5 ms·

Careful... you're on the verge here of realizing that intelligence is not a single-dimensional thing and that 'g' is bullshit.

by api 6y ago

natch 6y ago
Trollish comment above but I do wonder about this. I always hear people who think ‘g’ is bullshit giving some form of this argument: “AI can’t even x, how would you expect it to ever possibly do y?” It’s like saying: “How could a baby, which can not even tie its own shoes, spell a simple word, or fill a cup with water, ever possibly grow up to write a book, manage a corporation, or formulate a strategy for fighting a war? Impossible!” It’s almost as if they think babies can’t learn. The AI is not a baby though, they say. Yeah, it’s not. But it’s a constantly learning body of work that is not regressing and not slowing down. Why would it not get to ‘general’ eventually?
- GuiA 6y ago
  We have billions of examples of babies growing up to learn to spell and tie their shoes, therefore it's very reasonable to assume that that's a skill most babies will get to. There are 0 examples of a man made construct reaching "general" intelligence (whatever fuzzy meaning you may attach to it); there is no reason to believe that because we can reach some arbitrary human milestone today ("be a world class Go player"), any other human milestone ("start and run a company, and be a mentor and inspiration to others") is plausible. This is a very different case from e.g. "we built a prototype plane that can lift 15 ft off the ground for 10 seconds, we should be able to build one that can lift 10,000 feet for 10 hours", because in the former case we were beginning to have an understanding of aerodynamics that made that path plausible. We do not have such an understanding backing current ML work. That's well illustrated by the fact that only 6 years elapsed between the first manned flight and crossing the Atlantic by plane - practice caught up to theory really fast, as it tends to do in those cases. We are about 6 years in the current ML revolution - what is its equivalent to crossing the Atlantic? The logic you're advocating for here is more along the lines of "I taught my dog how to sit - shouldn't be too hard to get him to sit in front of a computer and start writing Python code now that I've got the first half figured out". (or - I taught my dog how to fetch - shouldn't be too hard to train him to be a full time food delivery employee, etc).
  - luckylion 6y ago
    > There are 0 examples of a man made construct reaching "general" intelligence (whatever fuzzy meaning you may attach to it); there is no reason to believe that because we can reach some arbitrary human milestone today ("be a world class Go player"), any other human milestone ("start and run a company, and be a mentor and inspiration to others") is plausible. No reason? If you were an outside observer looking at the very first individuals of what you decided to call human, maybe. But after so many steps were made? You can argue that, before there was a plane, there was zero reason to thing that humans can ever create one. And you could've claimed that for pretty much anything else. And you'd generally see that they did get created. Why would artificial intelligence be fundamentally different? I'm not saying "we can do it in the next five years", but to say that there's no reason to believe that it will ever happen? > We do not have such an understanding backing current ML work. And we did not have the knowledge of aerodynamics before we started looking into throwing things, then keeping things in the air for longer than they would if they were thrown, and eventually flying them (yes, a bit simplified).
- obvthrowaway2 6y ago
  >“How could a baby, which can not even tie its own shoes, spell a simple word, or fill a cup with water, ever possibly grow up to write a book, manage a corporation, or formulate a strategy for fighting a war? Impossible!" I don't think anyone has ever said that and meant it. Except to the very naive, it's pretty obvious that a child growing up into a functional adult is a function of training volume and adaptation. On the other hand, training volume for "AI" tends to be huge and yet there are definite strata that these machines seem confined to. I agree that that form of argumentation is meaningless though. AI is obviously improved over time, but as far as I know that's due to external modification and not just more training.
SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
Intelligence isn't a single-dimensional thing, but it seems pretty absurd to claim that there's no general factor at all. Could it really be meaningless to say that someone's smart?
- api 6y ago
  It's like saying a car is fast. Sure, the car is fast. Is it also reliable, efficient, aesthetically pleasing, comfortable, or affordable? How does it handle? How does it do off-road? Can it fly? Can it operate underwater? Real world fitness landscapes are complex and multidimensional. My comment was a little snarky because while I like this site quite a bit for many reasons I do get a little fatigued by the prevalence of the IQ cult. The notion that there is a single metric on which brains can be sorted is sort of a sacred dogma around here, and one which to me is obviously quite wrong. All it takes is a casual glance at intelligence as it actually manifests in the only real world example of an intelligent system we have: biology. It's clearly a multidimensional quality that can be optimized for a large range of things just like anything else. If intelligence is multidimensional in all other living things, by what rationale would we conclude that human intelligence is one-dimensional? ... or ... If virtually every engineered or evolved capability is subject to multi-dimensional optimization, then why not also intelligence?
  - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
    Absolutely true, but I'm not sure that's really a point of confusion. Almost everyone would agree that smart people aren't automatically good at athletics, or poetry, or woodworking. If you've seen people say that kind of thing I agree they're being silly.
  - luckylion 6y ago
    Yet we have a bunch of general attributes we expect when we say "car". Maybe "she's smart" is rather like "she has a car". You don't know whether it's a Porsche or a Truck, gas or electric, but you'll generally rely on her being able to cover larger distances than on foot, and at higher speeds, while also hauling some reasonable amount of luggage.
  - 6y ago
chongli 6y ago
It’s not bullshit to notice that a bunch of different abilities tend to be highly correlated. That’s all g is. What is bullshit is the formal theory of multiple intelligences, which is largely PC-inspired pseudoscience and does not account for the correlation between separate areas.
- api 6y ago
  Athletic ability (real time kinetic intelligence) and math ability are highly correlated? A car's speed and its ability to drive off-road are highly correlated? Rocket thrust and specific impulse are highly correlated? (Hint: these are inversely correlated.) I didn't come to this through PC. I came to it through a basic understanding of learning and optimization.
  - chongli 6y ago
    Athletic ability isn't intelligence. Intelligence may be a part of it (c.f. Wayne Gretzky's quote "skate to where the puck is going, not where it's been") but strength, speed, and stamina aren't. Burmese pythons are way stronger than humans yet I doubt anyone would call them more intelligent. Mantis shrimp have way faster reflexes and their vision is way more sophisticated than ours yet they're not more intelligent as well. There is a lot of debate over the definition of intelligence but one thing most definitions have in common is that it is general. A human being can play the piano, solve an integral, write a novel, compose a photograph, and many many more things. We do all of these things using the same "muscle", our brain. It turns out that some people's brains are faster at being able to learn all of these myriad tasks. That's all there is to it.
    - api 6y ago
      > That's all there is to it. I think that's the main point where we disagree. I think there's a hell of a lot more to it. I remember noticing when I was in school that while I could learn a variety of things, there were definitely subjects that were a lot easier for me and others in which I'd struggle no matter how hard I worked. I also observed other people with very different profiles of easy and hard subjects. I barely passed organic chemistry. I studied hard, but it just would not "take." I had a friend who breezed through it. Anything that involved writing though? I'd breeze through it. I could get As in any class that involved understanding concepts and writing about them with almost no effort. This same friend struggled to write an essay. I actually dropped out of vertebrate anatomy. Tons and tons of clades and names for discrete things. I found a way to adjust my major requirements to avoid taking it. Otherwise I would have had to switch majors. There is no way I could have passed that class with any amount of tutoring. It's like I have a photographic memory for concepts, but can't recall discrete facts. I kept looking for the underlying patterns in organic chemistry but it turns out we don't understand it well enough to have those... we just know a ton of reactions that do things. I flounder badly in subjects whose facts can't be attached to an abstract conceptual framework, but I can read about a concept once and I understand it forever. As a programmer I really love IDEs with "code insight" and other features that basically consult the documentation for you in real time. I get everything about the concepts and algorithms but can never remember the order of arguments on memcpy() even after using it for 20 years. I know memcpy() is there and what it does conceptually though, so it's fine since the IDE will show me which argument goes first. My point is that different people who are "smart" can differ radically in their ability profile.
joshualedbetter 6y ago
"Chimps have better short term memory than humans, even on human oriented tasks... Short term memory is an important dimension of intelligence. By Kelly's argument, humans are not smarter than chimps; indeed, he would claim that "smarter than chimpanzee" is a meaningless concept. This is cold comfort to the chimps whose species survive only because we deign to allow it. It is colder comfort still to all those species we have already wiped out. It's also cold comfort to humans who might be worried about being wiped out by machines." -- Human Compatible by Stuart Russell, page 148
dang 6y ago
Please don't post shallow flamebait, a.k.a. troll, in HN threads. Especially not on classic flamewar topics. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Careful... you're on the verge here of realizing that intelligence is not a single-dimensional thing and that 'g' is bullshit.

by api 6y ago

Careful... you're on the verge here of realizing that intelligence is not a single-dimensional thing and that 'g' is bullshit.

natch 6y ago

Trollish comment above but I do wonder about this. I always hear people who think ‘g’ is bullshit giving some form of this argument: “AI can’t even x, how would you expect it to ever possibly do y?” It’s like saying: “How could a baby, which can not even tie its own shoes, spell a simple word, or fill a cup with water, ever possibly grow up to write a book, manage a corporation, or formulate a strategy for fighting a war? Impossible!” It’s almost as if they think babies can’t learn. The AI is not a baby though, they say. Yeah, it’s not. But it’s a constantly learning body of work that is not regressing and not slowing down. Why would it not get to ‘general’ eventually?

GuiA 6y ago
We have billions of examples of babies growing up to learn to spell and tie their shoes, therefore it's very reasonable to assume that that's a skill most babies will get to. There are 0 examples of a man made construct reaching "general" intelligence (whatever fuzzy meaning you may attach to it); there is no reason to believe that because we can reach some arbitrary human milestone today ("be a world class Go player"), any other human milestone ("start and run a company, and be a mentor and inspiration to others") is plausible. This is a very different case from e.g. "we built a prototype plane that can lift 15 ft off the ground for 10 seconds, we should be able to build one that can lift 10,000 feet for 10 hours", because in the former case we were beginning to have an understanding of aerodynamics that made that path plausible. We do not have such an understanding backing current ML work. That's well illustrated by the fact that only 6 years elapsed between the first manned flight and crossing the Atlantic by plane - practice caught up to theory really fast, as it tends to do in those cases. We are about 6 years in the current ML revolution - what is its equivalent to crossing the Atlantic? The logic you're advocating for here is more along the lines of "I taught my dog how to sit - shouldn't be too hard to get him to sit in front of a computer and start writing Python code now that I've got the first half figured out". (or - I taught my dog how to fetch - shouldn't be too hard to train him to be a full time food delivery employee, etc).
- luckylion 6y ago
  > There are 0 examples of a man made construct reaching "general" intelligence (whatever fuzzy meaning you may attach to it); there is no reason to believe that because we can reach some arbitrary human milestone today ("be a world class Go player"), any other human milestone ("start and run a company, and be a mentor and inspiration to others") is plausible. No reason? If you were an outside observer looking at the very first individuals of what you decided to call human, maybe. But after so many steps were made? You can argue that, before there was a plane, there was zero reason to thing that humans can ever create one. And you could've claimed that for pretty much anything else. And you'd generally see that they did get created. Why would artificial intelligence be fundamentally different? I'm not saying "we can do it in the next five years", but to say that there's no reason to believe that it will ever happen? > We do not have such an understanding backing current ML work. And we did not have the knowledge of aerodynamics before we started looking into throwing things, then keeping things in the air for longer than they would if they were thrown, and eventually flying them (yes, a bit simplified).
obvthrowaway2 6y ago
>“How could a baby, which can not even tie its own shoes, spell a simple word, or fill a cup with water, ever possibly grow up to write a book, manage a corporation, or formulate a strategy for fighting a war? Impossible!" I don't think anyone has ever said that and meant it. Except to the very naive, it's pretty obvious that a child growing up into a functional adult is a function of training volume and adaptation. On the other hand, training volume for "AI" tends to be huge and yet there are definite strata that these machines seem confined to. I agree that that form of argumentation is meaningless though. AI is obviously improved over time, but as far as I know that's due to external modification and not just more training.

SpicyLemonZest 6y ago

Intelligence isn't a single-dimensional thing, but it seems pretty absurd to claim that there's no general factor at all. Could it really be meaningless to say that someone's smart?

api 6y ago
It's like saying a car is fast. Sure, the car is fast. Is it also reliable, efficient, aesthetically pleasing, comfortable, or affordable? How does it handle? How does it do off-road? Can it fly? Can it operate underwater? Real world fitness landscapes are complex and multidimensional. My comment was a little snarky because while I like this site quite a bit for many reasons I do get a little fatigued by the prevalence of the IQ cult. The notion that there is a single metric on which brains can be sorted is sort of a sacred dogma around here, and one which to me is obviously quite wrong. All it takes is a casual glance at intelligence as it actually manifests in the only real world example of an intelligent system we have: biology. It's clearly a multidimensional quality that can be optimized for a large range of things just like anything else. If intelligence is multidimensional in all other living things, by what rationale would we conclude that human intelligence is one-dimensional? ... or ... If virtually every engineered or evolved capability is subject to multi-dimensional optimization, then why not also intelligence?
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  Absolutely true, but I'm not sure that's really a point of confusion. Almost everyone would agree that smart people aren't automatically good at athletics, or poetry, or woodworking. If you've seen people say that kind of thing I agree they're being silly.
- luckylion 6y ago
  Yet we have a bunch of general attributes we expect when we say "car". Maybe "she's smart" is rather like "she has a car". You don't know whether it's a Porsche or a Truck, gas or electric, but you'll generally rely on her being able to cover larger distances than on foot, and at higher speeds, while also hauling some reasonable amount of luggage.
- 6y ago

chongli 6y ago

It’s not bullshit to notice that a bunch of different abilities tend to be highly correlated. That’s all g is. What is bullshit is the formal theory of multiple intelligences, which is largely PC-inspired pseudoscience and does not account for the correlation between separate areas.

api 6y ago
Athletic ability (real time kinetic intelligence) and math ability are highly correlated? A car's speed and its ability to drive off-road are highly correlated? Rocket thrust and specific impulse are highly correlated? (Hint: these are inversely correlated.) I didn't come to this through PC. I came to it through a basic understanding of learning and optimization.
- chongli 6y ago
  Athletic ability isn't intelligence. Intelligence may be a part of it (c.f. Wayne Gretzky's quote "skate to where the puck is going, not where it's been") but strength, speed, and stamina aren't. Burmese pythons are way stronger than humans yet I doubt anyone would call them more intelligent. Mantis shrimp have way faster reflexes and their vision is way more sophisticated than ours yet they're not more intelligent as well. There is a lot of debate over the definition of intelligence but one thing most definitions have in common is that it is general. A human being can play the piano, solve an integral, write a novel, compose a photograph, and many many more things. We do all of these things using the same "muscle", our brain. It turns out that some people's brains are faster at being able to learn all of these myriad tasks. That's all there is to it.
  - api 6y ago
    > That's all there is to it. I think that's the main point where we disagree. I think there's a hell of a lot more to it. I remember noticing when I was in school that while I could learn a variety of things, there were definitely subjects that were a lot easier for me and others in which I'd struggle no matter how hard I worked. I also observed other people with very different profiles of easy and hard subjects. I barely passed organic chemistry. I studied hard, but it just would not "take." I had a friend who breezed through it. Anything that involved writing though? I'd breeze through it. I could get As in any class that involved understanding concepts and writing about them with almost no effort. This same friend struggled to write an essay. I actually dropped out of vertebrate anatomy. Tons and tons of clades and names for discrete things. I found a way to adjust my major requirements to avoid taking it. Otherwise I would have had to switch majors. There is no way I could have passed that class with any amount of tutoring. It's like I have a photographic memory for concepts, but can't recall discrete facts. I kept looking for the underlying patterns in organic chemistry but it turns out we don't understand it well enough to have those... we just know a ton of reactions that do things. I flounder badly in subjects whose facts can't be attached to an abstract conceptual framework, but I can read about a concept once and I understand it forever. As a programmer I really love IDEs with "code insight" and other features that basically consult the documentation for you in real time. I get everything about the concepts and algorithms but can never remember the order of arguments on memcpy() even after using it for 20 years. I know memcpy() is there and what it does conceptually though, so it's fine since the IDE will show me which argument goes first. My point is that different people who are "smart" can differ radically in their ability profile.

joshualedbetter 6y ago

"Chimps have better short term memory than humans, even on human oriented tasks... Short term memory is an important dimension of intelligence. By Kelly's argument, humans are not smarter than chimps; indeed, he would claim that "smarter than chimpanzee" is a meaningless concept. This is cold comfort to the chimps whose species survive only because we deign to allow it. It is colder comfort still to all those species we have already wiped out. It's also cold comfort to humans who might be worried about being wiped out by machines." -- Human Compatible by Stuart Russell, page 148

dang 6y ago

Please don't post shallow flamebait, a.k.a. troll, in HN threads. Especially not on classic flamewar topics. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html