Intelligence

Smart people are a dime a dozen and often don’t amount to much. What counts is being creative and imaginative.

Intelligent people simply aren’t willing to accept answers that they don’t understand — no matter how many other people try to convince them of it, or how many other people believe it, if they aren’t able to convince them selves of it, they won’t accept it.

The Manfield amendments were a huge blow to Project Whorl. Panic set in among the Trustees as they scheduled urgent meetings with top officials from the Nixon administration, including the president himself. Out of those meetings came a brilliant idea. The Gang of Eight has to be briefed on all special access programs, even those that are waived... See more

The project would attempt to invent an anti-gravity system from the ground up instead of reverse engineering it. This project began in 1955 with the establishment of the Research Institute for Advanced Studies (RIAS) at the Glenn L. Martin Company, which later became Martin-Marietta and ultimately merged with Lockheed in 1995 to form the modern... See more

The dream of a Liberal (arts) education—which is the scaled, democratic form of the Keatsian ideal of negative capability—cannot hold up when liberalism itself is held to be suspect.

One of the most remarkable traits of human intelligence, highlighted by the GMM, is opportunistic learning: the ability to draw a lasting rule from a very small number of experiences, sometimes just one. This stands in stark contrast to AI’s dominant approach, based on massive data repetition. For humans, a single experience, especially if... See more