7 ms·

Too Smart

71 points by enigmatic02 5y ago

k__ 5y ago
"One of the most persistent fallacies is the reflexive association of wealth with wisdom," Sometimes, I have the feeling there are too many dumb people with money. And I don't even mean people like Bezos, but just people with a few millions. Buying a bunch of cars they never use, or house and estate that is much too big for them.
- paulpauper 5y ago
  Having just a top 2 percent iq which is Mensa cutoff is about 5x as exclusive as being a milionare .pretty amazing
  - k__ 5y ago
    It's crazy, really. A friend of mine has an IQ of 140 and she is one of least successful person I know. She said it's like a useless superpower. But on the other hand, she was never in an academic context, because of family.
solumos 5y ago
"Most of the allure of the information age is that ideas can be shared among huge groups of people. But among the superintelligent, that’s often not the case – they’re speaking a different language." I've found this to be true. There's an art to taking extremely complex ideas and distilling them down into something simple. In this, Feynman was a virtuoso.
- spookybones 5y ago
  Shouldn’t this also be an indicator of intelligence? It seems often underrepresented.
- paulpauper 5y ago
  Or maybe that was just part of Feynman's 'brand' and he got a lot of media attention. It's not like someone surveyed 100s of scientists and ranked Feynman as the best at explaining things.
ssivark 5y ago
More fundamentally, I would imagine that “intelligence” is an ill-defined concept unless one is willing to define it through the propensity for good performance in a certain kind of activity. At that point, the relation is tautologically true. If it isn’t, it can be argued that the wrong/useless measure of intelligence is being used.
- paulpauper 5y ago
  It is defined and is predictive. For example, educational attainment , job performance, income and wealth. The DOD considers it real enough that all recruits must pass a cogntive screening test, the AFQT, which is like a proxy for measuring IQ.
  - nradov 5y ago
    How then do you explain people like Donald Rumsfeld? He was highly intelligent by any standard measure, yet managed to make consistently bad decisions as Secretary of Defense.
    - bmeski 5y ago
      That’s what he wanted us to think.
    - kbelder 5y ago
      Marx was very intelligent, but so was Adam Smith. William F. Buckley was very intelligent, but so was Gore Vidal. There are many, many topics where increasing intelligence does not mean increasing convergence of conclusions. The further away you get from hard science, the easier it is to diverge... building (intelligently) upon incorrect and hard-to-falsify foundations.
  - magicalist 5y ago
    > It is defined and is predictive Somewhat predictive. > The DOD considers it real enough that all recruits must pass a cogntive screening test, the AFQT, which is like a proxy for measuring IQ. The DOD also often requires polygraph tests, so not the best endorsement.
marmshallow 5y ago
A nice short piece with a simple thesis. Should be easy enough for intelligent or ordinary people to understand.
bitcuration 5y ago
Exactly what the author wrote, the whole article is what he concoct to fool himself. Quite an irony. If one is really smart, you'd not find what's boring to mass is boring, such as spend less save more. There is a difference between delusional self-fulfill prophecy and evidence based deduction. More importantly it's an acquired skill. Despite intelligent or not, the author appears to be terribly lack of intellectual training.
euske 5y ago
It's unfortunate that people tend to think that smartness is just one-dimensional thing, i.e. a person can be either smart or not smart. To me, it seems that there are at least two major components: breadth and depth. "Depth" people are probably what we normally call smart people. They have excellent memory, analytical precision, quick decision, etc. They're good at navigating through a well-defined problem space quickly and confidently. They're more like athletes. They are intelligent as machines are intelligent. On the other hand, there are "breadth" people. They are much more distracted. They're always looking for different viewpoints and hidden variables, and sometimes they worry too much about what depth people would think trivial. But sometimes their worry turned out to be crucial. Their intelligence can be sometimes characterized as "thoughtful". The thing is that, breadth people often look slow or dumb to depth people, because they tend to digress to a seemingly irrelevant tangent. Their intelligence is more subtle and hard to measure. But I think they're definitely "smart" in their own way. We need both kinds of intelligence, but we tend to be attracted to more visible kinds of intelligence, which I think is unfortunate.
- machinelearning 5y ago
  I think that there’s a common variable here that’s useful for both thinking broad as well as deep. I suspect it’s something closely related to speed. When thinking broadly, it translates to speed of flipping through different patterns and frameworks to see which applies. This process is often silent and appears dumb because you end up rejecting most of the inapplicable patterns. It is difficult to verbalize these patterns because they are often in pictures. Some people with a high verbal fluency e.g. Patrick Collison can describe their thought process quite verbosely and the sheer speed of thought comes across but it’s not a very common trait which is why broad thinkers are often slow talkers e.g. Musk. When thinking deeply, the path is often linear and requires recalling and describing known concepts and perhaps incorporating figures to come to a conclusion. This is similar to solving a math problem on a test where the inferences are mostly linear but lead to a non obvious conclusion. When someone can do this process fast, they’re also seen as smart. Certainly it relies on similar faculties as broad thinking like a good memory and sheer speed of thought and verbalization. I think peoples life experiences and domain of study/work determime which kind of thinking they prefer and are more comfortable with but the underlying horsepower for both types of thinking are the same thing.
neverminder 5y ago
Definition of "smartness" is subjective though, isn't it? If a person is a brilliant scientist, engineer or whatever, but he makes incredibly stupid decisions in other areas of his life, is he still smart? Not in my book, which is why from my perspective the number of actually smart people is vanishingly small.
- bena 5y ago
  The problem is that we've conflated knowledgeable with intelligent. Knowing a lot of things is not the same as being intelligent. People think intelligence is something that expresses itself on its own. It doesn't, which is why it's hard to define. IIRC, if you have an IQ of about 125, you can handle any mental task set before you. If you want to become a world-class X, you can, with enough work. The thing is, intelligence is more like a multiplying force. It doesn't do anything on its own. What's 1 times 0? Zero. What's 1000 times 0? Still zero. Now, what if we multiply by 2 instead of 0? Or 3? So someone with a higher intelligence would need to put in less time to get good at a mental task, but they still need to actually put in the time. They need the knowledge. I think you get it on an intuitive level. Because you say from your "perspective that the number of actually smart people is vanishingly small". That's likely true. Because intelligence isn't measured in degrees or being able to rattle off trivia, it's in being able to make the connections and work out the logic better, faster, and with fewer details than someone else.
- jbluepolarbear 5y ago
  What do you considered smart? Does your definition account for neurodivergence?
antognini 5y ago
> I know people I would not want to debate with on the question, “What is 2 + 2?” because they could go down a rabbit hole that’s over my head and leave me either exhausted or convinced the answer may not be four. I've experienced something similar. I have a PhD in astronomy, and that tends to attract a certain sort. I became friends with a guy a while back who had discovered a group of geocentrists and was genuinely curious if there was anything to it. He lent me a book he had bought from them that was about 800 pages long making the case for geocentrism. Now you might think that it's an easy enough thing to prove that geocentrism is wrong. What about the Foucault pendulum? Surely that at least proves that the Earth rotates! But the geocentrists had considered that and a whole lot more to boot. The book was meticulously researched and went through dozens of historical experiments that demonstrate the motion of the Earth and then presented an explanation as to how these results were, in fact, consistent with their geocentric model. Many of these experiments are so obscure that they've pretty much been forgotten by everyone except historians of science. Of course it was all nonsense, but it was a surprisingly sophisticated form of nonsense. Fortunately for me by the time they were trying to explain away certain results in quantum physics they started to get pretty obviously out of their depth and were making easy to catch mistakes. But without that knowledge, discovering where they went wrong in their logic was non-trivial. I could certainly see how it could be a plausible argument for someone without a background in physics.
- machinelearning 5y ago
  Brandolini's law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law
  - naveen99 5y ago
    Yes NP probably bigger than P
- naveen99 5y ago
  Science needs smart skeptics. from the geocentrist view, you are the skeptic. And from your point of view they are the skeptic. Science doesn’t really say anything about where the center of the universe is. Surely the geocentrists don’t think earth is bigger than the sun or even other stars anymore.
thesausageking 5y ago
I can't read anything by Collaborative Fund without thinking about the scathing email the founder of CircleUp wrote about having one of their partners on his board: https://docs.google.com/document/d/17tEc9ETL4tjfTmNbpwJJ5OSx1c4j10ZBgeYXWGzO30Y/edit https://docs.google.com/document/d/17tEc9ETL4tjfTmNbpwJJ5OSx... Did they ever address it?
- cko 5y ago
  Wow what an email. Scathing indeed. If it means anything, it looks like that email wasn't referring to the author of the blog posts (which I've been consuming and appreciating quite regularly).
dvaun 5y ago
A different article about the pitfalls of intelligence is "The Outsiders"[0], which provides actual data. [0]: https://prometheussociety.org/wp/articles/the-outsiders/ https://prometheussociety.org/wp/articles/the-outsiders/
dougSF70 5y ago
Like most things in life, thinking is best done in moderation.
sunstone 5y ago
Though there are the smart people who live for getting to the simple core of complicated things. Please someone send me that guy's explanation of entropy.
jl2718 5y ago
Ergodicity is relevant here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergodicity_economics https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergodicity_economics At the risk of oversimplification, non-ergodicity means that you have to be stupid to get rich. A simple way to see that is gamblers ruin. If you start with $1 and 20 pulls on a slot machine that pays out double with 51% probability, only a complete moron could become a millionaire, but of course they would point to the 51% showing how they outsmarted everybody else. What would a smart person do? They would determine a utility function for money, definitely sub linear, and bet the amount that would maximize their high probability minimum return. Most likely, that would be zero. Life is like that. You only get so many pulls on the lever.

71 points by enigmatic02 5y ago

k__ 5y ago

"One of the most persistent fallacies is the reflexive association of wealth with wisdom," Sometimes, I have the feeling there are too many dumb people with money. And I don't even mean people like Bezos, but just people with a few millions. Buying a bunch of cars they never use, or house and estate that is much too big for them.

paulpauper 5y ago
Having just a top 2 percent iq which is Mensa cutoff is about 5x as exclusive as being a milionare .pretty amazing
- k__ 5y ago
  It's crazy, really. A friend of mine has an IQ of 140 and she is one of least successful person I know. She said it's like a useless superpower. But on the other hand, she was never in an academic context, because of family.

solumos 5y ago

"Most of the allure of the information age is that ideas can be shared among huge groups of people. But among the superintelligent, that’s often not the case – they’re speaking a different language." I've found this to be true. There's an art to taking extremely complex ideas and distilling them down into something simple. In this, Feynman was a virtuoso.

spookybones 5y ago
Shouldn’t this also be an indicator of intelligence? It seems often underrepresented.
paulpauper 5y ago
Or maybe that was just part of Feynman's 'brand' and he got a lot of media attention. It's not like someone surveyed 100s of scientists and ranked Feynman as the best at explaining things.

ssivark 5y ago

More fundamentally, I would imagine that “intelligence” is an ill-defined concept unless one is willing to define it through the propensity for good performance in a certain kind of activity. At that point, the relation is tautologically true. If it isn’t, it can be argued that the wrong/useless measure of intelligence is being used.

paulpauper 5y ago
It is defined and is predictive. For example, educational attainment , job performance, income and wealth. The DOD considers it real enough that all recruits must pass a cogntive screening test, the AFQT, which is like a proxy for measuring IQ.
- nradov 5y ago
  How then do you explain people like Donald Rumsfeld? He was highly intelligent by any standard measure, yet managed to make consistently bad decisions as Secretary of Defense.
  - bmeski 5y ago
    That’s what he wanted us to think.
  - kbelder 5y ago
    Marx was very intelligent, but so was Adam Smith. William F. Buckley was very intelligent, but so was Gore Vidal. There are many, many topics where increasing intelligence does not mean increasing convergence of conclusions. The further away you get from hard science, the easier it is to diverge... building (intelligently) upon incorrect and hard-to-falsify foundations.
- magicalist 5y ago
  > It is defined and is predictive Somewhat predictive. > The DOD considers it real enough that all recruits must pass a cogntive screening test, the AFQT, which is like a proxy for measuring IQ. The DOD also often requires polygraph tests, so not the best endorsement.

marmshallow 5y ago

A nice short piece with a simple thesis. Should be easy enough for intelligent or ordinary people to understand.

bitcuration 5y ago

Exactly what the author wrote, the whole article is what he concoct to fool himself. Quite an irony. If one is really smart, you'd not find what's boring to mass is boring, such as spend less save more. There is a difference between delusional self-fulfill prophecy and evidence based deduction. More importantly it's an acquired skill. Despite intelligent or not, the author appears to be terribly lack of intellectual training.

euske 5y ago

It's unfortunate that people tend to think that smartness is just one-dimensional thing, i.e. a person can be either smart or not smart. To me, it seems that there are at least two major components: breadth and depth. "Depth" people are probably what we normally call smart people. They have excellent memory, analytical precision, quick decision, etc. They're good at navigating through a well-defined problem space quickly and confidently. They're more like athletes. They are intelligent as machines are intelligent. On the other hand, there are "breadth" people. They are much more distracted. They're always looking for different viewpoints and hidden variables, and sometimes they worry too much about what depth people would think trivial. But sometimes their worry turned out to be crucial. Their intelligence can be sometimes characterized as "thoughtful". The thing is that, breadth people often look slow or dumb to depth people, because they tend to digress to a seemingly irrelevant tangent. Their intelligence is more subtle and hard to measure. But I think they're definitely "smart" in their own way. We need both kinds of intelligence, but we tend to be attracted to more visible kinds of intelligence, which I think is unfortunate.

machinelearning 5y ago
I think that there’s a common variable here that’s useful for both thinking broad as well as deep. I suspect it’s something closely related to speed. When thinking broadly, it translates to speed of flipping through different patterns and frameworks to see which applies. This process is often silent and appears dumb because you end up rejecting most of the inapplicable patterns. It is difficult to verbalize these patterns because they are often in pictures. Some people with a high verbal fluency e.g. Patrick Collison can describe their thought process quite verbosely and the sheer speed of thought comes across but it’s not a very common trait which is why broad thinkers are often slow talkers e.g. Musk. When thinking deeply, the path is often linear and requires recalling and describing known concepts and perhaps incorporating figures to come to a conclusion. This is similar to solving a math problem on a test where the inferences are mostly linear but lead to a non obvious conclusion. When someone can do this process fast, they’re also seen as smart. Certainly it relies on similar faculties as broad thinking like a good memory and sheer speed of thought and verbalization. I think peoples life experiences and domain of study/work determime which kind of thinking they prefer and are more comfortable with but the underlying horsepower for both types of thinking are the same thing.

neverminder 5y ago

Definition of "smartness" is subjective though, isn't it? If a person is a brilliant scientist, engineer or whatever, but he makes incredibly stupid decisions in other areas of his life, is he still smart? Not in my book, which is why from my perspective the number of actually smart people is vanishingly small.

bena 5y ago
The problem is that we've conflated knowledgeable with intelligent. Knowing a lot of things is not the same as being intelligent. People think intelligence is something that expresses itself on its own. It doesn't, which is why it's hard to define. IIRC, if you have an IQ of about 125, you can handle any mental task set before you. If you want to become a world-class X, you can, with enough work. The thing is, intelligence is more like a multiplying force. It doesn't do anything on its own. What's 1 times 0? Zero. What's 1000 times 0? Still zero. Now, what if we multiply by 2 instead of 0? Or 3? So someone with a higher intelligence would need to put in less time to get good at a mental task, but they still need to actually put in the time. They need the knowledge. I think you get it on an intuitive level. Because you say from your "perspective that the number of actually smart people is vanishingly small". That's likely true. Because intelligence isn't measured in degrees or being able to rattle off trivia, it's in being able to make the connections and work out the logic better, faster, and with fewer details than someone else.
jbluepolarbear 5y ago
What do you considered smart? Does your definition account for neurodivergence?

antognini 5y ago

> I know people I would not want to debate with on the question, “What is 2 + 2?” because they could go down a rabbit hole that’s over my head and leave me either exhausted or convinced the answer may not be four. I've experienced something similar. I have a PhD in astronomy, and that tends to attract a certain sort. I became friends with a guy a while back who had discovered a group of geocentrists and was genuinely curious if there was anything to it. He lent me a book he had bought from them that was about 800 pages long making the case for geocentrism. Now you might think that it's an easy enough thing to prove that geocentrism is wrong. What about the Foucault pendulum? Surely that at least proves that the Earth rotates! But the geocentrists had considered that and a whole lot more to boot. The book was meticulously researched and went through dozens of historical experiments that demonstrate the motion of the Earth and then presented an explanation as to how these results were, in fact, consistent with their geocentric model. Many of these experiments are so obscure that they've pretty much been forgotten by everyone except historians of science. Of course it was all nonsense, but it was a surprisingly sophisticated form of nonsense. Fortunately for me by the time they were trying to explain away certain results in quantum physics they started to get pretty obviously out of their depth and were making easy to catch mistakes. But without that knowledge, discovering where they went wrong in their logic was non-trivial. I could certainly see how it could be a plausible argument for someone without a background in physics.

machinelearning 5y ago
Brandolini's law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law
- naveen99 5y ago
  Yes NP probably bigger than P
naveen99 5y ago
Science needs smart skeptics. from the geocentrist view, you are the skeptic. And from your point of view they are the skeptic. Science doesn’t really say anything about where the center of the universe is. Surely the geocentrists don’t think earth is bigger than the sun or even other stars anymore.

thesausageking 5y ago

I can't read anything by Collaborative Fund without thinking about the scathing email the founder of CircleUp wrote about having one of their partners on his board: https://docs.google.com/document/d/17tEc9ETL4tjfTmNbpwJJ5OSx1c4j10ZBgeYXWGzO30Y/edit https://docs.google.com/document/d/17tEc9ETL4tjfTmNbpwJJ5OSx... Did they ever address it?

cko 5y ago
Wow what an email. Scathing indeed. If it means anything, it looks like that email wasn't referring to the author of the blog posts (which I've been consuming and appreciating quite regularly).

dvaun 5y ago

A different article about the pitfalls of intelligence is "The Outsiders"[0], which provides actual data. [0]: https://prometheussociety.org/wp/articles/the-outsiders/ https://prometheussociety.org/wp/articles/the-outsiders/

dougSF70 5y ago

Like most things in life, thinking is best done in moderation.

sunstone 5y ago

Though there are the smart people who live for getting to the simple core of complicated things. Please someone send me that guy's explanation of entropy.

jl2718 5y ago

Ergodicity is relevant here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergodicity_economics https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergodicity_economics At the risk of oversimplification, non-ergodicity means that you have to be stupid to get rich. A simple way to see that is gamblers ruin. If you start with $1 and 20 pulls on a slot machine that pays out double with 51% probability, only a complete moron could become a millionaire, but of course they would point to the 51% showing how they outsmarted everybody else. What would a smart person do? They would determine a utility function for money, definitely sub linear, and bet the amount that would maximize their high probability minimum return. Most likely, that would be zero. Life is like that. You only get so many pulls on the lever.