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High IQ people have the "clever silly" problem. "... an increasing relative level of IQ brings with it a tendency differentially to over-use general intelligen

High IQ people have the "clever silly" problem. "... an increasing relative level of IQ brings with it a tendency differentially to over-use general intelligence in problem-solving, and to over-ride those instinctive and spontaneous forms of evolved behaviour which could be termed common sense. Preferential use of abstract analysis is often useful when dealing with the many evolutionary novelties to be found in modernizing societies; but is not usually useful for dealing with social and psychological problems for which humans have evolved ‘domain-specific’ adaptive behaviours. ... when it comes to solving social problems, the most intelligent people are more likely than those of average intelligence to have novel but silly ideas" http://medicalhypotheses.blogspot.com/2009/11/clever-sillies-why-high-iq-lack-common.html http://medicalhypotheses.blogspot.com/2009/11/clever-sillies...

Xcelerate 12y ago
Haha, this is great. I'm not claiming to have a high IQ; however, the article you linked resonates a lot with me. In my previous relationship, I had a difficult time figuring out if what my (ex)-girlfriend said corresponded with what she actually meant, and I often thought she was playing "mind games" of some sort with me. So I began recording the intervals of time between our text messages and plotting them to search for discrepancies in our texting patterns. Lately, I've also been putting on different personas at parties I attend (I'm a grad student) and taking notes on the varying responses I get to each type of personality. I'm attempting to optimize charisma with this data, but I'm not having a lot of success yet. People always say to "be yourself", but if that was the case I simply wouldn't interact with others at all, so I have to develop some kind of personality to use. I was telling my sister about these types of social experiments, and she told me that overanalyzing everything to a fault produces the opposite result of what I'm trying to achieve. So far, she seem to have a point, because I still have difficulty deciphering how most people interact socially with each other. (I hope none of my friends know my HN username...)
- politician 12y ago
  Consider that you might be using the wrong hemisphere of your brain to analyze these situations and that chemically nullifying this tendency of one hemisphere to dominate your reasoning may improve your results. For example, consider the experiment where you get blindingly drunk and see how you react physically (calibration). Then, tone it down a few drinks and see how you react socially. Give someone else the keys to your car first. Alternatively, observe how you breath through your nose. It's known that the nostril through which you breath is related to which nervous system is active (you have two: sympathetic and parasympathetic, and they are related to increased blood flow in the right and left brain). Observe how you react socially when different hemispheres are active. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2923709 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2923709
- SilasX 12y ago
  When arguing with someone, or even just trying to understand their advice, I often find myself thinking: "If I actually understood this topic as well as you claim to, I would reveal that understanding much better than you currently are." The advice to "be yourself" is an excellent example: you can pretty trivially reveal "yourselfs" that the adviser recommends you not be, and "non-yourselfs" that you should be. And yet ... most people recommending that, cannot open the black box and reveal any greater precision to that heuristic, which I expect I would do if and when I gave such advice (or any heuristic advice). It's why I distinguish between levels of understanding[1]. There's the level at which you can emit the correct answers with no ability to introspect on them, and the level at which your understanding "plugs in" to the rest of your world-model. If you acquired the former without ever having to reflect on it, you may never turn it into the latter, nor need to. But neither will your advice make much sense. [1] http://lesswrong.com/lw/1yq/understanding_your_understanding/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/1yq/understanding_your_understanding...
  - tormeh 12y ago
    Being yourself doesn't mean what you think it means. It doesn't mean doing what feels natural or easy, it means that you should be honest and open about who you are, how you feel and what you want. Just knowing the latter things is hard and being honest and open about them is also hard.
    - SilasX 12y ago
      Considering that I didn't say what I think it means, it seems you may be under the very same illusion of understanding I was criticizing, in which one thinks one's explanation, metaphor, or heuristic has caused a specific model in the other's mind, when it has not. In the same way, about half of the people who have offered that advice, operationalize it oppositely from how you just did, because they (mistakenly) think that the correct behaviors do result from doing what feels natural or easy. Furthermore, for many people, "being honest and open about who they are and what they want" means directly conveying things that are socially inappropriately to convey, which leads them (including you, probably) to immediately update the advice in unpredictable ways, revealing it to have the same lack of content or understanding that I claimed.
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  Here's an xkcd for you - http://xkcd.com/523/ http://xkcd.com/523/ :). EDIT: on the other hand, there's that one as well - http://xkcd.com/701/ http://xkcd.com/701/.

Xcelerate 12y ago

Haha, this is great. I'm not claiming to have a high IQ; however, the article you linked resonates a lot with me. In my previous relationship, I had a difficult time figuring out if what my (ex)-girlfriend said corresponded with what she actually meant, and I often thought she was playing "mind games" of some sort with me. So I began recording the intervals of time between our text messages and plotting them to search for discrepancies in our texting patterns. Lately, I've also been putting on different personas at parties I attend (I'm a grad student) and taking notes on the varying responses I get to each type of personality. I'm attempting to optimize charisma with this data, but I'm not having a lot of success yet. People always say to "be yourself", but if that was the case I simply wouldn't interact with others at all, so I have to develop some kind of personality to use. I was telling my sister about these types of social experiments, and she told me that overanalyzing everything to a fault produces the opposite result of what I'm trying to achieve. So far, she seem to have a point, because I still have difficulty deciphering how most people interact socially with each other. (I hope none of my friends know my HN username...)

politician 12y ago
Consider that you might be using the wrong hemisphere of your brain to analyze these situations and that chemically nullifying this tendency of one hemisphere to dominate your reasoning may improve your results. For example, consider the experiment where you get blindingly drunk and see how you react physically (calibration). Then, tone it down a few drinks and see how you react socially. Give someone else the keys to your car first. Alternatively, observe how you breath through your nose. It's known that the nostril through which you breath is related to which nervous system is active (you have two: sympathetic and parasympathetic, and they are related to increased blood flow in the right and left brain). Observe how you react socially when different hemispheres are active. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2923709 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2923709
SilasX 12y ago
When arguing with someone, or even just trying to understand their advice, I often find myself thinking: "If I actually understood this topic as well as you claim to, I would reveal that understanding much better than you currently are." The advice to "be yourself" is an excellent example: you can pretty trivially reveal "yourselfs" that the adviser recommends you not be, and "non-yourselfs" that you should be. And yet ... most people recommending that, cannot open the black box and reveal any greater precision to that heuristic, which I expect I would do if and when I gave such advice (or any heuristic advice). It's why I distinguish between levels of understanding[1]. There's the level at which you can emit the correct answers with no ability to introspect on them, and the level at which your understanding "plugs in" to the rest of your world-model. If you acquired the former without ever having to reflect on it, you may never turn it into the latter, nor need to. But neither will your advice make much sense. [1] http://lesswrong.com/lw/1yq/understanding_your_understanding/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/1yq/understanding_your_understanding...
- tormeh 12y ago
  Being yourself doesn't mean what you think it means. It doesn't mean doing what feels natural or easy, it means that you should be honest and open about who you are, how you feel and what you want. Just knowing the latter things is hard and being honest and open about them is also hard.
  - SilasX 12y ago
    Considering that I didn't say what I think it means, it seems you may be under the very same illusion of understanding I was criticizing, in which one thinks one's explanation, metaphor, or heuristic has caused a specific model in the other's mind, when it has not. In the same way, about half of the people who have offered that advice, operationalize it oppositely from how you just did, because they (mistakenly) think that the correct behaviors do result from doing what feels natural or easy. Furthermore, for many people, "being honest and open about who they are and what they want" means directly conveying things that are socially inappropriately to convey, which leads them (including you, probably) to immediately update the advice in unpredictable ways, revealing it to have the same lack of content or understanding that I claimed.
TeMPOraL 12y ago
Here's an xkcd for you - http://xkcd.com/523/ http://xkcd.com/523/ :). EDIT: on the other hand, there's that one as well - http://xkcd.com/701/ http://xkcd.com/701/.