> We have no dang clue what intelligence is, nor how to measure it.
Broadly in laymen's terms, no, we don't. We do have some ideas though. We have lots and lots of different tests of different facets of intelligence. How high can you count? (crows can count up to 30), how long can you remember things? (elephants can remember things from up to 50 years ago), Memory games, Reasoning. "The Science of Human Intelligence" , by Haier, Colom, and Hunt. is a good read.
it really does feel like 'intelligence' is becoming so much more of a marketing term moreso than it is any actual definitive measure. I was acquaintances with a cognitive science post-doc many years ago who trained under the same program that Douglas Hofstadter was part of (and who he saw as a great popular science communicator but perhaps a bit over-rated when it came to his own research)
my very naive question to him back then was how close we were to understanding human cognition. we were both fans of grand strategy games (though the few hundred hours of Stellaris I played vs his thousands in EU4 paled in comparison) and I was asking if it was possible to map human cognition to the same array of interdependent logical chains-of-reasoning that games like that could be boiled down to
his answer, in short, was 'we are so, so, so far away and no, that's, at best, a reductive mental model of intelligence'
I keep that conversation in mind whenever I hear about all this talk of AGI - that realistically we're so far away from actual AGI in the same way that the inventor(s) of the wheel were from a gas-powered car, and there's many paradigm shifts to go in how we even understand what the nature of intelligence is before we get there
roughly, it reviews common techniques in neuroscience, and comes to the conclusion that they would not be able to understand even simple computing platforms that we have perfect information for (and can perfectly stimulate any internal connection, can perfectly read out the values on any internal connection, etc).
"The new bound saves a factor of ≈ log_3(n) over the prior record by Ford-Green-Konyagin-Maynard-Tao from 2018. The result is also now formalized by Alexeev in Lean."
I've been told that prediction markets provide reasonably good forecasts compared to most other methods. Could you help me understand why that might not be true?
This is one example from a source I just happened to read this morning, which is otherwise pretty positive about the prediction markets.
> Beyond fears about bad actors attempting to distort the markets for profit, some political operatives say the sites rarely deliver political forecasts that are different from traditional polling.
> For instance, polls during Wisconsin's gubernatorial primary showed Democrat David Crowley lagging other candidates by wide margins. Kalshi similarly projected Crowley as a long-shot candidate — but Crowley landed a surprise win.
> "It appears that there really aren't any predictions here, they're just reacting belatedly to public information, like polls and news stories," said Eddie Vale, a Democratic strategist in Washington who worked on Crowley's campaign. "If it was just a fun entertainment tool for political junkies, fine, but to me, all of this is a marketing sheen for an online gambling operation."
So it's not really that they provide bad predictions, it's more that they don't offer anything new. Except, of course, in the case when someone is using insider information in an attempt to profit. All this while also having the downsides of skimming money off every transaction and encouraging gambling habits.
This. Generating a frontend with guarantees can almost not be done with any other language. If you use the graphql module with code generation it's an absolute game changer. Every time I have Claude generate a moderately complex frontend in react I regret it sooner or later due to state issues and inconsistent behaviour. Not with elm. Everything that makes it difficult makes it perfect for ai.
[0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1911.01547
We have no dang clue what intelligence is, nor how to measure it.
[1] https://taylor.town/crowpower
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