Something I have always appreciated. I'm much less anxious working with very intelligent people, even if their intelligence eclipses mine. They don't have unusual ideas about what I should or should not be able to grasp. They can recognize which of my ideas are intelligent and which of my ideas are half-baked.
Working with unintelligent people, you need to spend more time building up a reputation. They cannot tell if you're intelligent based on what you say, or how you explain things -- only if you get results. This is nerve wracking for multiple reasons, but chiefly because intelligent people can be wrong, or unlucky, etc, and so only judging someone based on results is partially to judge based on luck.
>> I'm much less anxious working with very intelligent people, even if their intelligence eclipses mine. They don't have unusual ideas about what I should or should not be able to grasp. They can recognize which of my ideas are intelligent and which of my ideas are half-baked.
Funny, because Kary Mullis, Nobel Prize winner for inventing PCR, one of the most important tools in the history of molecular biology, the technique that made modern genetics and COVID testing possible, could not recognize that his ideas about AIDS being a hoax were half baked. Or his belief in astrology. Nobel laureate. Astrology...
Linus Pauling with his two Nobel Prizes, could not recognize that his vitamin C cures cancer crusade was half baked. James Watson decoded DNA itself and could not recognize that his ideas about race were half-baked.
William Shockley another Nobel Prize...for inventing the transistor, probably the most consequential invention of the 20th century, could not recognize that touring college campuses promoting eugenics and forced sterilization was half-baked.
Bill Gates could not recognize that hanging out with a convicted sex trafficker after the conviction was half baked. Larry Summers could not recognize that speculating about womens brains at a public conference was half baked.
Intelligent people are great at recognizing which of your ideas are half-baked and they can also be catastrophically bad at recognizing which of their own are.The smarter they are, the more elaborate the justification, the more airtight the rationalization, and the more spectacular the eventual collapse. Peter Thiel being the prime example...
Watch out for smart people... they are the worst judges of their own stupidity...
The paper is about more intelligent people having higher accuracy judging other's intelligence. Nobody is claiming that intelligent people are completely infallible, nobody is claiming that they're incapable of ever believing in incorrect things.
My experience is that smart people more often refrain from judgement of intelligence in others. Those that judge quickly, especially after a single statement that may have been stupendous or trivially illogical, almost certainly aren't the brightest stars in the night sky. That includes excentric people, perhaps not those that state something like that in an overly emotional state. But otherwise it is quite a good giveaway in my opinion.
Especially if you ask them to elaborate their disagreement, the argument is often trite and one-dimensional.
"I don't have enough information to render a judgement" is itself a judgement, and often a wise one. Some of the scariest folks think they really know a lot about a candidate after a job interview with some canned questions.
You say “the paper is about more intelligent people having higher accuracy judging others intelligence.” Lets talk about what the paper actually shows...since you all and the rest of this HN thread :-) are confidently defending a claim you apparently... have not even scrutinized...It says so much, that from the hundreds of comments mine is the only downvoted.
The study is about 198 German psychology students watching 1-minute video clips...
That is your entire evidentiary base for a sweeping claim about intelligence and judgment. The “valid cues” that drove accuracy were speech clarity and vocabulary...meaning the finding is essentially “people who are good at verbal processing noticed verbal cues.”. That is close to tautological, not some profound discovery about social perception. ;-)
But here is the part you really missed. The original commenter I replied to was not making the paper narrow claim. They said intelligent people “can recognize which of my ideas are intelligent and which of my ideas are half-baked.”
That is a much broader claim about intelligent people general judgment quality and exactly the kind of overreach my examples were dismantling. I was not arguing against the paper. I was arguing against the commenter extrapolation, which you are now also making by hiding behind the paper :-) as if it supports what was actually said.
Now...even if we stay strictly within the paper own claims: Correlational design, no causal inference possible, tiny unrepresentative sample, restricted intelligence range, zero validity (a 1-min clip vs. actual human interaction), multiple predictors tested with no correction for multiple comparisons, and half the authors own hypotheses failed.
The effect size could be trivially small for all the headline tells you. You are defending a study you probably read only as a headline, against criticisms you did not understand and were aimed at something else entirely.
The irony of confidently misjudging what argument you are even responding to, in a thread about people ability to judge accurately, is not lost on me.
The methodology is about as sound as a sociology study ever gets - respectable n and in a domain where "only college students" is probably OK.
The conclusion is pretty clear: intelligent people are better at discerning intelligence in others. The effect is weak but statistically significant.
This result lines up with mine (and others) experience, which is that it is significantly harder to bullshit a smart person than a stupid person about your own intelligence. It's fair game to discuss anecdotes in the context of a study like this because human beings don't understand the world in CIs and z-scores, they understand it in narratives.
> That is close to tautological, not some profound discovery about social perception. ;-)
So is my statement above. It would have been a profound discovery if the study found out that intelligent people were no more accurate at judging others' intelligence than anyone else.
> William Shockley another Nobel Prize...for inventing the transistor, probably the most consequential invention of the 20th century, could not recognize that touring college campuses promoting eugenics and forced sterilization was half-baked.
This seems different than the astrology or AIDS or cancer ideas mentioned above it as it's scientifically sound, just widely considered unethical.
This is honestly a tell about you. “Smart people” doesn’t imply that everything that comes from them is smart like they’re a branch of life with left-handed proteins. It’s much more complex.
Unintelligent people can also be right, or lucky, etc, and someone judging on those criteria can end up getting swept up in making some very bad decisions based on dubious advice.
One the most important lessons I ever learned in my career was not to mindlessly disregard a known bullshitter. He'll be right enough that you'll look foolish even if he hasn't earned his reputation.
I guess this supports a vague belief that I have held for decades: it is really difficult to rank the intelligence of people who are smarter than you
Through work I had the privilege of being around lots of people who were smarter than me, but if somebody asked me to rank them from "somewhat smarter" to "much smarter", I would have had a hard time.
Just an anecdote! I don't have any hard evidence.
I also wondered for many years why most of them didn't quit their jobs when on paper they would have been able to do so, but work is not a great place to ask those sorts of questions.
I think this might not be true though. This is like saying a marathon runner can walk like an amputee using a prosthetic.
Just like anyone else with a disadvantage, people who aren't that smart develop diverse compensatory strategies to work around their intellectual limitations, and these can look very different from popular caricatures of "dumb guy". A stupid person is not as simple as a smart person might imagine.
But by talking to them you can tell. It doesn’t matter if they made a ton of money selling real estate or whatever or have lovely personality traits or… let me know if I’m missing something. You can still tell by talking to them, because the structure and detail of a smarter person’s thought process is impossible to fake*. If you are similarly smart you can mirror their structure in your head, but if you are not you will just think they are saying something weird or confusing. Whereas there is nothing stopping a smarter person from simplifying their thought process when communicating, or filtering out thoughts they don’t think will be understood by the listener. Extremely smart people can get very good at this if they are well socialized.
It's funny to imagine that's the reason why "aliens invading us" or "AI taking over" are finally defeated at the end of a movie with a really stupid trick.
Yeah no I totally agree. I feel like I have a strong sense of a person's intelligence and their psychological capacity/abilities. I just passively look for it or analyze it in my interactions with them. But, if I don't myself have a grasp of the subtle abstract layers of complexity "above" a certain level, I can't evaluate another person's strengths in those areas, so I can't sense where they sit compared to others (or myself)!
I also think the more you know about things, the more you can see how well other people have integrated those things into their own psyche and how they employ those things, if that makes sense. Two people might both know a certain physics principle but one may elicit a far deeper and insightful employment of that knowledge than the other, even in casual situations.
Always thought of this as two cars driving faster than you on the road. After a certain distance it's clear both are faster than you, but really hard to say which one is the fastest.
>I also wondered for many years why most of them didn't quit their jobs when on paper they would have been able to do so, but work is not a great place to ask those sorts of questions.
Because they're smart enough to know neither money nor leisure is not the be all end all...
I cannot remember the exact quote, but I thought Norm Macdonald nailed this idea a while back.
He said something to the effect of: it's easy for a smart person to pretend they're dumb, but it's impossible for a dumb person to pretend they're smart.
Norm himself was pretty good at convincing people he was dumb when very much the opposite was true.
> it's impossible for a dumb person to pretend they're smart.
Unfortunately, that's not true. It's actually pretty easy to convince dumb people that you're smart, and so even dumb people can learn that skill. Myriad successful careers and even entire industries have been built on that foundation.
I realise he was making comedy, but breaking that down further I'd argue that dumb people can fool smart people for a little while that they're smart.
My social acuity has developed slowly, only after being repeatedly pounded into shape from mistakes, and quickly reading people is something that does not happen intuitively for me. I've been misled multiple times by people who, overall, I would now describe as just not that bright, with horrible consequences as the relationship developed. What they had in common is that they were all good at mirroring. Eg, They hear me use a technical term in an early conversation, they drop one or two confidently not much later, and before I picked up on what they were doing, I mistook them for an intellectual peer and let that early impression colour later ones. These days I'm much more attuned to it and have caught people doing it, along with the little microexpressions they pull when they think they've successfully deceived me. It's fun now, but it certainly didn't start that way.
I think the distribution of intelligence is extremely unfair in nature, leading to extremely unequal outcomes in society. I volunteer with an organization that gets ex-cons back on their feet and reintegrate into society by treating them for addiction, teaching basic finance skills, etc. I have found that for the majority of people in this program, their IQ is quite low compared with the average person, and it shows up in the form of extreme short-term thinking, not understanding interest rates, etc. It left me quite dejected, TBH. Not sure whether there is a solution.
I think they are implying that people with lower intelligence are more likely to be in jail. There's at least three reasons why I would consider this very plausible:
1. Intelligence is associated with higher impulse control.
2. Intelligent criminals are probably less likely to be caught. They might also have a better chance at working to lower their sentences after being caught.
3. It is harder to be successful with a lower IQ (although I would posit it is far from the most important factor), and economic hardship is strongly correlated with crime.
It's fairly simple to identify very smart people, but it takes some time. You ask them what their goals and predictions are, and then watch for a while.
I've noticed the smarter a person is, the fewer qualms they have about sharing exactly what they're aiming to do.
This approach is also a simple way to identify stupid people, but for stupid people there are much quicker methods. And stupid people tend to be cagey, because they have fewer tools for identifying when somebody is trying to take advantage of them, and because they've got experience being taken advantage of.
Being taken advantage of is not only a function of intelligence. It's also a function of emotional health. Sure, if the person is incapable of understanding they are being taken advantage of, they will be. But one can be perfectly capable of understanding that, see it happen in real time, and let it happen anyway. That has been the case with me for a long time. I could see, but I could not stop it, because I have been emotionally conditioned to allow it. Took a long time to fix.
There is also a risk of confusing a smart person with a person who speaks well. We have a built-in heuristic, that language signals intelligence. To a large extent it does, of course, but it can be deceptive. I've grown very weary of well-spoken people, who seem to want me to think they are also very smart.
Lastly, higher intelligence does not mean the person is a better human being. I find that there is an obsession with intelligence in the West. "Stupid" people can be really lovely and better companions than smart ones. There is something to be said about kindness and honesty.
> I've noticed the smarter a person is, the fewer qualms they have about sharing exactly what they're aiming to do.
I used to be like that. Openly speaking about what I aim to do and how. I ended up moderating that quality a fair bit after noticing some people began copying my ideas or outright stealing them. I was to slow to execute.
The nice thing about observing whether someone is accomplishing what they set out to accomplish is it doesn't matter how well spoken they seemed.
I've found that especially smart people have preternatural bullshit detectors, even when they lack "emotional health" or the ability to socialize well with others.
Smart people can be lovely, stupid people can be lovely, golden retrievers can be lovely... but that's tangential.
> I've found that especially smart people have preternatural bullshit detectors
I really disagree with that. So many smart people fell for obvious bullshit because it appealed to their intellectualism. Look at all the communist sympathizers in the West. Morons, but also intelligent people most of the time. They believed stories spread by the soviet propaganda, because they wanted to believe them.
> The nice thing about observing whether someone is accomplishing what they set out to accomplish is it doesn't matter how well spoken they seemed.
It's funny that you say that - there's another poster in this thready who claims that looking at the output is the stupid people's way of evaluating intelligence. Seems like we really have no idea how to tell (except for an actual IQ test)
> Smart people can be lovely, stupid people can be lovely, golden retrievers can be lovely... but that's tangential.
Yep, I was just making a note, that intelligence might be overrated as a trait.
I interact with people who seem about as smart as me fairly often- my college professors for example. And, I certainly have been in many situations where my domain knowledge was vastly less than some other person with real expertise. But I have a hard time thinking of a time when I thought someone else was significantly smarter than me. Probably, that's an example of exactly what the article is talking about- maybe I've met those people but failed to recognize them. They certainly must be out there (unless i am the smartest person in the world, in which case we're all in serious trouble).
Similar to your observation - I can think of at least one person who is definetly a lot smarter than than me, and yeah, I’m not sure I could tell you why exactly.
Part of it looks like focus, I think I have a broader skill set than they do. But I don’t know that I could like rank a set of people smarter than me.
A few signs: they know what your about to say and give you refutations to your argument before you voice them. Or you find they tend to block your argumentation and you don't quite know how to respond. Could be domain expertise though.
Or if it's a collaborative situation, they might propose an idea you are already kind of thinking about, but they do it faster and clearer.
Reminds me of this game show episode. I was watching it with friends, and I'm not sure if we all picked out who the smartest person would be, but I do remember we definitely figured out who one of the lower-ranked people would be just based on her blathering (I won't give it away here since people may want to enjoy the episode themselves).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAlI0pbMQiM
To be fair, the range of results were from 112 to 136. Just over one standard deviation. Like if you gave those tests again, you'd likely get a slightly different order. Basically, 131 - 136 is kind of a tie.
Now, 5 and 6 are basically locked in. You might see 5 and 6 swap or 5 swap with one of the top 4 to put him in fourth and that person in fifth.
But basically assume they've hit around the middle of their ability.
And yes, the black haired woman did harp on their credentials a lot. But a lot of them did and then there was the casual racism in putting the clean-cut Asian guy first and classism by putting the military guy last.
I haven't gotten to the end yet, but I think it's strange that it was initially presented as the participants taking the IQ test BEFORE they spoke and ranked each other, when they actually did so afterwards. Stereotype threat says hi.
EDIT: And, at the end... Yeah~
If I may blather a bit myself, though, it's interesting to note that the top four are likely within a margin of error. Good day, bad day, their rank is probably malleable. People like 5, IME, are quite intelligent, and I wonder if the circumstances affected their performance (4's too, possibly even 3's). 6... Well, I think that says a lot about where we are as a society. Though that might be the schadenfreude talking.
On the other hand, you could look at the ultimate ranking as one that leans heavily on each individual's confidence and comfort in the situation. 6's oversharing might have been rooted in nervousness and a sense of inferiority (the kind that might drive someone to, say, a push for high levels of formal accomplishment). Whereas, as someone in the comments pointed out, 3 was calm and relaxed even as they were being told that they were definitely the dumbest person in the room repeatedly. 1 is tall, male, stereotyped as intelligent, academically-accomplished, and acknowledged as such by everyone else; he had the best situational advantage for his headspace, entering the test.
Like the point of being more intelligent than someone or something is to an extent being able to simulate their brain and thinking with your own brain.
We’re cleverer than animals because we can simulate all their actions before they do them.
You can’t simulate something more advanced than yourself.
The opposite conclusion would also be obvious. We're a social species that might have deep primitives for evaluating the intelligence of another without needing to simulate the whole shebang.
I don't see how that would follow. If we are talking about "intelligence" in the formal sense of induction/prediction then it is a profoundly memory-hard problem as a matter of theory. This is to "learning" what the speed of light is to physics.
You can't replace the larger simulation required (i.e. more state/RAM) with a faster processor.
Sticking with the computation analogy, it could be a long-term memory look up. If memories were passed down the generations, people could simply memorize actions of individuals deemed smarter. Over a large sample size, a heuristic would emerge. Kind of like knowing there is always a sunset following a sunrise without understanding the solar system.
It is a zero sum game because you have a finite state budget for representing heuristics. Increasing the "smartness" (and therefore state required) of one heuristic necessarily requires reducing the smartness of other heuristics. The state is never not fully allocated, the best you can do is reallocate it.
This places an upper bound on the complexity of the patterns you can learn. At the limit you could spend 100% of resources building a maximally accurate model of a single thing but there are limits to ROI. Pre-digested learning makes it more efficient to acquire heuristics but it doesn't change the cost of representing it.
Some simple state machines are resistant to induction by design e.g. encryption algorithms.
I think that's kind of how all the religions were started. Smart people being tired of reasoning with dumb ones and instead going with "do this, because that's the will of God".
This general idea follows from the classic theorems on the limits of induction on finite computers. A computer can only build an inductive model of another computer that is substantially simpler than itself in a Kolmogorov sense. This process provides a measure for ordering simpler computers. Computers that are equally or more complex are indistinguishable via induction.
This is also a common basis for the concept of "free will": no computer can model its own behavior such that it can reliably predict it.
To a squirrel all humans are equally, unfathomably intelligent.
And the reverse too (not to self destruct, (A)Overthinking""" may not help, but never mind.. - it can't be so simple..?
=> "Human Intelligence" soon may be over. Even I did not - someone warn me then I stop - not as any could ever 'aftermind'.. - But can He..? - He would not (make such rock) ..it's another level. Or DNA, KISS ;).
While the linked study is interesting, using standardised tests is a terrible way to judge if someone is "intelligent".
Also imo is very difficult to come up with a universal definition of intelligence. For example, I hold Lionel Messi to be a very "intelligent" footballer, but I would judge his intelligence to be of vastly different nature to that of Albert Einstein.
Bit surprised that empathy makes no difference in this. People with high empathy tend to be good at reading others in general so would have thought that at least partially translates here
How did you reach that conclusion? From the article: "Those who demonstrated a stronger ability to perceive emotions in others also judged intelligence more accurately."
I guess you're surprised that empathy is not more important than intelligence? My thought there is that perceptiveness is a large part of intelligence, and if you lack that, you won't recognize the signs of intelligence no matter how empathetic you are.
Totally a hunch, but I always felt the (self proclaimed) "high EQ" people were people who generally hung out with other "high EQ", who generally were people that wear their emotions on their sleeve. Never mind mostly were interested in consuming content geared towards "people problems" rather than "thing problems".
The thing about IQ and EQ being on different ends of a spectrum is kind of wrong. Turns out, those people whose minds work more efficiently, do so across the board.
In other words, smarter people are better able to gauge people's emotions as well.
People with high empathy tend to feel other's feelings more (sometimes to their own detriment). Emotional intelligence helps with reading other people.
Think of it as social intelligence if the term “emotional” bothers you.
Solitary intelligence, in the wild, is just a different beast from tracking the exponential complexity of a social system. Everything we see—in biology, psychology and artificial intelligence—indicates that while these functions seem to share resources (you can't be an emotionally-intelligent idiot), they are distinct, with folks (and animals) possessing a lot of one and little of the other being observed, and their handicaps resulting from the lacking part being observeable, too,
If i get your point based on your answers: "intelligence" cannot be divided into categories. If you are intelligent, you can be trained to do whatever skill you want, its just a matter of being taught or exposed to the probelm. So it does not make sense for it to have its own category. So if you train intelligent people to be social, they will be social, its just software.
What i have seen: people can perform outstandingly well on classical intelligence without almost being taught. Think about mathematics or logic. But when you get into social/emotional territory, then it has a bigger correlation with how you were taught or your experienced when you where a small kid (but its not 100% causal). So in that sense its not the same thing.
Now, if you are unconfortable by calling it "intelligence", feel free to call it "skills". For me its the same thing as a football player having spacial awareness of the field. Sure, they have to be trained, but it is some "skill" that some people have an easier time using and improving.
Why not?
I know people who are very good at feeling other people’s emotions but very poor at analyzing them.
In kids you can see it all the time - like a kid started crying because he sees others cry, but if you ask them why they cry - the explanation is always ridiculous.
But even some adults are like that, interpreting your own or even others emotions is both a skill and a talent.
>In kids you can see it all the time - like a kid started crying because he sees others cry, but if you ask them why they cry - the explanation is always ridiculous.
Why can’t it be both? We have dedicated neural circuitry to mirroring others’ emotions, and pheromones that directly signal emotions between individuals.
It just isn't both. Emotional intelligence isn't mirroring others' emotions or smelling their pheromones, it is using the mind to actually understand rationally what is going through someone else's. It's how you can know what an octopus is thinking despite not having the neural circuitry to mirror its emotions or pick up its chemical signatures.
> It's how you can know what an octopus is thinking
You mean, it’s how you can assign anthropomorphised assumptions to the octopus. There’s a world difference between having semi reliable predictive power and actually knowing something.
Yes, exactly how you assign those assumptions to humans despite having no way of actually knowing that they have rich internal lives comparable to your own. It is the ability to simulate a mind foreign to your own and anticipate how it would respond to circumstances.
We don’t have to assume with humans. We can introspect our emotions and discuss them with others. Though we can’t be precise, we can understand and distinguish concepts like shame vs humiliation which appear to be (effectively) universal to the human experience.
That is a world apart from seeing an octopus react to something and assuming that anything resembling emotions are involved at all.
I think your description would be perfect in describing a psychopath - i.e. someone who can rationalize and think about other beings logically, without actually being able to subconsciously empathize.
Not all people like that at all. Some people really do feel emotions of others before being able to rationalize it.
> Some people really do feel emotions of others before being able to rationalize it.
Yeah, they are called empaths. That's empathy. Rationalizing is another process, which can be done faster with high emotional/social intelligence.
> psychopath - i.e. someone who can rationalize and think about other beings logically, without actually being able to subconsciously empathize.
Exactly. Low on empathy but high on intelligence - psychopath. Low on emotional intelligence but high on empathy - empath. Low on both - unfeeling idiot. High on both - a warm kind person.
No, a psychopath is someone who can't empathize. Theory of mind has nothing to do with empathy. The overwhelming majority of people are capable of both, but they are two distinct skills.
Having met many extremely intelligent people who struggle to understand the emotional state and responses of those around them, hell yeah I think it's a distinct category.
Doing math, or telling a joke, or catching a ball, or carrying a tune are all normal human behaviors. People's skills at any of them vary, and we don't refer to those with lower skill levels in that category as mentally deficient or ill.
The only ways that comprehending emotions wouldn't belong in its own category of intelligence would be if everyone were equally capable of deducing the emotional state of others, or that performing such deduction is not something intellectual, or that such deduction is strictly a consequence of existing intellectual categories.
>The only ways that comprehending emotions wouldn't belong in its own category of intelligence would be if everyone were equally capable of deducing the emotional state of others
Not every skill gets a whole category of intelligence.
>that such deduction is strictly a consequence of existing intellectual categories
Someone could be extremely proficient in disciplines that are associated with 'raw' intelligence, and yet utterly fail at theory of mind. Anyone that has been in a college campus probably has seen examples e.g, Classmate might click instantly with real analysis but will routinely perplexed about why their girlfriend is mad, or why they are seen as abrasive.
To be clear, in my experience it wasn't even a case of being on the spectrum or other neurodivergence. They simply had a bad model of other people's thoughts and emotions. Of course this isn't DnD, I've met people a order of magnitude smarter than me in the usual academics and with a deeper understanding of people.
You might not like the terminology, but it's a real thing and can be independent from what we usually call intelligence.
Consider a computer with a cpu and gpu. The CPU is a general purpose computer. It can do literally anything. Including software rendering. But the GPU is purpose designed for graphics so it will be much more efficient at the job. These days the GPU is also a general purpose computer so it could in theory do anythign the CPU does too, but for many things again it will be less efficient.
It's the same with emotional intelligence. The brain has dedicated circuitry for understanding other people. You can reason it through abstractly but it will be less efficient. You can also solve problems about natural science with the emotional reasoning part of the brain. Ever heard the expression "the atom wants a full shell of electrons"? That's empathy.
No, it is more like software. You either grow up around others, socialise and train your intuition or you don't. To believe there is special circuitry really goes deep into the pseudoscience territory.
You are correct that training is necessary, but that isn't the knockout blow you think it is. It goes for many of the specialized tasks (e.g. visual processing, auditory processing, motor skills, spatial awareness) done in the brain. You are born with the potential for these things but they have to be used or they will wilt.
As for where in the brain it happens it does seem to be a little spread out, but the superior temporal sulcus has an important role.
An interesting semi-related story is that taxi drivers in London take a very hard test called The Knowledge requiring them to memorize a huge amount of city layout. Studying for this produces measurable changes in the brain, leading to an enlarged posterior hippocampus. That it consistently leads to changes of the same type across many individuals clearly indicates that the brain is allocating resources to the relevant circuitry when this learning takes place.
There are many other ways to learn about the brains specialized processing such as looking what happens when various parts of the brain get damaged, or by putting people in scanners when they perform certain tasks.
You're the only person here invoking "special circuitry". All intelligence is a mix of both learned and biological factors.
Plus one of the big ways we evaluate the intelligence of other species is trying to see if they have theory of mind, which is intrinsically linked to social intelligence.
Edit: Ah, the person you replied to also invoked special circuitry.
makes sense. I assume that smart people tend to hang out with other smart people more, and naturally learn to identify the cues & patterns of those.
where as, if you don't hang out with many smart people, there is not much to recognize.
A data point: the parent of an about 140 IQ son told me that her son was in a room with other 120+ IQ kids. They started to talk and quickly formed groups. Those groups turned out to include kids of very similar IQ. The ones between 140 and 143 thought that the ones between 137 and 139 were not interesting to talk with.
People often see the Jungian personality traits of "judging" vs. "perceiving" etc as actual exogenous traits, but it's also a tendency to spend more time before coming to a conclusion.
What about less intelligent people judging the intelligence of more intelligent people - and about handling that, from both sides - finding (or not) that someone may be more intelligent than you ever know or could imagine - or to deal with someone that will never find that out - but will keep treating you instead as you were that more stupid person regardless of whatever - and what if when he by chance may find about that, the outcome could be even worse for you ?
(Good Soldier Švejk is _dark_ _comedy_ - but not necessary an answer someone could take or like, moreover some people may happen to be smart differently.. some with high IQ still be dumb - or, the.. reverse?? ..really? - but howTF ??? ;)
Assuming your samples are not biased, 1000 subjects are generally far more than are necessary to demonstrate an effect. People who complain about sample size are generally not that well-educated in statistics.
A well-educated person in statistics would also mention that it requires a certain class of distribution. This is one of Nassim Taleb's favourite subject (imagine computing the average net worth of a random group of people and suddenly Bill Gates is among them)
>But why this matters is there a challenge judging intelligence cross cultures?
I don't know for sure, but my own anecdotal experience is that yes, there most certainly are challenges when a person from one culture assesses the intelligence of someone else from another culture.
It would be nice to know whether this is supported by scientific evidence, or whether this is simply my own personal bias at play.
1) Syntax/semantic split. Can the person accept that a function called "multiplyBy5(a,b) { return a+b }" doesn't actually multiply by five, but adds the numbers?
2) PR speak: Does the person recognize that public relation speak is usually intentionally misleading, as in "the Russian Ministry of Defense said that a fire [onboard the Moskva] had caused ammunition to explode" (obviously caused by an Ukrainian missile and not an accidental fire, even though that's what's implied.) [0]
3) They're, their, there: There easy to tell apart, since they're meaning is so different. /s
4) Viewpoints: Can this person understand and articulate viewpoints that they consider "wrong" or simply don't hold themselves?
5) (new) LLM introspection: Does the person understand that LLMs have no secret understanding of themselves? An LLM like "Grok" doesn't actually understand "Grok" better than Gemini understands "Grok" - apart from minor differences in model strength maybe.
Are there people that would legitimately argue point 1?
If you are only looking at the call site, sure that could be confusing, but if you are looking at the definition as provided in your post, surely anyone that is able understand the concept of a function can see the problem?
I'm not arguing they don't exist, sure they do, but I'm confused as to how you came up with it as a litmus test? Is it that common?
Surely we can agree in a real scenario renaming it (or fixing implementation to match name) is likely appropriate, but to completely miss the error?
Hope this comes across as curiousity, because I am curious about this one from your list in particular.
I've heard the parable, "If you didn't eat breakfast or lunch yesterday, how would you feel around 3pm?", a common response is apparently "but I did eat lunch and breakfast yesterday".
I think it's similar to the case of counterfactuals, hypotheticals, or steelmaning and how well you can handle them. ("Can you accept that there can be a function named multiplyBy5 that does something else instead").
But I think if someone already is comfortable with working with abstractions such as "function" the thing is trivial, so it's a bit of a weird litmus test.
> "Can you accept that there can be a function named multiplyBy5 that does something else instead").
I think anyone that can understand a function can understand this, but one might not be happy accepting it's the case, and endeavor to change it.
I think it can be easy to lose sight of that distinction, and eagerness to fix it can be confused with not accepting it could be, but is also probably wrong.
What do you mean by "themselves" here? Grok is RL'd to behave like a Grok, so it trivially knows the qualities that define Grok better than Gemini does, which can only go by second hand sources.
> so it trivially knows the qualities that define Grok
How does it know? Where did he get that knowledge from? Did they train Grok, check it's qualities and included them in next training set? Was his source code and summarization of weights included, or maybe he has access to them for "introspection"?
I've heard that a non-Mensan asked a Mensan what it's like at a Mensa event. They replied, "If I have to explain something during a conversation, I only have to explain it _once_."
Something I have always appreciated. I'm much less anxious working with very intelligent people, even if their intelligence eclipses mine. They don't have unusual ideas about what I should or should not be able to grasp. They can recognize which of my ideas are intelligent and which of my ideas are half-baked.
Working with unintelligent people, you need to spend more time building up a reputation. They cannot tell if you're intelligent based on what you say, or how you explain things -- only if you get results. This is nerve wracking for multiple reasons, but chiefly because intelligent people can be wrong, or unlucky, etc, and so only judging someone based on results is partially to judge based on luck.
>> I'm much less anxious working with very intelligent people, even if their intelligence eclipses mine. They don't have unusual ideas about what I should or should not be able to grasp. They can recognize which of my ideas are intelligent and which of my ideas are half-baked.
Funny, because Kary Mullis, Nobel Prize winner for inventing PCR, one of the most important tools in the history of molecular biology, the technique that made modern genetics and COVID testing possible, could not recognize that his ideas about AIDS being a hoax were half baked. Or his belief in astrology. Nobel laureate. Astrology...
Linus Pauling with his two Nobel Prizes, could not recognize that his vitamin C cures cancer crusade was half baked. James Watson decoded DNA itself and could not recognize that his ideas about race were half-baked.
William Shockley another Nobel Prize...for inventing the transistor, probably the most consequential invention of the 20th century, could not recognize that touring college campuses promoting eugenics and forced sterilization was half-baked.
Bill Gates could not recognize that hanging out with a convicted sex trafficker after the conviction was half baked. Larry Summers could not recognize that speculating about womens brains at a public conference was half baked.
Intelligent people are great at recognizing which of your ideas are half-baked and they can also be catastrophically bad at recognizing which of their own are.The smarter they are, the more elaborate the justification, the more airtight the rationalization, and the more spectacular the eventual collapse. Peter Thiel being the prime example...
Watch out for smart people... they are the worst judges of their own stupidity...
The paper is about more intelligent people having higher accuracy judging other's intelligence. Nobody is claiming that intelligent people are completely infallible, nobody is claiming that they're incapable of ever believing in incorrect things.
My experience is that smart people more often refrain from judgement of intelligence in others. Those that judge quickly, especially after a single statement that may have been stupendous or trivially illogical, almost certainly aren't the brightest stars in the night sky. That includes excentric people, perhaps not those that state something like that in an overly emotional state. But otherwise it is quite a good giveaway in my opinion.
Especially if you ask them to elaborate their disagreement, the argument is often trite and one-dimensional.
"I don't have enough information to render a judgement" is itself a judgement, and often a wise one. Some of the scariest folks think they really know a lot about a candidate after a job interview with some canned questions.
You say “the paper is about more intelligent people having higher accuracy judging others intelligence.” Lets talk about what the paper actually shows...since you all and the rest of this HN thread :-) are confidently defending a claim you apparently... have not even scrutinized...It says so much, that from the hundreds of comments mine is the only downvoted.
The study is about 198 German psychology students watching 1-minute video clips...
That is your entire evidentiary base for a sweeping claim about intelligence and judgment. The “valid cues” that drove accuracy were speech clarity and vocabulary...meaning the finding is essentially “people who are good at verbal processing noticed verbal cues.”. That is close to tautological, not some profound discovery about social perception. ;-)
But here is the part you really missed. The original commenter I replied to was not making the paper narrow claim. They said intelligent people “can recognize which of my ideas are intelligent and which of my ideas are half-baked.”
That is a much broader claim about intelligent people general judgment quality and exactly the kind of overreach my examples were dismantling. I was not arguing against the paper. I was arguing against the commenter extrapolation, which you are now also making by hiding behind the paper :-) as if it supports what was actually said.
Now...even if we stay strictly within the paper own claims: Correlational design, no causal inference possible, tiny unrepresentative sample, restricted intelligence range, zero validity (a 1-min clip vs. actual human interaction), multiple predictors tested with no correction for multiple comparisons, and half the authors own hypotheses failed.
The effect size could be trivially small for all the headline tells you. You are defending a study you probably read only as a headline, against criticisms you did not understand and were aimed at something else entirely.
The irony of confidently misjudging what argument you are even responding to, in a thread about people ability to judge accurately, is not lost on me.
The methodology is about as sound as a sociology study ever gets - respectable n and in a domain where "only college students" is probably OK.
The conclusion is pretty clear: intelligent people are better at discerning intelligence in others. The effect is weak but statistically significant.
This result lines up with mine (and others) experience, which is that it is significantly harder to bullshit a smart person than a stupid person about your own intelligence. It's fair game to discuss anecdotes in the context of a study like this because human beings don't understand the world in CIs and z-scores, they understand it in narratives.
> That is close to tautological, not some profound discovery about social perception. ;-)
So is my statement above. It would have been a profound discovery if the study found out that intelligent people were no more accurate at judging others' intelligence than anyone else.
> William Shockley another Nobel Prize...for inventing the transistor, probably the most consequential invention of the 20th century, could not recognize that touring college campuses promoting eugenics and forced sterilization was half-baked.
This seems different than the astrology or AIDS or cancer ideas mentioned above it as it's scientifically sound, just widely considered unethical.
That's just Nobel Syndrome.
This is honestly a tell about you. “Smart people” doesn’t imply that everything that comes from them is smart like they’re a branch of life with left-handed proteins. It’s much more complex.
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Unintelligent people can also be right, or lucky, etc, and someone judging on those criteria can end up getting swept up in making some very bad decisions based on dubious advice.
One the most important lessons I ever learned in my career was not to mindlessly disregard a known bullshitter. He'll be right enough that you'll look foolish even if he hasn't earned his reputation.
I guess this supports a vague belief that I have held for decades: it is really difficult to rank the intelligence of people who are smarter than you
Through work I had the privilege of being around lots of people who were smarter than me, but if somebody asked me to rank them from "somewhat smarter" to "much smarter", I would have had a hard time.
Just an anecdote! I don't have any hard evidence.
I also wondered for many years why most of them didn't quit their jobs when on paper they would have been able to do so, but work is not a great place to ask those sorts of questions.
> it is really difficult to rank the intelligence of people who are smarter than you
a comparative example that i think about quite often, in the realm of TTRPG's:
A smart person can play a dumb character well, usually, but a dumb person cannot play a smart character.
Or rather, they usually end up playing a character that can be described as 'dumb guys idea of a smart guy', which is... distinct than 'smart guy'
the broader point, ig: to model a level of intelligence well, it has to be 'within' your own, otherwise the model ends up too lossy!
I think this might not be true though. This is like saying a marathon runner can walk like an amputee using a prosthetic.
Just like anyone else with a disadvantage, people who aren't that smart develop diverse compensatory strategies to work around their intellectual limitations, and these can look very different from popular caricatures of "dumb guy". A stupid person is not as simple as a smart person might imagine.
But by talking to them you can tell. It doesn’t matter if they made a ton of money selling real estate or whatever or have lovely personality traits or… let me know if I’m missing something. You can still tell by talking to them, because the structure and detail of a smarter person’s thought process is impossible to fake*. If you are similarly smart you can mirror their structure in your head, but if you are not you will just think they are saying something weird or confusing. Whereas there is nothing stopping a smarter person from simplifying their thought process when communicating, or filtering out thoughts they don’t think will be understood by the listener. Extremely smart people can get very good at this if they are well socialized.
* If it’s an interactive conversation, anyway
and: a smart person can write a movie script with a stupid character but stupid script writers fail badly when writing smart characters.
It's funny to imagine that's the reason why "aliens invading us" or "AI taking over" are finally defeated at the end of a movie with a really stupid trick.
The Big Bang Theory, explained.
Yeah no I totally agree. I feel like I have a strong sense of a person's intelligence and their psychological capacity/abilities. I just passively look for it or analyze it in my interactions with them. But, if I don't myself have a grasp of the subtle abstract layers of complexity "above" a certain level, I can't evaluate another person's strengths in those areas, so I can't sense where they sit compared to others (or myself)!
I also think the more you know about things, the more you can see how well other people have integrated those things into their own psyche and how they employ those things, if that makes sense. Two people might both know a certain physics principle but one may elicit a far deeper and insightful employment of that knowledge than the other, even in casual situations.
Always thought of this as two cars driving faster than you on the road. After a certain distance it's clear both are faster than you, but really hard to say which one is the fastest.
> if somebody asked me to rank them from "somewhat smarter" to "much smarter", I would have had a hard time.
It doesn't help that intelligence is many-dimensional.
It's also difficult to write characters that are smarter than the writer. See how poorly TV and movie writers portray intelligent characters.
>I also wondered for many years why most of them didn't quit their jobs when on paper they would have been able to do so, but work is not a great place to ask those sorts of questions.
Because they're smart enough to know neither money nor leisure is not the be all end all...
So both are? Like, combined?
Maybe they are smart enough to realize when they have a good thing going (on balance).
I cannot remember the exact quote, but I thought Norm Macdonald nailed this idea a while back.
He said something to the effect of: it's easy for a smart person to pretend they're dumb, but it's impossible for a dumb person to pretend they're smart.
Norm himself was pretty good at convincing people he was dumb when very much the opposite was true.
> it's impossible for a dumb person to pretend they're smart.
Unfortunately, that's not true. It's actually pretty easy to convince dumb people that you're smart, and so even dumb people can learn that skill. Myriad successful careers and even entire industries have been built on that foundation.
The truth is you can build a successful career, on a foundation of a successful industry, that is run for and run by, all idiots.
I can think of a couple of presidential careers where that worked out for the deceivers.
I see your point, but voters are not voting based on the candidate's intelligence levels.
Successful people are stupid? That's the theory?
It worked for me. ;-)
I realise he was making comedy, but breaking that down further I'd argue that dumb people can fool smart people for a little while that they're smart.
My social acuity has developed slowly, only after being repeatedly pounded into shape from mistakes, and quickly reading people is something that does not happen intuitively for me. I've been misled multiple times by people who, overall, I would now describe as just not that bright, with horrible consequences as the relationship developed. What they had in common is that they were all good at mirroring. Eg, They hear me use a technical term in an early conversation, they drop one or two confidently not much later, and before I picked up on what they were doing, I mistook them for an intellectual peer and let that early impression colour later ones. These days I'm much more attuned to it and have caught people doing it, along with the little microexpressions they pull when they think they've successfully deceived me. It's fun now, but it certainly didn't start that way.
I have my doubts about Nate Bargatze being half as dumb as he pretends to be as well. Great comedic niche to fill, in my opinion.
I think the distribution of intelligence is extremely unfair in nature, leading to extremely unequal outcomes in society. I volunteer with an organization that gets ex-cons back on their feet and reintegrate into society by treating them for addiction, teaching basic finance skills, etc. I have found that for the majority of people in this program, their IQ is quite low compared with the average person, and it shows up in the form of extreme short-term thinking, not understanding interest rates, etc. It left me quite dejected, TBH. Not sure whether there is a solution.
So you're telling me jailtime lowers people's IQs?
I think they are implying that people with lower intelligence are more likely to be in jail. There's at least three reasons why I would consider this very plausible:
1. Intelligence is associated with higher impulse control.
2. Intelligent criminals are probably less likely to be caught. They might also have a better chance at working to lower their sentences after being caught.
3. It is harder to be successful with a lower IQ (although I would posit it is far from the most important factor), and economic hardship is strongly correlated with crime.
It's fairly simple to identify very smart people, but it takes some time. You ask them what their goals and predictions are, and then watch for a while.
I've noticed the smarter a person is, the fewer qualms they have about sharing exactly what they're aiming to do.
This approach is also a simple way to identify stupid people, but for stupid people there are much quicker methods. And stupid people tend to be cagey, because they have fewer tools for identifying when somebody is trying to take advantage of them, and because they've got experience being taken advantage of.
I disagree with some of your observations.
Being taken advantage of is not only a function of intelligence. It's also a function of emotional health. Sure, if the person is incapable of understanding they are being taken advantage of, they will be. But one can be perfectly capable of understanding that, see it happen in real time, and let it happen anyway. That has been the case with me for a long time. I could see, but I could not stop it, because I have been emotionally conditioned to allow it. Took a long time to fix.
There is also a risk of confusing a smart person with a person who speaks well. We have a built-in heuristic, that language signals intelligence. To a large extent it does, of course, but it can be deceptive. I've grown very weary of well-spoken people, who seem to want me to think they are also very smart.
Lastly, higher intelligence does not mean the person is a better human being. I find that there is an obsession with intelligence in the West. "Stupid" people can be really lovely and better companions than smart ones. There is something to be said about kindness and honesty.
> I've noticed the smarter a person is, the fewer qualms they have about sharing exactly what they're aiming to do.
I used to be like that. Openly speaking about what I aim to do and how. I ended up moderating that quality a fair bit after noticing some people began copying my ideas or outright stealing them. I was to slow to execute.
The nice thing about observing whether someone is accomplishing what they set out to accomplish is it doesn't matter how well spoken they seemed.
I've found that especially smart people have preternatural bullshit detectors, even when they lack "emotional health" or the ability to socialize well with others.
Smart people can be lovely, stupid people can be lovely, golden retrievers can be lovely... but that's tangential.
> I've found that especially smart people have preternatural bullshit detectors
I really disagree with that. So many smart people fell for obvious bullshit because it appealed to their intellectualism. Look at all the communist sympathizers in the West. Morons, but also intelligent people most of the time. They believed stories spread by the soviet propaganda, because they wanted to believe them.
> The nice thing about observing whether someone is accomplishing what they set out to accomplish is it doesn't matter how well spoken they seemed.
It's funny that you say that - there's another poster in this thready who claims that looking at the output is the stupid people's way of evaluating intelligence. Seems like we really have no idea how to tell (except for an actual IQ test)
> Smart people can be lovely, stupid people can be lovely, golden retrievers can be lovely... but that's tangential.
Yep, I was just making a note, that intelligence might be overrated as a trait.
Pretty much by definition: if you fall for bullshit so long as it appeals to your vanity, then you’re not especially smart.
Is Chomsky smart?
Is a 0.01% outlier a member of the class I'm describing? No, he's not.
Because when I say "smart people", I'm not saying "every single smart person on the planet".
I'm going to point out that the submitter is posting their own site as regularly as clockwork (https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=comuniq.xyz) and has a very long history of self-promotion of their own domains under previous account names cannibalXxx, gorpo85, and saturn85, etc. Probably the most egregious example being https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=chat-to.dev which eventually got banned. The submitter identifies themselves as the owner of the site in the comment here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43531490 , meaning that it's the same individual.
Hopefully the HN administrators will get around to noticing this domain eventually as well and banning it.
I interact with people who seem about as smart as me fairly often- my college professors for example. And, I certainly have been in many situations where my domain knowledge was vastly less than some other person with real expertise. But I have a hard time thinking of a time when I thought someone else was significantly smarter than me. Probably, that's an example of exactly what the article is talking about- maybe I've met those people but failed to recognize them. They certainly must be out there (unless i am the smartest person in the world, in which case we're all in serious trouble).
Similar to your observation - I can think of at least one person who is definetly a lot smarter than than me, and yeah, I’m not sure I could tell you why exactly.
Part of it looks like focus, I think I have a broader skill set than they do. But I don’t know that I could like rank a set of people smarter than me.
A few signs: they know what your about to say and give you refutations to your argument before you voice them. Or you find they tend to block your argumentation and you don't quite know how to respond. Could be domain expertise though.
Or if it's a collaborative situation, they might propose an idea you are already kind of thinking about, but they do it faster and clearer.
Reminds me of this game show episode. I was watching it with friends, and I'm not sure if we all picked out who the smartest person would be, but I do remember we definitely figured out who one of the lower-ranked people would be just based on her blathering (I won't give it away here since people may want to enjoy the episode themselves). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAlI0pbMQiM
To be fair, the range of results were from 112 to 136. Just over one standard deviation. Like if you gave those tests again, you'd likely get a slightly different order. Basically, 131 - 136 is kind of a tie.
Now, 5 and 6 are basically locked in. You might see 5 and 6 swap or 5 swap with one of the top 4 to put him in fourth and that person in fifth.
But basically assume they've hit around the middle of their ability.
And yes, the black haired woman did harp on their credentials a lot. But a lot of them did and then there was the casual racism in putting the clean-cut Asian guy first and classism by putting the military guy last.
All-in-all, Jubilee is trash, as always.
Reminds me of "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt."
I haven't gotten to the end yet, but I think it's strange that it was initially presented as the participants taking the IQ test BEFORE they spoke and ranked each other, when they actually did so afterwards. Stereotype threat says hi.
EDIT: And, at the end... Yeah~
If I may blather a bit myself, though, it's interesting to note that the top four are likely within a margin of error. Good day, bad day, their rank is probably malleable. People like 5, IME, are quite intelligent, and I wonder if the circumstances affected their performance (4's too, possibly even 3's). 6... Well, I think that says a lot about where we are as a society. Though that might be the schadenfreude talking.
On the other hand, you could look at the ultimate ranking as one that leans heavily on each individual's confidence and comfort in the situation. 6's oversharing might have been rooted in nervousness and a sense of inferiority (the kind that might drive someone to, say, a push for high levels of formal accomplishment). Whereas, as someone in the comments pointed out, 3 was calm and relaxed even as they were being told that they were definitely the dumbest person in the room repeatedly. 1 is tall, male, stereotyped as intelligent, academically-accomplished, and acknowledged as such by everyone else; he had the best situational advantage for his headspace, entering the test.
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This seems pretty obvious doesn’t it?
Like the point of being more intelligent than someone or something is to an extent being able to simulate their brain and thinking with your own brain.
We’re cleverer than animals because we can simulate all their actions before they do them.
You can’t simulate something more advanced than yourself.
> This seems pretty obvious doesn’t it?
The opposite conclusion would also be obvious. We're a social species that might have deep primitives for evaluating the intelligence of another without needing to simulate the whole shebang.
I don't see how that would follow. If we are talking about "intelligence" in the formal sense of induction/prediction then it is a profoundly memory-hard problem as a matter of theory. This is to "learning" what the speed of light is to physics.
You can't replace the larger simulation required (i.e. more state/RAM) with a faster processor.
Sticking with the computation analogy, it could be a long-term memory look up. If memories were passed down the generations, people could simply memorize actions of individuals deemed smarter. Over a large sample size, a heuristic would emerge. Kind of like knowing there is always a sunset following a sunrise without understanding the solar system.
It is a zero sum game because you have a finite state budget for representing heuristics. Increasing the "smartness" (and therefore state required) of one heuristic necessarily requires reducing the smartness of other heuristics. The state is never not fully allocated, the best you can do is reallocate it.
This places an upper bound on the complexity of the patterns you can learn. At the limit you could spend 100% of resources building a maximally accurate model of a single thing but there are limits to ROI. Pre-digested learning makes it more efficient to acquire heuristics but it doesn't change the cost of representing it.
Some simple state machines are resistant to induction by design e.g. encryption algorithms.
I think that's kind of how all the religions were started. Smart people being tired of reasoning with dumb ones and instead going with "do this, because that's the will of God".
> You can’t simulate something more advanced than yourself.
Sometimes you can given more time. Many times being more intelligent is arriving at a conclusion faster without wasting as much on dead ends.
A bad analogy: Magnus Carlson making a move in seconds and still defeating his opponent which has minutes for a move.
This general idea follows from the classic theorems on the limits of induction on finite computers. A computer can only build an inductive model of another computer that is substantially simpler than itself in a Kolmogorov sense. This process provides a measure for ordering simpler computers. Computers that are equally or more complex are indistinguishable via induction.
This is also a common basis for the concept of "free will": no computer can model its own behavior such that it can reliably predict it.
To a squirrel all humans are equally, unfathomably intelligent.
And the reverse too (not to self destruct, (A)Overthinking""" may not help, but never mind.. - it can't be so simple..?
=> "Human Intelligence" soon may be over. Even I did not - someone warn me then I stop - not as any could ever 'aftermind'.. - But can He..? - He would not (make such rock) ..it's another level. Or DNA, KISS ;).
And today in obvious headlines: "Game recognize game"
While the linked study is interesting, using standardised tests is a terrible way to judge if someone is "intelligent".
Also imo is very difficult to come up with a universal definition of intelligence. For example, I hold Lionel Messi to be a very "intelligent" footballer, but I would judge his intelligence to be of vastly different nature to that of Albert Einstein.
Bit surprised that empathy makes no difference in this. People with high empathy tend to be good at reading others in general so would have thought that at least partially translates here
i've found this to be wrong a lot actually
high empathy means you feel what you think the other person is feeling,
Highly empathetic people have horrible theory of mind issues a lot of the time.
Kids from abusive homes are fucking impeccable at reading emotions, their health depended on it.
How did you reach that conclusion? From the article: "Those who demonstrated a stronger ability to perceive emotions in others also judged intelligence more accurately."
I guess you're surprised that empathy is not more important than intelligence? My thought there is that perceptiveness is a large part of intelligence, and if you lack that, you won't recognize the signs of intelligence no matter how empathetic you are.
Totally a hunch, but I always felt the (self proclaimed) "high EQ" people were people who generally hung out with other "high EQ", who generally were people that wear their emotions on their sleeve. Never mind mostly were interested in consuming content geared towards "people problems" rather than "thing problems".
The thing about IQ and EQ being on different ends of a spectrum is kind of wrong. Turns out, those people whose minds work more efficiently, do so across the board.
In other words, smarter people are better able to gauge people's emotions as well.
People with high empathy tend to feel other's feelings more (sometimes to their own detriment). Emotional intelligence helps with reading other people.
>Emotional intelligence
Pseudoscience.
Finally a comment which is clearly 100% human
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Think of it as social intelligence if the term “emotional” bothers you.
Solitary intelligence, in the wild, is just a different beast from tracking the exponential complexity of a social system. Everything we see—in biology, psychology and artificial intelligence—indicates that while these functions seem to share resources (you can't be an emotionally-intelligent idiot), they are distinct, with folks (and animals) possessing a lot of one and little of the other being observed, and their handicaps resulting from the lacking part being observeable, too,
If i get your point based on your answers: "intelligence" cannot be divided into categories. If you are intelligent, you can be trained to do whatever skill you want, its just a matter of being taught or exposed to the probelm. So it does not make sense for it to have its own category. So if you train intelligent people to be social, they will be social, its just software.
What i have seen: people can perform outstandingly well on classical intelligence without almost being taught. Think about mathematics or logic. But when you get into social/emotional territory, then it has a bigger correlation with how you were taught or your experienced when you where a small kid (but its not 100% causal). So in that sense its not the same thing.
Now, if you are unconfortable by calling it "intelligence", feel free to call it "skills". For me its the same thing as a football player having spacial awareness of the field. Sure, they have to be trained, but it is some "skill" that some people have an easier time using and improving.
Why not? I know people who are very good at feeling other people’s emotions but very poor at analyzing them.
In kids you can see it all the time - like a kid started crying because he sees others cry, but if you ask them why they cry - the explanation is always ridiculous.
But even some adults are like that, interpreting your own or even others emotions is both a skill and a talent.
>In kids you can see it all the time - like a kid started crying because he sees others cry, but if you ask them why they cry - the explanation is always ridiculous.
That's just called empathy.
Their point is that empathy is a (very useful) emotional response. It doesn't give you a correct model of the other persons mind.
Why can’t it be both? We have dedicated neural circuitry to mirroring others’ emotions, and pheromones that directly signal emotions between individuals.
It just isn't both. Emotional intelligence isn't mirroring others' emotions or smelling their pheromones, it is using the mind to actually understand rationally what is going through someone else's. It's how you can know what an octopus is thinking despite not having the neural circuitry to mirror its emotions or pick up its chemical signatures.
> It's how you can know what an octopus is thinking
You mean, it’s how you can assign anthropomorphised assumptions to the octopus. There’s a world difference between having semi reliable predictive power and actually knowing something.
Yes, exactly how you assign those assumptions to humans despite having no way of actually knowing that they have rich internal lives comparable to your own. It is the ability to simulate a mind foreign to your own and anticipate how it would respond to circumstances.
We don’t have to assume with humans. We can introspect our emotions and discuss them with others. Though we can’t be precise, we can understand and distinguish concepts like shame vs humiliation which appear to be (effectively) universal to the human experience.
That is a world apart from seeing an octopus react to something and assuming that anything resembling emotions are involved at all.
> We can introspect our emotions and discuss them with others.
And theory of mind is how you can know what someone is thinking without them telling you.
Because we have prior knowledge to rely on.
As opposed to built in neural pathways or pheromone responses.
I think your description would be perfect in describing a psychopath - i.e. someone who can rationalize and think about other beings logically, without actually being able to subconsciously empathize.
Not all people like that at all. Some people really do feel emotions of others before being able to rationalize it.
> Some people really do feel emotions of others before being able to rationalize it.
Yeah, they are called empaths. That's empathy. Rationalizing is another process, which can be done faster with high emotional/social intelligence.
> psychopath - i.e. someone who can rationalize and think about other beings logically, without actually being able to subconsciously empathize.
Exactly. Low on empathy but high on intelligence - psychopath. Low on emotional intelligence but high on empathy - empath. Low on both - unfeeling idiot. High on both - a warm kind person.
No, a psychopath is someone who can't empathize. Theory of mind has nothing to do with empathy. The overwhelming majority of people are capable of both, but they are two distinct skills.
Having met many extremely intelligent people who struggle to understand the emotional state and responses of those around them, hell yeah I think it's a distinct category.
what you're describing is a mental deficiency or illness. Being able to understand emotional state should be considered normal human behavior.
Doing math, or telling a joke, or catching a ball, or carrying a tune are all normal human behaviors. People's skills at any of them vary, and we don't refer to those with lower skill levels in that category as mentally deficient or ill.
I was thinking about what i said and regret it, it was a mistake.
> People's skills at any of them vary
exactly
We know that emotional intelligence, in the sense of Machiavellian intelligence, is really just completely normal intelligence.
The only ways that comprehending emotions wouldn't belong in its own category of intelligence would be if everyone were equally capable of deducing the emotional state of others, or that performing such deduction is not something intellectual, or that such deduction is strictly a consequence of existing intellectual categories.
>The only ways that comprehending emotions wouldn't belong in its own category of intelligence would be if everyone were equally capable of deducing the emotional state of others
Not every skill gets a whole category of intelligence.
>that such deduction is strictly a consequence of existing intellectual categories
Yes.
>Yes.
The fact that you don't list these says a lot about how much you know on this topic.
Someone could be extremely proficient in disciplines that are associated with 'raw' intelligence, and yet utterly fail at theory of mind. Anyone that has been in a college campus probably has seen examples e.g, Classmate might click instantly with real analysis but will routinely perplexed about why their girlfriend is mad, or why they are seen as abrasive.
To be clear, in my experience it wasn't even a case of being on the spectrum or other neurodivergence. They simply had a bad model of other people's thoughts and emotions. Of course this isn't DnD, I've met people a order of magnitude smarter than me in the usual academics and with a deeper understanding of people.
You might not like the terminology, but it's a real thing and can be independent from what we usually call intelligence.
you thinking selling doesn't take emotional intelligence?
Consider a computer with a cpu and gpu. The CPU is a general purpose computer. It can do literally anything. Including software rendering. But the GPU is purpose designed for graphics so it will be much more efficient at the job. These days the GPU is also a general purpose computer so it could in theory do anythign the CPU does too, but for many things again it will be less efficient.
It's the same with emotional intelligence. The brain has dedicated circuitry for understanding other people. You can reason it through abstractly but it will be less efficient. You can also solve problems about natural science with the emotional reasoning part of the brain. Ever heard the expression "the atom wants a full shell of electrons"? That's empathy.
No, it is more like software. You either grow up around others, socialise and train your intuition or you don't. To believe there is special circuitry really goes deep into the pseudoscience territory.
Emotions are just another abstract concept.
You are correct that training is necessary, but that isn't the knockout blow you think it is. It goes for many of the specialized tasks (e.g. visual processing, auditory processing, motor skills, spatial awareness) done in the brain. You are born with the potential for these things but they have to be used or they will wilt.
As for where in the brain it happens it does seem to be a little spread out, but the superior temporal sulcus has an important role.
An interesting semi-related story is that taxi drivers in London take a very hard test called The Knowledge requiring them to memorize a huge amount of city layout. Studying for this produces measurable changes in the brain, leading to an enlarged posterior hippocampus. That it consistently leads to changes of the same type across many individuals clearly indicates that the brain is allocating resources to the relevant circuitry when this learning takes place.
There are many other ways to learn about the brains specialized processing such as looking what happens when various parts of the brain get damaged, or by putting people in scanners when they perform certain tasks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_temporal_sulcus
You're the only person here invoking "special circuitry". All intelligence is a mix of both learned and biological factors.
Plus one of the big ways we evaluate the intelligence of other species is trying to see if they have theory of mind, which is intrinsically linked to social intelligence.
Edit: Ah, the person you replied to also invoked special circuitry.
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makes sense. I assume that smart people tend to hang out with other smart people more, and naturally learn to identify the cues & patterns of those. where as, if you don't hang out with many smart people, there is not much to recognize.
A data point: the parent of an about 140 IQ son told me that her son was in a room with other 120+ IQ kids. They started to talk and quickly formed groups. Those groups turned out to include kids of very similar IQ. The ones between 140 and 143 thought that the ones between 137 and 139 were not interesting to talk with.
Does that mean we should use a larger model as judge for evals, not a smaller one?
That was always the advice. Use the best model you can afford.
But some problems are easy and you can get away with a smaller model.
People often see the Jungian personality traits of "judging" vs. "perceiving" etc as actual exogenous traits, but it's also a tendency to spend more time before coming to a conclusion.
What about less intelligent people judging the intelligence of more intelligent people - and about handling that, from both sides - finding (or not) that someone may be more intelligent than you ever know or could imagine - or to deal with someone that will never find that out - but will keep treating you instead as you were that more stupid person regardless of whatever - and what if when he by chance may find about that, the outcome could be even worse for you ?
(Good Soldier Švejk is _dark_ _comedy_ - but not necessary an answer someone could take or like, moreover some people may happen to be smart differently.. some with high IQ still be dumb - or, the.. reverse?? ..really? - but howTF ??? ;)
Studies with fewer than 1,000 samples are not very meaningful.
Assuming your samples are not biased, 1000 subjects are generally far more than are necessary to demonstrate an effect. People who complain about sample size are generally not that well-educated in statistics.
A well-educated person in statistics would also mention that it requires a certain class of distribution. This is one of Nassim Taleb's favourite subject (imagine computing the average net worth of a random group of people and suddenly Bill Gates is among them)
Which would become a biased sample. It’s not as if nobody doing statistical analysis has never seen outliers before.
A sample size of 198 as per this study is more than sufficient to draw pretty strong conclusions.
The issue is not the sample size, it's that studies like these almost always involve a very homogenous population of young college students.
You mean WEIRD.
(Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic)
But why this matters is there a challenge judging intelligence cross cultures?
>But why this matters is there a challenge judging intelligence cross cultures?
I don't know for sure, but my own anecdotal experience is that yes, there most certainly are challenges when a person from one culture assesses the intelligence of someone else from another culture.
It would be nice to know whether this is supported by scientific evidence, or whether this is simply my own personal bias at play.
Also not replicated that I can see.
except they can be
Well, I mean, tone deaf people cannot accurately judge musical talent.
i.e. dumb people don't know they are dumb
game recognize game
Link to the referenced study (open access): "The good judge of intelligence" https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028962...
This is a worthless AI slop summary of this article (^1), posted to a random forum to drive traffic.
^1: https://www.psypost.org/intelligent-people-are-better-judges...
I've got some personal litmus tests:
1) Syntax/semantic split. Can the person accept that a function called "multiplyBy5(a,b) { return a+b }" doesn't actually multiply by five, but adds the numbers? 2) PR speak: Does the person recognize that public relation speak is usually intentionally misleading, as in "the Russian Ministry of Defense said that a fire [onboard the Moskva] had caused ammunition to explode" (obviously caused by an Ukrainian missile and not an accidental fire, even though that's what's implied.) [0] 3) They're, their, there: There easy to tell apart, since they're meaning is so different. /s 4) Viewpoints: Can this person understand and articulate viewpoints that they consider "wrong" or simply don't hold themselves? 5) (new) LLM introspection: Does the person understand that LLMs have no secret understanding of themselves? An LLM like "Grok" doesn't actually understand "Grok" better than Gemini understands "Grok" - apart from minor differences in model strength maybe.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_of_the_Moskva
Are there people that would legitimately argue point 1?
If you are only looking at the call site, sure that could be confusing, but if you are looking at the definition as provided in your post, surely anyone that is able understand the concept of a function can see the problem?
I'm not arguing they don't exist, sure they do, but I'm confused as to how you came up with it as a litmus test? Is it that common?
Surely we can agree in a real scenario renaming it (or fixing implementation to match name) is likely appropriate, but to completely miss the error?
Hope this comes across as curiousity, because I am curious about this one from your list in particular.
I've heard the parable, "If you didn't eat breakfast or lunch yesterday, how would you feel around 3pm?", a common response is apparently "but I did eat lunch and breakfast yesterday".
I think it's similar to the case of counterfactuals, hypotheticals, or steelmaning and how well you can handle them. ("Can you accept that there can be a function named multiplyBy5 that does something else instead").
But I think if someone already is comfortable with working with abstractions such as "function" the thing is trivial, so it's a bit of a weird litmus test.
> "Can you accept that there can be a function named multiplyBy5 that does something else instead").
I think anyone that can understand a function can understand this, but one might not be happy accepting it's the case, and endeavor to change it.
I think it can be easy to lose sight of that distinction, and eagerness to fix it can be confused with not accepting it could be, but is also probably wrong.
>LLMs have no secret understanding of themselves
What do you mean by "themselves" here? Grok is RL'd to behave like a Grok, so it trivially knows the qualities that define Grok better than Gemini does, which can only go by second hand sources.
> so it trivially knows the qualities that define Grok
How does it know? Where did he get that knowledge from? Did they train Grok, check it's qualities and included them in next training set? Was his source code and summarization of weights included, or maybe he has access to them for "introspection"?
I've heard that a non-Mensan asked a Mensan what it's like at a Mensa event. They replied, "If I have to explain something during a conversation, I only have to explain it _once_."
Not bad litmus tests. And yes a lot of idiots seem to fail at steel manning. I mean if you can't steel man your opponent what are you even doing?
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So that means I'm either an exceptional judge of character, or and idiot and don't know it. /s