alt.hn

4/9/2026 at 5:56:53 PM

Cached knowledge is not intelligence

 https://olshansky.info/thoughts/2026-04-09-cached-knowledge-is-not-intelligence

by speckx

4/9/2026 at 8:58:15 PM

I learned “crystallized intelligence” (what the author calls cached knowledge) and “fluid intelligence” (what he calls intelligence). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluid_and_crystallized_intelli...

It’s practically impossible to test the difference in people, because crystallized intelligence includes heuristics that affect problem-solving itself. But there is one, because two people with the same knowledge can score differently (e.g. with different thinking speed or effort).

EDIT: Technically crystallized intelligence may be only problem-solving heuristics, not all knowledge. But I don’t see the significance in the difference (e.g. between turning a word problem into a math equation then applying algebra, one of the Wikipedia examples, vs. “turning” the question “what is A?” into a lookup, then “applying” your previously-remembered A’s definition).

by armchairhacker

4/9/2026 at 8:06:50 PM

Intelligence is a factor of many things - this just talking about domain knowledge, which is pretty blunt and naive view of intelligence.

Intelligence is: Domain knowledge, ability to abstract, ability to compose, creative fluidity (idea generation rate), creative originality (new idea novelty), ability to empathize as well as understand and navigate complex social dynamics, metacognitive ability, and much much more

Often the reduction of intelligence to something simpler is "the engineers fallacy" - an engineering mind is so desperate to quantify something numerically, they oversimplify to try and get some scalar value they can maximize; but the cold hard truth is that the over simplification is too basic to encapsulate the important things, which are often not easily quantifiable numerically

by malux85

4/9/2026 at 7:34:22 PM

[flagged]

by canary_bird_001

4/9/2026 at 9:06:22 PM

[dead]

by aaron695

4/9/2026 at 7:42:33 PM

- Yes it is!

- No, it isn’t.

Is it intelligence to attribute this quote to Monty Python, or isn’t it?

Remembering things is traditionally considered a part of intelligence, memory that is. The subject has been discussed for ages. Personally I favor the statistical definition based on the observation that given a range of different intelligence tasks, individuals that succeed in one task generally succeed in other tasks. There is shared variance, a g-factor. Intelligence.

by nialse

4/9/2026 at 7:59:39 PM

Good point. I used to heavily criticize rote memorization for being distinct from intelligence because: school. It's painful to go through so many years of school where everyone is seemingly complicit on rote memorization being equal to "winning".

I grew up, and it still pains me but I had it better explained to me that memorizing things doesn't equal intelligence, but those people that remember a lot have a much larger pool of information to draw upon. So whatever definition I use for intelligence, like synthesis, well, a large pool of information to draw from probably helps a whole lot.

by apsurd

4/10/2026 at 12:26:19 AM

I would also say that it matters how you remember things. It's possible to memorize a large quantity of facts without really meshing them together into a coherent whole, and this is a lot less useful than remembering things through the relationships between them.

by rcxdude