flâneur

Intelligence doesn't exist. Let's talk aptitude instead.

sarv.substack.com · 2,224 words · saved by 1 readers

We need to move past human-centric definitions of intelligence.

There’s no such thing as intelligence. Nobody can decide what it means. It’s this weird mishmash of concepts that actually mean more like ‘what makes us humans special’, and facing the final bout of specialness leaving, we’re scrambling to redefine it. Just like the first step in understanding astronomy more broadly was dropping the Earth-as-the-center-of-the-universe reference frame, I think we need to drop the humans-as-the-definition-of-intelligent reference frame. I’m going to explain why intelligence is a counterproductive term, why we’re evolutionarily wired to be bad at reasoning…

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