The protagonist of Stella Maris is a young, brilliant and psychologically messy mathematical genius, for whom mathematics appears as both a salvation and a curse. It offers her precision in a world of ambiguity, but its very exactitude highlights how much remains unknowable. She spirals.

To understand what someone is truly capable of, one must observe them as they go out into the world and make something out of the life they’ve been given. We got the true measure of Einstein’s impact not by IQ-testing him but by watching him invent theories of physics.

A recent MIT Tech Review article attempted to address the same problem as the Santa Fe workshop: how we might build better AI evaluations. The author’s main recommendation was to look to the tools of social science, where “it’s particularly important that metrics begin with a rigorous definition of the concept measured by the test.” If we want to... See more

And indeed, the growing questions about AI consciousness only highlight the unknowability of consciousness in general. We can’t even prove other humans aren’t “philosophical zombies” lacking inner experience, much less grasp animal consciousness after coexisting with animals for millennia. If we can’t definitively confirm firsthand experience in... See more

There is a concept in philosophy also called cognitive closure. Unlike the corresponding concept in psychology, it describes not our need for answers but our inability to access them. Philosopher Colin McGinn coined the term to indicate that some philosophical questions may lie beyond human comprehension—the issue of consciousness, for example.... See more

Truth should be accessible yet transcendent, superior but subordinate. Why do our searches for fundamental truth seem so often contradictory?

“We never think of giving extraordinarily competent people IQ tests,” he said. “Administering an IQ test to Marie Curie or Albert Einstein would feel foolish. I suspect that Einstein would do very badly, probably outperformed by some precocious, irritating fourteen-year-old.”

“Academic peer review is widely criticized too,” he added. “For expert... See more

One problem was that tests previously seen as requiring intelligence, such as playing chess or recognizing speech, have now been dismissed as only requiring heuristics, shortcuts, not true intelligence, now that AI has mastered them. So, people asked, what evaluation would we set up ahead of time that everyone would agree on and that we wouldn’t... See more