<html><head><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"></head><body dir="auto">On Dec 31, 2019, at 3:43 PM, Mike Dougherty via extropy-chat <extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org> wrote:<blockquote type="cite"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="auto"><div><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Tue, Dec 31, 2019, 2:55 PM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat <<a href="mailto:extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer">extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:comic sans ms,sans-serif;font-size:small;color:#000000">(In response to a passing remark made today)</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:comic sans ms,sans-serif;font-size:small;color:#000000"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:comic sans ms,sans-serif;font-size:small;color:#000000">This battle has been going on for many decades: is intelligence just one thing, generally called g, or is it several several things?</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:comic sans ms,sans-serif;font-size:small;color:#000000"></div></div></blockquote></div></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">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.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">I cite precedent in the AI vs AGI debate.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">We don't need new meanings to old words/letters/acronyms; we need whole new alphabets/emojis/idea tokens</div></div></div></blockquote><br><div>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)).)</div><div><br></div><div>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.)</div><div><br></div><div>Regards,</div><div><br></div><div>Dan</div></body></html>