Not my area of expertise, but I think the intuition for why evolution didn't make us all Einstein's comes in two parts:
(1) IQ is very polygenetic - a big IQ gene might be 0.1 IQ, and there aren't a lot even that large, if I recall the large genome wide association studies done on this. As GWAS studies get larger we find more, but they're all super small effects.
(2) Having an extra 0.1 IQ point is easy to lose in the noise of other effects on having offspring.
So even if we assumed IQ was perfectly correlated with more surviving offspring in modern societies, it might take an extremely long time (even longer than a whole planet and a thousand years) to make a detectable difference.
I've been an engineer at Periscope for the past couple years and would be happy to answer any questions about the company or life as an engineer here.
I've worked on the whole stack here, but my favorite parts have been new charting features (most recently annotations), client and server side latency (I love the chrome flame graph profiler), machine learning for lead scoring models (hooray for scikit), and anytime we can ship a customer feature request the same day they request it.
Send me an email at [email protected] if you'd like to talk about life at Periscope! :)
The system isn't training on antonyms and analogies - it's training on wikipedia. It's learning the meaning (and multiple senses) for every word it can find.
The test they use to see if it actually learned what these words meant, in a limited sense, is to test it against a subset of verbal IQ tests (not what it was trained on!). You could ask it the antonym, synonym, or analogy for anything in English. This is an extension of word2vec / word embeddings.
That it beats the scores of college graduates impresses me.
Startups involve having to do everything with a tiny group of people, so the more skills you have personal experience with the better. If you business depends upon your product, sales and marketing skills, and you've only been a developer, it's going to be a very tough time.
Working at a startup is a great way to get some experience in several other domains, especially if you are one of the first employees. Even if you don't do it first hand, you'll get to spend a ton of time with "head of sales", "head of marketing", "head of product", because they'll be the other three dudes in your office.
(1) IQ is very polygenetic - a big IQ gene might be 0.1 IQ, and there aren't a lot even that large, if I recall the large genome wide association studies done on this. As GWAS studies get larger we find more, but they're all super small effects.
(2) Having an extra 0.1 IQ point is easy to lose in the noise of other effects on having offspring.
So even if we assumed IQ was perfectly correlated with more surviving offspring in modern societies, it might take an extremely long time (even longer than a whole planet and a thousand years) to make a detectable difference.