I find that the word intelligence has been put into great misuse. Take for example the Iraq war. CIA stands for Central Intelligence Agency when its job is to gather Information that answers questions of the yes/no type such as "Does Iraq have weapons of mass destruction, yes or no?" To answer that question you don't really need intelligence, you need good spying skills that get you the information you need in order to answer it. What the CIAs of the US failed to do was gather and provide Correct Information, not correct Intelligence. That's not their job nor should it be. That's why I think CIA should stand for Central Information Agency instead. (read more)

I wonder what's the smart thing to do with the Russian spies the FBI arrested. Wouldn't it have been better to keep them under surveillance and feed them misleading intelligence with an aim to make their spy work more expensive and benefit US foreign policy? That would be US-Russia: 1-0 on World Cup Intelligence. In so far as it costs less to surveil the spies than it costs the Russians to pay to keep them in the US, that's a penalty goal. Why refuse to hit it and spoil such an intelligent economic arrangement?

Some people will find this offensive. I can't help it. I was looking at numerous photos of children from parents who are both very good looking. An obvious observation is that while the children's level of beauty may not always match up to the level of their parents, they are still pretty good-looking. No "ugly" descendant strikes the eye as being, well, strikingly "ugly". Take the children of parents who are both intelligent and smart. Their children's intelligence will range from pretty decent to high. Now take two parents whose intelligence is very low and compare it with the intelligence their children are born with. Their children's intelligence will ALWAYS be higher than their parents'. (read more)

I want to create a LIQ test. LIQ means Lack of Intelligence Quotience. Can you suggest the right questions to ask in order to measure lack of intelligence? (I use lack of intelligence here as the politically correct term for sheer stupidity) There's a catch. The LIQ test is not for dumb people to take, it is actually for the smart ones. Smart people will have difficulty getting a high score on the LIQ test but if they manage to do it, then they must be exceptionally smart and brilliant to be able to fool it. If dumb people score low, however, should they be considered too smart or too dumb?

Are we sure the FBI has arrested the real spies or were they mere decoys? Why would an intelligence agency that considers itself "intelligent" send one group of spies without also sending another group trained to act as decoys so as to distract the enemy's counter-intelligence from the work the real spies are supposed to do?

Even if a woman is naturally very pretty, she still puts on make-up to look more beautiful and attractive when she goes out. If she doesn't overdo it with the make-up and her dress, no man will think she is arrogantly flaunting her beauty despite the fact that most people think to themselves that she is pretty even without the make-up. The truth is that all men will welcome and enjoy the extra beauty she has put on display. Why can't that be the case with intelligence as well? I have noticed that men become very defensive when they meet someone who's smarter than them. Why can't the reaction to something as beautiful as a smart mind be the same as the reaction to something as beautiful as a pretty face?

Do you think revenge should define how civilized our species is? Humans take revenge but animals don't! Despite such behavior, we believe that only ours is the most civilized species. We're smarter but no more civilized than animals. In order to survive animals follow the law of the jungle. If they had intelligence like ours they wouldn't. Revenge might be caused by intelligence that we possess and animals don't. One of the few really smart things we've accomplished is to base social life on Justice and not Revenge. Yet many people still think that Justice is not served until Revenge is taken. What's your view?

To become acquainted with the so-called humane process of government information extraction (some may call torture), citizens could volunteer their time to test the legitimacy of these techniques based on a compilation of given intelligence. The volunteers would be given intelligence that is worthless or vital to the tortures, yet the subjects and the tortures would be unaware of its validity. Given the proper incentives (say money) for the tortures to extract the information and subjects to keep it, and base the payout to a final decision as to whether the victim is a threat and/or hiding potential information, we may collect enough information about torture to weigh its benefits versus its costs

Google ranks the web by popularity. Wouldn't it be great if we could rank the web by intelligence or other attributes? People's IQ is measured in tests, why not measure the content of websites similarly and then filter search results accordingly?

Google probably has the brains and resources to offer such service in the future. For example, if I do a keyword search for 'subprime market tips', I want to filter the display of my search results so that I get the websites with most intelligent content only and not those with the most popular content. I know it sounds nice but people might say it's not possible to do. Google succeeded as a search engine because it was smarter due to the accuracy of its searches. Why not add intelligence or other attributes in the display of its searches?

thinking of a mirror that saves your facial expressions, uses artificial intelligence to play them back and makes your idol interact with you or your guests...mirror, mirror who is the most beautiful of them all? :)