intelligence 4

Paul Graham pens another brilliant essay on Is it worth being wise? It’s mostly about the difference between being wise (right most of the time) versus being smart (being right where few others are). If you’re picking between options, being wise is useful. There is a best option, and you’ll pick it most of the time. If you’re doing something creative, there’s no finite set of options. Then it’s worth being smart. Increasingly, tasks are asking for more creativity, so it may be better to be smart.

Excellent kuro5hin article on the brain and Turing machines. While on brains, kuro5hin also talks about geniuses.

Does education really pay? An interesting article on Forbes arguing that education does not cause higher salaries, but is merely correlated with it. The logic sequence is broadly: Labour markets want smart people. Smart people tend to want education. Hence labour markets appear to want educated people.

The Machiavellian Intelligence hypothesis says that the brain evolved more for its social purpose, than for finding food and things like that. Incidentally, Google’s collection on evolution is as comprehensive as ever.