What Is Intelligence?

There are too many social implications and problematic issues of power relations wrapped up in the quantification or operationalization of intelligence. For example we cannot even define intelligence in a sense that would be acceptable to use in human genetics.

The ability to make advantageous decisions in situations that are neither identical nor analogous to any previously encountered situation.

In other words, the ability to learn through understanding, rather than through memorization.

Acceptable to use, or flexible enough to be useful? To me the latter is way more important, since the general tech trend flows from acceptable --> accessible, and from objectively-identified & pursued convergent outcomes to subjectively-tailored divergent outcome-sets.

For this reason I'd stay away from defining intelligence as an end goal. Or, I'd say it needs to be done so as to be referential to a spec. Intelligence as defined by a scope with good reason behind it, and not the other way around. This is why GPT will keep using the word "model" when you talk to it about its intellect. One can even say that models are way cooler than intellect in like a million ways.

A respected veteran in personality research once told me at a conference, "NTs invented intelligence." [1] This wasn't meant in a complimentary way, but rather as something much more neutral and observational. But this is an example of the kind of specific, field-by-field argument vis-a-vis intelligence that turns the deferential approach to intelligence as a concept on its head, and hints that intelligence may be far from a reasonable general requirement of a suitable human OR machine, depending on the situation or problem scope.

It basically says, "if you walk out of your group and into another, don't expect your tools to work the same way there." Well, the same is true of any general-purpose problem-solver. From "if you are only intellectual enough..." to...if you are only _what_ enough, in this context? Powerful tool.

(If you combine this with the fact that the notion of lowering the perceived value of intelligence measurement or intelligence-related discourse is sometimes seen as a threat within tech communities, you can get really interesting chin-stroke going)

Anyway you can end up with some neat concepts that intellect-loving folks might call meta-intellect, more like developmental outcomes that integrate a higher level of consciousness. Not in a woo-woo way, so much as a "stuff I don't really care about, or think is outright stupid, might actually matter more than I think" sort of way. Because just when we think we are suitably [2] cross-trained against bias or just not knowing enough interesting stuff, we get another turn around the course.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keirsey_Temperament_Sorter#Rat...

2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXBQAJsxzm8

The ability to make inferences , anticipate things

The ability to make no mistakes or adapt from learnings trending mistakes to zero