# Some comments on intelligence

After reading another article on IQ, there are a few things that I wish would become common knowledge to increase the quality of the debate. Posting them here:

1)

There is a difference between an *abstract* definition of intelligence such that it could also apply to aliens or AIs (something like "an agent able to optimize for outcomes in various environments") and the specific way the intelligence is implemented *in human brains*. Because of the implementation details, things can be true about human intelligence even if they are not necessarily true about intelligence in general.

For example, we might empirically find that humans better at X are usually also better at Y, even if we could imagine a hypothetical AI (or even take an already existing one) whose skills at X and Y are unrelated. The fact that X and Y are unrelated *in principle* doesn't disprove the hypothesis that they are related *in human brains*.

2)

Saying "the important thing is not intelligence (or rationality), but domain knowledge or experience or something else" is...

...on one hand, true; and the fans of intelligence (or rationality) should probably be reminded of it quite often. Yes, your Mensa membership card or LessWrong account doesn't mean that you no longer have to study things because you can solve relativity in five minutes of armchair reasoning...

...on the other hand, it's not like these things are completely *unrelated*. Yes, you acquire knowledge by studying, but your intelligence probably has a huge impact on how *fast* you can do that, or even whether you can do that *at all*.

So we need to distinguish between short term and long term. In short term, yes, domain knowledge and experience matter a lot, and intelligence is probably not going to save you if the inferential distances are large. But in long term, intelligence may be necessary for *acquiring* the domain knowledge and experience.

In other words, there is a huge difference between "can use intelligence *instead of* X, Y, Z" and "can use intelligence *to acquire* X, Y, Z". The argument about intelligence being less important that X, Y, Z is irrelevant as an objection to the latter.

3)

An [article](https://commenter42.substack.com/p/substacks-obsession-with-simplistic) that led me to writing this all proposed that we do not need separate education for gifted children; instead we should simply say that some children are further ahead in certain topics (this part is not going to trigger anyone's political instincts) and therefore we should have separate classes for... those who *already* know something, and those who don't know it *yet*. This would nicely avoid the controversy around intelligence and heredity etc., while still allowing the more intelligent kids (assuming that there is such a thing) to study at their own speed. A win/win solution for both those who believe in intelligence and those who don't?

Unfortunately, I think this is not going to work. I approve of the idea of disentangling "intelligence" from "previously gained experience". But the entire point of IQ is that previously gained experience does *not* screen off intelligence. Your *starting* point is one thing; the speed at which you *progress* is another thing.

Yes, it makes sense in the classroom to separate the children who already know X ("advanced") from the children who don't know X yet ("beginners"). No need for the advanced to listen again to the things they already know. But if you keep teaching both groups at the speed optimal for their *average* members, both the gifted beginners and the gifted advanced will be bored, each one in their own group.

A system that allows everyone to achieve their full potential would be the one where the gifted beginner is allowed to *catch up* on the average advanced, and where the gifted advanced is allowed to leave the average advanced *behind*. But if the gifted beginner is in the classroom full of average beginners, that is *not* going to happen, because their *lessons* will always stay behind the advanced group. Even if the advanced group only progresses at the speed of the average advanced, the only way for the gifted beginner to get to that group would be to get some knowledge outside their classroom.

It might actually be better for the gifted beginner to be incorrectly sorted into the advanced group -- at the beginning, they would feel lost because they wouldn't know what their classmates already do, but there is a chance they might sooner or later catch up on them. But if we tried to make such accidents happen on purpose, then we are kinda reinventing sorting by intelligence.

Thus from certain perspective, sorting children by their initial experience could be even *worse* for the gifted beginners than not being sorted at all -- not being sorted at all at least allows them to progress at the average speed, while being sorted to the beginner group reduces them to the average-beginner speed. And if there is a(n imperfect) correlation between intelligence and initial experience, then we have effectively sorted the gifted beginner into the *lower*-intelligence classroom. (And if children from disadvantaged groups are likely to have lower initial experience than would be expected for their intelligence, then we have designed a system to sort gifted children from disadvantaged groups into lower-intelligence classrooms.) Ouch!

(However, allowing each child to *individually* progress at their own speed, that would be good for everyone. Also, very expensive, or would require AI tutors. So perhaps the AI tutors will finally solve this problem without anyone having to make an official statement on the intelligence and its possible relevance for education.)