Comment by gnramires
16 hours ago
While true in general (all terms are just arbitrary terms humans assign to stuff!), usually there are underlying well-defined concepts that can be associated with common-sense language and common-sense notions. For example, a line is probably a very ancient notion, but it was made more well-defined in Euclidean geometry. I don't think intelligence is a meaningless concept, but I do think there are a number of different more or less well-defined underlying concepts or formal definitions. I tend to associate intelligence with ability to reach (potentially fuzzy) goals or satisfy certain conditions (time-continued goals), solve problems, etc.. Where I live I think there is some controversy around the term artificial intelligence because people associate intelligence with more broad cognitive activity maybe including consciousness.
In fact I think this is a particularly important distinction right now, that intelligence seems (to me somewhat unexpectedly/counterintuitively) somewhat independent from consciousness, at least as far as artificial systems go (for example, old school chess engines are much capable than humans at chess but are definitely not sentient or conscious).
People seem to miss this a lot, yet we could claim every single thing is "undefined". Even physics is undefined. There's no grand theory of everything. But we still have some really good models. Our models now are a lot better than they were 100 years ago and even more than the 100 years before that and so on.
I abhor people who make the claim that words they didn't spend the time to understand are meaningless simply because they are incomplete. It is idiocracy masquerading as intelligence. I hate it so much because the logic doesn't just fool the listener, it fools the speaker.
I'll let Asimov rant to you all instead, since half a century ago he too was frustrated with this millennia old egomaniac claims https://hermiene.net/literature/essays/relativity-of-wrong
Carlo revelli explains in marvelous ways in "Reality is not what it seems" that all man made models of nature are wrong, but useful. Useful models get replaced by more-useful models. He starts out by explaining the once usefulness of the basic elements theory earth wind fire.