guitar.
The trick is to kill the lead algo-guitarist and then you get to take his spot in the front of the stage.
Artie practices “Enlightened Self Interest”. His altruism has a triple benefit: not only win-win for himself and his clients, but microloans enrich diverse communities around the world, fostering decentralized capitalism.
I’m certain his market forecasting considers overall economic impact, e.g. a loan for home improvements supporting local builders (client or not).
Say I’m no bunny, a gerbil am I.
I can’t use what money can buy
Birds and some bees told me things could go wrong.
Why can’t we all get along?
I’m saddened by today, though I’ve got a lot.
How could it work this way? Did it go to pot?
Algorithms,
Guitar music,
I’ve got nothing.
Should I ask for anything more?
Microloaning,
Keeps me solvent,
I’ve got nothing.
Should I ask for anything more?
Anasigma,
Sent assassins.
Let them shoo me from my door.
I teach children,
I had big plans,
I’ve got nothing.
Should I ask for anything more?
Algorighms,
Guitar music,
I teach children,
I had big plans,
I’ve got nothing.
Should I ask for anything more?
—from “I Got Rhythm,” George Gershwin.
Can I say how adorable it is to see again artie do that pose after all this time?