Definitions of Intelligence

I looked through Definitions of Intelligence and I was struck by how contemptible all these definitions, in fact their entire approach, was. None of them says anyhing about intelligence per se.

They serve merely as a heuristic which an intelligent agent can employ in order to gauge intelligence. Making these "definitions" entirely circular since they depend on what they define in order to be meaningful!

This can be seen simply by looking at the properties of these "definitions" of intelligence and observing that none of them have anything to do with intelligence. What are these properties?

1. goals
2. success
3. interaction
4. environments

Are goals a necessary requirement for an agent to be intelligent? No they are not. An agent could have no goals at all and still be considered intelligent. It might not be considered an agent but that's besides the point.

The point being that whatever makes an agent intelligent can't be the same thing that makes it an agent, otherwise there couldn't be stupid agents.

Is interaction a feature of intelligence? Are environments a feature of intelligence? Is success a feature of intelligence? No, they are not. Not individually and not in any combination. Intelligence isn't what something does, it's what something is.

And that fact is blindingly obvious to anyone of intelligence who has worked or known underachieving gifted children. But perhaps not to imbeciles who wish to deny the notion of gifted intelligence out of petty jealousy.

You see, gifted children are just as likely to become highly unsuccessful in life as they are to become highly successful. So they are "unsuccessful" in "many wide environments". Does this make them unintelligent? Hardly!

Are bacteria intelligent because they can colonize more environments than a human being? Is a single human being stupid because he or she cannot survive in any environment if left alone? Are a thousand idiots more intelligent than a lone genius? Yet this is what the "final definition" implies.

Clearly the standard approach to defining intelligence has deep flaws if it suffers from such trivial counter-examples. The fact these are never noted, let alone addressed, nevermind countered, marks the authors of such work as imbeciles.

Now obviously it's too much to ask an imbecile what intelligence is. Yet this is exactly the absurd situation we are presented with on that page. Definitions produced by imbeciles in a process of group-think. They are entirely unoriginal and the mere aggregation of them adds nothing to them.

Now, if someone capable of originality had been asked to come up with something insightful, they might get "living representation" or something else that would provoke deep thought. Something that has a chance of being right.

Followed up in a formal theory of intelligence.

Choice, diversity and competition

Choice is bad, diversity is good, competition is evil. And the sooner people learn to differentiate between them, the better.

Competition

Competition is defined by sociologists as the willful destruction of your adversaries. Competition is making other people lose. It is anti-social and psychopathic.

Economic competition on a large scale is economic warfare. The victims' bodies (bankrupt businesses) litter the landscape to be picked clean by vultures (called consumers by biologists).

Diversity

Diversity is good because it allows people to use whatever is most closely suited to their needs. If you have a range of numbers from 5 to 10 then none of them are particularly close to 5900. If you increase the range of numbers available to between 0.005 and 10,000 then you'll likely get something much closer to 5900. The same goes for products in general. Diversity adds value, so long as it's actually made use of.

Choice

Choice is a cost, not a value. Nobody wants to choose between three different sizes of toothpaste or 4 different brands of Whitening Toothpaste. Choices impose costs on people, the cost of choosing. Something which is definitely a cost since it is not enjoyed and is avoided wherever possible. It's the reason why people develop routines. The reason they take the same seat in the meeting room after the break. To avoid choosing.

So competition for the sake of competition is evil. Too much diversity that forces an overload of choices on people is evil. And meaningless choices that don't add to diversity are evil too.

How Americans Created The Totalitarian State

Americans have this ludicrous notion of "individual sovereignty". Now, in reality, that's the place Americans don't live in, it's easy to see how absurd this notion is because collectives of all sizes are absolute necessities.

You need cities to suppress suburban sprawl and manage utilities. You need city districts to counter the city's tendency to raze neighbourhoods for highways. You need food coops for decent non-toxic food. You need unions to manage employment insurance. And so on.

But with the Americans' toxic doctrine of "individualism" there is no room for these collectives. Now of course, if a rational response to collectives needs are suppressed then the need for collectives won't just go away. No more than the need for sex and liquor goes away just because Americans are prudes. Rather, the need for collectives re-emerges in some kind of fucked up manner.

And that's how American "individualism" has created the totalitarian state. So for all the Libertarians out there, for all the "small government conservatives out there" you created the totalitarian state you fucking imbeciles.