Humans judge if other humans are intelligent without going into philosophical circles.

How well they learn completely novel tasks (fail in conversation, pass with training). How well they do complex tasks (debated just look at this thread). How generally knowledgeable they are (pass). How often they do non sensical things (fail).

So IMO it really comes down if you’re judging by peak performances or minimum standards. If I had an employee that preformed as well as an LLM I’d call them an idiot because they needed constant supervision for even trivial tasks, but that’s not the standard everyone is using.

> Humans judge if other humans are intelligent without going into philosophical circles

That's totally fair. I expect that to continue to work well when kept in the context of something/someone else that is roughly as intelligent as you are. Bonus points for the fact that one human understands what it means to be human and we all have roughly similar experiences of reality.

I'm not so sure if that kind of judging intelligence by feel works when you are judging something that is (a) totally different from your or (b) massively more (or less) intelligent than you are.

For example, I could see something much smarter than me as acting irrationally when in reality they may be working with a much larger or complex set of facts and context that don't make sense to me.