The "world's smartest man" very recently predicted on X that Bitcoin would hit $220k by the end of the year. [1]
Here's the thing: IQ probably doesn't mean much of anything. But it is one of only a handful of ways we have to benchmark intelligence. The training of AI systems critically requires benchmarks to understand gain/loss in training and determine if minute changes in the system is actually winging more intelligence out of that giant matrix of numbers.
What I deeply believe is: We're never going to invent superintelligence, not because its impossible for computers to achieve, but because we don't even know what intelligence is.
While it seems unlikely, I wouldn't find it impossible (edit: learning more about IQ score, yeah 276 is definitly BS). You can be "intelligent" as in very good at solving logic puzzle and math problem, and the most obtuse and subjectively dumb person when it comes to anything else. It might be less likely but definitely happened.
I have met people working in very advanced field having the perspective and reflection of a middle schooler on politics, social challenges, etc. Somewhere also clearly blinded by their own capacity in own field and thought that it would absolutely transfer to other field and were talking with authority while anybody in the room with knowledge could smell the BS from miles away.
I'm not saying he doesn't have 276 IQ because it's impossible for someone who says that stuff to be smart, I'm saying he doesn't have 276 IQ because people who say that stuff tend to also lie about their IQ.
Well, it is mathematically impossible. Traditional IQ tests have a mean/median of 100, and follow a normal distribution with standard-deviation of 15 points.
So 270 would be 11 standard deviations above normal so 1 in 17,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 people.
It's possible in the same way its possible that you will spontaneously phase through the floor due to a particular outcome of atomic resonance. Possible, but so unlikely it almost certainly has not, nor ever will happen.
Might something a small as a grain of sand have phased through a solid barrier as thin as a piece of paper somewhere on earth, at some point over billions of years? Sure. Paper is still pretty thick, and a grain of sand is enormous on the atomic scale, but it's at least in the realm of practical probability. When you start talking about cum(P) events in the realm of 1/1e30 you simply can't produce a scenario with that many dice rolls. If our population was 8 quadrillion and spanned a 40,000 year empire we would likely still never see an individual 11σ from the mean.
The probability is exactly zero by definition. The maximum score on a test is a raw score of 100%. Tests are normalized to have the reported scores fit a normal distribution. An out-of-distribution score indicates an error in normalizing the test.
In other words, the highest IQ of every living person has a defined upper bound that is dependent on the number of living people and it is definitionally impossible to exceed this value. Reports of higher values are mistakes or informal exaggerations, similar to a school saying a student is one that you would only encounter in a million years. By definition it is not possible to have evidence to support such a statement.
The maximum IQ score anyone can get depends on the total number of people who have taken IQ tests so far. Even if every single person alive today took an IQ test (which is absurd in itself), the maximum IQ achievable would be between 190-197. In practice, I'd guess the maximum is somewhere between 170 and 185 (millions to tens of millions of IQ test results which were recorded).
Even then, you need special tests to distinguish between anyone with IQ higher than about 160 - all those people get the same (perfect) score on regular IQ tests.
So: claiming to have an IQ of 276? Bullshit. The guy whose parents claimed he scored 210 on an IQ test? Also bullshit. To get 210, there would have to have been ~500 billion IQ test results recorded.
Between 8 and 9 billion. But "impossible" means a chance of zero, and 8 billion / 17,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 > 0, so it's not impossible. The chances that he's lying or delusional are vastly higher of course, but that's no reason to use "impossible" incorrectly.
Impossible is almost always a colloquialism, almost everything is possible is you accept a low enough probability of success. We are talking about something less likely than almost anything else ever called impossible.
No, I think you are misunderstanding. IQ does not describe the likelihood of someone being that smart. It just means you order a number of people by their „intelligence“, the one in the middle is defined as 100 and then it depends on how many other people are in that line which IQ number the person at the end of the line gets. So it’s impossible because the definition of IQ is such that a certain number doesn’t come up without a certain number of measurements.
It‘s as if you would say 150% of all people are female. That is impossible, not just unlikely.
Depends on the exact "IQ" test but many do not have an upper bound. The thing to understand about IQ tests is that they were designed and are primarily used as a diagnosis tool by psychologists to identify learning deficiencies. There really isn't much evidence that having a 180 vs a 140 IQ means a whole lot of anything beyond one's ability to take that specific test. If anything, having an extremely high score outside of the normal range may indicate neuro-divergence and likely savant syndrome. Some people are savants in specific ways - working memory, pattern recognition, language skills, etc. IQ tests certainly test several different categories of intelligence, but also certainly leaves out a few other known forms of intelligence.
> Don't legitimate IQ tests top out at 160 for adults?
“Top out” can be interpreted many ways. It depends on how they are used.
Modern tests are fairly accurate up to 2sd (70-130). The tests start wavering in accuracy between 2sd and 3sd (55-70 and 130-145).
Over 3sd, and the only thing one can confidently say is that the examinee is most likely lower or higher than 3sd (55 and 145). The tests just don’t have enough data points to discriminate finely beyond those thresholds.
Let me further say that, on the high end, there are very few jobs for which I would make any selection decision based on how high an IQ score (or proxy thereof) is over 130. There are other variables, many of which are easier to measure, that are better predictors of success.
All of this doesn’t even take into consideration that there is relatively more type II error/bias in IQ results — that is, there are plenty of people who score less than their theoretical maximum (e.g., due to poor sleep the previous night), while there are relatively fewer people who score much higher than their theoretical maximum.
Yes they do. Not that it ever stopped people from making claims about having higher IQ.
IQ 160 means that you are 1 in 30,000 of your age group. That means that to calibrate a test that can measure that high, the authors had to test more than 30,000 people in each age group (depending on what statistical certainty you need, but it could be 10x the number for reasonable values). Not sure how large the age groups typically are, but the total number of people necessary for calibration is counted in millions. You have to pay them all for participating in the calibration, and that's not going to be cheap.
And with values greater than IQ 160, the numbers grow exponentially. So I am rolling to disbelieve than anyone actually calibrated tests for such large numbers. (Especially once the numbers start to exceed the total population of Earth, which is around IQ 190.)
There are separate tests for the extremes, but obviously less researched because the further out you go the less they have to work on.
Many years ago, while unemployed, I was sent for a intelligence and dyslexia test (because of the very same perceived waste of potential that the article talks about). I was not dyslexic but scored above the range that the intelligence test could measure. The professor(I believe he was moonlighting for research funding) performing the test talked about the upper range tests, but said they were very long, required specialists to conduct and there's seldom any reason to investigate where you are in the upper range.
Then we went on to waste a huge amount of time talking about human perception and I remember describing an idea that finally seems to be feasible because the new Steam VR headset does it and calls it Foveated rendering.
I can't specifically recall the date of this but the tester was recording results on his palm pilot, which was a flash new thing at the time.
Usually. There's diminishing returns the higher you go. The difference between 150 and 175 is much smaller than 125 and 150.
When you go from 30 seconds to 15 seconds to solve a problem, that's noticeable. But when you go from half a second to a quarter of a second, the difference doesn't really matter.
So a lot of IQ tests have some sort of ceiling where the only thing they can tell you is "Yeah, it's more than this".
Every 15 iq points makes you 1 standard deviation above the median. That means if you legitimately have an IQ of 276, you would 1 in 2.3 * 10^31, which is many orders of magnitude greater than the number of humans in history.
This guy is a fraud, he isn't measured by any legit institute, only by some random one which stated he is intelligent and he claims he was measured at 276 IQ.
He's low-key just trolling at this point, aaying he wants asylum in the US and making videos about how jesus/God is real with some scientific methods etc.
Just go check out his YouTube you'll see what I'm talking about.
First off, we don't have a good way to actually measure an individual's intelligence. IQ is actually meant to correlate with g which is a hidden factor we're trying to measure. IQ tests are good insofar as you look at the results of them from the perspective of a population. In these cases individual variation in how well it correlates smooths out. We design IQ tests and normalise IQ scores such that across time and over the course of many studies these tests appear to correlate with this hidden g factor. Moreover, anything below 70 and above 130 is difficult to measure accurately, IQ is benchmarked such that it has a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15. Below 70 and above 130 is outside of two standard deviations.
So, in summary, IQ is not a direct measure of intelligence. What you're doing here is pointing at some random guy who allegedly scored high on an IQ test and saying: "Look at how dumb that guy is. We must be really bad at testing."
But to say we don't know what intelligence is, is silly, since we are the ones defining that word. At least in this sense. And the definition we have come up with is grounded in pragmatism. The point of the whole field of research is to come up with and keep clarifying a useful definition.
Worth also noting that you can study for an IQ test which will produce an even less correlated score. The whole design and point of IQ tests is done with the idea of testing your ability to come up with solutions to puzzles on the spot.
My point is to state that one of two things must be true: Either IQ does not really measure Intelligence, or Intelligence (being the thing IQ measures or correlates to) isn't much of a desirable quality for agentic systems to have. I suspect its a mix. The people on the upper end of the IQ spectrum tend to lead wholly uninspiring lives; the 276 guy isn't the only example, fraud or not, there's a couple university professors with relatively average publishing history, a couple suicides, a couple wacko cult leaders, a couple self-help gurus... and the goat, Terrance Tao, he's up there, but its interesting how poorly the measure correlates with anything we'd describe as "success".
The apologists enter the chat and state "well, its because they're frauds or they're gaming the system" without an ounce of recognition that this is exactly what we're designing AI systems to do: Cheat the test. If you expect being able to pass intelligence evals as being a way to grow intelligence, well, I suspect that will work out just about as well as IQ tests do for identifying individuals capable of things like highly creative invention.
You are throwing around anecdotes. They're not that helpful.
It's worth noting that success in life (for whatever that is defined as) is not the same thing as intelligence. And being intelligent isn't even enough for you to be successful in intellectual pursuits either.
You can be highly intelligent and receive no education, have no access to books (or be unable to read) and then you might be able to intelligently solve the problem of eating a sandwich but that wont get you anywhere.
Likewise, you can be intelligent and have access to the right tools but you might be too anxious to try to excell. Maybe you're intelligent and have unmedicated ADHD causing you to constantly fail to actually get anything completes in a timely manner.
There are a lot of things between IQ and success in life. But we do know for a fact that when controlling for other factors, we see positive trends between IQ and life success. That doesn't mean that IQ is the only factor.
Certainly the fact you can pull out a handful of anecdotes about high IQ individuals and talk about how uninspiring their lives are doesn't mean that all high IQ people are living uninspiring lives, or that living an inspiring life is uncorrelated with IQ, or that there is even a meaningful definition of an inspiring life.
Lastly, please note that there are lots of successful people who had an IQ test where they scored really low, and lots of unsuccessful people who had an IQ test where they scored high. This will in part be due to the fact that IQ doesn't corelate at 100% with anything, but also due to the fact that IQ doesn't correlate with itself over time at 100%. You can do an IQ test on an exceptionally bad day, or an exceptionally good day, you might get an IQ test which is not good at measuring you in particular. That's why when we do research on this topic we apply multiple different tests, we control for variables, and we run these on large groups of people.
Whether intelligence is useful for a model or not, who knows. All I can tell you with relative confidence is that IQ tests are designed with humans in mind, and when you apply them to models, it is no longer clear what they measure.
One thing models don't have (yet) is lives which they can live and which we can study.
> IQ probably doesn't mean much of anything. But it is one of only a handful of ways we have to benchmark intelligence.
IQ means a lot of things (higher IQ people are measurably better at making associations and generating original ideas, are more perceptive, learn faster, have better spatial awareness).
It doesn't give them the power to predict the future.
It is less meaningful than that. It identifies who does well at tests for those things. That is not the same thing as being "better" at such things, it often just means "faster". IQ tests are also notorious for cultural bias. In particular with the word associations, they often just test for "I'm a white American kid who grew up in private schools."
And I say this as one of the white amercian kids who did great on those tests. My scores are high, but they are not meaningful.
When I was a young kid my eldest sister (who was 17 years older than me) was an educational psychologist and used to give me loads of intelligence tests - so I got pretty good at doing those kinds of tests. I actually think they are pretty silly, mostly because I generally come out very well in them...
It somewhat indicates better pattern recognition so I might give them advantage on predicting things in general. Not that it will make them prophets or oracles. But Prediction from higher IQ person is more likely to be correct. Not that world cannot be illogical and go against those predictions.
> What I deeply believe is: We're never going to invent superintelligence, not because its impossible for computers to achieve, but because we don't even know what intelligence is.
Speak for yourself, not all of humanity. There are plenty of rigorous, mostly equivalent definitions for intelligence: The ability to find short programs that explain phenomena (compression). The capability to figure out how to do things (RL). Maximizing discounted future entropy (freedom). 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 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!"
> 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.
> 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?
> And in those other cases? You have a rigorous definition of comedy?
There's surely more to comedy than subverting expectations. Someone else who cares more about comedy in particular can figure that out for themself, but surely I gave enough of the general idea to make it clear how you could go about measuring the intelligence necessary for comedy.
> A story is believed because a listener "wants" to believe it. Some listeners have more or less complex criteria for acceptance.
Yeah, that's the sense of "better" I was going for. I could have been more clear here, so I'm glad you figured out what I meant.
> Couldn't I say the same about your use of Introspective? Surely a more detailed phrase exists to describe what you mean.
It was a not-so-kind way of saying, "don't point at vague ideas to obscure what you really mean and make it difficult for others to understand what you mean to keep your opinion unassailable."
> Why exactly do you say this skill [resolving conflicts] is not intelligence-based?
Most people have more time to think than they actually use during conflicts, so I expect most of the time conflicts come from people preferring to not think than because they lack the ability. That or a fundamental value difference (you want my food, I want my food).
> Most people have more time to think than they actually use during conflicts, so I expect most of the time conflicts come from people preferring to not think than because they lack the ability.
This seems to imply that intelligence only exists in deliberate, conscious thought. Do you think that's true?
Second, revolving conflicts is not the same thing as getting into them, so it's unclear why bring that up at all.
True. I expect most conflicts come from people preferring not to think, and I also expect most conflicts escalate from people preferring not to think. Those are separate statements, and I only said the former.
> This seems to imply that intelligence only exists in deliberate, conscious thought. Do you think that's true?
Eh, I don't think it implies that, and I also don't think that is true.
What you need for conflict resolution is usually a willingness to try to resolve the conflict. In rare situations, where communication and time is limited, you can actually run into the issue where you have to be smart enough to figure out what the other person wants (and see if you can come up with a mutually beneficial offer), but often in real life you can just spend more time thinking and ask them what they want.
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.
I purposefully do not give out methods to measure intelligence, because people can train on them. I knew you wanted that, but that does not mean you get what you want. I also find it strange how you expect me to be empathetic in a way that makes you feel good about yourself, when you deserve no such compassion after pulling the dark arts on me.
That's ok, me and my "dark arts" will have to make do without your "compassion", somehow. And the world will have to make do without "training" on your secret "methods to measure intelligence", somehow.
I don't appreciate your expletives in your original unedited post, by the way, but the fact that you lost your temper is once again proof of something. You sound young, so I hope one day you "find a short program" to recover that data.
That last part was not sarcasm, in case you have any trouble picking it up.
> I don't appreciate your expletives in your original unedited post, by the way, but the fact that you lost your temper is once again proof of something.
It was the first edit where I added them, since I could not reply to your post, and I removed them once I could reply. Yes, I lost my temper. You did too (and first)... you're just less honest and put up a facade of politeness.
> And the world will have to make do without "training" on your secret "methods to measure intelligence", somehow.
Is the goal here to provoke me enough to get what you want? lol. Maximally adversarial.
If you want to have a discussion in good faith, then you need to work on your rhetoric. People are unlikely to want to engage with you, here or in your real life, if you regularly talk like that. Seek help.
My goal wasn't to have a discussion, it was to shut down the propagation of lies. This is one of those memetic viruses that people keep passing around, that most people passing around don't even bother to think about, and it has some pretty negative consequences, such as aiding in the elimination of American gifted programs.
Honestly not sure if this is a bit, it's so on-the-nose... Taking it at face value, you are literally claiming to know precisely what intelligence is? You would be the first to know if so. You should probably publish quickly before someone steals your definition!
In your post is demonstrated one of the deep mysteries of intelligence: How can a smart person make such a dumb assertion? (I'll give a hint: consider that "intelligence" is not a single axis)
I think Solomonoff beat me by about 70 years, and Wissner-Gross & Freer by about 10 years. Even if I had something novel to publish in this area, I think I would rather do something like solve ARC-AGI and make a lot of money.
1. Religious mysticism. The murkier people are on concepts like thinking, consciousness, and intelligence, the easier it is to claim they include some metaphysical aspect. Since you cannot actually pin down the metaphysical aspect, they must claim it is because you cannot pin down the physical aspect.
2. People do not like feeling less intelligent than other people, so they try to make the comparator ill-defined.
#2 is not relevant, and it also seems basically untrue.
So your belief is that the global scientific community broadly agrees that "intelligence" has not been rigorously defined because the global scientific community is trapped in religious mysticism?
I am going to be honest, and I'm not saying this as a jab - this is starting to sound completely disconnected from reality. The people who study intelligence are not, as a rule, mired in metsphysical hand-waving.
Huh? You asked, "why is there broad consensus today that intelligence is ill-defined?" That's what I answered. Did you mean to ask a different question, "why is there broad consensus among people who research intelligence that it is ill-defined?" Which kinds of people are you talking about? The information theorists? The machine learning researchers? The linguists? The psychologists?
The information theorists generally agree it has a precise definition, though they may choose different ones. The machine learning researchers typically only know how to run empirical experiments, but a small group of them do theory, and they generally agree intelligence is low Kolmogorov complexity. The linguists generally agree it cannot be defined, in the nihilistic sense, but if you posit a bunch of brains, then words have meaning by being signals between brains and intelligence is moving the words closer to the information bottleneck. I don't know what the psychologists say on the matter, though I wonder if they have the mathematical tools to even say things precisely.
Ok.. Let’s ask a different question. Assuming development of super-intelligence is possible.. How do you measure it? What criteria satisfies the “this is super intelligence”? You honestly sound like most pseudo-intellectuals I hear discussing this very topic..: Ironic how you think you’re the brilliant one and it’s others who are stupid… Actually not really ironic a fool doesn’t know he is a fool.
I literally gave you the criterion. You can measure, "I have this model that is supposed to compress data. I have this data. Does it compress the data into fewer bits than other models? Than humans?"
Or, "I have this game and this model. Does the model win the game more often than other models or humans?"
Or, "I have this model that takes in states in an environment and outputs actions. I have this environment. Does the actions it outputs have a higher discounted future entropy than other models or humans?"
True: A shadow take that I have been noodling on is that "ability to correctly predict the future" is actually the only true characteristic of intelligence. All other things we might label as intellect are either expressions of that, or something different that is more accurately categorized under a different label.
This isn't even that. If I'm a person others may take as a reference and I hold Bitcoin, it is in my interest to publicly state that Bitcoin is going to increase in value, because that in itself makes it increase in value and it's good for me.
But doing what is in one's best interest isn't necessarily the more intelligent decision. In a rat society, the more "intelligent" rats can possibly be better at acquiring resources to survive if selective pressure is put upon those with such talents but can just as well be early signifiers of 'behavioral sinks'[0]. Not to mention, certain illnesses, mental and otherwise can change motive regardless of IQ.
Actions don't necessarily dictate intelligence. The goal of life has to be defined to make such arguments. For example, using a maze as an analog you could argue the more intelligent person can arrive to the end faster and more elegantly but with life, it has no such defined and agreed on ends. If we're arguing that selfishness is a sign of intelligence then that view is quite myopic.
Exactly. We don't have a good definition of intelligence and I don't think we ever will. Like all social concepts, it is highly dependent on the needs, goals, and values of the human societies that define it, and so it is impossible to come up with a universal definition. If your needs don't align with the needs an AI has been trained to meet, you are not going to find it very intelligent of helpful for meeting those needs.
You're quite literally babbling. If a word has no good definition, it ceases to be a word. All you really mean is you use the word "intelligence" very loosely, without really knowing what you mean when you use it. You just use it to point at a concept that's vague in your head. That does not mean you could not make that concept more precise, if you felt inclined to be more introspective. It also does not mean that the precise idea I think of when I use the word "intelligence" is the same as your idea. But they'll often be close enough or even equivalent mathematically, as long as we both have precise definitions in mind.
> But they'll often be close enough or even equivalent mathematically
Who is babbling? The number of concepts in human language that have no mathematical formalization far outnumber the ones that do, lol.
Yes, we can, obviously, come up with shared, mathematically precise definitions for certain concepts. Keep in mind that:
A. These formal or scientific definitions are not the full exhaustion of the concept. Linguistic usage is varied and wide. Anyone who has bothered to open an introductory linguistics textbook understands this.
B. The scientific and mathematical definitions still change over time and can also change across cultures and contexts.
I can assure you that someone who has scored very high on an IQ test would not be considered "intelligent" in a group of film snobs if they were not aware of the history of film, up to date on the latest greats, etc. etc. These people would probably use the word intelligent to describe what they mean (knowledge of film) and not the precise technical definition we've come up with, if any, whether you like it or not.
My point is not that it is impossible to come up with definitions, my point is that for socially fluid concepts like intelligence, which are highly dependent on the needs and circumstances of the people employing the word, we will likely never pin it down. There is an asterisk on every use of the word. This is the case with basically every word to more or lesser degree, that's why language and ideas evolve in the first place.
My whole point is that people that don't realize this and put faith in IQ as though it is some absolute, or final, indicator of intelligence are dumb and probably just egotists who are uncomfortable with uncertainty and want reassurance that they are smart so that they can tell other people they are "babbling" and feel good about themselves and their intellectual superiority complex (read: self justified pride in being an asshole).
My claim is that this high variability and contextual sensitivity is a core part of this word and the way we use it. That's what I mean when I say I don't think we'll ever have a good definition.
EDIT: Or, to make it a little easier to understand. We will never have a universal definition of "moral good" because it is dependent on value claims, people will argue morality forever. My position is that "intelligence" is equally dependent on value claims which I think anyone who has spent more than five minutes with people not like themselves or trained in different forms of knowledge intuitively understands this.
Babbling in the mathematics sense: no information transmitted.
I agree with you in the linguistic sense on the word 'intelligence'. Everyone has their own colloquial meaning. That doesn't make their definitions correct. If someone says, "exponential growth," just to mean fast growth, they're wrong (according to me). It's impossible to have universally agreed upon definitions, but we can at least try to standardize some of them. If you only care about intelligence in regards to a specific niche, add adjectives not definitions.
IQ tests measure 'intelligence' in the general, correct sense of the word. Not perfectly, but they're pretty good. If you care about a specific task, you can finetune on that task. While a generally intelligent agent will do better than a less intelligent agent at pretty much all tasks, it can still be defeated by test-time compute.
Here's the thing: IQ probably doesn't mean much of anything. But it is one of only a handful of ways we have to benchmark intelligence. The training of AI systems critically requires benchmarks to understand gain/loss in training and determine if minute changes in the system is actually winging more intelligence out of that giant matrix of numbers.
What I deeply believe is: We're never going to invent superintelligence, not because its impossible for computers to achieve, but because we don't even know what intelligence is.
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/world-smartest-man-predicts-b...