on the relationship between smartness and intelligence

the difference between playing well and knowing what to play

happy sunday, it's the same kid in a different country. gorgonzola bruschetta, dirty money, and russian honey. life is a joke and god is funny.

if knowledge is organized wisdom, then what is the relationship between smartness and intelligence? some people think being smart really matters. i don't know, dog. i wouldn’t give a dog an iphone.

why do some people think being smart matters? think of the crowd obsessed with iq. i picture a nerd. why are the tech people so obsessed with intelligence? i picture a richer nerd.

for both nerds, thinking intelligence matters is more smart than it is intelligent. intelligence is the ability to exist, smart is the ability to play game(s) well.

if smart is about figuring out how to manipulate some system, intelligence is the ability to pick which games lead to the right orchestration of existence. if i become the best video game player in the world, i am smart, but if i become a hikikomori in the process, i am not intelligent. lex fridman is smart without being intelligent because fame exists less than a wife and kids. this necessarily implies existence has a quantity, measurable in terms of breadth and depth.

this sounds poetic but is empirical. if i write one article and it's viewed 114 times, we have some crude breadth score. the degree of engagement with this article is a crude depth score. this article probably exists more for me than it does for you, because i probably engaged deeper with it. viewing, writing and engagement are types of creation. creativity is the act of integrating information. information integrated is consciousness. consciousness is the physical interface of life. life is what exists.

again, this sounds philosophical but is empirical. if you write a response to this essay you will have integrated more information than if you just read the essay and therefore it will exist more in breadth. porn exists more than sex in terms of distribution, but sex exists more than porn overall. this registers, but only to the extent that we can register quantity. 'one person dying is a tragedy and 400,000 people dying is a statistic.' i'm not against porn or fame, i am against the wrong orchestrations of existence.

the nerds believe in believing in intelligence because believing in intelligence is a smart move for the nerds. believing in intelligence is the game they are playing. if smart is being able to play games well, intelligence is the act of deciding what game to play. the act of believing in intelligence is not intelligent, because there is no meta game being played on deciding whether or not believing in intelligence is the intelligent thing to do.

being intelligent about believing in intelligence would require determining whether or not it makes sense to place so much emphasis on this idea of intelligence. this isn't done, which is why you see no energy spent on understanding the relationship between, say, intelligence and organization—or between intelligence and the definitions of words. thinking intelligence matters is more smart than it is intelligent.

thinking about the relationship between organization and intelligence would not be a smart move for the nerds. believing in intelligence is a move that brings them the maximum amount of life within the game they are playing. the nerds are literally enabled to exist by believing the statement "intelligence matters" is true. what matters is what is meaningful. and what is meaningful is what registers, and what registers is a social fitness function.

if i am a part of the jewish community, and i register the belief that hitler is good, i am less fit in the jewish community. if i am part of the jewish community, the idea that hitler is not good is not going to be meaningful. if i believe hitler is good i literally will exist less within the context window that is the social system. i do not think hitler was good in any context window.

similarly, i have smart curious friends who go mute when i bring up certain words like say god or devil. they are unable to engage, no different than the tech community is unable to engage with the word organization. this is because they are being smart, not intelligent. a brave new world existence with 1984 dog collars encoded at the word level. the devil is intelligent.

smart is the ability to play games, intelligence is the ability to exist. life is what exists, and life is the interface between this physical reality and consciousness—which is integrated information, a function of ashby’s law of requisite variety. intelligence in the most fundamental sense is about being smart or playing the game of designing the right variety of capabilities that will integrate information to produce life. that's why the secret to a career is finding the intersection of what the market rewards you for and what you do impulsively.

but maximum intelligence is not maximally intelligent, because existence has a breadth and depth and the highest degree of depth is what black twitter calls light, or love is god's highest truth. this is a fancy way of saying the highest degree of existence is feeling connected to everything or recognizing we are all one. god is the highest point within a context window, and the highest god is the largest context window in which the highest point is the recognition that we are one, or what exists is information integrated. this is why marc andreessen does not want tech founders taking ayahusca and why you produce more ideas when you are high and so forth. again, sounds philosophical, but the highest degree of existence clearly happens with the highest degree of integration.

anyways, operating within light, enables us to observe that a world in which everyone is pursuing a maximum amount of intelligence is not maximally intelligent because life is performance art, which means it's ephemeral. the latest theory of everything is the free energy principle, which states that the purpose of all systems is to "reduce surprise." this is why it makes sense for every country to acquire weapons, for no one to ever leave the house and for the nerds to believe intelligence matters. the reduction of surprise increases the ability to exist within one context window while reducing the ability to exist within the larger context window. free energy is not free after all.

game theory shows us that if country x does not create a scary weapon, country y will, so the optimal choice is for country x to make a scary weapon. so why not do it? 'optimal,' i think, is a word invented by the same people who think intelligence matters.

adam bit the apple and a long time ago man stored food. the storage of time was the first mark of artificial time—which is artificial division or technology as it's called today—and the process of disintegration began. i don't think that's wrong, because i think that is what is, life is a creation, a performance art, an ephemeral process of breathing in and out, creation and destruction, living and reducing surprise. that isn't to say it's subjective though. a billboard in a natural landscape is the wrong orchestration of existence, no different than taking fifteen aspirins at once. the balance in everything cliche holds true.

if a dog had an iphone, it would be smarter and more intelligent in some context windows, but less intelligent in the one closer to god. a dog with an iphone could call friends, order an uber, post on social, invent new norms—but their ability to run around freely in a park would go down. they would exist less and be less intelligent.