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http://lesswrong.com/lw/km6/why_the_tails_come_apart/
I can't find data, but I bet the one-dimensional folk model works quite well among the general population.
It does! It's pretty reasonable to say that I'm much stronger than the average non-athlete, and Dan Green is much stronger than me, and all the fiddly caveats don't really change that analysis.
Does this work better or worse than IQ? I'm not sure.
More objective units of measure and the obvious causal relationship between visible muscle size and strength. Also, you bias IQ tests if you repeatedly take them, but you don't do likewise with strength tests so it's much easier to track changes in an individual's strength over time and most anyone whose lifts weights can objectively verify that he has become stronger. Lifting weights makes you stronger, therefore strength measures something real--no analogous statement exists about IQ.
Also, you bias IQ tests if you repeatedly take them, but you don't do likewise with strength tests so it's much easier to track changes in an individual's strength over time and most anyone whose lifts weights can objectively verify that he has become stronger.
Strength tests are absolutely biased by taking them repeatedly. Athletes call this "specificity".
More objective units of measure
How do you define/determine this?
the obvious causal relationship between visible muscle size and strength
Isn't there an "obvious" causal relationship between brain mass and intelligence?
you bias IQ tests if you repeatedly take them, but you don't do likewise with strength tests
.Above someone remarked that a female weightlifters might have a much more powerful snatch than male powerlifters, due to several strength tests involving specialised skills auxiliary to "general strength". So it seems that you might indeed be able to "bias" (at least some) strength tests.
Lifting weights makes you stronger, therefore strength measures something real--no analogous statement exists about IQ
How about "solving puzzles makes you smarter, therefore IQ measures something real"?
How do you define/determine this?
The standard definition of strength, which the post cleverly avoided ever stating, is "the ability to produce force against external resistance" or some variant thereof. Force is a well-defined physics term, and can be measured pretty directly in a variety of ways.
Isn't there an "obvious" causal relationship between brain mass and intelligence?
No. Whales aren't smarter than humans.
If by "obvious" you mean "the sort of thing you might guess from first principles", then both are obvious. But the muscle-strength relationship is obvious in another sense: in actual data, it will leap out at you as a very large factor. For example, 97% of variance in strength between sexes is accounted for by muscle mass, and one of the strongest predictors of performance in powerlifters is muscle mass per unit height.
So, when trying to form an opinion or position on climate change, what is a rational approach?
As far as I can tell the experts don't agree and have all taken political positions (therefore irrational positions).
Given a field with no expert consensus, where you can't just check things yourself, shouldn't the rational response be uncertainty?
I don't think global warming fits this description, though. AFAIK domain experts almost all broadly agree.
Sub-components of "strength" are each just skills. Some skills have broader applicability transfer than others. There is nothing universally upstream of every single other strength skill.
Some subcomponents aren't skills - or at least, it seems odd to label e.g. "unusually long arms" as a skill - but this is a nitpick.
In response to
There is no such thing as strength: a parody
It is interesting, though, how non-general strength is.
There is indeed a widely (unwittingly) held idea that "strength" is a one-dimensional thing: consider, say, superhero comics where the Hulk is stronger than anybody else, which means he's stronger at everything. You never read a comic where the Hulk is stronger at lifting things but Thor is stronger at throwing; that would feel really weird to most people. If the Marvel universe had a comic about strength sports, the Hulk would be the best at every sport.
But this isn't at all how strength works in the real world: there is a pretty large component of specificity. Very, very few athletes are competitive at high levels in even two strength sports, never mind all of them. Giant male powerlifters frequently have a snatch weaker than tiny female weightlifters, despite having dramatically more lean body mass, and naturally higher testosterone, and (usually) the benefit of performance-enhancing drugs. And if you put a powerlifter in the Highland Games - a contest of strength via various throwing events - well, they'd be hopeless!
To a strength athlete, this is obvious. Of course powerlifters have a lousy snatch! Most powerlifters don't even train the snatch! Strength isn't just about raw muscle mass; there is a very large component of skill, technique, and even neural adaptation to specific movement patterns.
But under the folk one-dimensional model of strength, this is a strange and surprising fact.
Ah... so not one individual personality, but a "city" of of AI's? Well, if I see it not as a "robotic superhuman" but "robotic super-humankind" then it certainly becomes possible - a whole species of more efficient beings could of course outcompete a lower species but I was under the impression running many beings each advanced enough to be sentient (OK Yudkowsky claims intelligence is possible without sentience but how would a non-sentient being conceptualize?) would be prohibitively expensive in hardware. I mean imagine simulating all of us or at least a human city...
If we could build a working AGI that required a billion dollars of hardware for world-changing results, why would Google not throw a billion dollars of hardware at it?
Given that I am wrong, I would prefer being proven wrong to not being proven wrong. However, given a wrongness of unknown status, I would prefer not being proven wrong to being proven wrong.
Given that I am wrong, I would prefer being proven wrong to not being proven wrong.
Yours is probably the central case, but "prove me wrong" and "I hope I'm wrong" aren't unheard-of sentiments. For example, a doctor giving a grim diagnosis. I think this can only (?) happen when the (perceived) value on the object level outweighs concerns about ego.
Uhm. Is there any known experiment that has been tried which has failed with respect to RL?
In the sense, has there been an experiment where one says RL should predict X, but X did not happen. The lack of such a conclusive experiment would be somewhat evidence in favor of RL. Provided of course that the lack of such an experiment is not due to other reasons such as inability to design a proper test (indicating a lack of understanding of the properties of RL) or lack of the experiment happening to due to real world impracticalities (not enough attention having been cast on RL, not enough funding for a proper experiment to have been conducted etc.)
It appears to me that ChristianKI just listed four. Did you have something specific in mind?
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The practice effect for IQ tests is about two orders of magnitude stronger than for strength tests. You could call this "specificity," but at that granularity, it's a bad thing.
Interesting. Can I ask you to unpack this statement? I'm curious what exactly you're comparing.
The difference between "has practiced a movement to mastery" and "has never performed a movement before" can be very large, like my powerlifter/snatch example in the other comment. But this is comparing zero practice to a very large amount of practice over a very long period of time. I would find it easy to believe that IQ tests see much greater returns from small amounts of practice.