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Brandon37's avatar

I wonder how much of this is high midwit hubris? I have about 125-130 IQ based on WAIS and ASVAB and I could maybe, with a lot of effort and headache and Khan academy teach myself to understand what all your mathematical equations mean but i understand you are smarter than me so I just skip all that and go to the verbal explanation at the end. I think these philosophers and NRX people just think because they are gifted kid learned how to read first smartest kid in elementary school smart they can understand all of reality all the time.

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Tony V's avatar

Most High-IQ societies at the top-end do have philosophers, but they are also mathematically inclined. They do in fact think in an abstract algebraic way when verbalizing their thoughts. Most papers are written by 110-135 IQ individuals (dependent on the original population) which is not sufficient enough to access powerful mathematical tools that would best encapsulate the precision of their thoughts (IQ 145+). Furthermore, academia is mostly about pushing papers, getting grants, getting political power nowadays -- it's just the nature of any institution that is human-made.

My counterargument would be modelling complex mathematical processes inside one's head is only one formulation of thought. The application of the operative-logical structure, its broader implications and effects is also necessitated. Having high working memory and high processing speed without abstraction capabilities is just as bad as a supercomputing human that is brute-forcing a problem without proper executive control over assigning where those resources are best utilized.

As Von Neumann has once said :

A facility with the symbolic manipulation of linear operators;

An intuitive feeling for the logical structure of any new mathematical theory;

An intuitive feeling for the combinatorial superstructure of new theories.

Most likely philosophers have (c) but whether they have (a) or (b) is not a given.

Dimensional reduction and abstraction is necessary (synthetic) but so is computational analysis (multi-variate analysis) (analytic). Without either, one can't perform integrative forms of thought.

Physicists are likely good with both, otherwise you just end up with equations but not knowing what they mean, or how they relate to the phenomenological space of reality.

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