Скачать или смотреть Intelligence Signalling: why we do it, and why it matters

We spend a lot of time showing off how intelligent we are, or worrying about how intelligent we aren't, or praising others for their intelligence. And we are not the only species that behaves this way.

This behaviour of ours is a big part of our success as a species. But why do we do it? This presentation tries to answer that question, and explores some ways we could do it better

0:00 Agenda
1:39 Examples of Intelligence Signalling
11:29 The evolutionary biology of signalling
24:22 Intelligence signalling in science
38:14 You are an intelligence signaller, and that's ok!
45:37 How to speed up scientific progress

EDIT: followup!

A friend of mine objected to this that it seemed rather unfalsifiable. He asked me for a prediction that my theory makes that might not be true in its absence. I couldn't think of anything at the time, but now I may have something.

Sport, broadly defined, is a "cultural universal" - all cultures do it. Boardgames are not. They are two related things. In sport you compete, a friendly way, to stratify by physical prowess. With boardgames you do the same thing with mental prowess. Probably not the best definitions of either of those things, but they'll do.

I said in my talk that I think that as a culture becomes more civilized, boardgames become a necessity, because people want to discriminate more and more on the basis of mental prowess. Some people might say "no no, intelligence signalling is bullshit, people play boardgames because they're fun, not in order to show off their mental prowess." My hypothesis here would say that the sensation of "fun" is just a way of saying that their mental mental prowess is sufficient that their favourite activity is to exercise it.

So what I think I'd like to do is try to measure "frequency of boardgame playing" (easy to define) in a number of "different cultures" (slightly harder to define) which measurably "have a need for distinction based on mental prowess" (hard to define but not impossible). I expect it would be found that technological development correlates with adoption of boardgames in a way that is a little harder to explain in the absence of intelligence signalling as a motivation for it.