komponisto comments on Helpless Individuals - Less Wrong

42 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 30 March 2009 11:10AM

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Comment author: komponisto 01 December 2010 05:12:35AM 0 points [-]

I could continue the semantic argument ("would it be a CQ test or a cancer test?"), but instead I'll just skip to the real reason I use the term "IQ", which is because it's shorter than "intelligence", and I don't consider "the ability to achieve good results on IQ tests" to be an interesting or important enough concept to deserve exclusive rights to the term.

Comment author: multifoliaterose 03 December 2010 06:14:27AM 1 point [-]

There are a couple of potential issues with your usage:

  1. The ability to achieve good results on IQ tests is correlated with various figures of interest. See the references that Carl Shulman gives here. As such, IQ does have a functional and useful technical meaning and assigning it a new meaning can be confusing.

  2. Different people may have different notions of "the underlying trait that IQ tests are supposed to be measuring." In particular, there's a serious possibility of perhaps unknowingly taking one's own mental architecture (including aesthetic preferences) to define the direction (if not magnitude) in mind-space of this trait on account of generalizing from one example.

The use of "intelligence" stands to suffer from (2) though not (1). I've found it most fruitful to maintain a positivistic attitude toward intelligence as a concept unless I'm in conversation with somebody who I know attaches the same connotations to the term that I do.

Comment author: multifoliaterose 03 December 2010 06:25:19AM 0 points [-]

(My other comment not withstanding; I agree that what IQ tests measure is of limited interest and usefulness; the issue is just that it's not so clear how to do better.)