Hm. When I originally read your description of solving the matrices, it seemed to me like your algorithm was shaped the wrong way- I would look at the matrix, identify the transformation, predict what the right answer would be, and then find it in the options. (I only used serious thought and hypothesis falsification on the last question.) Now I'm less confident that I understand my algorithm for identifying the transformation.

That loss of confidence is a clue that you are understanding the process better.

How do you "identify the transformation"? That's the whole banana!

There is a separate step, finding the answer in the set of answers, which is a partial confirmation. If one is not certain of the entire transformation, but has identified aspects of it, possible elements of the transformation, sometimes the choice can be made by elimination among the answers. But the process you describe is my own default, and that's how I started. At first it was trivial. It got less simple. Then I saw that I was going to run out of time! Then it became a matter of optimizing what I was going to answer, once I got that I was unlikely to complete.

Obviously, I could take the test again, but that would defeat the purpose. I did go back to review certain problems, for the discussion here. Yes, to be a more standard intelligence test, the results should be reported by age. I suspect that, unless someone has trained for this kind of test, raw results will peak at a certain age, then decline after that.

Or the test could be untimed, in which case I'd expect I could do very well. I might do better than some younger people, just as "smart," who aren't as careful. I would not generally be satisfied with less than total, accurate prediction, with a simple algorithm. (Any answer could be justified with a complicated enough algorithm.)

Back to the question of how the transformation is identified. It's an excellent question. It is questions like this that must be answered to develop artificial intelligence.

And for general artificial intelligence, they must be answered in the general case. It may be possible to find specific, "trick" algorithms that work for specific problems. But humans can solve these problems "out of the box," so to speak, without almost no instruction. How do we do that?

Rather obviously, we are designed to detect patterns of behavior, which we use for prediction.

There is little doubt in my mind that there is an age-related shift. Calling it "bad" would be shallow. There is a trade-off.

I don't see it as a difference in "ability to solve," but rather as a difference in the speed with which untrained heuristics can be used. That could be related to the effect I've long noticed, a marked decline in an ability to multiprocess, to handle multiple independent threads or processes. If solving the matrix involves testing a large number of possibilities, the more that can be tested at once, the faster the process will be. It's as if I've moved toward being a Turing machine, from being massively parallel.

I would not consciously perceive the "separate processes," necessarily. Rather, the result of them would pop up in my consciousness as "ideas." I'd just "see" the solution.

The decline might be the result of increased capacity being devoted to depth rather than breadth. If so, it's not a "bad" happening, but a relative disability related to an improvement in a different ability.

It points to certain issues in life extension, however. The brain might naturally reach a kind of saturation. Life extension without intelligence enhancement in some way, i.e., the development of cyborg technology, might not be all so valuable. (We are experiencing this to a degree in that we have rapid access to massive information, but the bandwidth of those connections is generally narrow.)

But these are just ideas. I have no specific test of "depth."

I'm not sure it will do much good, but here is the post, and this is a permanent link to the discussion as it stands now. This was a goodbye post, to AD, one of the seemingly saner members of the RationalWiki community, an elected moderator. There is a link in my goodbye post back to AD's comment in a discussion that included history, but that's a lot more than I expect people here to be interested in. Suffice it to say that the user has a history of being exactly what he says he is, a highly effective troll. He says "professional."

(To understand some of the discussion, "promote" on RatWiki means "remove sysop privileges" or sometimes "block.")

A "public vote system" has been used for centuries in standard deliberative process. You go to a Town Meeting and think that a question should not be considered, and you so move, and that is subject to immediate and very public vote. Private voting systems have been used and often have an abusive effect. Such systems, in standard process, when allowed, generally require a supermajority. Elections are an exception, where secret ballots are standard.

Much comment here seems to assume yes/no on "private." It's possible to collect data on "impressions" that is private, and it is not necessarily abusive. It can become abusive when this is used in a fixed decision-making system.

The karma system is quite popular, and the way it works should not, ideally, be damaged by "improvements." Improvements may address the ways that it does not work, and there are a number.. There are many good ideas in this thread. Some of them, implemented raw, could do harm. Hence the need for discussion and the development of informed consensus, which can be very different from raw, knee-jerk consensus. Such raw consensus can be used to develop starting points, and is worthy of respect, but not worship.

Otherwise a community is vulnerable to cascades and to confirmation bias.

Standard deliberative process uses committee systems for topics not ready for full consideration and vote. The conversations take place in small groups, where brainstorming may be more open and less harmful, and, ideally, all significant points of view are represented in those groups. Distributed communication is essential for sound and efficient social process.

I don't have an answer to the specific question, only to the class of questions. To approach understanding this, we need to distinguish between reality and what points to reality, i.e, symbols. Our skill as humans is in the manipulation of symbols, as a kind of simulation of reality, with greater or lesser workability for prediction, based in prior observation, of new observations.

"Apples" refers, internally, to a set of responses we created through our experience. We respond to reality as an "apple" or as a "set of apples," only out of our history. It's arbitrary. Counting, and thus "behavior like integers" applies to the simplified, arbitrary constructs we call "apples." Reality is not divided into separate objects, but we have organized our perceptions into named objects.

Examples. If an "apple" is a unique discriminable object, say all apples have had a unique code applied to them, then what can be counted is the codes. Integer behavior is a behavior of codes.

Unique applies can be picked up one at a time, being transferred to one basket or another. However, real apples are not a constant. Apples grow and apples rot. Is a pile of rotten apple an "apple"? Is an apple seed an apple? These are questions with no "true" answer, rather we choose answers. We end up with a binary state for each possible object: "yes, apple," or "no, not apple." We can count these states, they exist in our mind.

If "apple" refers to a variety, we may have Macintosh, Fuji, Golden delicious, etc.

So I have a basket with two apples in it. That is, five pieces of fruit that are Macintosh and three that are Fuji.

I have another basket with two apples in it. That is, one Fuji and one Golden Delicious.

I put them all into one basket. How many apples are in the basket? 2 + 2 = 3.

The question about integer behavior is about how categories have been assembled. If "apple" refers to an individual piece of intact fruit, we can pick it up, move it around, and it remains the same object, it's unique and there is no other the same in the universe, and it belongs to a class of objects that is, again, unique as a class, the class is countable and classes will display integer behavior.

That's as far as I've gotten with this. "Integer behavior" is not a property of reality, per se, but of our perceptions of reality.

Interesting, Friendly-HI. I was pointing to something distinct from both. In the Wikipedia article, "crystallized intelligence" is not about "knowledge," per se, but is something integrated. What has shifted for me is "fast," when it comes to a series of new analyses of my sensory input. I'm not that kind of fast any more. However, "depth" appears to have increased.

To me, it's important that I distinguish my accumulated experience from "truth." It's just my accumulated experience, my past. The present and future remain open, as long as I'm alive.

What I've observed in myself about reports of "God" doing something I'll describe as "insufficient curiosity." I have frequently not asked how the person identified the source as "God."

White beard, what? No, I've assumed, way too easily, that their actual experience doesn't matter.

And this could also be quite interesting if the person is a mathematician. Depends on what is more important to us, solving the unsolved math problem, and perhaps understanding heuristics, or coming up with evidence that something unexpected is going on. Can't explain it? Goddidit. Q.E.D.

The key is confirmed experimental results that are other than predicted by established theory. When theory is very well established, there is a tendency to out-of-hand dismiss contradictory results as probable errors. Sometimes that "theory of error" is accepted without the errors ever being identified. This especially can happen if there is mixed success in confirmation, which can happen when a phenomenon is not understood and is difficult to set up.

Nuclear physics is such a field, where quantum mechanics is incredibly successful at making accurate predictions when the environment is simple, i.e., in a plasma.

However, in the solid state, to apply quantum mechanics, to predict fusion probabilities, notably, requires simplifying assumptions.

Seeking to test the accuracy of these assumptions, Pons and Fleischmann, starting in about 1984, found a heat anomaly. The effect was difficult to set up, it required loading of deuterium into palladium at a ratio higher than was normally considered possible, and most palladium samples didn't work.

They were not ready to announce the work, but the University of Utah forced them, for intellectual property reasons, to hold a press conference. All hell broke loose, it is said that for a few months the bulk of the U.S. discretionary research budget was spent trying to reproduce their results.

Most of these efforts were based on inadequate information about the original research, most failed (for reasons that are now understood), and a cascade developed that there was nothing but incompetence behind the finding.

However, some researchers persisted, and eventually there were many independent confirmations, and the heat effect was found, by a dozen research groups, to be correlated with the production of helium, at the ratio expected for deuterium fusion to helium, within experimental error. Helium was not expected to be a normal product of deuterium fusion (it's a rare branch), and when normal (hot) fusion does result in helium, there is always a gamma ray, required by conservation of momentum. No gamma rays.

The mechanism is not known. What I've written here is what you will find if you look for recent reviews of the field in mainstream journals. (See especially Storms, "Status of cold fusion (2010)," Naturwissenschaften.)

But the opinion is still extremely common that the whole thing is "pathological science," or worse.

Until the mechanism is known, this might be a laboratory curiosity, or it could open up a whole new territory, with vast implications. More research is needed.