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Comment by gvb | Hacker News Reader

The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge, but imagination.

— Albert Einstein http://quotationsbook.com/quote/21310/

(and Isaac Asimov had a lot of imagination)

It's interesting that that "quotation" from Albert Einstein, a sentiment I would love to attribute to him, because it encapsulates an idea I share about the importance of creativity, seems never to be traced to one of Einstein's actual writings. Has anyone ever checked the latest edition of Quotable Einstein

http://www.amazon.com/New-Quotable-Einstein-Alice-Calaprice/...

(I have checked the preceding edition)

http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Einstein-Albert/dp/0691026963...

to see if that is a genuine Einstein quotation? In the English-speaking world, Einstein is second only to Mark Twain in having sayings attributed to him that he never said.

http://www.amazon.com/Quote-Sleuth-Manual-Tracer-Quotations/...

Eureka! I have found the quotation, in what must be a verifiable source.

http://www.sciencemusings.com/blog/2006/10/imagination-and-k...

I'll have to find the magazine interview soon, to see it with my own eyes.

Imagination goes a long way towards realizing the kind of future you want to have, not just solving the immediate problems you've been presented with.

If you can imagine the outcome of your decisions you can avoid the suffering/regret of unfulfilled dreams, failed relationships, and misspent youth.

Not just imagination - but curiosity as well.

No single thing is a "true sign of intelligence", that is to ignore the mutual interdependence of things. You can't have imagination without any knowledge.

Jeff Hawkins has a good general framework for intelligence. X is more intelligent than Y if X can make better predictions given the same information as Y. X is more intelligent than Y if X can make predictions as good as Y's with less information.

That sounds like a good proposal on a definition of intelligence, but it doesn't tell you why someone would be good at predicting something, which is what my point was: that when you try to claim that any one thing is the reason for someone's ability to, in this case, predict something, you're ignoring the multitudes of other reasons that are all interrelated.

All the various forms of intelligence can be seen as a form of predictive capability. For example, coordination of many elements or one's own body parts involves making moves which avoid chaos, collision, or some other dysfunction. Avoidance is a kind of prediction.

I went to the Wikipedia article

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Hawkins#Neuroscience

to make sure you were referring to the author whose book I have perused before. I will note for the record that Hawkins has not won wide acceptance for his view of intelligence among other researchers to date.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/tx/optimization/

http://lesswrong.com/lw/va/measuring_optimization_power/

Eliezer Yudkowsky described this pretty well.

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