On YouTube comments there seems to be a consensus that aligns with yours. I was quite surprised to find that I did not, at all, find her arrogant. The majority of the commenters did. I am still finding it hard to believe.
As far as IQ tests go, I know I will do poorly. I think way too slow. Which I am sure is part of what it is testing for.
I have encountered so many people who have fewer higher academic degrees than I do but are just wicked smart. They get a new concept so fast. Speed through a chain of consequences so fast. Unfamiliar board games of strategy may be a good test bed. I would be abysmal. On the other hand my brother would kill in them.
EDIT: And, at the end... Yeah~
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.
Pseudoscience.
Not every skill gets a whole category of intelligence.
>that such deduction is strictly a consequence of existing intellectual categories
Yes.
The fact that you don't list these says a lot about how much you know on this topic.
It's the same with emotional intelligence. The brain has dedicated circuitry for understanding other people. You can reason it through abstractly but it will be less efficient. You can also solve problems about natural science with the emotional reasoning part of the brain. Ever heard the expression "the atom wants a full shell of electrons"? That's empathy.
Emotions are just another abstract concept.
Plus one of the big ways we evaluate the intelligence of other species is trying to see if they have theory of mind, which is intrinsically linked to social intelligence.
Edit: Ah, the person you replied to also invoked special circuitry.
In kids you can see it all the time - like a kid started crying because he sees others cry, but if you ask them why they cry - the explanation is always ridiculous.
But even some adults are like that, interpreting your own or even others emotions is both a skill and a talent.
That's just called empathy.
To be clear, in my experience it wasn't even a case of being on the spectrum or other neurodivergence. They simply had a bad model of other people's thoughts and emotions. Of course this isn't DnD, I've met people a order of magnitude smarter than me in the usual academics and with a deeper understanding of people.
You might not like the terminology, but it's a real thing and can be independent from what we usually call intelligence.
I guess you're surprised that empathy is not more important than intelligence? My thought there is that perceptiveness is a large part of intelligence, and if you lack that, you won't recognize the signs of intelligence no matter how empathetic you are.
high empathy means you feel what you think the other person is feeling,
Highly empathetic people have horrible theory of mind issues a lot of the time.
In other words, smarter people are better able to gauge people's emotions as well.
^1: https://www.psypost.org/intelligent-people-are-better-judges...
The issue is not the sample size, it's that studies like these almost always involve a very homogenous population of young college students.
(Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic)
But why this matters is there a challenge judging intelligence cross cultures?
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.
Hopefully the HN administrators will get around to noticing this domain eventually as well and banning it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
david-gpu•2h ago
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•2h ago
Because they're smart enough to know neither money nor leisure is not the be all end all...
nickburns•2h ago
SoftTalker•2h ago
throwaway27448•1h ago
It doesn't help that intelligence is many-dimensional.
x3n0ph3n3•1h ago
helle253•1h ago
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•12m ago
asar•1h ago
amatecha•54m ago
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.