3 ms·
No, actually. This is also just automaticity and thoughtlessness. The brain needs time to process. The faster you react, the less time the brain has to process
by MrYellowP 5y ago
No, actually. This is also just automaticity and thoughtlessness.
The brain needs time to process. The faster you react, the less time the brain has to process things. While I agree that someone taking too much time for processing isn't necessarily "smart", believing that a faster response is indicative of higher intelligence is ass backwards.
In the end, even if the response contains deeper thoughts, it's still a thoughtless response when that response has been created long before the conversation happened.
The point is that the brain needs time to gather and process. The less time you give your brain to do so, the more automatic your behaviour will be.
The fact that most people react quickly is absolutely indicative of them not actually using any higher brain functions while conversing with others. And it's observable in the faces of others. You can see if someone is actually thinking, or not. It's not even hard to notice, you can learn it using a mirror.
Furthermore can you never be sure if the "deep thoughts" are actually ones owns and it's important to verify if a person came up with them ones self, or if they're just someone elses thoughts mindlessly parrotted.
It's important to understand that, what I am talking about, is like a difference between doing something actively and passively.
Or, from a different perspective and directly addressing what you wrote:
> your thinking has already been done.
You, yourself, have written the reason why "producing them faster is also indicative of more intelligence" is wrong, because "the thinking has already been done." equals "there was no thinking involved in coming up with the response."
... and THAT is not intelligent behaviour, it's automaticity.
- notahacker 5y agoAutomatism of the articulation of things an individual interprets at a much higher level is intelligent behaviour, and a high proportion of synchronous communication is based around establishing/clarifying things the other party is already supposed to have in mind. Someone isn't demonstrating greater intelligence because they can't parse the basic greeting as a single concept so have to retrospectively analyse each individual word of the sentence to infer meaning, because they don't have an existing opinion on an issue (or haven't started thinking about it when it first became the subject of the conversation a minutes earlier) or because they have to iterate through number of possibilities to guess at something somebody else simply recalls or already figured out. GPT-3 determining the most probable of millions of possible followup word sequences each time the other party emits a new word by comparing it with a vast corpus of mostly irrelevant data isn't reasoning at as high a level as the person who grasps as soon as the other person references $subject that what the other person wants is agreement, and thats as simple as human "automated" responses get (GPT-3 will get there too, via a more circuitous route)
- jka 5y ago> Well, if you're the kind of person who thinks a lot in private -- then, in conversation, you can respond quickly and deeply: because your thinking has already been done. I also disagree with this, and I'll provide slightly different reasoning, although I think it does overlap with what you're saying regarding evident utilisation of the mind. Even if someone has done a lot of thinking about an issue, they may want to take time before responding in a conversation to make sure that they've correctly pattern-matched the circumstances, and to prepare a suitable response for the moment and audience.
- Ataraxiaist 5y agoAt some point I think this is system 1 vs system 2 thinking in that Daniel Kahneman Thinking Fast Slow context. I am really not sure though if any of my thought is something other than lookup tables and types of joins.
- throwaway6734 5y agoYoure ignoring instinctual/creative responses. Deeply thinking isn't always required to produce high quality ideas (like lightbulb moments)