I'm not sure why it matters whether we use an absolute scale. In another couple years, LLMs will trounce everybody on every topic. Even if you think they cheated with the Navier-Stokes proof, it seems clear enough that they can operate as a peer to, say, the worst professional mathematicians (if not the best), who are so far above the median person in reasoning and analytical ability that it's difficult to even qualitatively describe it. On an absolute scale, human intelligence is fairly meaningless, just like human lifespan is nothing when you look at the billions of years that our universe has existed. On a relative scale, if you learn about something like the standard model of particle physics, and then you realize that the average person struggles with fractions, you see that obviously in human terms, there seems to be a big difference by 2-3 standard deviations.
> I’m not sure why it matters whether we use an absolute scale. In another couple years, LLMs will trounce everybody on every topic.
Whether intelligence is innate or trained, and what the absolute scale is, matter tremendously for national education policy, not to mention food, pollution, finance and everything that contributes to outcomes. Your examples are mainly based on differences in training. The main difference between particle physics and fractions is school, not cortical thickness, right?
Personally I also care whether the narratives we share and the public conception of intelligence is true and accurate or not. There absolutely are cultural biases surrounding intelligence that affect society and affect how people treat each other. If intelligence is trained, then we know we can focus on training. If intelligence is largely genetic and not training (or SES or nutrition, etc.) then grouping kids by ability is more justified than otherwise. If the biological component of 2 standard deviations above the mean in intelligence is relatively small (like it is for many other physical traits) then the term “gifted” is exaggerating reality, in addition to any mis-attribution of the source of the difference that the word implies.
Is LLMs getting better a reason to stop learning or stop caring about education & education policy? LLMs only got where they are by humans showing them everything humans wrote, right? I don’t see how LLMs improving changes anything with respect to teaching humans or measuring human ability. One thing that LLMs or AI in general might help enable is teaching kids at their own pace. The whole reason we teach kids in groups by age is because it’s easy and scalable. If each kid had her/his own teacher, then making the timing of the curriculum adaptive becomes feasible. Maybe AI-supplemented teaching will open this door, though there are still valid reasons to keep kids interacting and learning along with other same-age kids.
My point is that an absolute scale is meaningless. Compared to something like an LLM we will all soon be considered morons in an absolute sense.
So only a relative scale makes sense, and I don't know how someone who's ever worked with the general public can think that the only thing most people need to understand particle physics is more school. I used to work in a tutoring center when I was a teenager, and there would be third graders that would read 3-4 simple sentences and then be unable to answer basic questions about what they read. I honestly didn't know how to help sometimes because it was like they would read a sentence out loud to me and all they needed to do was repeat the sentence to answer the question and they couldn't. Like they didn't hear the words coming out of their own mouth. My daughter could read multiple paragraphs and then have no trouble answering questions when she was 4. There was one sixth grader in the tutoring center learning calculus.
Best I can tell, innate intelligence is real and the differences are vast (from a human perspective). People are uncomfortable with that idea, I suppose because they still place intrinsic value on intelligence along the same lines of the eugenicists you were complaining about, but it's worse if you don't just acknowledge it and work with it. The solution here is to just take for granted that people have inherent value, not to deny reality around people's differences.
I do agree though that LLMs have great potential to be personal tutors and allow each person to reach their own ceiling.
