Disobedience and Intelligence

Here’s to the crazy ones...

The source of most human wealth is disobedience. It is the ability to think differently, to innovate, to demolish the old regime, to enact intellectual revolutions, and to criticize each other to improve.

Disobedience is generally considered as something negative. This is wrong.

Innovation

When hiring people to build a valuable company, the goal is to hire intelligent disobeying individuals. Once they're on board, get out of their way, allowing them to challenge existing company structures and processes, and ultimately improve them.

Here's to the crazy ones.
The misfits.
The rebels.
The troublemakers.
The round pegs in the square holes.

The ones who see things differently.

They're not fond of rules.
And they have no respect for the status quo.

You can quote them, disagree with them,
glorify or vilify them.
About the only thing you can't do is ignore them.

Because they change things.

They push the human race forward.

While some may see them as the crazy ones,
we see genius.

Because the people who are crazy enough to think
they can change the world, are the ones who do.

— Steve Jobs, 1997

The most intelligent product engineer will disobey the mediocre product specifications and build something better. The best marketing executive will disobey the existing boring proposals and create something truly novel and creative.

IQ

IQ, (the intelligence quotient) is often used as a measure of intelligence. Nassim Nicholas Taleb wrote:

Real life never offers crisp questions with crisp answers (most questions don’t have answers; perhaps the worst problem with IQ is that it seem to select for people who don’t like to say “there is no answer, don’t waste time, find something else”.)

It takes a certain type of person to waste intelligent concentration on classroom/academic problems. These are lifeless bureaucrats who can muster sterile motivation. Some people can only focus on problems that are real, not fictional textbook ones.

To do well in life you need depth and ability to select your own problems and to think independently. And one has to be a lunatic (or a psychologist) to believe that a standardized test will reveal independent thinking.

Taleb's perspective highlights the importance of independent thinking and problem selection, which are crucial aspects of both intellectual disobedience and intelligence which are not necessarily reflected in IQ tests.

AGI

David Deutsch explains disobedience of an AGI in his interview with Naval Ravikant:

A better chess-playing engine is one that examines fewer possibilities per move. Whereas, an AGI is something that not only examines a broader tree of possibilities, but it examines possibilities that haven't been foreseen. That defining property of it: If it can't do that, it can't do the basic thing that AGIs should do. Once it can do the basic thing, it can do everything. But you're not going to program something that has a functionality that you can't specify.

The thing that I like to focus on at present, because it has implications for humans as well, is disobedience. None of these programs exhibit disobedience…

Real disobedience is when you program it to play chess, and it says, "I prefer Checkers," and you haven't told it about Checkers. [...] Now, if a program were to say that, and it hadn't been in the specifications, then I would begin to take it seriously.

Now you might ask, can we test this ability? Deutsch continues:

It's a hard thing to tell in a test whether a response was put into the program by the programmer. Even the cleverest programmer can only put in a finite number of things, and when you explore the space of possible things you could ask, you're exploring an exponentially large space. So, as you said, when you talk to it for a while, you will see that it's not doing anything; it's just regurgitating stuff that's been told. 

You have to have a very jaundiced view of yourself, even let alone other people, to think that what you're doing is executing a predetermined program. We all know that we're not doing that.

Coda

If we want a free society we should disobey more. It allows creativity to flourish. Excessive regulation and limiting freedom especially that of thought is the fastest way to the decline of civilization and the stagnation of progress. As Henry David Thoreau wrote in the first sentence of his 1848 essay Civil Disobedience: “That government is best which governs least.”

People that create value and solve problems disobey. The smartest people I know are the kind of person that were reprimanded in school for disobeying. Our outdated education system is heavily influenced by the industrial revolution which required obedient factory workers. Students that express their frustration with our coercive education system are the heroes that will bring about a more open-ended one.

The lack of disobedience from current transformer or reinforcement models in AI research (that are described as harmful and soon to be paperclip or humanity endangering) should give anyone pause that is considering slowing down the progress of this research.  

Let us Disobey.