intelligence

TRX
January 30, 2013
372:
Thag strong. Thag take mate.

Ogg smart. Hit Thag with rock. Take Thag's mate.

Bernard smarter. Shoot Ogg with gun. Take Ogg's mate.

Nigel very smart. Manipulate Bernard's financial situation, subvert Bernard's mate with Bernard's money.

And who is smarter than Nigel?

TRX
January 30, 2013
375:
@30:
What is wrong with simply defining intelligence as generalized problem solving ability?
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Because it's way easier to test for memory, language, math skills, and speed.

Some people aren't happy unless they can get a metric, even if they don't understand what they're measuring.

Also, designing tests for problem-solving ability is rather difficult, with unexpected failures.

For example, as a child I was given one such test in school. It consisted of a matchbox, a paper clip, a thumbtack, a piece of string, and a candle. The test was to affix the candle to the wall with the candle oriented upward so it would burn.

I bent the paper clip into a shallow spring, wedged it into a corner, and balanced the candle on top, more or less vertical. I "failed" the test. The "correct" answer was "use the thumbtack to attach the matchbox to the wall, then set the candle on the matchbox." When I pointed out that the wall was made out of concrete block, I was told since I hadn't come up with the "correct" solution, I had still failed.

Whoever designed the test obviously failed to account for concrete or brick walls, but the secondary failure was not to realize that some "professional" administering the test would do it in such a room, *and* insist the results were still valid.

Granted it's a simple example, but other examples of bad test design aren't hard to find.

TRX
January 30, 2013
376:
@44:
But compared to even the slowest of 1940s era vacuum tube electronic tabulators and it begins to look a bit piss-poor.
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But to run the calculator you have to input the data. When you do it in your head, you already *have* the data; the tradeoff is in your favor when you can run the figures faster than you can work the keys.

TRX
January 30, 2013
380:
@217:
Moore's Law is not going to give you whole-brain emulators that run 100x faster within a few months.
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Doesn't matter. Even if it takes 18, 21, or 40 years... you only have to do it *once*. Then you just make copies.

TRX
January 30, 2013
381:
@253:
Getting back to the original question, why aren't we smarter, I turn to Jared Diamond's (and Alfred Russel Wallace's) observation that Papuans are smarter both than indonesians and the white scientists they help.
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Thor Heyderdahl wrote extensively about that sort of thing in "Aku-Aku", about his expedition to Easter Island in 1955. He was impressed with how fast the islanders picked up working Norwegian and English, among other things.

Heyerdahl's theory was that the Easter Islanders had basically bred themselves bigger, faster, and smarter via centuries of war, and that the more highly aggresive ones didn't make it through the collapse of the island's ecosystem, which favored cooperation over aggression.

TRX
January 30, 2013
383:
@358
(reason for multiple computer and natural languages)
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Long before Marvin Minsky started writing papers on language, Jack Vance wrote an SF novel called "The Languages of Pao," describing a culture divided into castes, with each caste having a language created and optimized specifically for its purposes.

Any complete language will let you get a task done, but the wrong language will make things a lot harder than they have to be...

TRX
January 31, 2013
410:
@358:
the Phaistos Disk faded into obscurity, and Gutenberg gets the credit for inventing moveable type. Actually, the Koreans invented moveable type before Gutenberg.
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Lots of people invented movable type before Gutenberg. But all modern printing is a descendant of Gutenberg's invention.

For some reason, many highly important things have to be invented many times, sometimes over centuries, before they take off, no matter how useful they might seem in retrospect.

TRX
January 31, 2013
411:
@401:
in the US there are some fairly smart pro athletes.
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The bell curve would suggest that, but the high school and college I went to had special "sports" curricula for their athletes. They were basically the same as the "remedial" courses, excepted dumbed down even more, and they only had to be in class half a day vs. all day.

The valedictorians every year I was in high school were "athletes" with 4.0 grade averages. Of course, their "A"s in Calculator Math and Study Hall counted exactly the same as "A"s in Calculus 2 or Chemistry 3.

(yes, they graded "study hall" where I went to school. And, amazingly, some people still managed to fail...)