Study their behaviors. Observe their territorial boundaries. Leave their habitat as you found it. Report any signs of intelligence.

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Sunday, February 09, 2025

It Is Low-IQ to Fantasize Super IQ

It's a mistake to use the human IQ scale as an intuition pump for the possibility of intelligence far beyond human.

IQ is defined by the distribution of intelligence in the human population. Every 15 IQ points is defined as one standard deviation, and we can calculate the rarity of a given IQ using the cumulative distribution function of the normal distribution. Only about 8 living humans would have an IQ of 190, and none would have 200. Even if we invoke Einstein or von Neumann, we don't have a rigorous notion of what a human IQ approaching 190 would be like.

IQ is simply meaningless when we use a number like 250 to describe the intelligence of a super-AI (or alien). A human IQ of 250 would correspond to one person in 10^23, which is roughly the number of grains of sand on Earth. An IQ of 1000 picks out one human in 10^789. Such IQ levels are literally meaningless for both human and non-human intelligences. When humans talk about IQs above 200, they might as well say "super duper duper duper smart". Their use of integer IQ numbers instead of "dupers" doesn't mark the described entity as smart. It just marks the description as dumb.

There are plenty of intelligent things we can say on the topic of super-intelligence. But invoking IQs above 200 isn't one of them.

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