How do you measure the capacity for improvisational comedy? How do you measure a talent for telling convincing lies? How do you measure someone's capacity for innovating in a narrative medium? How do you measure someone's ability for psychological insight and a theory of self? How do you measure someone's capacity for understanding irony or picking up subtle social cues? Or for formulating effective metaphors and analogies, or boiling down concepts eloquently? How about for mediating complex, multifaceted interpersonal conflicts effectively? How do you measure someone's capacity for empathy, which necessarily involves incredibly complex simulations and mental models of other people's minds?

Do you think excelling in any of these doesn't require intelligence? You sound like you consider yourself quite intelligent, so are you excellent at all of them? No? How come?

Can you tell me which part of an IQ test or your "rigorous, moslty equivalent definitions for intelligence" capture any of them?

  > I hate how stupid people propagate this lie that we don't know what intelligence is, just because they lack it. It's quite convenient, because how can they be shown to lack intelligence when the word isn't even defined!

How's this: "I hate how stupid people propagate this lie that we know what intelligence is, just because they do well within the narrow definition that they made up. It's quite convenient, because how can they be shown to lack intelligence when their definition of it fits their strengths and excludes their weaknesses!"

> How do you measure the capacity for improvisational comedy?

What makes something funny? Usually, it's by subverting someone's predictions. You have to be good at predicting other's predictions to do this well.

> How do you measure a talent for telling convincing lies?

You have to explain a phenomenon better than the truth to convince someone of your lie.

> How do you measure someone's capacity for innovating in a narrative medium?

As in, world-building? That is more of a memory problem than an intelligence problem, though you do need to be good at compressing the whole world into what is relevant to the story. People who are worse at that will have to take more notes and refer back to them more often.

> How do you measure someone's ability for psychological insight and a theory of self?

They are better at explaining a phenomenon (their self).

> How do you measure someone's capacity for understanding complex, multi-faceted irony or picking up subtle social cues?

Refer to the above. Also, using the adjectives 'complex, multi-faceted' is lazy here. Be more introspective and write what you really want to say.

> Or for formulating effective metaphors and analogies, or boiling down concepts eloquently?

Compression = finding short programs that recover the data.

> How about for mediating complex, multifaceted interpersonal conflicts effectively?

Quite often not an intelligence problem.

> How do you measure someone's capacity for empathy, which necessarily involves incredibly complex simulations and mental models of other people's minds?

"incredibly complex simulations and mental models of other people's minds," however will you do this? Oh, I know! Your brain will have to come up with a small circuit that compresses other people's brain pretty well, as it doesn't have enough capacity to just run the other brain.

> Do you think excelling in any of these doesn't require intelligence? You sound like you consider yourself quite intelligent, so are you excellent at all of them? No? How come?

I am actually pretty good at pretty much all of these compared to the average person.

> What makes something funny? Usually, it's by subverting someone's predictions.

And in those other cases? You have a rigorous definition of comedy?

> You have to explain a phenomenon better than the truth to convince someone of your lie.

This is so often not true I would argue it's generally false. A story is believed because a listener "wants" to believe it. Some listeners have more or less complex criteria for acceptance.

> As in, world-building? That is more of a memory problem than an intelligence problem, though you do need to be good at compressing the whole world into what is relevant to the story. People who are worse at that will have to take more notes and refer back to them more often.

People like Tolkien and Martin? Note taking as a sign of poor skill/intelligence is a wildly novel take from my point of view.

> Also, using the adjectives 'complex, multi-faceted' is lazy here. Be more introspective and write what you really want to say.

Couldn't I say the same about your use of Introspective? Surely a more detailed phrase exists to describe what you mean.

> interpersonal conflicts... Quite often not an intelligence problem.

Oh, I think this will get at the root of our misunderstandings. I believe I've seen this attitude before. Before I jump to conclusions: Why exactly do you say this skill is not intelligence-based?

> And in those other cases? You have a rigorous definition of comedy?

There's surely more to comedy than subverting expectations. Someone else who cares more about comedy in particular can figure that out for themself, but surely I gave enough of the general idea to make it clear how you could go about measuring the intelligence necessary for comedy.

> A story is believed because a listener "wants" to believe it. Some listeners have more or less complex criteria for acceptance.

Yeah, that's the sense of "better" I was going for. I could have been more clear here, so I'm glad you figured out what I meant.

> Couldn't I say the same about your use of Introspective? Surely a more detailed phrase exists to describe what you mean.

It was a not-so-kind way of saying, "don't point at vague ideas to obscure what you really mean and make it difficult for others to understand what you mean to keep your opinion unassailable."

> Why exactly do you say this skill [resolving conflicts] is not intelligence-based?

Most people have more time to think than they actually use during conflicts, so I expect most of the time conflicts come from people preferring to not think than because they lack the ability. That or a fundamental value difference (you want my food, I want my food).

> Most people have more time to think than they actually use during conflicts, so I expect most of the time conflicts come from people preferring to not think than because they lack the ability.

This seems to imply that intelligence only exists in deliberate, conscious thought. Do you think that's true?

Second, revolving conflicts is not the same thing as getting into them, so it's unclear why bring that up at all.

True. I expect most conflicts come from people preferring not to think, and I also expect most conflicts escalate from people preferring not to think. Those are separate statements, and I only said the former.

> This seems to imply that intelligence only exists in deliberate, conscious thought. Do you think that's true?

Eh, I don't think it implies that, and I also don't think that is true.

Ok, but then... what does any of that have to do with "conflict resolution is not usually a function of intelligence"?

What you need for conflict resolution is usually a willingness to try to resolve the conflict. In rare situations, where communication and time is limited, you can actually run into the issue where you have to be smart enough to figure out what the other person wants (and see if you can come up with a mutually beneficial offer), but often in real life you can just spend more time thinking and ask them what they want.

Reducing comedy to 'subverting predictions' and empathy to 'compression algorithms' is like explaining music as 'organized sound waves', technically defensible yet completely missing the point. Missing the forest for the trees is an objective sign of limited metacognition, by the way.

The fact that you claim to be 'above average' at empathy and social cues while writing this robotic dismissal that completely misses the point (I asked for measurement methods, you provided questionable definitions) is the ultimate proof of my argument. You haven't defined intelligence, you've just compressed the meaning of it until it's small enough to fit inside your ego.

I purposefully do not give out methods to measure intelligence, because people can train on them. I knew you wanted that, but that does not mean you get what you want. I also find it strange how you expect me to be empathetic in a way that makes you feel good about yourself, when you deserve no such compassion after pulling the dark arts on me.

That's ok, me and my "dark arts" will have to make do without your "compassion", somehow. And the world will have to make do without "training" on your secret "methods to measure intelligence", somehow.

I don't appreciate your expletives in your original unedited post, by the way, but the fact that you lost your temper is once again proof of something. You sound young, so I hope one day you "find a short program" to recover that data.

That last part was not sarcasm, in case you have any trouble picking it up.

> I don't appreciate your expletives in your original unedited post, by the way, but the fact that you lost your temper is once again proof of something.

It was the first edit where I added them, since I could not reply to your post, and I removed them once I could reply. Yes, I lost my temper. You did too (and first)... you're just less honest and put up a facade of politeness.

> And the world will have to make do without "training" on your secret "methods to measure intelligence", somehow.

Is the goal here to provoke me enough to get what you want? lol. Maximally adversarial.

If you want to have a discussion in good faith, then you need to work on your rhetoric. People are unlikely to want to engage with you, here or in your real life, if you regularly talk like that. Seek help.

My goal wasn't to have a discussion, it was to shut down the propagation of lies. This is one of those memetic viruses that people keep passing around, that most people passing around don't even bother to think about, and it has some pretty negative consequences, such as aiding in the elimination of American gifted programs.

Honestly not sure if this is a bit, it's so on-the-nose... Taking it at face value, you are literally claiming to know precisely what intelligence is? You would be the first to know if so. You should probably publish quickly before someone steals your definition!

In your post is demonstrated one of the deep mysteries of intelligence: How can a smart person make such a dumb assertion? (I'll give a hint: consider that "intelligence" is not a single axis)

I think Solomonoff beat me by about 70 years, and Wissner-Gross & Freer by about 10 years. Even if I had something novel to publish in this area, I think I would rather do something like solve ARC-AGI and make a lot of money.

If that's true, why is there broad consensus today that intelligence is ill-defined?

1. Religious mysticism. The murkier people are on concepts like thinking, consciousness, and intelligence, the easier it is to claim they include some metaphysical aspect. Since you cannot actually pin down the metaphysical aspect, they must claim it is because you cannot pin down the physical aspect.

2. People do not like feeling less intelligent than other people, so they try to make the comparator ill-defined.

#2 is not relevant, and it also seems basically untrue.

So your belief is that the global scientific community broadly agrees that "intelligence" has not been rigorously defined because the global scientific community is trapped in religious mysticism?

I am going to be honest, and I'm not saying this as a jab - this is starting to sound completely disconnected from reality. The people who study intelligence are not, as a rule, mired in metsphysical hand-waving.

Huh? You asked, "why is there broad consensus today that intelligence is ill-defined?" That's what I answered. Did you mean to ask a different question, "why is there broad consensus among people who research intelligence that it is ill-defined?" Which kinds of people are you talking about? The information theorists? The machine learning researchers? The linguists? The psychologists?

The information theorists generally agree it has a precise definition, though they may choose different ones. The machine learning researchers typically only know how to run empirical experiments, but a small group of them do theory, and they generally agree intelligence is low Kolmogorov complexity. The linguists generally agree it cannot be defined, in the nihilistic sense, but if you posit a bunch of brains, then words have meaning by being signals between brains and intelligence is moving the words closer to the information bottleneck. I don't know what the psychologists say on the matter, though I wonder if they have the mathematical tools to even say things precisely.

Ok.. Let’s ask a different question. Assuming development of super-intelligence is possible.. How do you measure it? What criteria satisfies the “this is super intelligence”? You honestly sound like most pseudo-intellectuals I hear discussing this very topic..: Ironic how you think you’re the brilliant one and it’s others who are stupid… Actually not really ironic a fool doesn’t know he is a fool.

I literally gave you the criterion. You can measure, "I have this model that is supposed to compress data. I have this data. Does it compress the data into fewer bits than other models? Than humans?"

Or, "I have this game and this model. Does the model win the game more often than other models or humans?"

Or, "I have this model that takes in states in an environment and outputs actions. I have this environment. Does the actions it outputs have a higher discounted future entropy than other models or humans?"