[engfan]

I have never heard anyone think this way: “The main mistake people usually make is thinking Newton or Einstein were just scaled-up good students, that a genius comes to life when you linearly extrapolate a top-10% student.

The reason such people are widely lauded as geniuses is precisely because people can’t envision smart students producing paradigm-shifting work as they did.

Yes, people may be talking about AI performance as genius-level but any comparison to these minds is just for marketing purposes.

[8note]

we kinda think too much of them though. each is also a product of their surroundings, and had contemporaries who could or did come to the same revelations.

[InfiniteLoup]

What's your opinion on John von Neumann?

[seanhunter]

Yes, or Leonard Euler.

[_diyar]

Alien

[downboots]

If the universe is not intelligent, how can a subset of it be intelligent? If it is all computation, what is the purpose?

[sebastiennight]

The first question is weird. Many subsets of X can have property Y without X having it, wouldn't you say?

"If the desert is not covered in palm trees, how can a subset of it be covered in palm trees?"

"If the neural network is not activating, how can a node of the network be activating?"

[downboots]

Good note. Your examples suggest thinking of 'property' as a sort of discontinuous indicator function on the subsets. I'm thinking about the interdependence between the function values or across subsets, regardless of continuity, in the context of universal computation. How to localize or define intelligence? Take the example of IQ, as a platonic ideal for measuring intelligence, vs all possible groups you could make with those people. Hard to define intelligence https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39977664