I feel like empiricists routinely and easily perform the partially opinionated act of operationalization, and what's being critiqued here is the <lack> of opinion in operationalization, except for the mocking of scientific appearance. Likewise, many discussions on consciousness are worthy of critique for lacking operationalization.

We will always question whether the operationalization is a good proxy, but there's a difference when firms lack even the opinion to do so.

You're just saying that abstract nouns have no explicit referent like a brick or apple.

I take exception to democracy as a noun or attribute like 'truth', however. Truth is an abstract attribute. Sometimes a noun. Democracy is a process: two wolves and a sheep voting on what's up for dinner.

> You're just saying that abstract nouns have no explicit referent like a brick or apple.

I think smallnamespace has the right idea but maybe chose some week analogies in his examples, you've also picked the the most well defined one (although it's popularly contorted into many things it's original definition is actually quite strict).

Here's a better analogy, actually it's not really even an analogy, just a generalisation that countless people have attempted and failed to define and quantify throughout history: Intelligence, (define it), scientists can't, and IQ doesn't cut it. We can quantify some specific easily measurable abilities but there are many others we can't, seemingly vague things like intuition that are vital ingredients to the umbrella of "intelligence" are just do difficult to nail down individually let alone in concert. Likewise you can measure different aspects of developers, implement this generic algorithm, define the complexity of this code in big O notation, they can sometimes be indicators like IQ but none of them really point to actual brilliance, that can only be measured on the job.

Some will argue against me here but I don't think these types of things can be measured (except externally by overall results when applied), because in order to measure we need something to compare to, but everyones own bag of tricks is nuanced and intricately different to everyone elses in subtle ways... if we all thought exactly the same way but to different "abilities" then everyone would be making the same insights but at different speeds and efforts, that's not what people do, people just think in their own way and the more unique that is the more "clever" they can appear.

Where this analogy breaks down (or does not share with) is that programming is not all about being clever and unique (although that will of course differentiate you), it's also a craft that it's possible to be good at without being particularly unique... it's quite possible to have one and not the other, you could come up with original solutions to problems but be terrible at architecting and implementing it.

You articulated this very well, but somehow I've lost the thread (if I ever had it).

Are you essentially agreeing-with/supporting what /u/smallnamespace said?

It seems we can all agree that hiring software developers, while having no false negatives and no false positives is hard.

Thanks, and you are right - I digressed into that analogy a bit too much... I am agreeing and supporting what smallnamespace said. In summary:

"Great developer" Is extremely subjective from both perspectives. Specifically the role, what are you developing? but more importantly the person, clones are not useful in cognitively demanding roles (otherwise it would have been automated already).

Highly subjective things are messy and often impossible to quantify (as smallnamespace was arguing), but his analogies were weak in this respect so I furthered this argument by extending it into the familiar difficulties of defining and quantifying intelligence (also highly subjective by application and individual).

I'm curious about your claim that GI is hard to define (true) and measure (not true?).

GI is whatever the standard iq test measures. Higher numbers seem to correlate with better outcomes in certain settings. Right? What's controversial about that?

IQ is far from comprehensive, the aspects of the mind it measures are discrete and relatively low level, this is why two people with the same IQ can have different intelligence as perceived by others. As you traverse the higher level of abstractions it becomes impossible to compare, some just don't exist in other peoples minds, they are not a fundamental part of the biological structure (subjectivity starts to define the quanta, not biology, so how do you compare something that does not exist in all individuals, not to mention the number of possible abstractions multiply as the level of abstraction increases).

As I said before IQ is an indicator of potential at best (the potential for the abstractions built on top of it), even of the low level abilities it does not include all of them, we cannot externally measure all of them.

Here's another way of looking at it: if IQ _was_ comprehensive, the number of individual questions would be astronomical, it would be impossible to construct or take such a test because it tries to enumerate and quantify all of the different learned abstraction above the inherently low level ones across all of humanity.

Taking that fictitious test a bit further, note that if we imagine all humans actually taking it, their score will be extremely low, because it's impossible to have 100% (you would need a massive brain that could simultaneously learn all of the _different_ ways of thinking).

> GI is hard to define (true) and measure (not true?)

Doesn't this seem like a contradiction to you? how do you empirically measure something that you cannot define?

Certainly one number is vaguely ridiculous (yet effective for the original purpose), but you are conflating learned models (which are content), as opposed to capacity (such as raw short term memory).

> you are conflating learned models (which are content), as opposed to capacity (such as raw short term memory).

There is no correct definition, however most people agree that intelligence is more than innate ability. If you are focusing on the later as a definition then you can indeed measure it, but consider that there are many people with an IQ as high as Einstien's, but no such deep understanding in quantum mechanics or even any subject.

I would argue that casting out "learned" as something superficial is incorrect, learning is not simply acquisition of knowledge (as education systems have very slowly begun to understand since the mid 20th century)

Hmmm. Yes to your P1 and maybe to your P2.