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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
by 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 agoYou 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 agoA 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 agohttps://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 agoTo 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.
- 9wzYQbTYsAIc 6y agoThe Wikipedia link has many more references. Openness to experience is a very well studied topic in personality psychology.
- knaq 6y agoYou've created a heuristic that scores people as "not smart" if they are your political opponents or if they have different views on religion.