Human-Level Intelligence or Animal-Like Abilities? (2018) • Hacker News Board

Re: Human-Level Intelligence or Animal-Like Abilities? (2018)

#41

Post by SamReidHughes » Tue, Jun 09, 2020, 12:49 AM UTC

api wrote: post #9

chongli wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not bullshit to notice that a bunch of different abilities tend to be highly correlated. That’s all g is. What is bullshit is the formal theory of multiple intelligences, which is largely PC-inspired pseudoscience and does not account for the correlation between separate areas.

Athletic ability (real time kinetic intelligence) and math ability are highly correlated? A car's speed and its ability to drive off-road are highly correlated? Rocket thrust and specific impulse are highly correlated? (Hint: these are inversely correlated.) I didn't come to this through PC. I came to it through a basic understanding of learning and optimization.

It depends on what you mean by highly.

There are some direct biological 'g' factors that you can think of. One would be sleep quality, another brain volume. Also, brain damage events like concussions, and probably anesthesia, affect both athletic and mathematical performance. Thus, you should also expect there to be kinds of genetic and congenital developmental deficiencies that do the same.

Looking at relationships of reaction time/IQ as well as target practice/ASVAB score, they have a stronger relationship at the low end of the spectrum. Among kids in the 90% decile, you shouldn't see much of a relationship! They've got low difference in 'g' factor, I guess. But if you go down to the 20-50% range, you get, to increasing degrees, all those malcoordinated kids on the playground who seem like they were born with a pre-concussed brain.

Obviously, parental mating patterns affect some of the overall correlation, but the way the relationship is stronger at the lower end indicates the presence of true 'g' factors.

Re: Human-Level Intelligence or Animal-Like Abilities? (2018)

#42

Post by est31 » Tue, Jun 09, 2020, 2:23 AM UTC

chongli wrote: post #21

est31 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I think the notion of a scalar intelligence metric won't stand the test of time. Some people are born with golden hands and excel at everything they touch while others are over-achievers in narrow subjects only. Just think what a scalar intelligence concept would mean: there is only one single gene that gives rise to all of the variance in intelligence among humans. This can't be it, there are likely dozens if n…

Even if you say that intelligence is a vector, well, vectors have norms. The perception I'm trying to counter here is that intelligence involves tradeoffs which somehow result in a fair outcome for all. That Bobby's writing ability is offset by Billy's chess-playing. That's not the case at all. Take someone like John Von Neumann. One of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century (and perhaps all time), he could…

> The perception I'm trying to counter here is that intelligence involves tradeoffs which somehow result in a fair outcome for all.

Yeah a zero cost sum model is totally wrong. As are models which assume that everyone is born equally smart and all differences just come from training or whatever. Some people have better abilities and it doesn't imply that they are worse in other areas. But they might only have extraordinary performance in specific tasks. And others, like I've mentioned above, have golden hands, von Neumann being an example.

I've done some searching and the model of intelligence seems to be an open area of debate, but it seems that research has moved on from the "not much more than g" era. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6526477/

> For several decades, the question of whether measures of specific cognitive ability contributed anything meaningful to the prediction of performance on the job or performance in training once measures of general mental ability were taken into account appeared to be settled, and a consensus developed that there was little value in using specific ability measures in contexts where more general measures were available. It now appears that this consensus was premature, and that measures of specific abilities can make important contributions even if general measures are taken into account.

Re: Human-Level Intelligence or Animal-Like Abilities? (2018)

#43

Post by visarga » Tue, Jun 09, 2020, 6:32 PM UTC

chongli wrote: post #16

api wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Athletic ability (real time kinetic intelligence) and math ability are highly correlated? A car's speed and its ability to drive off-road are highly correlated? Rocket thrust and specific impulse are highly correlated? (Hint: these are inversely correlated.) I didn't come to this through PC. I came to it through a basic understanding of learning and optimization.

Athletic ability isn't intelligence. Intelligence may be a part of it (c.f. Wayne Gretzky's quote "skate to where the puck is going, not where it's been") but strength, speed, and stamina aren't. Burmese pythons are way stronger than humans yet I doubt anyone would call them more intelligent. Mantis shrimp have way faster reflexes and their vision is way more sophisticated than ours yet they're not more intelligent a…

> There is a lot of debate over the definition of intelligence but one thing most definitions have in common is that it is general. A human being can play the piano, solve an integral, write a novel, compose a photograph, and many many more things.

There is a nice paper on this topic.

On the Measure of Intelligence - François Chollet https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.01547

I believe generality in human intelligence is overrated. We can't do large multiplication in our heads, we can't solve the Salesman problem in our heads, and many other things we can't do because our intelligence is not in fact general. It has a set of skills and can combine them in many ways.