8 ms·
Intelligent people are better judges of the intelligence of others
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289625000972 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028962...
- david-gpu 7mo agoI guess this supports a vague belief that I have held for decades: it is really difficult to rank the intelligence of people who are smarter than you Through work I had the privilege of being around lots of people who were smarter than me, but if somebody asked me to rank them from "somewhat smarter" to "much smarter", I would have had a hard time. Just an anecdote! I don't have any hard evidence. I also wondered for many years why most of them didn't quit their jobs when on paper they would have been able to do so, but work is not a great place to ask those sorts of questions.
- coldtea 7mo ago>I also wondered for many years why most of them didn't quit their jobs when on paper they would have been able to do so, but work is not a great place to ask those sorts of questions. Because they're smart enough to know neither money nor leisure is not the be all end all...
- nickburns 7mo agoSo both are? Like, combined?
- SoftTalker 7mo agoMaybe they are smart enough to realize when they have a good thing going (on balance).
- throwaway27448 7mo ago> if somebody asked me to rank them from "somewhat smarter" to "much smarter", I would have had a hard time. It doesn't help that intelligence is many-dimensional.
- x3n0ph3n3 7mo agoIt's also difficult to write characters that are smarter than the writer. See how poorly TV and movie writers portray intelligent characters.
- helle253 7mo ago> it is really difficult to rank the intelligence of people who are smarter than you a comparative example that i think about quite often, in the realm of TTRPG's: A smart person can play a dumb character well, usually, but a dumb person cannot play a smart character. Or rather, they usually end up playing a character that can be described as 'dumb guys idea of a smart guy', which is... distinct than 'smart guy' the broader point, ig: to model a level of intelligence well, it has to be 'within' your own, otherwise the model ends up too lossy!
- silvestrov 7mo agoand: a smart person can write a movie script with a stupid character but stupid script writers fail badly when writing smart characters.
- dist-epoch 7mo agoIt's funny to imagine that's the reason why "aliens invading us" or "AI taking over" are finally defeated at the end of a movie with a really stupid trick.
- ericd 7mo agoThe Big Bang Theory, explained.
- thecrash 7mo agoI think this might not be true though. This is like saying a marathon runner can walk like an amputee using a prosthetic. Just like anyone else with a disadvantage, people who aren't that smart develop diverse compensatory strategies to work around their intellectual limitations, and these can look very different from popular caricatures of "dumb guy". A stupid person is not as simple as a smart person might imagine.
- pfannkuchen 7mo agoBut by talking to them you can tell. It doesn’t matter if they made a ton of money selling real estate or whatever or have lovely personality traits or… let me know if I’m missing something. You can still tell by talking to them, because the structure and detail of a smarter person’s thought process is impossible to fake*. If you are similarly smart you can mirror their structure in your head, but if you are not you will just think they are saying something weird or confusing. Whereas there is nothing stopping a smarter person from simplifying their thought process when communicating, or filtering out thoughts they don’t think will be understood by the listener. Extremely smart people can get very good at this if they are well socialized. * If it’s an interactive conversation, anyway
- asar 7mo agoAlways thought of this as two cars driving faster than you on the road. After a certain distance it's clear both are faster than you, but really hard to say which one is the fastest.
- amatecha 7mo agoYeah no I totally agree. I feel like I have a strong sense of a person's intelligence and their psychological capacity/abilities. I just passively look for it or analyze it in my interactions with them. But, if I don't myself have a grasp of the subtle abstract layers of complexity "above" a certain level, I can't evaluate another person's strengths in those areas, so I can't sense where they sit compared to others (or myself)! I also think the more you know about things, the more you can see how well other people have integrated those things into their own psyche and how they employ those things, if that makes sense. Two people might both know a certain physics principle but one may elicit a far deeper and insightful employment of that knowledge than the other, even in casual situations.
- TheMagicHorsey 7mo agoReminds me of this game show episode. I was watching it with friends, and I'm not sure if we all picked out who the smartest person would be, but I do remember we definitely figured out who one of the lower-ranked people would be just based on her blathering (I won't give it away here since people may want to enjoy the episode themselves). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAlI0pbMQiM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAlI0pbMQiM
- SoftTalker 7mo agoReminds me of "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt."
- huflungdung 7mo ago[dead]
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- underlipton 7mo agoI haven't gotten to the end yet, but I think it's strange that it was initially presented as the participants taking the IQ test BEFORE they spoke and ranked each other, when they actually did so afterwards. Stereotype threat says hi. EDIT: And, at the end... Yeah~ If I may blather a bit myself, though, it's interesting to note that the top four are likely within a margin of error. Good day, bad day, their rank is probably malleable. People like 5, IME, are quite intelligent, and I wonder if the circumstances affected their performance (4's too, possibly even 3's). 6... Well, I think that says a lot about where we are as a society. Though that might be the schadenfreude talking. On the other hand, you could look at the ultimate ranking as one that leans heavily on each individual's confidence and comfort in the situation. 6's oversharing might have been rooted in nervousness and a sense of inferiority (the kind that might drive someone to, say, a push for high levels of formal accomplishment). Whereas, as someone in the comments pointed out, 3 was calm and relaxed even as they were being told that they were definitely the dumbest person in the room repeatedly. 1 is tall, male, stereotyped as intelligent, academically-accomplished, and acknowledged as such by everyone else; he had the best situational advantage for his headspace, entering the test.
- Havoc 7mo agoBit surprised that empathy makes no difference in this. People with high empathy tend to be good at reading others in general so would have thought that at least partially translates here
- yetihehe 7mo agoPeople with high empathy tend to feel other's feelings more (sometimes to their own detriment). Emotional intelligence helps with reading other people.
- hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm 7mo ago>Emotional intelligence Pseudoscience.
- youoy 7mo agoFinally a comment which is clearly 100% human
- hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm 7mo ago[flagged]
- tekno45 7mo agoyou thinking selling doesn't take emotional intelligence?
- dtj1123 7mo agoHaving met many extremely intelligent people who struggle to understand the emotional state and responses of those around them, hell yeah I think it's a distinct category.
- chasd00 7mo agowhat you're describing is a mental deficiency or illness. Being able to understand emotional state should be considered normal human behavior.
- elbci 7mo ago[dead]
- creatonez 7mo agoThis is a worthless AI slop summary of this article (^1), posted to a random forum to drive traffic. ^1: https://www.psypost.org/intelligent-people-are-better-judges-of-the-intelligence-of-others/ https://www.psypost.org/intelligent-people-are-better-judges...
- exossho 7mo agomakes sense. I assume that smart people tend to hang out with other smart people more, and naturally learn to identify the cues & patterns of those. where as, if you don't hang out with many smart people, there is not much to recognize.
- iwalton3 7mo agoLink to the referenced study (open access): "The good judge of intelligence" https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289625000972?via%3Dihub https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028962...
- ZYZ64738 7mo agoStudies with fewer than 1,000 samples are not very meaningful.
- Maxatar 7mo agoA sample size of 198 as per this study is more than sufficient to draw pretty strong conclusions. The issue is not the sample size, it's that studies like these almost always involve a very homogenous population of young college students.
- uxhacker 7mo agoYou mean WEIRD. (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) But why this matters is there a challenge judging intelligence cross cultures?
- Maxatar 7mo ago>But why this matters is there a challenge judging intelligence cross cultures? I don't know for sure, but my own anecdotal experience is that yes, there most certainly are challenges when a person from one culture assesses the intelligence of someone else from another culture. It would be nice to know whether this is supported by scientific evidence, or whether this is simply my own personal bias at play.
- dhosek 7mo agoAssuming your samples are not biased, 1000 subjects are generally far more than are necessary to demonstrate an effect. People who complain about sample size are generally not that well-educated in statistics.
- dist-epoch 7mo agoA well-educated person in statistics would also mention that it requires a certain class of distribution. This is one of Nassim Taleb's favourite subject (imagine computing the average net worth of a random group of people and suddenly Bill Gates is among them)
- stephbook 7mo agoI've got some personal litmus tests: 1) Syntax/semantic split. Can the person accept that a function called "multiplyBy5(a,b) { return a+b }" doesn't actually multiply by five, but adds the numbers? 2) PR speak: Does the person recognize that public relation speak is usually intentionally misleading, as in "the Russian Ministry of Defense said that a fire [onboard the Moskva] had caused ammunition to explode" (obviously caused by an Ukrainian missile and not an accidental fire, even though that's what's implied.) [0] 3) They're, their, there: There easy to tell apart, since they're meaning is so different. /s 4) Viewpoints: Can this person understand and articulate viewpoints that they consider "wrong" or simply don't hold themselves? 5) (new) LLM introspection: Does the person understand that LLMs have no secret understanding of themselves? An LLM like "Grok" doesn't actually understand "Grok" better than Gemini understands "Grok" - apart from minor differences in model strength maybe. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_of_the_Moskva https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_of_the_Moskva
- doxeddaily 7mo agoNot bad litmus tests. And yes a lot of idiots seem to fail at steel manning. I mean if you can't steel man your opponent what are you even doing?
- D-Coder 7mo agoI've heard that a non-Mensan asked a Mensan what it's like at a Mensa event. They replied, "If I have to explain something during a conversation, I only have to explain it _once_."
- fuzzzerd 7mo agoAre there people that would legitimately argue point 1? If you are only looking at the call site, sure that could be confusing, but if you are looking at the definition as provided in your post, surely anyone that is able understand the concept of a function can see the problem? I'm not arguing they don't exist, sure they do, but I'm confused as to how you came up with it as a litmus test? Is it that common? Surely we can agree in a real scenario renaming it (or fixing implementation to match name) is likely appropriate, but to completely miss the error? Hope this comes across as curiousity, because I am curious about this one from your list in particular.
- bahmboo 7mo agoi.e. dumb people don't know they are dumb
- ThrowawayR2 7mo agoI'm going to point out that the submitter is posting their own site as regularly as clockwork (https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=comuniq.xyz https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=comuniq.xyz) and has a very long history of self-promotion of their own domains under previous account names cannibalXxx, gorpo85, and saturn85, etc. Probably the most egregious example being https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=chat-to.dev https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=chat-to.dev which eventually got banned. The submitter identifies themselves as the owner of the site in the comment here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43531490 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43531490 , meaning that it's the same individual. Hopefully the HN administrators will get around to noticing this domain eventually as well and banning it.
- fallingfrog 7mo agoWell, I mean, tone deaf people cannot accurately judge musical talent.
- jaffee 7mo agoAnd today in obvious headlines: "Game recognize game"
- fallingfrog 7mo agoI interact with people who seem about as smart as me fairly often- my college professors for example. And, I certainly have been in many situations where my domain knowledge was vastly less than some other person with real expertise. But I have a hard time thinking of a time when I thought someone else was significantly smarter than me. Probably, that's an example of exactly what the article is talking about- maybe I've met those people but failed to recognize them. They certainly must be out there (unless i am the smartest person in the world, in which case we're all in serious trouble).
- techblueberry 7mo agoSimilar to your observation - I can think of at least one person who is definetly a lot smarter than than me, and yeah, I’m not sure I could tell you why exactly. Part of it looks like focus, I think I have a broader skill set than they do. But I don’t know that I could like rank a set of people smarter than me.
- dist-epoch 7mo agoA few signs: they know what your about to say and give you refutations to your argument before you voice them. Or you find they tend to block your argumentation and you don't quite know how to respond. Could be domain expertise though. Or if it's a collaborative situation, they might propose an idea you are already kind of thinking about, but they do it faster and clearer.
- SunshineTheCat 7mo agoI cannot remember the exact quote, but I thought Norm Macdonald nailed this idea a while back. He said something to the effect of: it's easy for a smart person to pretend they're dumb, but it's impossible for a dumb person to pretend they're smart. Norm himself was pretty good at convincing people he was dumb when very much the opposite was true.
- datsci_est_2015 7mo agoI have my doubts about Nate Bargatze being half as dumb as he pretends to be as well. Great comedic niche to fill, in my opinion.
- lisper 7mo ago> it's impossible for a dumb person to pretend they're smart. Unfortunately, that's not true. It's actually pretty easy to convince dumb people that you're smart, and so even dumb people can learn that skill. Myriad successful careers and even entire industries have been built on that foundation.
- WarmWash 7mo agoThe truth is you can build a successful career, on a foundation of a successful industry, that is run for and run by, all idiots.
- abraxas 7mo agoI can think of a couple of presidential careers where that worked out for the deceivers.
- D-Coder 7mo agoI see your point, but voters are not voting based on the candidate's intelligence levels.
- nh23423fefe 7mo agoSuccessful people are stupid? That's the theory?
- baddash 7mo agogame recognize game
- everdrive 7mo agoSomething I have always appreciated. I'm much less anxious working with very intelligent people, even if their intelligence eclipses mine. They don't have unusual ideas about what I should or should not be able to grasp. They can recognize which of my ideas are intelligent and which of my ideas are half-baked. Working with unintelligent people, you need to spend more time building up a reputation. They cannot tell if you're intelligent based on what you say, or how you explain things -- only if you get results. This is nerve wracking for multiple reasons, but chiefly because intelligent people can be wrong, or unlucky, etc, and so only judging someone based on results is partially to judge based on luck.
- argee 7mo agoUnintelligent people can also be right, or lucky, etc, and someone judging on those criteria can end up getting swept up in making some very bad decisions based on dubious advice.
- everdrive 7mo agoOne the most important lessons I ever learned in my career was not to mindlessly disregard a known bullshitter. He'll be right enough that you'll look foolish even if he hasn't earned his reputation.
- johnbarron 7mo ago>> I'm much less anxious working with very intelligent people, even if their intelligence eclipses mine. They don't have unusual ideas about what I should or should not be able to grasp. They can recognize which of my ideas are intelligent and which of my ideas are half-baked. Funny, because Kary Mullis, Nobel Prize winner for inventing PCR, one of the most important tools in the history of molecular biology, the technique that made modern genetics and COVID testing possible, could not recognize that his ideas about AIDS being a hoax were half baked. Or his belief in astrology. Nobel laureate. Astrology... Linus Pauling with his two Nobel Prizes, could not recognize that his vitamin C cures cancer crusade was half baked. James Watson decoded DNA itself and could not recognize that his ideas about race were half-baked. William Shockley another Nobel Prize...for inventing the transistor, probably the most consequential invention of the 20th century, could not recognize that touring college campuses promoting eugenics and forced sterilization was half-baked. Bill Gates could not recognize that hanging out with a convicted sex trafficker after the conviction was half baked. Larry Summers could not recognize that speculating about womens brains at a public conference was half baked. Intelligent people are great at recognizing which of your ideas are half-baked and they can also be catastrophically bad at recognizing which of their own are.The smarter they are, the more elaborate the justification, the more airtight the rationalization, and the more spectacular the eventual collapse. Peter Thiel being the prime example... Watch out for smart people... they are the worst judges of their own stupidity...
- jonplackett 7mo agoThis seems pretty obvious doesn’t it? Like the point of being more intelligent than someone or something is to an extent being able to simulate their brain and thinking with your own brain. We’re cleverer than animals because we can simulate all their actions before they do them. You can’t simulate something more advanced than yourself.
- dist-epoch 7mo ago> You can’t simulate something more advanced than yourself. Sometimes you can given more time. Many times being more intelligent is arriving at a conclusion faster without wasting as much on dead ends. A bad analogy: Magnus Carlson making a move in seconds and still defeating his opponent which has minutes for a move.
- JumpCrisscross 7mo ago> This seems pretty obvious doesn’t it? The opposite conclusion would also be obvious. We're a social species that might have deep primitives for evaluating the intelligence of another without needing to simulate the whole shebang.
- jandrewrogers 7mo agoI don't see how that would follow. If we are talking about "intelligence" in the formal sense of induction/prediction then it is a profoundly memory-hard problem as a matter of theory. This is to "learning" what the speed of light is to physics. You can't replace the larger simulation required (i.e. more state/RAM) with a faster processor.
- neonstatic 7mo agoSticking with the computation analogy, it could be a long-term memory look up. If memories were passed down the generations, people could simply memorize actions of individuals deemed smarter. Over a large sample size, a heuristic would emerge. Kind of like knowing there is always a sunset following a sunrise without understanding the solar system.
- ai_slop_hater 7mo agoDoes that mean we should use a larger model as judge for evals, not a smaller one?
- dist-epoch 7mo agoThat was always the advice. Use the best model you can afford. But some problems are easy and you can get away with a smaller model.
- coffeeaddict1 7mo agoWhile the linked study is interesting, using standardised tests is a terrible way to judge if someone is "intelligent". Also imo is very difficult to come up with a universal definition of intelligence. For example, I hold Lionel Messi to be a very "intelligent" footballer, but I would judge his intelligence to be of vastly different nature to that of Albert Einstein.
- pmontra 7mo agoA data point: the parent of an about 140 IQ son told me that her son was in a room with other 120+ IQ kids. They started to talk and quickly formed groups. Those groups turned out to include kids of very similar IQ. The ones between 140 and 143 thought that the ones between 137 and 139 were not interesting to talk with.
- go_artemis 7mo agoPeople often see the Jungian personality traits of "judging" vs. "perceiving" etc as actual exogenous traits, but it's also a tendency to spend more time before coming to a conclusion.
- jandrewrogers 7mo agoThis general idea follows from the classic theorems on the limits of induction on finite computers. A computer can only build an inductive model of another computer that is substantially simpler than itself in a Kolmogorov sense. This process provides a measure for ordering simpler computers. Computers that are equally or more complex are indistinguishable via induction. This is also a common basis for the concept of "free will": no computer can model its own behavior such that it can reliably predict it. To a squirrel all humans are equally, unfathomably intelligent.
- t23414321 7mo agoAnd the reverse too (not to self destruct, (A)Overthinking""" may not help, but never mind.. - it can't be so simple..? => "Human Intelligence" soon may be over. Even I did not - someone warn me then I stop - not as any could ever 'aftermind'.. - But can He..? - He would not (make such rock) ..it's another level. Or DNA, KISS ;).
- unsupp0rted 7mo agoIt's fairly simple to identify very smart people, but it takes some time. You ask them what their goals and predictions are, and then watch for a while. I've noticed the smarter a person is, the fewer qualms they have about sharing exactly what they're aiming to do. This approach is also a simple way to identify stupid people, but for stupid people there are much quicker methods. And stupid people tend to be cagey, because they have fewer tools for identifying when somebody is trying to take advantage of them, and because they've got experience being taken advantage of.
- neonstatic 7mo agoI disagree with some of your observations. Being taken advantage of is not only a function of intelligence. It's also a function of emotional health. Sure, if the person is incapable of understanding they are being taken advantage of, they will be. But one can be perfectly capable of understanding that, see it happen in real time, and let it happen anyway. That has been the case with me for a long time. I could see, but I could not stop it, because I have been emotionally conditioned to allow it. Took a long time to fix. There is also a risk of confusing a smart person with a person who speaks well. We have a built-in heuristic, that language signals intelligence. To a large extent it does, of course, but it can be deceptive. I've grown very weary of well-spoken people, who seem to want me to think they are also very smart. Lastly, higher intelligence does not mean the person is a better human being. I find that there is an obsession with intelligence in the West. "Stupid" people can be really lovely and better companions than smart ones. There is something to be said about kindness and honesty. > I've noticed the smarter a person is, the fewer qualms they have about sharing exactly what they're aiming to do. I used to be like that. Openly speaking about what I aim to do and how. I ended up moderating that quality a fair bit after noticing some people began copying my ideas or outright stealing them. I was to slow to execute.
- unsupp0rted 7mo agoThe nice thing about observing whether someone is accomplishing what they set out to accomplish is it doesn't matter how well spoken they seemed. I've found that especially smart people have preternatural bullshit detectors, even when they lack "emotional health" or the ability to socialize well with others. Smart people can be lovely, stupid people can be lovely, golden retrievers can be lovely... but that's tangential.
- anotherevan 7mo agoSo that means I'm either an exceptional judge of character, or and idiot and don't know it. /s
- RigelKentaurus 7mo agoI think the distribution of intelligence is extremely unfair in nature, leading to extremely unequal outcomes in society. I volunteer with an organization that gets ex-cons back on their feet and reintegrate into society by treating them for addiction, teaching basic finance skills, etc. I have found that for the majority of people in this program, their IQ is quite low compared with the average person, and it shows up in the form of extreme short-term thinking, not understanding interest rates, etc. It left me quite dejected, TBH. Not sure whether there is a solution.
- emil-lp 7mo agoSo you're telling me jailtime lowers people's IQs?
- arw0n 7mo agoI think they are implying that people with lower intelligence are more likely to be in jail. There's at least three reasons why I would consider this very plausible: 1. Intelligence is associated with higher impulse control. 2. Intelligent criminals are probably less likely to be caught. They might also have a better chance at working to lower their sentences after being caught. 3. It is harder to be successful with a lower IQ (although I would posit it is far from the most important factor), and economic hardship is strongly correlated with crime.
- t23414321 7mo agoWhat about less intelligent people judging the intelligence of more intelligent people - and about handling that, from both sides - finding (or not) that someone may be more intelligent than you ever know or could imagine - or to deal with someone that will never find that out - but will keep treating you instead as you were that more stupid person regardless of whatever - and what if when he by chance may find about that, the outcome could be even worse for you ? (Good Soldier Švejk is _dark_ _comedy_ - but not necessary an answer someone could take or like, moreover some people may happen to be smart differently.. some with high IQ still be dumb - or, the.. reverse?? ..really? - but howTF ??? ;)