re: #202 freetoken

Yeah, exactly. And then there’s the enormous gulf between the capacity of ‘intelligence’ and the actual use of it. I have a lot of friends who are ‘smarter’ than me at math, who I can beat at games and other challenges that utilize math. They can solve huge important problems and figure out coding algorithms, but I can much better assess the virtue of certain moves in a simple card game.

I’m also reminded of the journals of soldiers from WWII, talking about how you learn to survive in a warzone, the various simple but absolutely necessary things, like not bunching up, wearing two layers of socks and drying them out every day, not taking random potshots, etc., and how people either learned that shit or they died and you generally could not predict who would learn it and who wouldn’t. And it wasn’t the smart guys, or the street-smart guys, or whatever, that it was such a bizarre melange of weird stuff you had to do that it basically mattered more how engaged you were, you were tough-minded enough to learn in that sort of chaotic environment.

So how do you test for that, and how do you compare it? Person A is ‘smarter’ in a quiet room, person B is ‘smarter’ at learning life lessons while people get blown to guts and fragments around him.