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Comment by worksonmine | Hacker News Reader

I don't agree with your definition at all.

2 people want to kill each other. The one taking the first step is the intelligent one because according to your definition he was better at predicting an outcome than his opponent.

The real world is more complex than that and there are multiple options where both survive, or letting your opponent live and killing yourself because his life is more beneficial to humanity and so on.

Any organism can survive, but for most (including us) that implies a selfish outlook but the most intelligent people I know or heard of never even consider their own ego.

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Maybe I wasn't clear enough. The definition of intelligence I propose is wholly distinct from human prosocial values like cooperation.

This makes it useful for judging these properties across living and non-living intelligent processes, such as bacteria, ants, plants, dogs, LLMs, etc. It is not a useful definition for judging the value or "goodness" of human beings within society.

I'm arguing that intelligence (as prediction) is simpler than we often presume, not a mystery at all, and a basic building block of complex life. We happen to have a lot of it.

I'm not coming from a moral standpoint either, just giving an example of how correct prediction may lead to consequences we would call retarded. Predicting resources being scarce may lead to over-consumption which leads to the extinction of everything. You could argue an intelligent organism would predict that and adapt but we're still trying ourselves.

There are plants that slow their own growth to share resources if their neighbor is of the same species, and vice-versa if it's a different species. That could be called intelligence in a sense, but it's not as simple as just prediction there's a social aspect and a long-term goal. But is it even conscious and aware of what it's doing or is it just the traits favored by evolution. Is agency part of your definition of prediction or is it enough to just react to the surroundings?

Intelligence is much more complex than a single trait. Being good at prediction is just that, being good at prediction.

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