- 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!
- > 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.
- >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).
- It's also difficult to write characters that are smarter than the writer. See how poorly TV and movie writers portray intelligent characters.
- i.e. dumb people don't know they are dumb
- Link to the referenced study (open access): "The good judge of intelligence" https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028962...
- 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 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.
- 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.
- 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
- If you believe comprehending emotions belongs in its own category of intelligence, I have a bridge to sell you.
- 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’re seeing—in biology, psychology and in artificial intelligence—indicates that while these functions seem to share resources (you can’t have a lot of one with almost none of the other), 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,
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- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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- 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.
- 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...
- 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.
- 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
- Reminds me of "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt."
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- 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.
- 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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