Re: The skill of learning skills.

Lester Zick wrote: 
Okay. But how is your possible measure of intelligence superior to
"we'll know it when we see it"? All the different schools of thought
seem to have their own measure of what they're looking for in smarts.

The "we'll know it when we see it" definition is as bad as it gets. You cannot derive anything from such a definition except a yes/no answer with no reasoning. 

Well I agree except your resolution of the paradox seems to be "we'll
know it when it gets skillful". Traveler seems to think "we'll know it
when it gets timing". Glen's seems to be "we'll know it when it gets
trainable".Dan's appears to be "we'll know it when it's neruological".
Darwin's was "we'll know it when it gets evolutionary". These all take
the resolution of the paradox a step further without solving the
paradox or even being able to say exactly what the paradox is. Besides
there are already systems with timing, trainability neurology, evolve,
and are skillful without evidence of intelligence.

Everyone has their own ideas for what an intelligence is. We need to pick the definitions that seem reasonable and strive to create something which fits the description.

My proposed measure is not unique. It may not be the best around either, I'm not claiming it is. It does have some predictive power though. I noted some interesting consequences after the definition. It is also more concrete than many other definitions. I was hoping we could tighten it up further, or come up with something else that is concrete. 

The problem here is how to tighten it up in the direction of
intelligence. We could combine all the factors cited above and
still not know what intelligence is.

On the contrary we would have created a definition for what we're looking for. Instead of searching for that warm and fuzzy "aha!" feeling we'd have a concrete means of judging our progress. The better our definition the better we can judge our progress. That is what I mean by tightening.

No amount of defining will give us the answer outright but you shouldn't expect it to.

I thought you were against "we'll know it when we see it" approaches
to intelligence. We don't resolve that problem by replacing the term
"see" with "timing" "trainability" "neurology" "evolve" or "skillful".
The problem is the "we'll know it when it . . ." part of the equation
and not the ". . . see, train,, skillful, etc." part. Those terms are
just descriptive references to various aspect of intelligence.

Actually there is an important difference. We repleace "we know it when ...." with "the more ... the more intelligent". Do you see the distinction? Its the difference between a compass that points at the north pole and a light that turns on when youre there.

-- Risujin
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