Benjamin Goertzel wrote:
Richard,
I don't think Shane and Marcus's overview of definitions-of-intelligence
is "poor quality".
I'll explain why I said "poor quality".
In my experience of marking student essays, there is a stereotype of the
"night before deadline" essay, which goes like this. If the topic is X,
the student grabs a bunch of definitions that other people have given of
X, and they start the essay by saying "Well, we don't really know what X
is in all it's [sic] glory, but So-and-so has said [definition 1]. In
contrast, So-and-so-other has disagreed and said that [definition 2]
......" and on and on through a long and miserable list of quotations.
Then, realizing that something more is needed, the essay writer winds up
with a commentary that comes out of nowhere and arbitrarily declares
that some point of view or some formula is probably the best.
In reading Legg and Hutter's first essay in the AGIRI-06 workshop, and
now their more recent expansion of that paper, I see no difference
between what they did and the stereotypic night-before-deadlne essay.
That is why I comdemned it with the phrase "poor quality".
As for your other (very diplomatic) comment, phlogiston was also a nice
example of a precise formulation of one perspective on the
multidimensional concept of combustion. Multidimensional concepts are
sometimes not what they are cracked up to be.
Your job is to be diplomatic. Mine is to call a spade a spade. ;-)
Richard Loosemore
I think it is just doing something different than what you think it should be
doing.
The overview is exactly that: A review of what researchers have said about
the definition of intelligence.
This is useful as a view into the cultural mind-space of the research
community regarding the intelligence concept.
As for their formal definition of intelligence, I think it is worthwhile as a
precise formulation of one perspective on the multidimensional concept
of intelligence. I don't agree with them that they have somehow captured
the essence of the concept of intelligence in their formal definition though;
I think they have just captured one aspect...
-- Ben G
On 1/14/08, Richard Loosemore <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Pei Wang wrote:
On Jan 13, 2008 7:40 PM, Richard Loosemore <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
And, as I indicated, my particular beef was with Shane Legg's paper,
which I found singularly content-free.
Shane Legg and Marcus Hutter have a recent publication on this topic,
http://www.springerlink.com/content/jm81548387248180/
which is much richer in content.
Unfortunately, this paper is not so much "richer in content" as
"containing a larger number of words and formulae". It adds nothing to
the previous (poor quality) paper, falls into exactly the same pitfalls
as before, and repeats the trick of pulling an arbitrary mathematical
definition out of the hat without saying why this definition should
correspond with the natural or commonsense definition.
Any fool can mathematize a definition of a commonsense idea without
actually saying anything new.
Richard Loosemore
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