“Here the professor fell silent and looked again at the camera crew. They, too, were silent and stared at him in astonishment. In anguish, the professor threw his tiki torch to the ground, where it broke into several pieces and went out. “I have come too early, my time is not yet. They have not realized that intelligence is dead, and yet they have done it themselves.”
“Hemingway said that happiness in intelligent people was rare but shit even contentment amongst the mediocre is hard to fathom.”
“Carol was discovering that the one thing that can be more disconcerting than intelligent hatred is demanding love.”
“Intelligence is too complex and multifaceted a thing to reduce to any single dimension.”
“The moral here is that nature and nurture should not be opposed. Pure learning, in the absence of any innate constraints, simply does not exist. Any learning algorithm contains, in one way or another, a set of assumptions about the domain to be learned. Rather than trying to learn everything from scratch, it is much more effective to rely on prior assumptions that clearly delineate the basic laws of the domain that must be explored, and integrate these laws into the very architecture of the system. The more innate assumptions there are, the faster learning is (provided, of course, that these assumptions are correct!). This is universally true. It would be wrong, for example, to think that the AlphaGo Zero software, which trained itself in Go by playing against itself, started from nothing: its initial representation included, among other things, knowledge of the topography and symmetries of the game, which divided the search space by a factor of eight. Our brain too is molded with assumptions of all kinds. Shortly, we will see that, at birth, babies brains are already organized and knowledgeable. They know, implicitly, that the world is made of things that move only when pushed, without ever interpenetrating each other (solid objects)—and also that it contains much stranger entities that speak and move by themselves (people). No need to learn these laws: since they are true everywhere humans live, our genome hardwires them into the brain, thus constraining and speeding up learning. Babies do not have to learn everything about the world: their brains are full of innate constraints, and only the specific parameters that vary unpredictably (such as face shape, eye color, tone of voice, and individual tastes of the people around them) remain to be acquired.”
“Our brain is therefore not simply passively subjected to sensory inputs. From the get-go, it already possesses a set of abstract hypotheses, an accumulated wisdom that emerged through the sift of Darwinian evolution and which it now projects onto the outside world. Not all scientists agree with this idea, but I consider it a central point: the naive empiricist philosophy underlying many of today s artificial neural networks is wrong. It is simply not true that we are born with completely disorganized circuits devoid of any knowledge, which later receive the imprint of their environment. Learning, in man and machine, always starts from a set of a priori hypotheses, which are projected onto the incoming data, and from which the system selects those that are best suited to the current environment. As Jean-Pierre Changeux stated in his best-selling book Neuronal Man (1985), “To learn is to eliminate.”
“... intelligence is a combination of mental ability and the accumulated knowledge that arises from that ability.”
“Having the entire world s resources right at your computer yet not using them is like having a body without a brain.”
“Beautiful pictures comes to mind when eyes are closed. They can be realistic too when opened. It ll require a blend of hard work and strategic moments.”
“You cannot have big thoughts if you are constantly doing small things (e.g. always checking your smartphones for the latest micro-updates on your social media of trivia and pointlessness). Using a smartphone makes you dumb. It shortens your attention span and shrinks your intelligence. They should be renamed dumbphones. They don t expand your consciousness, they contract it and make it tiny. Most smartphone users are out of their tiny little minds. Predatory capitalism and its consumer gadgets have been enormously damaging to the intellectual progress of the human race. They have been remarkably successful at dumbing down humanity and promoting the Dunning-Kruger effect.”
“If common sense is so rare, isn t it common sense to start calling it rare sense?”
“Brains are more effective than beauty. Only the world tries to make women forget it. They don t want us to be too smart ... They re scared that if they encourage it, we ll end up more intelligent than the men. With the secret being ... that we already are.”
“On occasion, the leader may be intelligent and highly educated, but the possession of these qualities does him, as a rule, more harm than good. By showing how complex things are, by allowing of explanation and promoting comprehension, intelligence always renders its owner indulgent, and blunts, in a large measure, that intensity and violence of conviction needful for apostles. The great leaders of crowds of all ages, and those of the Revolution in particular, have been of lamentably narrow intellect; while it is precisely those whose intelligence has been the most restricted who have exercised the greatest influence.”
“There is, and there always has been, an unusually high and consistent correlation between the stupidity of a given person and that person’s propensity to be impressed by the measurement of I.Q.”
“the prophet Isaiah makes a strong statement about the fact that no one knows the will of God. He proclaims that eye has not seen and ear has not heard the things God wants to do for His people. Yet Paul answers the prophet of old by making it clear that those things they did not know back then, we know now because we have God’s Spirit within us. His Spirit gives us access to His mind and thoughts. Isaiah the prophet goes on to ask a profound question: Who has known the mind of the LORD, that he will instruct Him? Paul answers in effect, “We know! We have the mind of Christ.” “How do we actually have access to God’s mind?” you ask. Paul says that the Holy Spirit knows the thoughts of God, and that the Holy Spirit lives in us.”
“If you really have to argue, do it to find better solution not to show off your intelligence.”
“Whither is intelligence? I will tell you. We have killed it – you and I.”