Friday, June 20, 2008

In the Long Run, We're All Boring









Anonymous said...

"Thus, the only thing that will increase in the future will be emergent properties, things like bee hives, or ant mounds, that act like an organism but are full of ignorant agents"

By this logic our democratic process should have a secure future.

Your argument on intelligence and enjoyment seems to argue against great achievement. Perhaps it is not lack of enjoyment, but a different kind of enjoyment. the difference between puffing a joint while watching a sit-com and seeing the ideas in your head become reality, or the anguish/rush of seeing a problem solved, etc. I would say the intelligent have a different word of enjoyment open to them, while they may be shut off from the casual enjoyments of the majority.

J. said...

Enjoy the ennui still it lasts!

Most of us cannot have enough IQ to solve the problems life forces us to deal with. I, for one, need to solve the problem of financing four Jewish pricess daughters. I could use more IQ. I have signed a contract to solve an impossibly complex problem. My neighbor an Israeli general is forced to deal with a madman in Iran who is building bombs and missiles to kill us. Never a dull moment.

Anonymous said...

This is a crazy post, were you drunk or something? Most of all I really don't understand the point about if you are really intelligent, everything is boring. You give no examples and this is far from obvious. At the airport, waiting to board, 70% of people are doing nothing, 20% on their cell phone, 10% reading or working. Who are the smart ones? Who are the bored ones?

1. Futurists are always fantastically wrong.

2. Doomsday Hypothesis IMO makes it extremely unlikely that the human race will live 1e6 yrs from now.

3. Each person only lives so long - you can't know or learn everything no matter how smart you are. Although I guess the futurists will also predict that we will eventually be immortal (or maybe as soon as 2050!, keep popping the pills Ray).

I agree with your last sentence, although not with the logic that got you there.

Eric Falkenstein said...

examples? From above:
1) Bertrand Russel found math boring as he got older.
2) Kids find many jokes pleasurable, while adults don't
3) sex seems to be either boring, or a black hole in he LR

Anonymous said...

loved the part about having kids choices! and so the system gets back to its equilibrium state. that effin dawkins was onto smth. absolute inteligence in year million extrapolates past events, but random mutations might had a bigger effect in the past than we like to admit. that's what makes it interesting

Anonymous said...

Why would maths become boring with increasing intelligence? One can always work on harder problems. Russell was wrong if he suggested that "that mathematics is fundamentally 'trivial'". Mathematical results become trivial once they have been proved, but before they have been proved, they can be extremely non-trivial for any form of intelligence that cannot do infinite computations in finite time.

Since doing infinite computations in finite time is probably physically impossible, there will always be non-trivial mathematical problems.

Anonymous said...

I don't know, by IQ tests I am intelligent, and I still laugh a ton every time I watch "The Big Lebowski", I have never been bored by any sex I've had, and I like watching sports (although I try not to because I feel like it's a waste of time while there is still so much to learn).

Anonymous said...

In "Hitchhiker's Guide ..." didn't Adams write about this, and said God gave himself amnesia.

Or, as the old saying goes, ignorance is bliss.

Or, as Seeger said (against the wind?), I wish I didnt know now what I didn't know then.

Anonymous said...

Maybe the smarter you get, the more like you are to encounter the wrath of a vexatious centimillionaire? Somehow life stays interesting.