Comment by skydhash
3 days ago
Better code and better prose are not great indicators of intelligence. Can it help you survive in the middle of the jungle? Can it grow rice? Can it give you first aid? Intelligence is the ability to learn skills and adapt them to the situation. The importance of skills is contextual. Better prose and code is just education, not intelligence.
Imagine it's 2006, there's no LLM in sight and you're arguing on an Internet forum that growing rice is a better highlight of intelligence than computer programming or writing.
Also it absolutely is not education, as repeated failure to educate programmers without aptitude or drill essay-writing into general population has shown.
Then you'll also says that a printer is more intelligent than most of humanity because it can replicate a drawing better than any painter. Or that the ipod is a better musician, etc,...
I can't be amazed at tools. I only applaud the minds that create them. Someone that find a way to grow rice where everyone thought was impossible is way more worthy than whatever opus produced. Just like someone winning the Tour de France is more remarkable than the latest AI benchmark or whatever.
There's likely about a billion cyclists and most of them stand no chance at winning Tour de France ever in their life. And it's funny how we moved from growing rice towards inventing the agriculture.
And look I don't know how to grow rice but I grew other staple foods before. I also wrote substantial texts and programmed computers for decades. Saying that farming is more intellectually challenging than writing or programming is plain ridiculous and counterproductive to whatever argument you were trying to make.
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