Published by marco on
Scott Adams, author of the Dilbert comic strip and several books, including the interesting God’s Debris: A Thought Experiment (Amazon) and increasingly bitter Dilbert collections, like When Did Ignorance Become A Point Of View? (Amazon) has a blog as well and updates with ferocious regularity, almost always with a unique idea that usually freewheels into a thought experiment. Some work, some don’t.
A recent theme was free will.
This entry asks “[w]hat one simple problem could you eliminate … that would fix virtually every other problem in the world?” If you’ve read his blog more than once or twice, you’ve noticed that he doesn’t pull any punches, usually saying whatever the hell he pleases about his audience. This follow-up post to the “Little Robot” describes a lesson he learned from that article, namely, that the problem he would fix is this: “imbue us all with the knowledge of who is smarter than ourselves on any given topic”. That way, the confusion in the comments from his last post—in which posters assumed he was the moron, and he, likewise, assumed that they were, because he couldn’t see their point or they didn’t have one; he couldn’t tell in all cases. To paraphrase Arthur C. Clarke: “any sufficiently advanced form of argument is indistinguishable from actual knowledge”. The point is that neither party can be absolutely sure that the other isn’t a super-genius making a killer argument that is just beyond them.
“My magical solution is to give humans the power to tell the difference between a super genius and a moron. I think this would solve every problem in the world because chances are that the smartest super genius in each field has a good idea how to fix that field. But the only solutions being considered are the ones coming from tall guys with good hair.”