What if intelligence was simply the ability to convince others you’re intelligent? I know it sounds like a cop-out (isn’t any recursive definition a cop-out) but with so many wildly different theories about what intelligence really is, it’s by far not the most unreasonable one.

This brings me to an interesting thought on how intelligence should be measured. The intelligence quotient test (you know, those puzzles) has been criticized widely as both suffering from false positives (you can train yourself to solve these brain teasers and puzzles; they are fairly predictable and being able to do them doesn’t necessarily make you intelligent) and false negatives (people who don’t have strong verbal skills will be deemed “unintelligent”). How about I measure intelligence by asking everyone how intelligent they think everyone else is. I would then weigh the opinions by how well each reviewer knows the reviewee, and by how intelligent they were deemed to be. This is recursive, yes, based on a hypothesis that intelligent people can gauge intelligence better than unintelligent people.

How exactly would this work? Say I send out a survey where I ask everyone to place everyone they know in one of several “buckets” (equivalence classes) based on how intelligent they are. Bucketing is my favorite way of assessing things — the problem with the ranking is that it takes too much time and often ends up being arbitrary (it’s much harder to answer the question “is person X more intelligent than person Y” than the question “is person X by and large as intelligent as person Y”); the problem with some scale is, again, that it’s arbitrary to begin with, and that it either requires some kind of reference point at which point it simply becomes a ranking, or it’s a heuristic, at which point it suffers from the same problem as IQ. If there aren’t too many buckets, this exercise is not particularly hard.

Then I figure out how intelligent everyone is by collating people’s reviews of them. I would weigh the reviews based on how well the person knows the reviewee (again, on a 5-point scale or something)–i.e. how confident that person is of his/her read of the reviewee. If the population is large enough, this resultant intelligence level will be pretty granular (much more granular than the number of buckets we started with). Now, since I’m assuming that intelligent people can tell intelligence better, I’d go back and weigh the opinions by how intelligent each person is. This will change the intelligence “score” slightly — so I feed the new scores back into the weighing, and so on, until the entire process converges on some numbers.

I don’t know yet — it’s a very interesting question — whether it will always converge, but my guess is that it will. It will definitely not diverge (since the intelligence score is bounded). It may oscillate.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 25th, 2009 at 18:05 and is filed under clever, paramathematics, reductions, whatis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.