btw- does arlo have an arlo jr?…seems hed be just in time to loop back to his grandads adventures and journey the great depression of 2030.:)ish.

nature cycles, thus mans machine’s are like nature.. not the other way around…:)

The point about technologist over scientist is well-taken and concise. That’s a theme worthy of elaboration, c3.

Knowledge is not its own reward.

Not when you can be on American Idol;)

Prok: The models of chaotic/complex systems down to quantum effects are increasingly looking like useful models how intelligence is realized. As in all science, it isn’t the truth or falsity of the model at question because no model is ‘true’ or ‘false’. The question is does it inspire tests of values which can be repeated and for which the values have a measure of predictability. IQ is not necessarily a predictor of success anyway.

What I guess you may object to is processes by which some attempt to use these tests to differentiate classes of test subjects seeing these as socially divisive. They in fact can be. Do you remember the genetic work that seem to demonstrate that in fact some statistical samples of black populations show a genetic deficiency for a trait required for pre-frontal growth? Before the work could be checked, the researchers were run to ground with such objections. At that point, society began to witch hunt the researcher because of social ethics which themselves begin to appear to be unethical. Now it is a case of not only not knowing but clearly establishing not wanting to know. Good science; bad ethics.

I agree with the notion of the ‘singularity cult’ but they don’t bother me any more than a cult of wooden shoe cloggers. They are noisy but they only hurt their own insoles.

Why would the dynamic nature of IQ somehow keep eugenics at bay? There really is a eugenics already at work with the singularity theory itself, however much it concedes plasticity.

I am laying down a marker in this discussion. Increasingly I find these “brain” discussions are in fact creating correlations that don’t add up.

A key way the singularity cult sells itself, for example, is by referencing all the “good work” it will do for children, the disabled, etc. Kurzweil’s reader for the blind is constantly cited as a way to emotionally blackmail people into never criticizing something that plans to nihilistically do away with the physical world and dispense with much of humanity, too.

The concept of stability/instability *shouldn’t* map, and that was my point. “Correlative relationship in no way demonstrates causality” is exactly my point, so I don’t why you are reciting it back to me.