"Uncontroversial"? In an era of machine learning vs artificial intelligence? When you want to "fix software"? As someone trained in maths, but also as an experienced systems analyst, I always start by clarifying what people mean by the terms we're discussing - it saves a lot of misunderstandings.
I do agree about the problems with soft…
"Uncontroversial"? In an era of machine learning vs artificial intelligence? When you want to "fix software"? As someone trained in maths, but also as an experienced systems analyst, I always start by clarifying what people mean by the terms we're discussing - it saves a lot of misunderstandings.
I do agree about the problems with software development, though - run by salesmen rather than developers, to a large extent. Currently we have "machine learning" that is totally not intelligent because it's entirely determined by the data it's given to learn from. But the philosophical & neuroscientific questions that arise from the question of whether we can develop genuinely intelligent machines are fascinating - and "what do we mean by intelligence?" is part of that, related to the hard question of "what is consciousness?".
That's an interestingly limited description of intelligence that you offer, though.
When you talk about "processing information", what do you include/exclude? Are you limiting that to information that can be written down, categorised, counted? Reading body language, for example, is a key human skill but it's a whole new dimension in itself, hard to measure without including a lot of cultural bias.
Patterns, ditto - if you talk to someone who's deeply aware of the ecosystem they inhabit, the patterns they perceive will be completely different to anything you could use in an IQ test: subtle, complex and ever-shifting. That habitual depth of perception bleeds through into every aspect of their thought, too.
How exactly can you measure people's ability to think in abstractions? Because what's an obvious superficial fact to one person is an abstraction to someone else. This whole discussion is a case in point.
As a mathematician, it annoys me when other would-be scientists (psychologists for example) misuse the tools provided and then claim authority for their crackpot theories. IQ testing is part of the whole eugenics thought-pattern: it assumes the superiority of the Western mindset, and yet it doesn't even respect the rules that mindset imposes, breaking them whenever it suits. Psychologists' use of statistics is famously "the way a drunk uses a lamp post: more for support than illumination". Attempting to apply a measure to an unmeasurable space is a bit special, though, even for them.
I have a friend with "learning difficulties" whose ability to work in 3-D is astonishing: he can look at an object like a car with a rusty inside wheel arch, and cut & weld a replacement with its complex sets of curves, faultlessly. And yet he can't read well enough to do one of your tests. His information processing, pattern perception & even thinking about abstractions are phenomenal in some ways, just not in the ways that suit IQ testing. His way of tracking how much cash he's got left in his bank account is dizzying - but it works.
I score highly on IQ tests, as long as I remind myself to give the answer the test compiler expected, rather than the many other possibilities that spring to mind. Offered a chance to discuss the results, as I have been when people were trying to develop new ones, it became clear that the people designing the tests wanted to reward people who think just the way they do, and to reject anyone who thinks differently. That's only human, of course, but it's a big problem if you're claiming universal validity for your test.
I came through college at a time & in a place where the leading mathematicians of the day were developing chaos & complexity theories, and I've carried on following developments in this topic. It's taken me into all sorts of areas of study and made me realise just how limited Western thought has been over the last couple of hundred years. It's achieved some wonderful things but only in limited areas, and if we are to move forward, we need to understand the gaps in our thinking. Assuming that everything that matters can be measured & counted is one of those gaps - some things are just not measurable, in maths or in real life.
ps - steaming piles of ideas manure are a vital part of a healthy ecosystem of ideas. The dead ones have to go somewhere to be broken down ready for reuse!
"That's an interestingly limited description of intelligence that you offer, though."
That wasn't a description, that was a few examples.
I come here for discussions, not for arguments; it seems you want to take almost everything I write as the springboard for an argument. I'm not interested in another dormitory bull session debate on what consciousness is nor the deficiencies of Western thought; I live in the East and they don't seem to have figured out much more than we have.
A pity; this is an area that interests me a lot, I too am degreed in mathematics and have studied Devaney and Kaufmann since that introductory article in Scientific American (before it turned into another Popular Mechanics).
The comparative measure of intelligence doesn't require an infinite number of dimensions and it can't account in generality for anomalies like savants. It can compare Weyl and Einstein but cannot account for a Galois.
Sorry, I never had a "dormitory bull session debate" so I don't understand the reference. Intelligence is a really interesting field, though, and the overlap between maths & psychology is fertile ground as far as I'm concerned.
I'm curious: why do you think we need to measure intelligence?
I'm not trying to answer for Chris, but I can tell you where it mattered. I was an active-duty Marine in the 1960s. At that time, we had no choice in the occupational specialty we would be assigned to. The ability to independently perform while under stress was critical. The decision process involved testing.
There was the GCT test which was a rough equivalent of an IQ test. MENSA will allow, or at one time did, a Navy GCT score. There was also a battery of aptitude and psychological tests. All of those were used in the decision-making process. Notably, every MOS had a minimum GCT requirement, but it was not the only consideration. If you were qualified for a hard to fill field, you'd probably be assigned to that rather than one you scored higher in. After that, the training was set up for a high attrition where some washed out nearly 50% and reassigned to another field.
It was a highly successful method for getting the right people into the right jobs. The reason for both a base level of general intelligence and aptitude should be obvious since that zeros in on smart for what and able to do what? Over the years I saw people who were smart enough to get a degree in engineering, computer science or mathematics who ended up in management because they did not perform well in their field. The ability to apply knowledge is a big deal. I don't know if that can be predicted with a test other than actual performance.
Sorry that I rambled a bit, but history has shown that a general level of intelligence is required for success in some things although I strongly think that a sharper focus is needed after that. You don't need to go to the level of idiot savant to see that ability is not level across a single number measure of intelligence like IQ.
Every century or so the world coughs up a mathematician whose mind is off the scale. It's not about metrics; these people see relationships and make advances that change everything. Two interesting consistencies: (1) they are all men and (2) they do their best work before the age of 20. I mentioned Galois; he let himself be lured into a duel and was killed before he could produce any more.
Then there are the people like Richard Feynman, Enrico Fermi, Hermann Weyl (who assisted Einstein), whose brilliance allows them to see interconnectedness that others can't. At the first atomic bomb test Fermi walked around the tower tearing up a pad of paper; after the explosion he made eyeball estimates of how far the scraps had been blown, and in his head calculated the bomb yield. He was 95% accurate.
I wonder what it's like to live in a head like that.
You're posing a lot of pointless questions that I am not going to engage in. You are being aggressively competitive with someone uninterested in competing.
Because it's really expensive & tells you nothing useful. (Even you couldn't come up with a use case you thought would convince me.)
Because the results are unreliable, and that can be disastrous. (Never mind the wastefulness of really bright kids who fail, ever had a really incompetent boss who'd passed all the tests but knew nothing worth knowing?)
and finally
Because intelligence isn't measurable. (However you rejig the tests, they'll never be reliable. Sad but true - sometimes reality is a bitch like that.)
And by the way I notice that you accuse me of being "competitive" when you can't come up with answers to my questions. I've been polite throughout, but I do reply to the points you've made. If you see that as "aggressive", it's not me that has a problem.
" IQ testing is part of the whole eugenics thought-pattern"
This is unpardonable hyperbole. Intelligence testing is Heinrich Himmler and Zyklon-B. I really think you should dial that WAY back.
"he can't read well enough to do one of your tests."
One of MY tests? I'm not involved in evaluating anyone other than potential software hires, is there some reason you are making this discussion so personal?
"... if we are to move forward, we need to understand the gaps in our thinking. Assuming that everything that matters can be measured & counted is one of those gaps"
You're about a century behind in your education. It is fundamental to science, and has been for a century, that there are limits to what is knowable. Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle shook up science profoundly and required a fundamental rethinking that went far, far beyond measurement of position and momentum.
And before you object that this is irrelevant to the discussion, the calcium ion gates in the synapse are small enough to have quantum mechanical properties and while the debate over the role of the quantum in consciousness is unsettled, it is far from rejected.
"Uncontroversial"? In an era of machine learning vs artificial intelligence? When you want to "fix software"? As someone trained in maths, but also as an experienced systems analyst, I always start by clarifying what people mean by the terms we're discussing - it saves a lot of misunderstandings.
I do agree about the problems with software development, though - run by salesmen rather than developers, to a large extent. Currently we have "machine learning" that is totally not intelligent because it's entirely determined by the data it's given to learn from. But the philosophical & neuroscientific questions that arise from the question of whether we can develop genuinely intelligent machines are fascinating - and "what do we mean by intelligence?" is part of that, related to the hard question of "what is consciousness?".
That's an interestingly limited description of intelligence that you offer, though.
When you talk about "processing information", what do you include/exclude? Are you limiting that to information that can be written down, categorised, counted? Reading body language, for example, is a key human skill but it's a whole new dimension in itself, hard to measure without including a lot of cultural bias.
Patterns, ditto - if you talk to someone who's deeply aware of the ecosystem they inhabit, the patterns they perceive will be completely different to anything you could use in an IQ test: subtle, complex and ever-shifting. That habitual depth of perception bleeds through into every aspect of their thought, too.
How exactly can you measure people's ability to think in abstractions? Because what's an obvious superficial fact to one person is an abstraction to someone else. This whole discussion is a case in point.
As a mathematician, it annoys me when other would-be scientists (psychologists for example) misuse the tools provided and then claim authority for their crackpot theories. IQ testing is part of the whole eugenics thought-pattern: it assumes the superiority of the Western mindset, and yet it doesn't even respect the rules that mindset imposes, breaking them whenever it suits. Psychologists' use of statistics is famously "the way a drunk uses a lamp post: more for support than illumination". Attempting to apply a measure to an unmeasurable space is a bit special, though, even for them.
I have a friend with "learning difficulties" whose ability to work in 3-D is astonishing: he can look at an object like a car with a rusty inside wheel arch, and cut & weld a replacement with its complex sets of curves, faultlessly. And yet he can't read well enough to do one of your tests. His information processing, pattern perception & even thinking about abstractions are phenomenal in some ways, just not in the ways that suit IQ testing. His way of tracking how much cash he's got left in his bank account is dizzying - but it works.
I score highly on IQ tests, as long as I remind myself to give the answer the test compiler expected, rather than the many other possibilities that spring to mind. Offered a chance to discuss the results, as I have been when people were trying to develop new ones, it became clear that the people designing the tests wanted to reward people who think just the way they do, and to reject anyone who thinks differently. That's only human, of course, but it's a big problem if you're claiming universal validity for your test.
I came through college at a time & in a place where the leading mathematicians of the day were developing chaos & complexity theories, and I've carried on following developments in this topic. It's taken me into all sorts of areas of study and made me realise just how limited Western thought has been over the last couple of hundred years. It's achieved some wonderful things but only in limited areas, and if we are to move forward, we need to understand the gaps in our thinking. Assuming that everything that matters can be measured & counted is one of those gaps - some things are just not measurable, in maths or in real life.
ps - steaming piles of ideas manure are a vital part of a healthy ecosystem of ideas. The dead ones have to go somewhere to be broken down ready for reuse!
"That's an interestingly limited description of intelligence that you offer, though."
That wasn't a description, that was a few examples.
I come here for discussions, not for arguments; it seems you want to take almost everything I write as the springboard for an argument. I'm not interested in another dormitory bull session debate on what consciousness is nor the deficiencies of Western thought; I live in the East and they don't seem to have figured out much more than we have.
A pity; this is an area that interests me a lot, I too am degreed in mathematics and have studied Devaney and Kaufmann since that introductory article in Scientific American (before it turned into another Popular Mechanics).
The comparative measure of intelligence doesn't require an infinite number of dimensions and it can't account in generality for anomalies like savants. It can compare Weyl and Einstein but cannot account for a Galois.
But then, that's not what it's for.
Sorry, I never had a "dormitory bull session debate" so I don't understand the reference. Intelligence is a really interesting field, though, and the overlap between maths & psychology is fertile ground as far as I'm concerned.
I'm curious: why do you think we need to measure intelligence?
I'm not trying to answer for Chris, but I can tell you where it mattered. I was an active-duty Marine in the 1960s. At that time, we had no choice in the occupational specialty we would be assigned to. The ability to independently perform while under stress was critical. The decision process involved testing.
There was the GCT test which was a rough equivalent of an IQ test. MENSA will allow, or at one time did, a Navy GCT score. There was also a battery of aptitude and psychological tests. All of those were used in the decision-making process. Notably, every MOS had a minimum GCT requirement, but it was not the only consideration. If you were qualified for a hard to fill field, you'd probably be assigned to that rather than one you scored higher in. After that, the training was set up for a high attrition where some washed out nearly 50% and reassigned to another field.
It was a highly successful method for getting the right people into the right jobs. The reason for both a base level of general intelligence and aptitude should be obvious since that zeros in on smart for what and able to do what? Over the years I saw people who were smart enough to get a degree in engineering, computer science or mathematics who ended up in management because they did not perform well in their field. The ability to apply knowledge is a big deal. I don't know if that can be predicted with a test other than actual performance.
Sorry that I rambled a bit, but history has shown that a general level of intelligence is required for success in some things although I strongly think that a sharper focus is needed after that. You don't need to go to the level of idiot savant to see that ability is not level across a single number measure of intelligence like IQ.
Every century or so the world coughs up a mathematician whose mind is off the scale. It's not about metrics; these people see relationships and make advances that change everything. Two interesting consistencies: (1) they are all men and (2) they do their best work before the age of 20. I mentioned Galois; he let himself be lured into a duel and was killed before he could produce any more.
Then there are the people like Richard Feynman, Enrico Fermi, Hermann Weyl (who assisted Einstein), whose brilliance allows them to see interconnectedness that others can't. At the first atomic bomb test Fermi walked around the tower tearing up a pad of paper; after the explosion he made eyeball estimates of how far the scraps had been blown, and in his head calculated the bomb yield. He was 95% accurate.
I wonder what it's like to live in a head like that.
To refute bigots?
That's a stupendously disingenuous response.
If I were really being difficult, I'd suggest that this means you accept that there's no rational reason to try to measure intelligence.
Try again?
No.
You're posing a lot of pointless questions that I am not going to engage in. You are being aggressively competitive with someone uninterested in competing.
Why measure intelligence?
Why not?
Because it's really expensive & tells you nothing useful. (Even you couldn't come up with a use case you thought would convince me.)
Because the results are unreliable, and that can be disastrous. (Never mind the wastefulness of really bright kids who fail, ever had a really incompetent boss who'd passed all the tests but knew nothing worth knowing?)
and finally
Because intelligence isn't measurable. (However you rejig the tests, they'll never be reliable. Sad but true - sometimes reality is a bitch like that.)
And by the way I notice that you accuse me of being "competitive" when you can't come up with answers to my questions. I've been polite throughout, but I do reply to the points you've made. If you see that as "aggressive", it's not me that has a problem.
" IQ testing is part of the whole eugenics thought-pattern"
This is unpardonable hyperbole. Intelligence testing is Heinrich Himmler and Zyklon-B. I really think you should dial that WAY back.
"he can't read well enough to do one of your tests."
One of MY tests? I'm not involved in evaluating anyone other than potential software hires, is there some reason you are making this discussion so personal?
"... if we are to move forward, we need to understand the gaps in our thinking. Assuming that everything that matters can be measured & counted is one of those gaps"
You're about a century behind in your education. It is fundamental to science, and has been for a century, that there are limits to what is knowable. Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle shook up science profoundly and required a fundamental rethinking that went far, far beyond measurement of position and momentum.
Some suggested reading:
https://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Theory-Schism-Physics-Postscript-ebook/dp/B00CDUUCEO/ref=sr_1_1
https://www.amazon.com/John-Bell-Foundations-Quantum-Mechanics/dp/9810246889/ref=sr_1_1
And before you object that this is irrelevant to the discussion, the calcium ion gates in the synapse are small enough to have quantum mechanical properties and while the debate over the role of the quantum in consciousness is unsettled, it is far from rejected.