4 ms·

IQ is compute speed, not storage. It has nothing to do with knowledge. IBM used to give one out as part of their hiring process, years ago, and even I took it t

IQ is compute speed, not storage. It has nothing to do with knowledge. IBM used to give one out as part of their hiring process, years ago, and even I took it the entire test was a timed multiple choice exam where every question was looking at an object made out of cubes and choosing the correct orientation of the object from the choices, after the object was arbitrarily rotated according to instructions in the question. Then, IQ can be derived by determining how quickly all participants can answer the questionnaire correctly, and ranking their speeds, and then normalizing the values so 100 is in the middle. Turns out, scores will fall along a bell curve if you do that. You can call that phenomenon whatever, but most people call it IQ and hopefully I've explained well why that has nothing at all to do with static knowledge in this comment.

11101010001100 2y ago
Speed can be learned though...chess for example.
- roenxi 2y ago
  It isn't really possible to learn calculation speed, learning is about memorising shortcuts and heuristics, or perhaps how to spot them. And training to avoid waste. Strategic questions. Consider calculating 1+1*1*1*1*1*1*1*1... (= 2). It doesn't matter how quickly someone attempts to multiply an infinite number of 1s they will never succeed because infinity is too large. They have to notice a shortcut that lets them skip doing all the calculations. That shows the difference between calculation speed and happening upon a superior strategy. But people who can calculate very quickly will have a lot of opportunities to come up with a successful strategy because they can try more in what time they have.
  - 11101010001100 2y ago
    This is exactly what happens in chess... for instance trading into a known winning endgame.
    - JohnMakin 2y ago
      this was exactly what I thought of and couldn’t articulate it this briefly - particularly pattern recognition and muscle memory in physical chess. It looks crazy when you see it, but the “tricks” are rote. I play mostly 5m chess because I’m a much faster thinker than I am at depth, and a lot of it is just trained speed since I was a young kid. When you see a particular pattern 50,000 times there are people that are good at just immediately making that synapse connect in their head as to the next move, without thinking, I believe this factor is called “intuition” sometimes on accident. It’s definitely a gift to learn though that I think is often confused with deep intelligence sometimes - which explains certain chess types well too. I am often confused for the latter type when I definitely am not - I think those type of intelligences are better at specialization whereas I’m more of a generalist because I can juggle a lot of things at once. They’re both very different types of intelligence that cannot be measured by iq tests, which is why I tend to scoff at what use they are and their usability in predicting outcomes. Trying to then take this flawed approach and apply it to AI is ludicrous and completely jumping the shark to me. You want to take a flawed measure of human intelligence that we also dont understand fully, and apply it to a machine that we also dont really understand? Ok, then miss me when I laugh at that kind of talk, it is just so silly. This is a more general rant in this broader thread and not directed at anyone spefifically.
      - godelski 2y ago
        I think you would enjoy the book Moonwalking With Einstein. The author is a journalist who's interested in memory competitions and while interviewing he ends up training with these people. Of course, learning that these are skills that surprisingly most people can lean. I think it's really eye opening into what we can do. The guy trains a year and wins the US competition, moving on to represent the US in a world competition. I think anyone would be impressed if you saw someone memorize a deck of cards in under 2 minutes. But maybe the most astonishing thing is that we are all capable of this but very few can. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonwalking_with_Einstein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonwalking_with_Einstein
  - JohnMakin 2y ago
    when I was a kid, I had a unique gift for numbers and breaking them down into primes that led me to somehow competing on the county level for these weird speed-math challenges that were popular when I was young. I remember using a lot of tricks. Being able to quickly break down a number into primes by rote memorization was a thing I specifically remember being trained on. There are a lot of number tricks out there that you can train and speed yourself up. this made me quite successful in certain games of chance and odds based games that require quick mental arithmetic when I was younger. Some of it requires mathematical insight, for sure, to derive insight that leads to more speed - but arithmetic can be trained for sure.
    - godelski 2y ago
      This also matches a lot about what we know about the brain and recall. It is a demonstrable phenomena. Just like how any athlete has quicker reflexes. Sure, some might be innate, but their training definitely makes it faster. Information is information. I mean we all go on "autopilot" at times. Much more frequently in things we do frequently. That's kinda a state of high recall. Not much thinking needs to be done. A great example of this might be a speed cuber, someone who solves rubix cubes fast. Clearly they didn't start that fast.
godelski 2y ago
> IQ is compute speed, not storage. Says who? Honestly. I've never seen that claim before. Sure, tests are timed but that's a proxy for efficiency in extrapolation. If we define IQ in this way then LLMs far outperform any human. I'm pretty confident this would be true of even more traditional LMs. Speed really is just the measurement of recall. A doubt we'd call someone intelligent if they memorized the multiplication table up to 100x100. Maybe at first but when we ask them for 126*8358?
- cjcole 2y ago
  > > IQ is compute speed, not storage. > Says who? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann#Mathematical_quickness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann#Mathematical_... Von Neumann's mathematical fluency, calculation speed, and general problem-solving ability were widely noted by his peers. Paul Halmos called his speed "awe-inspiring." Lothar Wolfgang Nordheim described him as the "fastest mind I ever met". Enrico Fermi told physicist Herbert L. Anderson: "You know, Herb, Johnny can do calculations in his head ten times as fast as I can! And I can do them ten times as fast as you can, Herb, so you can see how impressive Johnny is!" Edward Teller admitted that he "never could keep up with him", and Israel Halperin described trying to keep up as like riding a "tricycle chasing a racing car." He had an unusual ability to solve novel problems quickly. George Pólya, whose lectures at ETH Zürich von Neumann attended as a student, said, "Johnny was the only student I was ever afraid of. If in the course of a lecture I stated an unsolved problem, the chances were he'd come to me at the end of the lecture with the complete solution scribbled on a slip of paper." When George Dantzig brought von Neumann an unsolved problem in linear programming "as I would to an ordinary mortal", on which there had been no published literature, he was astonished when von Neumann said "Oh, that!", before offhandedly giving a lecture of over an hour, explaining how to solve the problem using the hitherto unconceived theory of duality. A story about von Neumann's encounter with the famous fly puzzle has entered mathematical folklore. In this puzzle, two bicycles begin 20 miles apart, and each travels toward the other at 10 miles per hour until they collide; meanwhile, a fly travels continuously back and forth between the bicycles at 15 miles per hour until it is squashed in the collision. The questioner asks how far the fly traveled in total; the "trick" for a quick answer is to realize that the fly's individual transits do not matter, only that it has been traveling at 15 miles per hour for one hour. As Eugene Wigner tells it, Max Born posed the riddle to von Neumann. The other scientists to whom he had posed it had laboriously computed the distance, so when von Neumann was immediately ready with the correct answer of 15 miles, Born observed that he must have guessed the trick. "What trick?" von Neumann replied. "All I did was sum the geometric series."
AlotOfReading 2y ago
Isn't that just the Knox cube test, which people with aphantasia are substantially slower to answer? That seems like a very silly hiring test given that aphantasia is not considered a cognitive impairment and people who have it aren't less intelligent in any obvious way.

11101010001100 2y ago

Speed can be learned though...chess for example.

roenxi 2y ago
It isn't really possible to learn calculation speed, learning is about memorising shortcuts and heuristics, or perhaps how to spot them. And training to avoid waste. Strategic questions. Consider calculating 1+1*1*1*1*1*1*1*1... (= 2). It doesn't matter how quickly someone attempts to multiply an infinite number of 1s they will never succeed because infinity is too large. They have to notice a shortcut that lets them skip doing all the calculations. That shows the difference between calculation speed and happening upon a superior strategy. But people who can calculate very quickly will have a lot of opportunities to come up with a successful strategy because they can try more in what time they have.
- 11101010001100 2y ago
  This is exactly what happens in chess... for instance trading into a known winning endgame.
  - JohnMakin 2y ago
    this was exactly what I thought of and couldn’t articulate it this briefly - particularly pattern recognition and muscle memory in physical chess. It looks crazy when you see it, but the “tricks” are rote. I play mostly 5m chess because I’m a much faster thinker than I am at depth, and a lot of it is just trained speed since I was a young kid. When you see a particular pattern 50,000 times there are people that are good at just immediately making that synapse connect in their head as to the next move, without thinking, I believe this factor is called “intuition” sometimes on accident. It’s definitely a gift to learn though that I think is often confused with deep intelligence sometimes - which explains certain chess types well too. I am often confused for the latter type when I definitely am not - I think those type of intelligences are better at specialization whereas I’m more of a generalist because I can juggle a lot of things at once. They’re both very different types of intelligence that cannot be measured by iq tests, which is why I tend to scoff at what use they are and their usability in predicting outcomes. Trying to then take this flawed approach and apply it to AI is ludicrous and completely jumping the shark to me. You want to take a flawed measure of human intelligence that we also dont understand fully, and apply it to a machine that we also dont really understand? Ok, then miss me when I laugh at that kind of talk, it is just so silly. This is a more general rant in this broader thread and not directed at anyone spefifically.
    - godelski 2y ago
      I think you would enjoy the book Moonwalking With Einstein. The author is a journalist who's interested in memory competitions and while interviewing he ends up training with these people. Of course, learning that these are skills that surprisingly most people can lean. I think it's really eye opening into what we can do. The guy trains a year and wins the US competition, moving on to represent the US in a world competition. I think anyone would be impressed if you saw someone memorize a deck of cards in under 2 minutes. But maybe the most astonishing thing is that we are all capable of this but very few can. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonwalking_with_Einstein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonwalking_with_Einstein
- JohnMakin 2y ago
  when I was a kid, I had a unique gift for numbers and breaking them down into primes that led me to somehow competing on the county level for these weird speed-math challenges that were popular when I was young. I remember using a lot of tricks. Being able to quickly break down a number into primes by rote memorization was a thing I specifically remember being trained on. There are a lot of number tricks out there that you can train and speed yourself up. this made me quite successful in certain games of chance and odds based games that require quick mental arithmetic when I was younger. Some of it requires mathematical insight, for sure, to derive insight that leads to more speed - but arithmetic can be trained for sure.
  - godelski 2y ago
    This also matches a lot about what we know about the brain and recall. It is a demonstrable phenomena. Just like how any athlete has quicker reflexes. Sure, some might be innate, but their training definitely makes it faster. Information is information. I mean we all go on "autopilot" at times. Much more frequently in things we do frequently. That's kinda a state of high recall. Not much thinking needs to be done. A great example of this might be a speed cuber, someone who solves rubix cubes fast. Clearly they didn't start that fast.

godelski 2y ago

> IQ is compute speed, not storage. Says who? Honestly. I've never seen that claim before. Sure, tests are timed but that's a proxy for efficiency in extrapolation. If we define IQ in this way then LLMs far outperform any human. I'm pretty confident this would be true of even more traditional LMs. Speed really is just the measurement of recall. A doubt we'd call someone intelligent if they memorized the multiplication table up to 100x100. Maybe at first but when we ask them for 126*8358?

cjcole 2y ago
> > IQ is compute speed, not storage. > Says who? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann#Mathematical_quickness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann#Mathematical_... Von Neumann's mathematical fluency, calculation speed, and general problem-solving ability were widely noted by his peers. Paul Halmos called his speed "awe-inspiring." Lothar Wolfgang Nordheim described him as the "fastest mind I ever met". Enrico Fermi told physicist Herbert L. Anderson: "You know, Herb, Johnny can do calculations in his head ten times as fast as I can! And I can do them ten times as fast as you can, Herb, so you can see how impressive Johnny is!" Edward Teller admitted that he "never could keep up with him", and Israel Halperin described trying to keep up as like riding a "tricycle chasing a racing car." He had an unusual ability to solve novel problems quickly. George Pólya, whose lectures at ETH Zürich von Neumann attended as a student, said, "Johnny was the only student I was ever afraid of. If in the course of a lecture I stated an unsolved problem, the chances were he'd come to me at the end of the lecture with the complete solution scribbled on a slip of paper." When George Dantzig brought von Neumann an unsolved problem in linear programming "as I would to an ordinary mortal", on which there had been no published literature, he was astonished when von Neumann said "Oh, that!", before offhandedly giving a lecture of over an hour, explaining how to solve the problem using the hitherto unconceived theory of duality. A story about von Neumann's encounter with the famous fly puzzle has entered mathematical folklore. In this puzzle, two bicycles begin 20 miles apart, and each travels toward the other at 10 miles per hour until they collide; meanwhile, a fly travels continuously back and forth between the bicycles at 15 miles per hour until it is squashed in the collision. The questioner asks how far the fly traveled in total; the "trick" for a quick answer is to realize that the fly's individual transits do not matter, only that it has been traveling at 15 miles per hour for one hour. As Eugene Wigner tells it, Max Born posed the riddle to von Neumann. The other scientists to whom he had posed it had laboriously computed the distance, so when von Neumann was immediately ready with the correct answer of 15 miles, Born observed that he must have guessed the trick. "What trick?" von Neumann replied. "All I did was sum the geometric series."

AlotOfReading 2y ago

Isn't that just the Knox cube test, which people with aphantasia are substantially slower to answer? That seems like a very silly hiring test given that aphantasia is not considered a cognitive impairment and people who have it aren't less intelligent in any obvious way.