[ExI] iq misconception

[Dan TheBookMan]

On Dec 31, 2019, at 3:43 PM, Mike Dougherty via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
> 
>> On Tue, Dec 31, 2019, 2:55 PM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>> (In response to a passing remark made today)
>> 
>> This battle has been going on for many decades:  is intelligence just one thing, generally called g, or is it several several things?
> 
> 
> As far as I know, g is 9.8m/s^2 and I will refuse to accept any attempt to have it mean anything else.
> 
> I cite precedent in the AI vs AGI debate.
> 
> We don't need new meanings to old words/letters/acronyms; we need whole new alphabets/emojis/idea tokens

As used in discussions of human intelligence and psychometrics, g has been around for about a century now. I don’t believe I’ve seen a single instance of someone in the field not understand the usage. In this case, g or ”g factor” seems to be a very helpful term. When I first became interested in the study of intelligence, I wasn’t at all confused by it, and I knew of the physics use of the same letter. (And I never confused lowercase g as used in physics with it as used in function theory (for another function so you say things like f(g(x)) = g(f(x)).)

Actually, coming up with new letters, etc. each time is okay (think of Cantor using the Hebrew alphabet in his work), but I don’t see any big confusion here. Even AGI seems to be a decent distinction, though one could argue AI == AGI. (That’s what’s under discussion by those making the distinction, so I wouldn’t rule it out as meaningless if I were to think AGI is nothing more than AI. Folks inventing the term were not aiming to obfuscate to my knowledge.)

Regards,

Dan
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