Cached knowledge is not intelligence
speckx
18 points
5 comments
April 09, 2026
Related Discussions
Found 5 related stories in 56.8ms across 4,075 title embeddings via pgvector HNSW
- Artificial Cleverness: The system that knows everything and understands nothing marcelmoos · 18 pts · March 29, 2026 · 54% similar
- Intelligence is a commodity. Context is the real AI Moat adlrocha · 28 pts · March 01, 2026 · 52% similar
- Intelligent people are better judges of the intelligence of others 01-_- · 96 pts · April 06, 2026 · 50% similar
- Why the most valuable things you know are things you cannot say nr378 · 142 pts · April 04, 2026 · 45% similar
- Thinking Fast, Slow, and Artificial: How AI Is Reshaping Human Reasoning Anon84 · 116 pts · March 21, 2026 · 45% similar
Discussion Highlights (3 comments)
nialse
- 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.
malux85
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
armchairhacker
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).