LW - Some comments on intelligence by Viliam

The Nonlinear Library

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Some comments on intelligence, published by Viliam on August 3, 2024 on LessWrong.
After reading another article on IQ, there are a few things that I wish would become common knowledge to increase the quality of the debate. Posting them here:
1)
There is a difference between an abstract definition of intelligence such that it could also apply to aliens or AIs (something like "an agent able to optimize for outcomes in various environments") and the specific way the intelligence is implemented in human brains. Because of the implementation details, things can be true about human intelligence even if they are not necessarily true about intelligence in general.
For example, we might empirically find that humans better at X are usually also better at Y, even if we could imagine a hypothetical AI (or even take an already existing one) whose skills at X and Y are unrelated. The fact that X and Y are unrelated in principle doesn't disprove the hypothesis that they are related in human brains.
2)
Saying "the important thing is not intelligence (or rationality), but domain knowledge or experience or something else" is...
...on one hand, true; and the fans of intelligence (or rationality) should probably be reminded of it quite often. Yes, your Mensa membership card or LessWrong account doesn't mean that you no longer have to study things because you can solve relativity in five minutes of armchair reasoning...
...on the other hand, it's not like these things are completely unrelated. Yes, you acquire knowledge by studying, but your intelligence probably has a huge impact on how fast you can do that, or even whether you can do that at all.
So we need to distinguish between short term and long term. In short term, yes, domain knowledge and experience matter a lot, and intelligence is probably not going to save you if the inferential distances are large. But in long term, intelligence may be necessary for acquiring the domain knowledge and experience.
In other words, there is a huge difference between "can use intelligence instead of X, Y, Z" and "can use intelligence to acquire X, Y, Z". The argument about intelligence being less important that X, Y, Z is irrelevant as an objection to the latter.
3)
An article that led me to writing this all proposed that we do not need separate education for gifted children; instead we should simply say that some children are further ahead in certain topics (this part is not going to trigger anyone's political instincts) and therefore we should have separate classes for... those who already know something, and those who don't know it yet.
This would nicely avoid the controversy around intelligence and heredity etc., while still allowing the more intelligent kids (assuming that there is such a thing) to study at their own speed. A win/win solution for both those who believe in intelligence and those who don't?
Unfortunately, I think this is not going to work. I approve of the idea of disentangling "intelligence" from "previously gained experience". But the entire point of IQ is that previously gained experience does not screen off intelligence. Your starting point is one thing; the speed at which you progress is another thing.
Yes, it makes sense in the classroom to separate the children who already know X ("advanced") from the children who don't know X yet ("beginners"). No need for the advanced to listen again to the things they already know. But if you keep teaching both groups at the speed optimal for their average members, both the gifted beginners and the gifted advanced will be bored, each one in their own group.
A system that allows everyone to achieve their full potential would be the one where the gifted beginner is allowed to catch up on the average advanced, and where the gifted advanced is allowed to leave the average advanced behin...