undefined | Better HN

0 pointswalleeee6mo ago0 comments

> the intellectual capability of a group of people is measured by the intellectual capability of the smartest person there, not the average of all the people.

Nonsense. The capacities of an organized group of people are very different from the capacities of any individual in it or the averaged capacities of its members. Even an absolute dictatorship where the dictator is resident genius.

Your claim is only correct if it's a dictator with an army of automatons. The claim you want to refute is just as wrong, unless the people follow a strict algorithmic decision procedure, which even the stodgiest bureaucracy only loosely approximates.

Agents and groups have fundamentally different dynamics. An anthill does things no ant can conceive of. Many human organizations filled with smart, well-intentioned people do incredibly stupid things. Etc.

0 comments

IgorPartola6mo ago

I am not discounting the importance of the group being able to recognize the smartest person or people. But of the hundreds of thousands of Athenians we only recognize several dozens to maybe a couple hundred individuals as having moved the needle.

You can also think of it as “the maximum intellectual capability of the group is limited by the intellectual capability of its smartest members”.

walleeeeOP6mo ago

Ignoring the difficulty of defining such a needle in a general sense, I still think the point is disproved by the fact that groups can do things no individual member can conceive of, let alone do, alone.

If it's true of ants, who we likely agree have not so large a cognitive lightcone as us, surely it is of us. The only way I see for it not to be true of us is to posit a hard cap on intelligence which we are closer to.

There are also forms of intelligence which resist formalization and do not equate to cleverness. For instance, wisdom.

IgorPartola6mo ago

I am specifically talking about intellectual capability. No one person can build an aircraft by themselves. But also if you take 10,000 people of IQ of exactly 100 (which is always defined as a median IQ for a population), you will not get a carrier either. You also wouldn’t get calculus or general relativity or genetic engineering.

1 more reply

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

0 pointswalleeee6mo ago0 comments

> the intellectual capability of a group of people is measured by the intellectual capability of the smartest person there, not the average of all the people.

0 comments

IgorPartola6mo ago

You can also think of it as “the maximum intellectual capability of the group is limited by the intellectual capability of its smartest members”.

walleeeeOP6mo ago

There are also forms of intelligence which resist formalization and do not equate to cleverness. For instance, wisdom.

IgorPartola6mo ago

1 more reply

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse