Our current method of evaluating non-human intelligence is mostly taking tasks humans are known to do and seeing if we can get animals to do them, which biases it toward finding animals performing at no greater level in any dimension than humans. We don't really have a coherent model of what intelligence is, much less an unbiased interspecies test of it.

Humans obviously have the most human-like intelligence; any other superlatives attached to human intelligence should probably be prefaced with “apparently” rather than “clearly”.

Indeed. Going further, the idea that "general intelligence" can exist is something I'll countenance; the assumption that humans have it is a conceit without convincing evidence, based on a sample of one.

Why do you make this claim? Engineering, science, and mathematics are all convincing evidence that humans have general intelligence. Humans also score highly in measures of intelligence like https://arxiv.org/abs/0712.3329.

I think I'm going to say that "greater" doesn't really fit. Specialised in a different way, yes. I think that trying to apply a single value on a single scale simplifies it to a nonsense.

How are you measuring this? How are you coming up with numbers? A Clark's Nutcracker can remember the location of tens of thousands of hidden pine seeds over a 15 mile radius and find them even though it's now a snowy winter and the seed was buried months previously. Clearly, this bird is smarter than pretty much every human I ever met.

A chimp (at least one chimp) is better at remembering random numbers than a human (at least some humans, including a memory champion); https://www.sciencefriday.com/articles/are-humans-smarter-th...

It's usually about this point the guy on HN who claims animals can't think because they have no formal spoken language turns up.

And no, a real feat of memory can easily be measured and proven. The subject modifies a large list of items (e.g. seed in knothole), then later retrieves said item exactly once. That would be real evidence.

I understand that human memory champions do the same in terms of using locations as a crutch for memory, with their memory palaces and so on. They build themselves spatial pictures and clues. So this bird has a memory as good as human memory champions? As for keeping track of where they hid things by noting where they were in relation to other things; isn't that what humans do? If you removed all landmarks, buildings and everything from my city and replaced it with a flat, featureless plain, I would not be able to identify the location of my house. I find my house by looking at other things to work out which way to walk.

Anyway, I'll stop here because we're both using unprovable axioms as our basis. I suggest that human intelligence is very specialised and that we struggle to even see other specialised intelligence, so limited are we in our thinking. You suggest that humans have a wide ranging general intelligence (poorly defined as that concept is), superior to all others? Neither of us can disprove an axiom, although we can both spend all day suggesting things that creature A can do that creature B cannot.

The test you suggest does strike me as very human focussed; reminds me of tests showing that some creatures can't remember faces based on showing them human faces. Turns out that humans are really good at human faces, and some other animals are really good at other kinds of faces.

I do appreciate your civil tone, though. You did come across as a sealion at the start (which is why I ignored you), but that turned out to be a misread on my part.

Human level of intelligence is clearly far greater unless you impose some very arbitrary restrictions on human abilities so they can be beaten by some very specific animal abilities.

I would suggest that the evidence indicates otherwise. Written language seems to have taken humans tens of thousands of years to work out, so coming up with that system is clearly not fairly easy. Keeping track of 50000 locations over a 15 mile radius such that they can be found again six months later in winter under a foot of snow using marks in the ground made with a stick, without a written language? That seems... difficult.