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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 t

by 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.
mlac 5y ago
I view this as RAM vs HD space. Some people have amazing recall (HD). Some across many fields, others focused on one specialty. Others can process quickly and deal with a lot of inputs (RAM). Both are “smart” in different ways. Scary smart people have both and draw connections between a lot of different facts very quickly and easily. My wife and I are “smart” on paper (literally printed degrees), but we’ve been blessed to be relatable. More than one time I’ve had people say “oh we won’t have anything in common since you studied there”. But we do. We eat the same food, drink the same water, and 95% of life is a shared experience. I’ve not met someone who doesn’t have 5% more knowledge about something than I do. Sure I’ve got a lot of RAM, I can probably pick it up quickly, but I still have something to learn. And there are things where I’m way out of my element and that 5% is way different (a second language I’ve never studied).
rafaelero 5y ago
These two things are correlated because they stem from a single factor called general intelligence. People have tried for decades to come up with different kinds of intelligences and it never holds up to scrutiny. So, yeah, the general predisposition to learn and generalize ideas seems to be a one dimensional thing. This article also seems to not be very attentive to the literature regarding intelligence. There is no threshold after which intelligence stops being beneficial to things like income and wealth. So we can confidently declare that the more intelligent someone is, the better the actions they take (at least the actions that lead them to acquire more resources). There are some ideas here that I think are worth investigating, though. The fact that smart people can hold confident opinions about very contentious topics (for example, republicans arguing that global warming is a scam) is a curious phenomenon. The interaction between intelligence and ideology can indeed be a very dangerous one.
- whatshisface 5y ago
  >People have tried for decades to come up with different kinds of intelligences and it never holds up to scrutiny. What about spatial, verbal, and the other one that I forgot?
  - rafaelero 5y ago
    They are also highly correlated between each other.
0xdeadb00f 5y ago
At first I thought I fell somewhere in between the depth and breadth groups you've put forward. But now I think I more align with "breadth", definitely. I'm very erratic, distracted. In a recent project with some peers I did something "trivial" but it led to a major change in the project. Mty peers were impressed with my finding. I figure they think it's trivial. They probably don't (maybe?). I didn't get good grades in school, due to my mental state. But after school and into University I'm suddenly performing better than I could have ever thought I would have. This comes with some impostor syndrome. I think my course is easy - but it can't jusy be "easy", I passed that one class notorious for a 75% fail rate with a distinction, that was _me_. But still, my mind is ripe with doubts.

by euske 5y ago

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.

mlac 5y ago

I view this as RAM vs HD space. Some people have amazing recall (HD). Some across many fields, others focused on one specialty. Others can process quickly and deal with a lot of inputs (RAM). Both are “smart” in different ways. Scary smart people have both and draw connections between a lot of different facts very quickly and easily. My wife and I are “smart” on paper (literally printed degrees), but we’ve been blessed to be relatable. More than one time I’ve had people say “oh we won’t have anything in common since you studied there”. But we do. We eat the same food, drink the same water, and 95% of life is a shared experience. I’ve not met someone who doesn’t have 5% more knowledge about something than I do. Sure I’ve got a lot of RAM, I can probably pick it up quickly, but I still have something to learn. And there are things where I’m way out of my element and that 5% is way different (a second language I’ve never studied).

rafaelero 5y ago

These two things are correlated because they stem from a single factor called general intelligence. People have tried for decades to come up with different kinds of intelligences and it never holds up to scrutiny. So, yeah, the general predisposition to learn and generalize ideas seems to be a one dimensional thing. This article also seems to not be very attentive to the literature regarding intelligence. There is no threshold after which intelligence stops being beneficial to things like income and wealth. So we can confidently declare that the more intelligent someone is, the better the actions they take (at least the actions that lead them to acquire more resources). There are some ideas here that I think are worth investigating, though. The fact that smart people can hold confident opinions about very contentious topics (for example, republicans arguing that global warming is a scam) is a curious phenomenon. The interaction between intelligence and ideology can indeed be a very dangerous one.

whatshisface 5y ago
>People have tried for decades to come up with different kinds of intelligences and it never holds up to scrutiny. What about spatial, verbal, and the other one that I forgot?
- rafaelero 5y ago
  They are also highly correlated between each other.

0xdeadb00f 5y ago

At first I thought I fell somewhere in between the depth and breadth groups you've put forward. But now I think I more align with "breadth", definitely. I'm very erratic, distracted. In a recent project with some peers I did something "trivial" but it led to a major change in the project. Mty peers were impressed with my finding. I figure they think it's trivial. They probably don't (maybe?). I didn't get good grades in school, due to my mental state. But after school and into University I'm suddenly performing better than I could have ever thought I would have. This comes with some impostor syndrome. I think my course is easy - but it can't jusy be "easy", I passed that one class notorious for a 75% fail rate with a distinction, that was _me_. But still, my mind is ripe with doubts.