h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Entry: intelligence - A598584
Author: xyroth (rash enough to tackle intelligence@A584525) - U149792

As agreed in another thread, I will be putting all of the entries at the project through this forum, as a test to see how it helps improve university project feedback.

any comments greatly recieved.

I assume this is the introduction to the Intelligence Project. If so, I think it needs a better introduction itself. I'd say something like:

"We have all met intelligent people, people so clever that it is immediately obvious that they are intelligent. But as soon as we ask 'what is intelligence' and try to measure it, we run into problems. This series of linked entries try to explore some of the aspects of intelligence, whether it can be measured and even whether such a thing exists."

Some typos, etc:

tests of Evoked Potential was --> tests of Evoked Potential were
This has lead --> This has led
most of which disagree with most of the others --> most of which disagree with each other

"people so clever that it is immediately obvious that they are intelligent"

Gnomon, doesn't this beg the question? It suggests that the only people you can call intelligent are those who are clever enough, whatever 'enough' may mean. And it would shift the onus of definition onto 'clever', which doesn't really help, does it? And wouldn't it be 'immediately obvious' only to someone else of high intelligence? A person of low intelligence might not recognise it, or at least not immediately.

I don't think intelligence has to be an axiological term. I think dictionaries would define it as an ability. So a person could be of high intelligence or minimal intelligence or anywhere in between. It seems to be used sometimes in the way people also sometimes use 'quality' (eg 'a quality product'), as though the only quality possible is high quality, which is of course not so.

Bels

xyroth, thanks for putting this into the WW, which will make it easier to attend to and comment on. The only thing is whether it would be better a) to have lots of separate threads, as you have at the moment, which makes it difficult to track the various discussions on one's PS, or b) to have all the comments in one thread (eg this one), which would also help cross-fertilisation, I think. You could perhaps consider taking the other entries out of the WW but making sure they are all linked on this entry.

Just a thought.

Bels

Something else that might help is if a number of discrete entries are concatenated, as least for review purposes, into standard-length entries of anything up to, say, 2000 words each, especially where there is an affinity between subjects (eg general and specific intelligence). I do find a multiplicity of mini-entries more difficult to deal with. You can always cut them down again into bite-size pieces later.

well, that is a lot of comment, some of it with it's own agenda.

starting with the simple stuff, I made a deliberate choice once the notes passed 90 kb that it would not all be kept in one entry. it was just unworkable.

As there are lots of "mini entries" as bels calls them already in the edited guide, I thought it much better to get a set of entries that covered their subject well enough, but that got the conceptual interlinking right from the outset, as this is almost impossible to fix without major rewriting at a later date (as I have been finding out when I tried to do anything at all with the artificial intelligence stuff).

therefore, I would be mildly hostile to the idea of merging them back into a smaller number of bigger entries. I might do it if it proves really necessary, but I would rather expand the existing entries instead (which when the structure and interlinking are right is much easier to do).

Having decided not to mergethem except when unavoidable, we then come to the subject of seperate threads versus one meta thread.

I remember the problems of the original intelligence thread, where a minor dispute over prejudicial comments in a tiny part made it impossible to work on any of the rest, as it caused debating rather than discussion, and resulted in entrenched positions on all sides.

by keeping it as seperate threads, we can hopefully keep the contentious stuff contained to the specific entry which is under dispute, allowing work to continue on the other entries in the meantime without them getting too contaminated from the other thread.

also, we get the advantage that the review forum thread gets bound to the entry, so come update time we don's have to wade through hundreds of entries to find the 20 or so that concern a specific entry.

but your approach might be better for small projects that only have a couple of entires. As the entire idea of putting university entries into this forum is experimental, the split point between the 2 approaches will no doubt become clearer as time goes by.

then we get to the harder question of defining intelligence. due to the relative youth of this science (although it is currently at a level where it is more of an art than a science) we have the situation that almost nothing has a definitive definition. to make matters worse, most definitions disagree with each other, and those that don't tend to be circular.

for example I have seen intelligence defined as ability, which when yo look that up is defined as skill, and so on until you got to a definition which defined itself as the aplication of intelligence to improve the quality of performance of the task.

therefore I have tried to avoid defining stuff except where there is relative agreement on what it all means. for the rest I have tried to produce an overview which gives the flavour of the variability of meaning attached to the terms.

As to gnomon's assumption tht this is the introduction to the intelligence project, that is not quite true. If it was trying to be that, then I think he would be right about it needing a better introduction. it still might.

What I set out to do with this specific entry was to make it so that if anyone needed to link to intelligence, then they would not have the problem I had with the existing artificial intelligence entry that it is almost completely wrong for what I need to refer to.

so when linking to this entry, you should not have that problem, and you should then be able to link from this entry to any of a number of more specific entries which attempt to cover their section in more detail, interlinking properly, and being easy to expand if more info came in.

for example, you could need to mention millitary intelligence in an article on warfare. you would then search for it, and probably not find it, but when searching for intelligence, you would find this, which could hopefully be expanded fairly easily to give it a mention.

if someone then decided to give military intelligence a write-up, then the mention could be changed into a link. (this is how most of the entries in the project came about).

Also, this subject is relatively new, and most of the key research is only just becoming possible. so it will need updating within five or ten years from now to deal with a radically different knowledge of the subject than we have now.

the subject is also very big, so by trying to produce a set of entries that cover each subsection in just enough detain, but which can easily link to an article on the section, I hope to make the whole thing easily expandable.

Hopefully this organisation will help make it so that is not too hard to do.

Bels, you accuse my approach of begging the question. What I was trying to say was:

"We all know what intelligence means. But when we go to measure it, we find that we don't really know what it means; each of us appears to have a slightly different idea, and all attempts to define it appear to lead to either circular definitions, or ones which don't seem to fully capture the 'spirit' of true intelligence."

OK, I admit that once I saw the length of the previous entries I pretty much scanned and skipped reading what is no douibt a fsacinating and worthwhile discussion about something very important


But about the article.
I like the intro. It's a nice overview and offers nice embedded links to the other sections. You might consider putting an "Index" or "Table of Contents" in your text (in addition to the one supplide in the right margin), where you can give a sentence of comment when needed. Some Uni article have these and they're sometimes helpful.

One issue: first sentence:
"Intelligence is a subject that touches lots of other subjects, and where it does, they usually define the vocabulary slightly differently in each subject. In most cases, they use it in broadly the same way, but almost always, there are more questions than answers."
Suggestion:
The subject of intelligence overlaps with many other areas of study. The various subjects create their own definitions of "intelligence". The notion of intelligence is the same. The various "specialties" talk about the same topic, i.e. "intelligence", but semantically they create more questions than answers

Why: the first sentence is a compound and uses "is" as its verb when touches or overlaps "activates" the sentence more. the "they" after the compound AND is vague, it's also vague in the seceond sentence, as is IT. I don't know that my suggestion is better, but it may change some of the unclear referrences some.

Friar

PS> I'll take a look at your other links later today or tomorrow. Fascinating topic so far.

you are right, that first paragraph needs work.

I don't think your solution solves it's problems though.

any other ideas anyone?

I agree. My "solution" was really klunky. It's hard to read as I write in the text box and then try to return to the entry, etc.

Also, I am a bigtime "deconstructionist" editor. The best way to proof read anything is to read it backwards first, sentence by sentence, then return and read it forwards. Reading it backwards catches all the unclear pronouns and vague verbs. But it's the KING of nit-picking editing and tends to annoy everyone. Nevertheless. . .
Friar

nit pick away.

I had to put the project on hold for a while when I stopped getting feedback.

now that I am getting some, I welcome it, as it can only make the entries better.

Boy, we're repeating ourselves in mutliple conversation threads.
OK from now on (well, after THIS post) i'll keep my comments unique from convo to convo.

Friar

Silly little niggle but the lack of a capital letter in the title really annoys me...

Roz.

oops, well spotted.