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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   35546 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022

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The only meaningful measure of intelligence is one's ability to successfully make predictions about the world -- smart people can predict, geniuses can exploit. If you're right, you're right, and if you're wrong, you're wrong. It's a very straightforward thing.

not sure about this. I think the most intelligent people may not make for the best forecasters, or maybe the two are not that highly correlated. Intelligence is more about precession/preciseness of skill whereas forecasting is more about intuition and 'having a feel for things' (with some evidence to support the supposition) , which is not as precise.

If the world's smartest man routinely fails to make accurate predictions about the world, what use is his alleged brilliance? What does he have to show for his intelligence? He needs to be able to achieve or his genius is illusory.

string theory doesn't make predictions as well as Newtonian gravity does, but I don't think anyone would dispute that you need to have a high IQ to understand the math behind it. IQ measures in part the ability to understand abstractions. Predicting is something else, more to do with randomness or non-deterministic systems. There may be some weakly positive correlation, but hardly mutually inclusive.

I'm not saying it doesn't indicate high IQ. I'm saying it's useless to be intelligent but unable to leverage that into successful interfacing with your external reality.

that is a far difference from being a meaningful measure of something. I agree applied intelligence matters but that's different from what I think you originally said

Just different concepts of 'meaningful'. IQ isn't valuable in and of itself, it's what a high IQ can allow you to do that's impressive. Big number without the accolades to back it up is just... a big number.

There are achievements that don't reduce to empirics you know. Anything to do with apriori for instance.

I don't think anyone would deny that Euler was highly intelligent, but who in their right mind would go to him for predictions about the real world?

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