https://michaelzuo.wordpress.com
michaelyzuo@gmail.com
M. Y. Zuo
Karma: 607
How does someone view the actual outcomes of the ‘Highlighted Grants’ on that page?
It would be a lot more reassuring if readers can check that they’ve all been fulfilled and/or exceeded expectations.
I am not asking about ‘true’ general intelligence? Or whatever that implies.
If your not sure, I am asking regarding the term commonly called ‘general intelligence’, or sometimes also known as ‘general mental ability factor’ or ‘g-factor’, in mainstream academic papers. Such as those found in pedagogy, memetics, genetics, etc…
See: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%252C5&q=“general+intelligence”&btnG=
Where many many thousands of researchers over the last few decades are referring to this.
Here is a direct quote by a pretty well known expert among intelligence researchers, writing in 2004:
“ During the past few decades, the word intelligence has been attached to an increasing number of different forms of competence and accomplishment-emo-tional intelligence, football intelligence, and so on. Researchers in the field, however, have largely abandoned the term, together with their old debates over what sorts of abilities should and should not be classified as part of intelligence. Helped by the advent of new technologies for researching the brain, they have increasingly turned their attention to a century-old concept of a single overarching mental power. They call it simply g, which is short for the general mental ability factor. The g factor is a universal and reliably measured distinction among humans in their ability to learn, reason, and solve problems. It corresponds to what most people mean when they describe some individuals as smarter than others, and it’s well measured by IQ (intelligence quotient) tests, which assess high-level mental skills such as the ability to draw inferences, see similarities and differences, and process complex information of virtually any kind. Understanding g’s biological basis in the brain is the new frontier in intelligence research today. The g factor was discovered by the first mental testers, who found that people who scored well on one type of mental test tended to score well on all of them. Regardless of their contents (words, numbers, pictures, shapes), how they are administered (individually or in groups; orally, in writing, or pantomimed), or what they’re intended to measure (vocabulary, mathematical reasoning, spatial ability), all mental tests measure mostly the same thing. This common factor, g, can be distilled from scores on any broad set of cognitive tests, and it takes the same form among individuals of every age, race, sex, and nation yet studied. In other words, the g factor exists independently of schooling, paper-and-pencil tests, and culture.”
No one that I know based on first hand information, otherwise I probably would have included them as an example.
Most likely due the fact that people who succeeded at such have little reason to advertise it beyond a small circle.
So then what is the issue you want to discuss?
Neither of us can do more than offer our guesses and opinions on these two points.
Since I’m asking LW readers I imagine the default ‘degree of credence’ for any proof is something that the vast majority of LW readers will accept as the actual, bonafide, truth and are willing to acknowledge this when presented with it.
And predicting the future on a global scale, successfully, repeatedly, and precisely, has no correlated measures, if we assume precognition is impossible.
So we can conveniently sidestep this issue. Hence why I mentioned it…
I’m not sure there exists a formal operational definition of “general intelligence”, there’s no direct measurement possible
Then how can anyone prove, in the future, whether an AGI exists, or not?
Which tests are you referring to and how do they exactly measure general intelligence?
(And not say IQ or how much the test taker crammed…)
Well I agree it is a much higher bar than just ‘above average’, yet it still seems like the easiest way of delivering a credible proof that can’t be second guessed somehow. (That I can think of, hence the post)
Since ‘cheating’ at this would also mean that the person somehow has gained insider information for a calendar year that was above and beyond what the same ‘specialized institutions’ could obtain.
Which is so vanishingly unlikely that I think pretty much everyone (>99% of readers) would accept the results as the bonafide truth.
But it probably is limited only to literal geniuses and above as a practical mechanism.
[Question] How does someone prove that their general intelligence is above average?
Blocking a lot isn’t necessarily bad or unproductive… but in this case it’s practically certain blocking thousands will eventually lead to blocking someone genuinely more correct/competent/intelligent/experienced/etc… than himself, due to sheer probability. (Since even a ‘sneering’ crank is far from literal random noise.)
Which wouldn’t matter at all for someone just messing around for fun, who can just treat X as a text-heavy entertainment system. But it does matter somewhat for anyone trying to do something meaningful and/or accomplish certain goals.
In short, blocking does have some, variable, credibility cost. Ranging from near zero to quite a lot, depending on who the blockee is.
Why not pay them nothing until they are shown to be correct with sufficiently credible proof, and then pay out a huge prize?
Because it’s already settled, at least according to some authority with a better track record and higher credibility than any individual author/reviewer/OP/etc…
That’s pretty much always the intended meaning, whenever anyone copies text straight from a dictionary anywhere on this site.
How does linking this make sense?
I’m not disputing the definitions, it’s already settled as indicated in the copied text.
And even if the OED were disputing this, it is already superior in authority to the OP, to you, and likely everyone else who read that link post, so its definitions are already accepted widely enough that random people on an internet forum can’t possibly alter that acceptance one way or the other.
Can you list out any random three out of this ‘bunch’?
What are the claims/arguments here?
“Endpoints are easier to predict than trajectories”
According to…? Can you link the proof?
The OED defines ‘gender’, excluding obsolete meanings, as follows:
gender
Grammar.
1.a. c1390– In some (esp. Indo-European) languages, as Latin, French, German, English, etc.: each of the classes (typically masculine, feminine, neuter, common) of nouns and pronouns distinguished by the different inflections which they have and which they require in words syntactically associated with them; similarly applied to adjectives (and in some languages) verbs, to denote the appropriate form for accompanying a noun of such a class. Also: the fact, condition, or property of belonging to such a class; the classification of language in this way. Sometimes called grammatical gender, to distinguish this sense from natural gender: see grammatical gender n., natural gender n. In most European languages, grammatical gender is now only very loosely associated with natural distinctions of sex. English is regarded as possessing natural gender in that certain pronouns expressing natural contrasts in gender are selected to refer to nouns according to the meaning of the nouns, the contrasts being either between masculine (e.g. he, his, etc.) and feminine (e.g. she, her, etc.) or between personal (e.g. the abovementioned masculine and feminine pronouns and who, whoever, etc.) and non-personal (e.g. it, its, which, etc.). In recent times nouns incorporating gender suffixes (esp. those indicating females and formed on generic nouns, such as authoress, poetess, etc.) have become much restricted in use. common, epicene, feminine, masculine, neuter gender, etc.: see the first element.
1.b. 1819– In extended use. Esp. in non-European languages: any of several other analogous categories into which nouns may be divided (regardless of any connection with sex).
3.a. 1474– gen. Males or females viewed as a group; = sex n.11. Also: the property or fact of belonging to one of these groups. Originally extended from the grammatical use at sense 1 (sometimes humorously), as also in Anglo-Norman and Old French. In the 20th cent., as sex came increasingly to mean sexual intercourse (see sex n.1 4b), gender began to replace it (in early use euphemistically) as the usual word for the biological grouping of males and females. It is now often merged with or coloured by sense 3b.
3.b. 1945– Psychology and Sociology (originally U.S.). The state of being male or female as expressed by social or cultural distinctions and differences, rather than biological ones; the collective attributes or traits associated with a particular sex, or determined as a result of one’s sex. Also: a (male or female) group characterized in this way.
So of course ‘natural selection is not optimizing fitness’, since none of those things actually exist in the atoms, and electrons, and spacetime fabric, etc… that make up planet Earth.
i.e. There are no ‘natural selection’ molecules to be found anywhere.
And even the patterns are highly contingent on many factors, perhaps infinitely many, so they can’t be said to have discrete, separable, relationships in the literal sense.
It’s just convenient shorthand to describe something many people believe to be sufficiently understood enough among their peers, that they can get away with skipping some mental steps and verbage.
How do you define ‘real’, ‘me’, ‘real me’, etc…?
This seems to be stemming from some internal confusion.
I don’t think my comment gave off the vibe that it is ‘easy/simple’ to do, just that it isn’t as much of a long shot as the alternative.
i.e. Waiting for someone smarter, more competent, politically savvier, etc…, to read your comment and then hoping for them to do it.
Which seems to have a very low probability of happening.
This seems always “fuzzily true”?
e.g. Which atom of the store are you measuring to?
The store has many quadrillions of atoms spread across a huge volume of space, relative to atom sizes, and there is no ultimate arbiter on the definitive measuring point.