Re: Interview with Samantha Kleinberg on CL-GODB, Common Lisp & Bioinformatics

* Pascal Bourguignon

First you'd have to define intelligence.

Or you could just factor analyze outcome data over a wide range of
tests and intellectual life activities. As it happens, there reliably
emerges a single common factor explaining considerably more of the
between-subject variance than any other factor. Now call that factor
"general intelligence" (or "psychometric g", or whatever, it doesn't
really matter) and start exploring it.

So, no, you don't have to define intelligence. It is just there, in
the data. You discover it.

A thing to keep in mind: IQ is a differential, intra-species
concept. It doesn't compare the intelligence of brick, dog, chimp and
man. A philosophical quest for a definition of "intelligence" in the
sense of "what makes us human" is orthogonal to IQ testing.

Marcus
.