5 ms·

I 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 w

I 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 6mo 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 6mo ago
  So both are? Like, combined?
  - SoftTalker 6mo ago
    Maybe they are smart enough to realize when they have a good thing going (on balance).
throwaway27448 6mo 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 6mo ago
It's also difficult to write characters that are smarter than the writer. See how poorly TV and movie writers portray intelligent characters.
helle253 6mo 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 6mo ago
  and: a smart person can write a movie script with a stupid character but stupid script writers fail badly when writing smart characters.
  - dist-epoch 6mo ago
    It'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 6mo ago
  The Big Bang Theory, explained.
- thecrash 6mo ago
  I 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 6mo ago
    But 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 6mo ago
Always 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 6mo ago
Yeah 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.

coldtea 6mo 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 6mo ago
So both are? Like, combined?
- SoftTalker 6mo ago
  Maybe they are smart enough to realize when they have a good thing going (on balance).

throwaway27448 6mo 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 6mo ago

It's also difficult to write characters that are smarter than the writer. See how poorly TV and movie writers portray intelligent characters.

helle253 6mo 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 6mo ago
and: a smart person can write a movie script with a stupid character but stupid script writers fail badly when writing smart characters.
- dist-epoch 6mo ago
  It'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 6mo ago
The Big Bang Theory, explained.
thecrash 6mo ago
I 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 6mo ago
  But 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 6mo ago

Always 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 6mo ago

Yeah 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.