asciilifeform: and the immediate engineering applications of being able to distinguish folks into rough equivalence classes of stupidity by purely mechanical means - are there.
asciilifeform: see eysenck's works for intro to subject.
asciilifeform: as well as other factors (reaction time, even)
asciilifeform: they don't define it, normally. but they deduced a statistical item, called 'G', which is the overall correlation between the various tests in use
asciilifeform: incidentally, watson's 'public goatfuck' statement is not the least bit controversial among the actual psychometrics folks.
asciilifeform: with elaborate gentlemen's agreements among the participants to keep the field out of the line of fire
asciilifeform: found that intelligence test design ('psychometry') was still a going concern
asciilifeform: was in the process of revealing what was useful.
asciilifeform: wanted to see where the hard limit is.
asciilifeform: naturally the very concept of sitting down and solving a picture puzzle is learnable. this was clear to me. but i wanted a kind of 'carnot engine limit' of unlearnability.
asciilifeform: they won't cross-publish to 'big, mainstream' journals. have own ghetto.
asciilifeform: turned out, it was still alive, just carefully non-public
asciilifeform: this was a fool's errand, but in the process, i ended up lifting the lid on an entire 'secret' field of psychometry
asciilifeform: for this to work, the problems on the test were to have been mechanically-generated but sufficiently varied that you will never see the same 'kind' particularly often
asciilifeform: 'can't train' as in, you could, idea being, take it every morning, and get a useful result re: your mental state on that day
asciilifeform: that is, a mechanized intelligence test that the victim 'can't train for'
asciilifeform: this is a subject that i have a little personal connection with. at one point, i spent almost two years of spare time working on what turned out to be 'fried ice'☟︎
asciilifeform: engineer may not know or give a fuck how magnetism is made of spins, but will use magnet all the same to good effect
asciilifeform: incomplete - sure. it's more a set of engineering formulae than a total philosophy.
asciilifeform: mactardism is a very visual field. it doesn't account much for function << complicated. apple corp. is still running on fumes from a gigantic tank of back-when-everything-else-was-a-joke in a number of palpable ways. see also http://www.loper-os.org/?p=132
asciilifeform: de gustibus non est disputandum but poison is poison.
asciilifeform: sorta how culinary science is plagued by disputes of taste but toxicology is a field.
asciilifeform: there's no fucking usable definition of intelligence << there are, however, accurate and usable definitions of... stupidity.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: this is the deal breaker for me. i actually run the monitors at about 50% gamma. << i did get it down to 30% or so. would've liked even less - while retaining contrast. simply to avoid... baking.
asciilifeform: i bought a small crate, some years ago, to play with.
asciilifeform: (magnet can be suspended above a buckling spring, or rubber doohickey, or whatever - but this is purely for the user's pleasure and plays no electrical role)
asciilifeform: a small magnet moves near a (hermetically sealed) hall effect junction
asciilifeform: these are found in 'explosion-proof' machinery - e.g., to be used in mines, gas pipelines
asciilifeform: a true '$maxint' keyboard would use hall effect sensors for the actuation, rather than rubber dome and carbon (topre, model m, mebranes) or contacting electrodes (leaf springs - alps, cherry)
asciilifeform: as i understand, these are quite rare outside of jp.
