mathemajician comments on Stupid Questions Open Thread - Less Wrong

42 Post author: Costanza 29 December 2011 11:23PM

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Comment author: mathemajician 31 December 2011 01:06:48AM 3 points [-]

I agree that it would be dangerous.

What I'm arguing is that dividing by resource consumption is an odd way to define intelligence. For example, under this definition is a mouse more intelligent than an ant? Clearly a mouse has much more optimisation power, but it also has a vastly larger brain. So once you divide out the resource difference, maybe ants are more intelligent than mice? It's not at all clear. That this could even be a possibility runs strongly counter to the everyday meaning of intelligence, as well as definitions given by psychologists (as Tim Tyler pointed out above).