Conflating knowledge with intelligence

[Carl-Richard]

18 hours ago, Inliytened1 said:

@Carl-Richard yes and no.  It's relative.   Sometimes they could understand the thing if they had direct experience of it.  But most of the time no, it just means in that area of intelligence you have more.  They aren't going to grasp it either way.  For example- with. Chess - you can play a guy a thousand times and still beat him a thousand times.  Yet with Checkers maybe if he played you a few times he would finally beat you.

Interesting example. It brings up an interesting topic, and I'm curious what you think: Tyler1 the streamer recently hit 1960 elo in Chess, and he only started playing under a year ago (infamously at 200 elo lol), which is outright insanity. How do we explain such an amazing feat?

Chess is a weird sport in that it's often associated with raw intelligence, but there is also the notion that you only get really good if you started playing when you were really young (implying that experience is crucial), and there is also tons of concrete knowledge involved (openings, remembering games of other players, etc.).

That said, these notions might be somewhat outdated due to Chess becoming increasingly digitalized, where you can endlessly play games over and over, practice Chess puzzles, analyze your games, etc. And that is partially what I think Tyler1 has capitalized on: he is a video game streamer who is used to grinding games for multiple hours a day, so when he started fixating on Chess, it's not surprising that he would experience some great results compared to an average person with a job or who came up during the pre-digitalized era. But 1960 elo in 9 months? Surely he must have some intellectual gift, right?

So it begs the question: is his incredible 1960 elo in 9 months mostly due to his intelligence, or is it mostly due to his massive grinding schedule and use of clever skill-improving online technology (experience, knowledge)? I don't remember ever hearing Tyler1 being described as an intellectual genius, if anything quite to the contrary. Could anybody else achieve something similar if they put in the same number of hours and ferocious attention?

 

 

Edited May 18 by Carl-Richard

[zurew]

2 hours ago, Carl-Richard said:

To the extent that this definition of intelligence is separate from knowledge (which could be described as "searching the problemspace beforehand"; essentially "experience"), intelligence becomes more related to "mystical" abilities like intuition and generalizable principles like logic, systemic concepts and virtues. 

Yes, I think its useful to separate knowledge from intelligence.

2 hours ago, Carl-Richard said:

These generalizable principles are of course themselves a form of knowledge, but they're elegant and adaptable, so you don't have to "search the entire problemspace" (rely on experience/knowledge) to solve a problem. They transcend mere knowledge. But this generalizability has many flaws (hence Vervaeke saying intelligence is prone to self-deception), which is why concrete knowledge is important and why for example there is "wisdom in tradition". And of course, recognizing the need for a balance between generalizable and concrete knowledge is what wisdom is. And similar to how a generalizable principle is a type of knowledge, balance is a type of generalizable principle, but it's hyper-generalized, transcending mere generalizability. It's highly virtuous; sacred. So it transcends both knowledge and intelligence.

Yeah thats a good breakdown.

A little longer version of Vervaeke's relevance realization is something like this (this is for other users, I know you know these things):

 Ideally we would solve problems algorithmically if we could, which means 100% certainty regarding either confirming that there is no logically possible solution for a problem or finding the best possible solution.  The issue is that , that would entail searching the whole problemspace beforehand and checking all logically possible options and the connection between those options. Now of course, thats not really viable when it comes to most problems , because the amount of logically possible options and the connections between those options is way too large.

So we end up using herusitics, where finding a solution or confirming that it is logically impossible to solve a problem is not guaranteed. A Heruistic basically means  bias. A Heruistic in the context of problemspace can mean 2 different things: 1) The framing of the problem (how you want to connect/contextualize the parts together) and 2) Preemptively selecting a small fraction from the whole problemspace and hoping that all the relevant information to solve the problem will be there. And thats where self-deception comes in.

So the self deception: There is a difference between psychological certainty (when you are unable to question or deny the validity of your conclusion, because you can't conecieve of a different conclusion) and between  logical certainty (which is deductive validity, where its logically impossible for the solution to be false if the premises are true). Now, because we use heruistics,  we only focus on certain things and we completely ignore and are  unaware of things, we often times end up with highly certain conclusions about things, even though none of them is deductively justified.  

Sometimes you misframe a problem (you try to connect the dots together in a way , where they cant be connected) and thats why you can't find a solution for it and other times the reason why you can't find a solution, is because you are not aware of all the relevant info that would be necessary to solve the problem. - and thats where the concept of breaking the salience landscape comes in.

Salience landscape is all the things that you are aware of a given moment (all the thoughts, sounds, feelings, sights etc, that are salient to you). In the context of problemspace, salience landscape is basically the small fraction that you are aware from  the whole.  Breaking the salience landscape is necessary so that you can become aware of other parts and other connections in the problemspace.  And this is where the usefulness of  psychedelics . meditation, yoga and other methods comes in.

Edited May 18 by zurew

[Reciprocality]

There is no intelligence without the archaic form of knowledge called situational memory.

Memories are the touchstone we test propositions against, it is even the subject of most of our propositions.

 

Intelligence is the ability to identify things, when you see a tenth of your toothbrush you can identify the whole thing, why? Because your memories informs you of the whole when you see the part, but why? 

Could we answer that question by analysing the toothbrush? And if not must we then analyse its identity in the absence of its object? 

 

How little of the toothbrush do you need to see to identify it? How little of the person do you need to see to have an unchangeable conception of them? How much do you need to partake in society to spot not only the differences between individual people but also their cultural or innate commonality without having any other society to compare with? How often are you informed of the similarity between something in your vision and something of your past?

The more such questions we ask the closer we get to a mean of them, this is our general intelligence, and as Carl-Richard stated, it is independent of any particular knowledge base.

 

The less information is required for you to see the whole the more space will be available in your mind to see a bunch of wholes.

Edited May 19 by Reciprocality

[Reciprocality]

Analogical thinking is intuition plus origination.

If an item A and its identity is similar to an item B and its identity then how did you spot that similarity?

The answer is that you originate a more general conception than the one which pertains to either item alone, if it pertains to both, since they were not identical, then the conception has no singular essence (family resemblance of Wittgenstein), while if it truly pertains to neither then its referent is elsewhere, differently mediated or non-real.

 

Intuition is not just when you solve a hard problem without knowing how, it is there when you imagine the world as you wake up or when you imagine the lawn before you open the door. 

 

Analogy is heightened intelligence, since not only is the whole seen through the part but a new whole is created by two or more distinct ones (parts). It follows from their nature that we do not cash in on our analogies before much later in life.

 

Edit: A rotten analogy is when the two items are already identical, or when you already have a word for their similarity.

Edited May 19 by Reciprocality

[Nilsi]

1 hour ago, Reciprocality said:

There is no intelligence without the archaic form of knowledge called situational memory.

Memories are the touchstone we test propositions against, it is even the subject of most of our propositions.

 

Intelligence is the ability to identify things, when you see a tenth of your toothbrush you can identify the whole thing, why? Because your memories informs you of the whole when you see the part, but why? 

Could we answer that question by analysing the toothbrush? And if not must we then analyse its identity in the absence of its object? 

 

How little of the toothbrush do you need to see to identify it? How little of the person do you need to see to have an unchangeable conception of them? How much do you need to partake in society to spot not only the differences between individual people but also their cultural or innate commonality without having any other society to compare with? How often are you informed of the similarity between something in your vision and something of your past?

The more such questions we ask the closer we get to a mean of them, this is our general intelligence, and as Carl-Richard stated, it is independent of any particular knowledge base.

 

The less information is required for you to see the whole the more space will be available in your mind to see a bunch of wholes.

Are you saying that to truly understand Beethoven's 9th Symphony is to just assess that it’s made up of woodwinds, percussion, strings, and so on, and that it represents the musical form called a symphony, and that any deeper assessment of this work of art is merely a suboptimal use of your intelligence? I couldn’t come up with a more vulgar conception of intelligence if I tried.

"The whole" you are referring to is infinitely complex, and I would define intelligence as precisely the ability to hold as much of that complexity in mind as possible.

Edited May 19 by Nilsi

[Nilsi]

9 minutes ago, Nilsi said:

Are you saying that to truly understand Beethoven's 9th Symphony is to just assess that it’s made up of woodwinds, percussion, strings, and so on, and that it represents the musical form called a symphony, and that any deeper assessment of this work of art is merely a suboptimal use of your intelligence? I couldn’t come up with a more vulgar conception of intelligence if I tried.

"The whole" you are referring to is infinitely complex, and I would define intelligence as precisely the ability to hold as much of that complexity in mind as possible.

I suppose @Carl-Richard would even agree with you and call that „optimal experience“ or whatever as opposed to the „neuroticism“ i’m advocating for, if i recall his position on this correctly.

[Yimpa]

Consider that you can be extremely intelligent despite not knowing what 1 + 1 =

[Reciprocality]

7 hours ago, Nilsi said:

Are you saying that to truly understand Beethoven's 9th Symphony is to just assess that it’s made up of woodwinds, percussion, strings, and so on, and that it represents the musical form called a symphony, and that any deeper assessment of this work of art is merely a suboptimal use of your intelligence?

@Nilsi No but I would be happy to entertain an analysis of what I wrote suggesting that I did say so.

 

Beethovens symphony is both 1. a multitude of sensorial stimuli and 2. an overlay of perceptions of beauty, enjoyment, emotion and even meaning that varies to some extent between people. Each sensorial portion of the piece will be a part of a whole that the listener identifies via their memory, and this is what the text you quoted takes as undeniable.

Edited May 19 by Reciprocality

[LordFall]

Well soon enough we are going to have the greatest disparity in intelligence ever seen in history. I'd say most people are gonna rely on AI to just feed them entertainment where as some are gonna use it to sharper their intellect and become a superintelligence themselves. 

[Carl-Richard]

2 hours ago, LordFall said:

Well soon enough we are going to have the greatest disparity in intelligence ever seen in history. I'd say most people are gonna rely on AI to just feed them entertainment where as some are gonna use it to sharper their intellect and become a superintelligence themselves. 

Currently, I believe people who use AI uncritically is decreasing not necessarily their intelligence but the quality of their knowledge, as AI often makes simple factual mistakes. Especially if you're using AI very often (and especially uncritically), it means you're generally using an unreliable tool, which can certainly impact your intelligence. So AI is probably already making less smart people dumber, while smarter people are maybe getting a little smarter.

[Nilsi]

20 hours ago, Reciprocality said:

The less information is required for you to see the whole the more space will be available in your mind to see a bunch of wholes.

This is like saying, "the faster you move through an art museum, the faster you can go do other things."

There is actually a rather fitting Drake lyric about this mindset of spectacle:

„I know a girl whose one goal was to visit Rome
Then she finally got to Rome
And all she did was post pictures for people at home
'Cause all that mattered was impressin' everybody she's known“

[Rafael Thundercat]

What about plant intelligence? Not wanting to talk shit about "Mother Ayahusaca and so forth, but drinking it for 7 years it amazes me that sometimes I feel like I am seeing and sensing the reality as a plant, and at same time is true that when the substance is inside my veins the difference and separations from it and me vanish and the information,insigths and wisdom are coming from my own being, expanded by the effect of the brew. Also if under the influence of the medicine I ingest some other plant or element the essence of the element manifest itself in different visionary patterns, aromatic plants for example made of flowers bring certain vibe and infomation. 

[Nilsi]

4 minutes ago, Rafael Thundercat said:

What about plant intelligence? Not wanting to talk shit about "Mother Ayahusaca and so forth, but drinking it for 7 years it amazes me that sometimes I feel like I am seeing and sensing the reality as a plant, and at same time is true that when the substance is inside my veins the difference and separations from it and me vanish and the information,insigths and wisdom are coming from my own being, expanded by the effect of the brew. Also if under the influence of the medicine I ingest some other plant or element the essence of the element manifest itself in different visionary patterns, aromatic plants for example made of flowers bring certain vibe and infomation. 

You should listen to this:

 

[Reciprocality]

5 hours ago, Nilsi said:

5 hours ago, Nilsi said:

  On 19/05/2024 at 4:05 PM, Reciprocality said:

The less information is required for you to see the whole the more space will be available in your mind to see a bunch of wholes.

This is like saying, "the faster you move through an art museum, the faster you can go do other things."

There is actually a rather fitting Drake lyric about this mindset of spectacle:

„I know a girl whose one goal was to visit Rome
Then she finally got to Rome
And all she did was post pictures for people at home
'Cause all that mattered was impressin' everybody she's known“

@Nilsi Certainly, and if I say that exercising gives better endurance it is like saying that you ought to become an olympic athlete.

The implication in the art museum statement is that there is something you miss out on by passing through it, both the existence or absence of an equivalent situation what regards the generality of parts and wholes is independent of the meaning of the merely falsifiable assertion you responded to, that the less of a whole is required to identify it the more space is available for other wholes.

Isn't it interesting that instead of responding to the way the more literal interpretation of my reply relates to its relevant discussion your alternative interpretation in both deviating from that relation and entirely overshadowing it by introducing your own mind-associations informs me that you are literally just speaking with that part of yourself you require to imagine other people.

The irony is that the way you reply by going miles beyond its literal meaning sees a whole through a part, though in this case the relation between the two is a fictional subsumption of the part (my assertion about the increased space for wholes the less of a part is required to identify them..) to a whole (..the normative interpretation that therefore one ought to identify as many wholes and hast through as many parts as possible), instead of moving soberly in the reverse direction by analysing the actual statement, which would be very like your supposed point of spending time in an art museum instead of hasting through it.

Edited May 20 by Reciprocality

[Nilsi]

11 minutes ago, Reciprocality said:

@Nilsi Certainly, and if I say that exercising gives better endurance it is like saying that you ought to become an olympic athlete.

The implication in the art museum statement is that there is something you miss out on by passing through it, both the existence or absence of an equivalent situation what regards the generality of parts and wholes is independent of the meaning of the merely falsifiable assertion you responded to, that the less of a whole is required to identify it the more space is available for other wholes.

Isn't it interesting that instead of responding to the way the more literal interpretation of my reply relates to its relevant discussion your alternative interpretation in both deviating from that relation and entirely overshadowing it by introducing your own mind-associations informs me that you are literally just speaking with that part of yourself you require to imagine other people.

The irony is that the way you reply by going miles beyond its literal meaning sees a whole through a part, though in this case the relation between the two is a fictional subsumption of the part (my assertion about the increased space for wholes the less of a part is required to identify them..) to a whole (..the normative interpretation that therefore one ought to identify as many wholes and hast through as many parts as possible), instead of moving soberly in the reverse direction by analysing the actual statement, which would be very like your supposed point of spending time in an art museum instead of hasting through it.

To be fair, you’re not making it easy to grasp what you’re getting at, so I just ran with the associations that came to mind. That’s the only way I know how to respond to such obscurity, and it usually leads to more clarity, although in your case, I can’t say that’s true.

[Reciprocality]

1 hour ago, Nilsi said:

To be fair, you’re not making it easy to grasp what you’re getting at, so I just ran with the associations that came to mind. That’s the only way I know how to respond to such obscurity, and it usually leads to more clarity, although in your case, I can’t say that’s true.

@Nilsi I appreciate that you push me to try to write more comprehensibly.

We can likely all agree that @Carl-Richard is onto something about the distinction between knowledge and intelligence, and perhaps that in the general modern culture there is little clarity of that distinction and their relationship, in that we so often come to infer someones intelligence or lack thereof merely from their existence of their knowledge.

I propose one way to clarify the distinction of these concepts through the statistical average of how small a section of a whole someone needs to determine the identity of that whole. I acknowledge that this is an counterintuitive approach to measure intelligence  since it is in fact knowledge-based, I will come back to this counterintuitive problem in section b below.

I underpin the above proposition by ..

a. pointing out the necessary condition for any intelligence (situational memory), and that there is no difference between that memory base and the whole we imagine when it is identified through its parts, I validate this condition in my own experience by discovering the presence of situational memory in the meaning of all that I am thinking and allow myself to generalise from there.

b. pointing out that the less is required for someone to identify x (a generality, a concept, an identity or a whole) the more space they will have available for those xes, I do not provide evidence for this assertion as I find it terribly plausible.

c. pointing out that the more space is available for xes the more relationships one can see between them, the quicker the transition between them, the more mutual exclusion thus clarity of them and the more distinct from specialised knowledge they will be thus the easier to distinguish from any such specialised knowledge.

These are not theorems, nor are they comprehensive theories, they are falsifiable assertions that ideally get subject to statistical methodology when attempted falsified, until then we explore its plausibility and test it against the scrutiny of our own memory and imagination.

 

If we introduce problem solving into the mix (which is indeed the true mark of intelligence) we must suddenly account for a persons heuristics and cultural background and general tendency to actually think in terms of problems (unless you can show me why we don't need to, I will take it as a given), without accounting for those we would easily end up with the smartest people around near the bottom, since their ability to recognise wholes through parts are so extreme that they rarely ever had to solve any problem or potentially never even considered them as problems developing thereby a very limited set of problem solving skills. Perhaps these can be considered right brained?

Edited May 20 by Reciprocality

[LordFall]

@Carl-Richard That's a good point. I think those factual mistakes will be fixed but I think the even greater fool's trap is it will remove the need to think entirely. Already AI has read every book released so you could ask it for book summaries of all the books on Leo's list for example. 

There is a new paradigm though where you can use it instead as a way to test your own knowledge and benefit from the hundreds of billion put into training it. Definitely will be interesting to see what type of learning opportunities will come out of it in the next decade. 

[Nilsi]

1 hour ago, Reciprocality said:

@Nilsi I appreciate that you push me to try to write more comprehensibly.

We can likely all agree that @Carl-Richard is onto something about the distinction between knowledge and intelligence, and perhaps that in the general modern culture there is little clarity of that distinction and their relationship, in that we so often come to infer someones intelligence or lack thereof merely from their existence of their knowledge.

I propose one way to clarify the distinction of these concepts through the statistical average of how small a section of a whole someone needs to determine the identity of that whole. I acknowledge that this is an counterintuitive approach to measure intelligence  since it is in fact knowledge-based, I will come back to this counterintuitive problem in section b below.

I underpin the above proposition by ..

a. pointing out the necessary condition for any intelligence (situational memory), and that there is no difference between that memory base and the whole we imagine when it is identified through its parts, I validate this condition in my own experience by discovering the presence of situational memory in the meaning of all that I am thinking and allow myself to generalise from there.

b. pointing out that the less is required for someone to identify x (a generality, a concept, an identity or a whole) the more space they will have available for those xes, I do not provide evidence for this assertion as I find it terribly plausible.

c. pointing out that the more space is available for xes the more relationships one can see between them, the quicker the transition between them, the more mutual exclusion thus clarity of them and the more distinct from specialised knowledge they will be thus the easier to distinguish from any such specialised knowledge.

These are not theorems, nor are they comprehensive theories, they are falsifiable assertions that ideally get subject to statistical methodology when attempted falsified, until then we explore its plausibility and test it against the scrutiny of our own memory and imagination.

 

If we introduce problem solving into the mix (which is indeed the true mark of intelligence) we must suddenly account for a persons heuristics and cultural background and general tendency to actually think in terms of problems (unless you can show me why we don't need to, I will take it as a given), without accounting for those we would easily end up with the smartest people around near the bottom, since their ability to recognise wholes through parts are so extreme that they rarely ever had to solve any problem or potentially never even considered them as problems developing thereby a very limited set of problem solving skills. Perhaps these can be considered right brained?

Wouldn’t you agree that when you’re in love with someone, you would want to be able to understand and empathize with them as deeply as possible, knowing fully well that their identity is infinitely complex and you will never get to the bottom of it for all eternity? And isn’t that desire and tenacity in loving and getting to know them the true mark of intelligence?

Same goes for any object of desire. 

And why would you even care about understanding anything you don’t love? Isn’t that stupidity?

Your point may hold for pragmatic purposes, like understanding enough about a toothbrush to know how to use it, but beyond that it doesn’t hold up.

Edited May 20 by Nilsi

[Reciprocality]

25 minutes ago, Nilsi said:

Your point may hold for pragmatic purposes, like understanding enough about a toothbrush to know how to use it, but beyond that it doesn’t hold up.

damnit

[Ahbapx]

They might not have assumed you have innate abilities, They might have acknowledged your natural ease with learning new things or taking risks.
Not everyone has the luxury of learning new things to risk their already fragile cognition.