Dunno, throwing a hissy and saying "FUCK THA [CUSTOMERS WHO DISAGREE WITH OUR POLICIES]" like they did makes them seem like babies who couldn't be trusted with a toy ball, let alone a social networking service.
"When I use a word, it means exactly what I mean it to mean, no more and no less." -- Humpty Dumpty
"Intelligence is what intelligence tests measure." -- Edward Boring
I'm actually surprised by how few comments have been made regarding the actual nature of intelligence in this thread. yummyfajitas' parent comment is one of those few, and he equates intelligence as we understand it with g, the hypothesized general intelligence posited by psychometricians.
y.f. makes the same two arguments that psychometricians make for the validity of g as a representation of human intelligence,[1] which are supposed to demonstrate g's "internal validity" and "external validity". The former refers to the positive correlations between various (supposed) intelligence tests (described in the jargon as the "positive manifold"), and the latter to the positive correlations between g and supposed success in life. Broadly, the internal validity argument proves the "general" in "general intelligence", whereas the external validity argument proves the "intelligence".
The first wrinkle in these arguments is the claim that all human intelligence tests positively correlate with each other to give a universal intelligence factor. This is false; there exist demographics where g is _not_ the predominant factor explaining inter-demographic test score differences.[2]
Here is another problem. Psychometricians tend to decide whether some test metric measures intelligence by how well it correlates with existing "intelligence tests" that're g-associated. y.f. does this in his comment: "It is relatively independent of cultural knowledge: i.e., french is nearly independent of g (1), while physics, plumbing and loading irregularly sized boxes into a truck are highly correlated to g". (I.e., French tests can't be real tests of intelligence, since they don't correlate with g, but physics, plumbing, and bin packing must be, because they do.) But this renders the internal validity argument circular: its two prongs now become: (1) g must exist because intelligence tests correlate positively, and (2) and intelligence tests are those tests that correlate positively with g. The circle closes.
The external validity argument supposedly rescues the g concept from this trap, by demonstrating that g correlates vaguely with real-life behaviours. Unfortunately, the correlations are nowhere near perfect, that g correlates with success doesn't suffice to show causality, and pointing out the correlations does not eliminate the underlying circularity in g's definition. All in all, the evidence is inadequate to reject the null hypothesis that there is no causal link between g and life success.
[1] Well, I say "human intelligence", but if I recall correctly, at least one psychometrician even tried to argue that g might well be a cross-species phenomenon!
[2] Dolan, C.V. Roorda, W., and Wicherts, J. M. (2004). "Two failures of Spearman's hypothesis: The GATB in Holland and the JAT in South Africa", Intelligence, vol. 32, p. 155-173.
You seem to misunderstand the definition of g, as g is not defined in terms of intelligence tests.
Take as your statistic the result of many tests: physics, box loading, french, basketball, etc, and then do a PCA or similar test. One of the principal components will be g, provided you have enough data. This is what defines g.
Intelligence tests are simply tests designed to be more highly correlated with g. If we discarded intelligence tests, we could recreate them (or equivalent tests) based on statistical analysis of the other test data. They are certainly not arbitrary measures.
The external argument doesn't rescue g; g is quite safe. The external argument merely claims that 'g' and 'intelligence' are the same thing, or very close. g exists regardless of what you want to call it.
As for the paper you cite, I skimmed it. Unless I misunderstood it horribly, it merely claims that particular IQ tests don't effectively measure g across different groups. That doesn't mean g doesn't exist as a hidden variable, merely that a particular test is poorly correlated with it for some population.
This guy is a statistics professor, and has a lot to say about exactly what "g" is. He even runs experiments! I know the article is a bit long but I promise it's worth reading.
Well, I admit, I just skimmed it, I'll try to read the whole thing later. But near as I can tell, he isn't addressing the validity of g at all, merely claiming it is unproven that genetic differences between population groups is due to genetics or other factors (a claim I don't disagree with).
Are there any studies showing that basketball performance, French fluency, bin packing, and physics knowledge, all taken together, will produce a meaningfully large general factor? Intuitively it seems unlikely, and it doesn't jibe with what I understand g's definition to be based on the comments of people like Eysenck and Jensen, who justified g on the basis of intelligence test correlations, and only later tried to tie it to biological functions (evoked brain signal potential in Eysenck's case, reaction time in Jensen's) and metrics of social, sports, and job performance.
Regardless, I agree that g exists in at least a limited sense, but I maintain that there is insufficient evidence to demonstrate that it emerges from innate, immutable physical properties of the brain, and you still can't attribute life success to it.
For real. If software is supposed to operate within a set of hard limits, and its trivial to detected the attempted breaching of those limits, it's stupid as all hell not to have the software account for that without gratuitously throwing away all of the user's data.
Thank you, Paul Graham, for elaborating God's own -- er, your own -- Hierarchy Of Argumentation. Without it I would otherwise have passed this life unaware of the fact that "you are an ass hat" is a poorer argument than explicitly refuting one's opponent's central point. I can't show my appreciation enough for this.
"Such" language? How do you mean? Is the particular F U C K constellation of letters somehow objectively worse than, say, F U D G E or F R E A K? He made a "wrong choice"? You understood his point, yes? He got it across efficiently, yes? Seems to me he expressed himself perfectly fluently.
Words aren't just "constellations" of letters. This is a silly idea. Not only is it a poor excuse for using profanity, but it also takes the power out of taboo words.
