Why could you not use text to measure intelligence? Isn't that what we used to do? Have students write an essay, and then deduce that they had enough intelligence to put some thoughts together?
Well that's the trick. That the systems we use, as a proxy, to measure intellinnce in people are actually fairly easy to immitate.
But let's be clear these were always, and are, bad measures of intelligence. You cannot test a dolphin this way. And its easy to cheat on tests either thru recall , wrote-learning, etc. and IQ tests haev very poor individual test-retest reliability.
In humans there's a convenient correlation that verbal articulation in text is a strong but weak correlate of intelligence. Its "Good enough" for allocating meat bodies to our various institutions. But if you've met many well-tested people you'll realise how, in practice, terrible this measuring approach is. The world we inhabit is filled with misclassified "intellects" who perform well under text-based rubrics. Add LLMs to that heap, the cheater par execellence.
Sure. Let's first establish a measure is not what is being measured. Then, as far as measures go, we need measures that capture the entire animal kingdom. I can go it into it, but its a lot of time and I'm busy atm.
Consider thought that all mammals have imagination, and model-based reinformcement, and a wide vareity of other capacities required for intelligence. And so merely issuing "text" captures, incorrelate, only these capacities by proxy.
I'm sure if you thought about it yhou could come up with tests that distinguish lizards from birds and the greater apes from the lesser. Those are the tests
