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> Well, a lot of very intelligent people never achieve their goals either. They're not intelligent with respect to the goals they're not achieving. Or they're
by aeorgnoieang 9y ago
> Well, a lot of very intelligent people never achieve their goals either.
They're not intelligent with respect to the goals they're not achieving. Or they're competing with other people that are more 'intelligent'. There are (of course!) confounding factors but, all else being equal, the more intelligent agent should win.
Let's use a concrete example. Consider someone that's very good at solving math problems but is unhappy with their job. What's the problem with just considering that they're intelligent with respect to solving math problems but bad at (all of the skills necessary to be good at) finding a satisfying job?
Achieving goals, winning 'games', etc., seems like a really useful and really general way of measuring the effectiveness of things and that seems pretty close to, if not exactly, what intelligence is (if it's any one thing in particular).
> I'd suggest that intelligence is not the achievement of goals but the formulation of goals.
What's the motivation to define intelligence in that way?
- Ygg2 9y ago> the more intelligent agent should win. Not necessarily. An intelligent agent could lose to an agent that can simply see the future.
- rocqua 9y agoIn the sense here, an agent that can see the future is 'infinitely intelligent'. Seeing the future has a tendency of becoming paradoxical when you start acting on that information though.
- Ygg2 9y agoI don't think that's true. A beast with ability to see two days in advance could easily kill a human, but still not be able to do anything else, like beat him at chess or make tools.
- emiliobumachar 9y agoYour example seems reasonable, but not as a rebuttal to the paradoxical nature of seeing the future. The paradoxes are the same as in time travel. Imagine your best sees itself hunted down two days in advance; it simply goes somewhere else so the hunters don't find it. Then it didn't really see the future, did it?
- abiox 9y ago> it didn't really see the future, did it depends on your model of time and the universe, i suppose. perhaps "a future" vs "the future".
- aeorgnoieang 9y agoMagical powers (and powerful, potentially paradoxical ones at that) are an extremely blatant violation of "all else being equal".