RobinHanson comments on Belief in Intelligence - Less Wrong

17 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 25 October 2008 03:00PM

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Comment author: RobinHanson 25 October 2008 06:41:05PM 0 points [-]

We also have concepts such as "wealth" and "power" which describe an agent's ability to achieve its goals. Will you be distinguishing "intelligence" from these, or are they synonyms for your purposes?

Comment author: DanielLC 05 October 2012 05:53:14AM 0 points [-]

"Wealth" refers to possession of valuable things specifically. "Power" seems to be more the potential to optimize rather than the act of actually optimizing.

Comment author: RobbBB 31 August 2013 11:28:41PM 0 points [-]

Wealth and intelligence are both kinds of power. The most important distinction may be that we think of wealth as outside the agent, whereas intelligence is internal to the agent. So if you change the agent's environment while leaving the agent intact, its intelligence will remain constant, but its wealth will fluctuate.

If it's hard to exactly define where an agent's boundaries are, the distinction might become merely conventional. For instance, if my normal level of intelligence is reliant on ingesting a certain food or nootropic (or meme), then that resource may be viewed as part of my intelligence (like my brain's architecture), or it may be viewed as an environmental factor that modulates how effective my intelligence is at shaping the particular environment it's in.