Decisions, decisions…
As ever, Scott Adams tells a home truth in the guise of humour:
The person I’m thinking of is not stupid and this has made me wonder how anyone can vacillate between being intelligent and, as Adams puts it, failing the Turing test. The conclusion I have reached is that this happens when people are well out of their sphere of expertise - so far out of it that they don’t even know the extent of their ignorance. I’ve noticed that under these conditions, people resort to aphorisms and herd behaviour.
Not long after this thought crystallised, it came to me that this is very likely a standard fallback behaviour, not just for primates, but for any animal that could remotely be described as intelligent.
This observation is very interesting in the context of my existing notions on the nature of intelligence. I’ve always defined intelligence as the capacity for analysis in the absence of precedent. More recently I have wondered how to factor in the inclination to analyse.
The capacity for intelligence is (IMHO) intrinsic to any large layered neural network with feedback channels. However, this is true only to the extent that the potential for huge bulging muscles is inherent in every man. Couch potatoes utterly fail to bulge, except possibly around the middle.
Regular exercise is required to procure even slight bulging. Or cerebration.
Gym junkies like working out.
Intelligent people enjoy analysing things. I say “analysing things” rather than “thinking” because you can think about doughnuts, boobs and beer with very little in the way of analysis.
The application of intelligence is an inherently time-consuming activity. Mammals invented dreaming as a way to cope with the fact that you can’t do a thorough analysis while something is trying to eat you.
When decisions must be made under fire, it greatly helps to have thought the situation through in advance. When this is not possible, due to unforeseen circumstances, it becomes necessary to fall back on more general precedent. This is no more or less than the adaptation of solutions to similar problems on the basis that they worked and have already been thought through.
When there is no precedent, behaviour is erratic and unpredictable. This is itself a survival behaviour: the unpredictability of one’s confusion can throw a spanner in the other party’s works.