From: Joshua Fox (joshua@joshuafox.com)
Date: Wed Aug 23 2006 - 12:27:37 MDT
I concur with Ben and Richard's postings about IQ testing: This is the
wrong focus.
Might I point out the possibility of one of those good ol' cognitive
bias here: Many SL4 members have scored high on IQ and similar tests,
and are proud of that, and so may place an unresaonable focus on
testing.
Responding to Michael A.:
> Singularity is about smartness, not technology, and the second you
> build something smarter than you, everything we know flies out the window.
Certainly. But how is the measurement of IQ by tests relevant to the
development of artificially enhanced intelligence?
> And by the way, discussions of IQ are most definitely SL4.
...
> Conversations about intelligence and comparisons between intraspecies
> and interspecies intelligence differentials make up the core of the
> argument ...
IQ tests are not relevant to interspecies differentials until some
non-human can take them too, and I have not seen that IQ-test-taking
is even an intermediate goal of any of the AGI efforts.
As for intraspecies (intra-humanity) differentials, humans vary only
slightly on the continuum of intelligence. And even if we could
accurately measure the difference between people in the 50th, 90th,
and 99th percentile of intelligence, how would that make a difference
to the AGI effort? Achieving a 100 IQ AGI is hard enough; I'd guess
that going beyond that to 160 IQ is relatively trivial.
I will grant that _if_ IQ-tests can differentiate what are ultimately
minor gradations and differences of human intelligence, and _if_ these
minor differences give researchers valuable hints for analyzing human
intelligence with the goal of reproducing General Intelligence, then
IQ tests are relevant.
However, the discussion in this thread has not been about that
angle, but rather about how to best measure the differences between
humans in a way that correlates with real intelligence, and this seems
only secondarily relevant to SL4.
Joshua
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