[axxto]

How do you measure the capacity for improvisational comedy? How do you measure a talent for telling convincing lies? How do you measure someone's capacity for innovating in a narrative medium? How do you measure someone's ability for psychological insight and a theory of self? How do you measure someone's capacity for understanding irony or picking up subtle social cues? Or for formulating effective metaphors and analogies, or boiling down concepts eloquently? How about for mediating complex, multifaceted interpersonal conflicts effectively? How do you measure someone's capacity for empathy, which necessarily involves incredibly complex simulations and mental models of other people's minds?

Do you think excelling in any of these doesn't require intelligence? You sound like you consider yourself quite intelligent, so are you excellent at all of them? No? How come?

Can you tell me which part of an IQ test or your "rigorous, moslty equivalent definitions for intelligence" capture any of them?

  > I hate how stupid people propagate this lie that we don't know what intelligence is, just because they lack it. It's quite convenient, because how can they be shown to lack intelligence when the word isn't even defined!

How's this: "I hate how stupid people propagate this lie that we know what intelligence is, just because they do well within the narrow definition that they made up. It's quite convenient, because how can they be shown to lack intelligence when their definition of it fits their strengths and excludes their weaknesses!"

[programjames]

> How do you measure the capacity for improvisational comedy?

What makes something funny? Usually, it's by subverting someone's predictions. You have to be good at predicting other's predictions to do this well.

> How do you measure a talent for telling convincing lies?

You have to explain a phenomenon better than the truth to convince someone of your lie.

> How do you measure someone's capacity for innovating in a narrative medium?

As in, world-building? That is more of a memory problem than an intelligence problem, though you do need to be good at compressing the whole world into what is relevant to the story. People who are worse at that will have to take more notes and refer back to them more often.

> How do you measure someone's ability for psychological insight and a theory of self?

They are better at explaining a phenomenon (their self).

> How do you measure someone's capacity for understanding complex, multi-faceted irony or picking up subtle social cues?

Refer to the above. Also, using the adjectives 'complex, multi-faceted' is lazy here. Be more introspective and write what you really want to say.

> Or for formulating effective metaphors and analogies, or boiling down concepts eloquently?

Compression = finding short programs that recover the data.

> How about for mediating complex, multifaceted interpersonal conflicts effectively?

Quite often not an intelligence problem.

> How do you measure someone's capacity for empathy, which necessarily involves incredibly complex simulations and mental models of other people's minds?

"incredibly complex simulations and mental models of other people's minds," however will you do this? Oh, I know! Your brain will have to come up with a small circuit that compresses other people's brain pretty well, as it doesn't have enough capacity to just run the other brain.

> Do you think excelling in any of these doesn't require intelligence? You sound like you consider yourself quite intelligent, so are you excellent at all of them? No? How come?

I am actually pretty good at pretty much all of these compared to the average person.

[soiltype]

> What makes something funny? Usually, it's by subverting someone's predictions.

And in those other cases? You have a rigorous definition of comedy?

> You have to explain a phenomenon better than the truth to convince someone of your lie.

This is so often not true I would argue it's generally false. A story is believed because a listener "wants" to believe it. Some listeners have more or less complex criteria for acceptance.

> As in, world-building? That is more of a memory problem than an intelligence problem, though you do need to be good at compressing the whole world into what is relevant to the story. People who are worse at that will have to take more notes and refer back to them more often.

People like Tolkien and Martin? Note taking as a sign of poor skill/intelligence is a wildly novel take from my point of view.

> Also, using the adjectives 'complex, multi-faceted' is lazy here. Be more introspective and write what you really want to say.

Couldn't I say the same about your use of Introspective? Surely a more detailed phrase exists to describe what you mean.

> interpersonal conflicts... Quite often not an intelligence problem.

Oh, I think this will get at the root of our misunderstandings. I believe I've seen this attitude before. Before I jump to conclusions: Why exactly do you say this skill is not intelligence-based?

[axxto]

Reducing comedy to 'subverting predictions' and empathy to 'compression algorithms' is like explaining music as 'organized sound waves', technically defensible yet completely missing the point. Missing the forest for the trees is an objective sign of limited metacognition, by the way.

The fact that you claim to be 'above average' at empathy and social cues while writing this robotic dismissal that completely misses the point (I asked for measurement methods, you provided questionable definitions) is the ultimate proof of my argument. You haven't defined intelligence, you've just compressed the meaning of it until it's small enough to fit inside your ego.