Here is our monthly place to discuss Overcoming Bias topics that have not appeared in recent posts.
Subscribe to Overcoming Bias
By Robin Hanson ยท Hundreds of paid subscribers
This is a blog on why we believe and do what we do, why we pretend otherwise, how we might do better, and what our descendants might do, if they don't all die.
I'm curious if anyone has any pre-formed riff they could give on the relationship of instinct to general intelligence. That is, I would assume by Occam, that the brain is primarily a repetition of a basic simple design, yet there is clearly some method of encoding design patterns that translate into fairly specific predictable skills in the organism.
This would seem somewhat analogous to a kernel of friendliness controlling behavior for an AI as it passed from newborn to well-trained.
Is there any research on how well you can read off a person's IQ and personality traits from his or her appearance?