14 ms·

Ask HN: How to figure out if someone is smart during a casual conversation?

• hindsightbias 6y ago
  Anyone who listens for more than 20 seconds is over 110 IQ. People who talk mostly about other people rarely are.
  • therm0 6y ago
    I know plenty of people who are extremely intelligent who only talk about themselves. Isn't social intelligence only one component of overall intelligence?
  • totololo 6y ago
    Reminds me of this quote: "Great Minds Discuss Ideas. Average Minds Discuss Events. Small Minds Discuss People."
  • 9wzYQbTYsAIc 6y ago
    Ability to think about others’ frame of mind is a kind of intelligence. You are probably referring to gossip, however. Also, listening duration is a measure of attention not intelligence.
  • chrisked 6y ago
    Listening plus being very curious might be a good indicator. Smart people tend to understand that the world is complicated and there is always something to learn how it functions.
• fortran77 6y ago
  Ask him which operating system he uses.
  • Hackbraten 6y ago
    I think that comment says more about you than about the person in question. And it’s not the operating system joke that’s bothering me here.
    • mpfundstein 6y ago
      nothing else to do?
      • Hackbraten 6y ago
        Pardon?
  • TigeriusKirk 6y ago
    If they laugh, they're smart.
  • oehtXRwMkIs 6y ago
    btw
• stncls 6y ago
  "Smart" is vague, but in any case I'm not sure it's possible. For sure I can't. Here's my anecdata with a very narrow but pragmatic definition of "smart". When I did academic research, there was no correlation between any aspect of the casual conversation I held with students and their abilities in maths and CS theory. N=O(10).
  • totololo 6y ago
    Can you explain N=O(10)? is N their ability and O(10) the big O notation (flat and low)?
    • MikeTheGreat 6y ago
      I think the idea is that 'N is on the order of 10 students or so'. It's stretching the Big Oh notation but it isn't terrible. I wonder about instead using notation like N = ~10
      • seotut2 6y ago
        > It's stretching the Big Oh notation but it isn't terrible I'd say it is terrible. O(10) is O(1), and it doesn't make a lot of sense in this context (measure of growth to represent a scalar).
        • jaredsohn 6y ago
          Which is also the same as O(1000000000) for which data would have different significance.
        • zests 6y ago
          f = O(n) makes no sense either. It should be f ∈ O(n). However, notation serves us and we don't serve the notation. People say "Big O" when they mean "Big Theta".
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• contingencies 6y ago
  One heuristic not often used is openness to new information and flexibility of opinion. If you can select an area where the person may have a pre-formed opinion that you know is objectively unwarranted with current data, you can present that data and see their reaction. Intelligent people tend to be open to and actively enjoy recieiving new information which challenges and alters their opinion, creating a more informed and more well founded perspective. Insecure, groupthink people will instead vehemently deny the validity of the new information and rigidly stick to a pre-formed opinion. This is a clear sign of a limited capacity for critical thinking. Edit: Just realised Alan Kay said this more succinctly. A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points.
  • 9wzYQbTYsAIc 6y ago
    You are describing measures of personality traits, not intelligence. http://www.actforlibraries.org/intelligence-and-personality-correlation-big-five-iq-relationship/ http://www.actforlibraries.org/intelligence-and-personality-...
    • contingencies 6y ago
      A rose by any other name would smell as sweet. If you check the literature, I'd be extremely surprised if they are not highly correlated. Note also that IQ, which has issues of its own, is not the same as intelligence.
      • 9wzYQbTYsAIc 6y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_and_personality?wprov=sfti1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_and_personality?w... Plenty of literature referenced there. At best, not even a modest correlation (r=.42, at best, r=.06 at worst) for openness.
        • contingencies 6y ago
          To argue against the notion you would need to be clear on how openness is defined. I was specifically suggesting openness to information that goes against ones existing opinion, and the act of then changing that opinion. I would be very interested to read a study regarding this sort of situation. The link you provided itself suggests that old frumpy (not open by some definition) people are correlated, and young open (by some definition) people are correlated. So at least one view of openness per se is allegedly thought by some papers to be only correlated when combined with another factor (age). However the link you provided only appears to be a library community-related website vaguely summarizing a very small selection of third party papers, which is basically equally as good as our random HN comments for citeability.
• jasonv 6y ago
  “Smart” is merely one characteristic you can scan for in a conversation. Find at least a pair: smart & sociopathic, smart & empathetic, smart & withdrawn, smart & searching, smart & engaged, etc.
• 9wzYQbTYsAIc 6y ago
  Depends on what kind of smarts you are looking for: Quickness? Adaptability or rote responses? Knowledge? Trivia or domain knowledge? Ability to learn new ideas? Ability to analyze? Ability to memorize? Ability to improvise? Etc You could probably ascertain surface level measures for those kind of questions in the course of a single conversation, but you’d only be seeing a sliver of their self in one conversation and it would be best to just ask the person “how smart do you think you are?” in some innocent way at an opportune moment in the conversation.
• mac01021 6y ago
  What do you mean by "smart"?
• retrocomputing 6y ago
  This is a simple supervised learning classification problem, just select the right features. You have to know what kind of smartness you are looking for, for your training data set. Record the conversation then pull it through your classifier.
• radihuq 6y ago
  I've been playing around with trying to arbitrarily quantify perceived intellect. Here's my working formula at the moment: `P = A * SUM([B * C * TopicA] + [B * C * TopicB] + [B * C * TopicC] [...])` Where: P = Perceived intellect A = Coefficient that measures the ability to connect different concepts B = Depth of knowledge of a topic C = Ability to break down topic into concepts The people I perceive to be smart come up with logically-sound answers to questions they don't know the answer to, based on past knowledge. If I ask `what is X?`, they say `I don't know what X is, but based on Y and Z, it might be ...` So if you're trying to identify if this person can come off as smart, perhaps a tactic could be asking them a question about a domain they are not an expert in.
• hi5eyes 6y ago
  ask them to expand on any of their views/probe for more nuanced opinions
• knaq 6y ago
  This isn't going to go well for anybody above you, since you are only equipped to judge in one direction. Some ideas though: 1. generating new and unusual humor 2. spotlessly logical grammar, aside from interruptions like changing an argument mid-sentence 3. understands a huge vocabulary (note: doesn't necessarily use it) None of those is going to get you very far. It's also very verbal-oriented.
• brudgers 6y ago
  I presume everyone is smart. Intelligence is orthogonal to my interests. It's orthogonal to my opinions. It's orthogonal to my education. It's orthogonal to their ability to communicate in a way that is clear to me. And it is orthogonal to all those things in me.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• bsder 6y ago
  Be interested in and ask interesting questions about the things they are discussing. Someone who is genuinely into a subject will generally be quite happy to talk about it at length. CAUTION: if you do this, you will unmask far more poseurs than genuinely interesting people. Be prepared for the social fallout.
• nosmokewhereiam 6y ago
  Put a piece of paper trash on the floor and see if they put it in the waste basket upon entering the room. Tests values.
  • muzani 6y ago
    The downside of this approach is they'll judge you as not very smart.
    • meiraleal 6y ago
      And manipulative.
• one2know 6y ago
  In my experience people don't have the ability to determine if someone is smarter than themselves. They can detect that someone is a different intelligence level. Most people will react the same to someone with much greater intelligence as someone with much less intelligence. Secondly, intelligent people modulate their communication to be what the people they are talking to expect. They won't use big words at the bar, but will totally change in an academic or professional setting. One way that "smarter" than oneself is revealed is when a person predicts or anticipates something. That could be experience, or just indicates that they had already processed the situation to the same level.
  • muzani 6y ago
    "...people don't have the ability to determine if someone is smarter than themselves." I'd disagree. You can look at HN, for example. When we upvote something, it usually means that we've learned something from the conversation and left a little smarter. Few people are generally smarter about everything, unless you're talking to say, Bill Gates. Most people are smarter in certain topics.
    • one2know 6y ago
      You are talking about knowledge and trivia recall. I am talking about critical thinking, deductive thinking which does not depend on how much information a person has seen.
    • meiraleal 6y ago
      And someone smart with different values and views might not think Bill Gates is that smart.
  • logicslave 6y ago
    Not even close to being true. Its glaringly obvious when someone has true intelligence
    • one2know 6y ago
      If I see fanboyism I immediately lose respect for someone's intelligence. A truly intelligent person is going to have a hard time finding anyone with relative glaringly obvious intelligence. Some people buy into popular intelligence and are amazed by ted talks, lectures, that sort of thing that really isn't an indicator of intelligence. Anyone can play Mozart if they practice the same sheets of music over and over.
• muzani 6y ago
  I've had great conversations with strangers about whether aliens exist, or whether they can be made of sand, or rock, or gas. The intelligent people know how to link that to other things - temperatures, evolution, whether planets or cities can be sentient, the definition of consciousness. You can talk about things like souls or ghosts too. You can also open up fixed topics that everyone has an opinion about. Politics, religion/life, economics, and investing are nice. Everyone intelligent has some kind of investment strategy. A lot of people at least try to figure out religion at some point. A lot of intelligence is understanding that you could be wrong, and dealing with that. If someone straight up says, "Communism bad, end of story," without trying to understand why communism is bad, they're likely not very smart.
  • meiraleal 6y ago
    The best answer, but someone that "understand" why communism is bad might still be wrong (and by consequence, not been that smart, just tricked one level deeper)
• c22 6y ago
  I start by assuming everyone is smarter than me, then I rule people out by process of elimination when I hear them say dumb things. Also, I think I accidentally trick smart people into thinking I'm smart sometimes by just saying random things that turn out to have some unexpectedly humorous connection inside the smart person's brain. Sometimes I figure out the joke later, but often I don't. I think once this has happened people give me the benefit of the doubt when my random shit doesn't sync up to their preconceptions and just assume that they didn't get the joke this time.
• D-Coder 6y ago
  Use the One-Joke Mensa Test: "Did you hear the one about the cannibal who passed his friend in the street?"
• probinso 6y ago
  when you use somebody as a resource in casual conversation based on your knowledge of their domain expertise and they provide information that you had not considered. That's about it
• blackboxlogic 6y ago
  Not a good proxy for "smart", but when I'm deciding whether or not to pursue future interactions (professional or socially), I turn to the classic turing test. Spend most of the conversation listening, except as needed to keep the conversation going. Imagine you can't see or hear them, but only read their words on paper. How sure are you that they are not a computer program? For me, notes of emotion, hints of future hope or past regrets, recognition that humans are flawed or acknowledging that others may hold a different perspective are strong moves. Silliness, reasoning, compassion, specialized interests score points too. Next, run this test on yourself. Be more human.
• gradschool 6y ago
  A telltale sign of being smart in my experience is the habit of waiting until someone else finishes talking before saying anything. I suspect that people who aren't smart are conditioned to talk over other people because they're accustomed to being justifiably ignored otherwise. The nice thing about this heuristic is that it works just as well for small talk and deep conversations.
• empeyot 6y ago
  This rather negative excerpt from Jack Nasher, "Conv!nced - How to Prove Your Competence and Win People Over", p. 185-187 may be helpful: "We are frightenly bad at making an accurate assessment of other people's competence, and the same is true for the closely related factor of intelligence⁰. In one experiment, only 20 percent of people tested were able to assess the intelligence of others with higher accuracy than a random number generator. […] To assess intelligence, which is colesely related to competence, there are, however, some generally valid factors. The following items are charcteristics of an actual high intelligence¹: • speaking quickly • using easily understandable speech and standard English • making eye contact while talking • displaying self-confident behavior • reacting quickly and with little hesitation […] Unlike many of the previously discussed points, however, these five items are also indicators of actual high intelligence. All of these points can rather easily be evaluated by mere observation. Interestingly, it is easier for us to make an accurate evaluation if we only hear people and do not see them - visual factors often are misleading." [0] Reynolds, D.J. & Gifford, R. (2001). The sounds and sights of intelligence: A lens model channel analysis. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 27, 187-200. [1] Murphy, N. (2007). Appearing smart: The impression management of intelligence, person perception accuracy, and behavior in social interaction. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 33, 325-39 and [2]
• empeyot 6y ago
  This rather negative excerpt from Jack Nasher, "Conv!nced - How to Prove Your Competence and Win People Over", p. 185-187 may be helpful: "We are frighteningly bad at making an accurate assessment of other people's competence, and the same is true for the closely related factor of intelligence⁰. In one experiment, only 20 percent of people tested were able to assess the intelligence of others with higher accuracy than a random number generator. It should be noted that women tended to be better than men at judging the intelligence of others after a short meeting; however, they were still far from being accurate. […] To assess intelligence, which is closely related to competence, there are, however, some generally valid factors. The following items are characteristics of an actual high intelligence⁰⁻¹: • speaking quickly • using easily understandable speech and standard English • making eye contact while talking • displaying self-confident behavior • reacting quickly and with little hesitation […] Unlike many of the previously discussed points, however, these five items are also indicators of actual high intelligence. All of these points can rather easily be evaluated by mere observation. Interestingly, it is easier for us to make an accurate evaluation if we only hear people and do not see them - visual factors often are misleading." [0] Reynolds, D.J. & Gifford, R. (2001). The sounds and sights of intelligence: A lens model channel analysis. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 27, 187-200. [1] Murphy, N. (2007). Appearing smart: The impression management of intelligence, person perception accuracy, and behavior in social interaction. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 33, 325-39
• novia 6y ago
  Casually discuss logic puzzles and probe to see if they understand the concept of a paradox. Talk about the odds of something happening and see if they can think in terms of probabilities beyond 50/50. I've found myself as a mathematician that conversations just flow with other people who have a math background in ways that they don't with other people. It's probably due to a conversational deficit on my part. As others have mentioned, something really important is mental flexibility, the ability to look at new evidence and adjust your opinion. You can find out if people have this ability in a casual conversation, but it would have to be a long casual conversation.