Intelligence

Tom Barbalet's idea that intelligence should be measured by survival is a much better approach than previous ones. The fact the idea can be applied to more complex systems, shows that it scales well to represent a physical context. Time naturally applies survival as a metric to gauge intelligence because age is able to represent perseverance within physical creation. Unfortunately, quality is obscured by the scale when this idea is applied because often quality is unique at any point in time. Education can gauge intelligence in a more accurate way if it combines a search for survival and quality by pursuing unbounded problems (problems that are considered unsolvable but have intermediate solutions). Creating proper testing that uses unbounded problems is a difficult task, but it would be a great benefit to society. Such testing would be able to gauge creativity in addition to previous knowledge (memorization).

Interactions within society depends on rules and are an important guiding force within our lives. However, without breaking rules there is no innovation. An interesting example can be found in a traffic study that found an optimal speed on a dense freeway with 40% of the traffic breaking rules. Often rules are broken because the rules were formed by ignorance. Rule-breaking should be integrated, in a controlled way, with education. Solving unbounded problems would help motivate students to create a complete solution and make the problem bounded (which could be considered breaking a rule).

Unfortunately, unbounded problems are generally buried in specific complexity that is not applicable to simple studies. However, I think it could still be possible to form testing based on unbounded problems, as global knowledge becomes more categorized and accessible.