Dwarkesh Patel: evaluation

Transcript context

…The software can be genetic, too, but that doesn't mean it's immutable. It just means that it’s there at the beginning. Okay. I suspect it's not software because––let's suppose it was software and something that they chose to do is something they could change—it's mysterious to me why these people would also accept the jobs with lower pay but are less cognitively demanding, or why they would choose to do worse on an academic test or IQ test. Why would they choose to do precisely this thing somebody who was less cognitively powerful would do? So it seems the more parsimonious explanation is that they are cognitively less powerful. Why would someone choose not to go to school, for instance, if they were given a choice and not to have any lessons? Well, there are many reasons why they might choose that. Some of them are good, some of them bad. Calling some jobs cognitively demanding is already begging the question because you're just referring to a choice that people make—which is a software choice—as being, by definition, forced on them by hardware. It's not cognitively deficient, and it's just that they don't want to do it! The same way if there was a culture that required Brett Hall to be able to speak fluent Mandarin Chinese to do a wide range of tasks. If he didn't know Mandarin Chinese, he'd be relegated to low-level tasks. Then he would be “choosing” the low-level tasks rather than the “cognitively demanding task”, but it's the only culture that assigns a hardware interpretation to the difficulty of doing that task.…

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