I'll be candid with my sources - I took a class with Patrick Winston called The Human Intelligence Enterprise where we went over a history of AI ideas. Nowhere in that class did I get the impression that 'general intelligence' is 'wacko amateur thinking'. Maybe the former director of the MIT AI lab just failed to impress upon us the disdain for general intelligence you say is commonplace.

http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput...