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Article 5712 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: nlc@media.mit.edu (Nick Cassimatis)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: AI failures
Message-ID: <1992May18.032351.9922@news.media.mit.edu>
Date: 18 May 92 03:23:51 GMT
References: <1992May16.162406.17453@news.media.mit.edu> <1992May17.082629.27776@news.media.mit.edu> <1992May17.144901.8032@news.acns.nwu.edu>
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In article <1992May17.144901.8032@news.acns.nwu.edu> learn@speedy.acns.nwu.edu (William J. Vajk) writes:
>In article <1992May17.082629.27776@news.media.mit.edu> Nick Cassimatis writes:
>
>>In article <1992May16.162406.17453@news.media.mit.edu> Marvin Minsky writes:
>
>>>In <1992May16.125258.15430@news.media.mit.edu> Nick Cassimatis writes:
>
>Interestingly, there is probably more unhappiness among the most intelligent 
>(my personal observation with no real numbers to back this up.) This alone
>suggests to me something for which I do have some real data. That choice
>alone is not *the* controlling factor; the limitations imposed by genetic 
>predisposition play a very large role. We have begun to understand some of 
>the physical aspects and the relationships to happiness.
>
>Bill Vajk
>

I myself have noticed and been surprised by this myself.  I've begun
to wonder if the unhappiness is the cause of the intelligence and not
the other way around, as is first assumed.  Maybe the unhappiness was
an impetus for the development of intelligence.  Many people who I knew
to be intelligent in grade school, are not even now going to college
and really don't strike me as being that smart (I'm not equating
intelligence with a knowledge of group theory either.  When dealing
with something that they knew well, they just don't seem to excel as
they once did.)  Maybe at some point these people became
"well-adjusted" to society (which I consider to be a very sinister
goal of many educational theorists (often but not always liberal)).
Since they grew up in Ohio on the border of the rust belt and the corn
fields, they were assimilated into a "society" that was far from
conducive to the pursuits of the mind.  Now I and a few other people
from my school who did OK were the ones who never did quite fit in.
Perhaps not quite fitting in gave us more opportunity (or even
encouragement) to begin to think about ourselves and our thoughts so
that we ultimately became intelligent.

Now as I look around many of my fellow undergraduates at MIT, I see
many who seem to have not quite gotten over their initial
disappointment at not fitting in; after all, they've only been away
for a few years -- if that.  Maybe they will never get over it and
eventually become the people who are referred to when someone talks
about smart people being unhappy.

Of course, maybe they never fit in because they were smarter than the
others.  Determining the first cause here is difficult.  Perhaps there
was no first cause and the processes of becoming intelligent and
becoming unhappy fed on each other through development.

There is also another explanation: almost certainly being intelligent
has to do with "knowing thy self" and thy thoughts better than others.
Such self-reflection seems to be a recent development in human
evolution (Julian Jaynes would say it happened only a few thousand
years ago -- no time for evolution to get the best of it.) Perhaps
this reflection is really some sort of a bug that throws things out of
wack and is thus a source of unhappiness.

Another theory: being educated could cause unhappiness because that
education consists in partially assimilating contradictory moral
codes.  If you take much of academia serious today, then you are
supposed to be at once objective, caring, compassionate, honest,
intelligent, and unselfish (there are so many contradictions therin!);
many would have us be ashamed of liking any sort of art, music or
literature created before 1960 -- and only a select bit of this.  For
many it is taboo to enjoy the simple pleasure of a sporting event
every now and then.  The point is, that an educated person is offered
so many different values, that if he tries to live up to even a
fraction of them, he is bound to contradiction and unhappiness.  An
unreflective professional athlete (not to pick on them, but as an
example) doesn't have nearly as many opportunities to go through this.

These are only pet theories, and I haven't given any of them enough
though or research to be able to be that sure of any one of them.

Disclaimer: I must have used terms such as "(un)happiness",
"intelligent", etc vaguely or even in a contradictory manner.  But it
is unavoidable with such "folk psychological" terms.  My consolation
is in the thought that we have to start thinking about these things
somewhere, and I can see no other viable alternatives.

-Nick


