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Comment by yakult | Hacker News Reader

My pet theory: much of 'gut feelings' and intuition boils down to having our internal black box predict the behavior of other people. When you are 'average', this often simplifies to reasoning about what you would do in the same circumstances, which is relatively easy. If you are 3 standard deviations out, you'll have to compensate that consciously, which is inaccurate and difficult and slow. This is like how UI designers have difficulty to discern which parts of their UI are hard to use, while the end user could do so effortlessly.

Smart people end up having to run SmartPerson + NormalPersonVM(pre-alpha) in parallel. Normal people just run NormalPerson natively. Then they complain about bugs and slowness ('smart people are out of touch with reality!', etc.)

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I've got a similar-ish theory. "Smart" people get rewarded as a child or adolescent for doing "smart" behavior, which teaches them to interact with deeper and richer observations and insights. If you don't get trained as a "smart" person, you get better responses to surface appearances.

The slowness comes out of this natively - "smart" children are taught to do more complicated things with social data, and brains need more time to get the sensory data necessary for more complicated behaviors. It takes a tenth of a second for the Patellar reflex, about a second to recognize a friend and wave hello, and a conversation to get someone on board with your project.

No magic required, just training the same sort of behaviors normal people have in the same sort of way. The most difficult part is un-learning "impress people with how clever you are" behaviors.

Agree. One of my friends is pretty smart (at least, above above-average) and works in the tech industry. When he was young he had to "simulate" his emotions to "look like a normal person." He had to think what normal people would feel under his situation and tried to feel that way (or tried to make himself looked feeling that way in front of people). For example, he thinks that crying on funerals is illogical, because the dead are dead already, nothing can bring them back and the dead would surely rather see people they love live happily instead of in sorrow. But no. Until he escaped from the environment he was born he had to live like a normal person, and tried to cry on funerals.

This could also be true of less intelligent people, and not true of more intelligent people.

Edit: typo

Not to diagnose your friend, but more as a general note: that kind of perspective sounds (from my admittedly unqualified perspective) much more typical of people on the autism spectrum or certain other non-neurotypicals than it does of "smart people" in general. It might be worth noting that there's some (mostly-anecdotal) indications that tech, particularly programming itself, may have higher incidence of people on the spectrum than other fields.

> Not to diagnose your friend

Then please don't.

His friend might not be on the autism spectrum, and it would be blatantly irresponsible to claim he was based on such limited evidence with no qualifications - which is why I didn't.

Rather, I stated that that kind of mindset is usually more common in individuals on the spectrum. It is, in fact, one of its most common and defining features - even if, on its own, it's not sufficient for a diagnosis. It's relevant to the discussion, even if it's not relevant to his friend in particular.

What further qualification could I have added to make myself clearer? I definitely don't want to be encouraging lazy net-diagnoses, as they're harmful to the people who have such disorders, so I'm genuinely curious how you would rather I have phrased this.

You could not have qualified that statement more. It's just hard to communicate ideas because the response prediction engine we build in our minds operates with a high degree of uncertainty.

Most dumb and normal people also don't cry at funerals.

Smarter people than your friends have feelings, fall in love and cry for their dead pets.

Nothing to do with how smart you are. Cynicism isn't being smart. Cynicism is just being cynic.

He could be smarter and not cry and just say "I'll miss him/her" in smalltalk rather than rationalising the whole thing (because that's actually the dumb thing to do).

Inability to understand emotions is not the same thing as being smart. It is possible to be smart and not to understand them, but plenty of smart people do get why people cry at funeral.

Also, majority of people who attend funerals don't cry and even more don't cry publicly. It is highly inappropriate to laugh or look happy, but if he was trying to simulate cry, then his idea of funerals was not based on reality nor observation.

I agree. Feynman was incredibly intelligent, musically inclined, and charmingly social. Anyone who feels out of touch with (perceived inferior) normal people due to being too smart is creating a hierarchy of people which places them just one step off the bottom. At the same time they present as if their position is the top step on the ladder.

People pigeonhole themselves into categories based on RPG mechanics. In their head, they're at Intelligence 10 so that must mean that they had to sacrifice Charisma. The real world doesn't have game balance. People will turn out to be smart and funny and kind and good looking. To make it worse, these will correlate.

And besides, the idea of intelligence resulting in damaged social skills is odd. Being able to generalise and make inductive conclusions is an important skill that is substantially helped by being intelligent. Making social decisions the long way (thinking through them) is inefficient. An intelligent person who's doing that is just poorly using their time.

Not saying you're wrong at all (in fact I agree), but I think that an important thing to remember is that smart people still have limited time like everyone else, hence they will probably be less enthusiastic to fritter it away on "meaningless" social interaction and small-talk when they could be doing something they consider useful, challenging or stimulating.

This tendency IMO tends to make some smart people less adept at social interaction, just because they do less of it. Not all smart people, but definitely some of them. Probably everyone knows an intelligent person who is socially awkward.

So that's another influence. But it's all generalizations.

> For example, he thinks that crying on funerals is illogical, because the dead are dead already, nothing can bring them back and the dead would surely rather see people they love live happily instead of in sorrow. But no. Until he escaped from the environment he was born he had to live like a normal person, and tried to cry on funerals.

No, the more I think about it, the more I think your friend is really missing something. Funerals aren't about crying because the dead could be in pain or suffering. It's crying about the absence and the hole they leave in our life. (that and emotional contagion, which is a regular psychological effect in such gatherings)

The fact he concluded he had to cry on funerals just goes to show his line of reasoning clearly lacks logic and experience to fuel it (teenage angst ?).

Now of course it depends on the culture you are raised in (see old italy black dressed old women at funerals for instance) and the violence attached to behaving outside the norm.

The few people I know to be whole-enchilada smart know ordinary people better than ordinary people know themselves. I think parent's pet theory only applies to a subspecies of google-smart.

> Smart people end up having to run SmartPerson + NormalPersonVM(pre-alpha) in parallel.

This sounds a lot like autism spectrum disorder. Only some smart people work this way; for others, the social mechanisms are intact and operate normally (and sometimes very efficiently). For anecdotal evidence and some insights, see Eric Raymond's blog post[1].

[1]http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7060

> My pet theory: much of 'gut feelings' and intuition boils down to having our internal black box predict the behavior of other people.

That's a tautology.

> Smart people end up having to run SmartPerson + NormalPersonVM(pre-alpha) in parallel. Normal people just run NormalPerson natively. Then they complain about bugs and slowness ('smart people are out of touch with reality!', etc.)

When all you have is hammer, everything looks like a nail.

> NormalPersonVM(pre-alpha)

I literally did a spit-take when I read that. Is there a proper term for that cognitive routine?

System 2 override, perhaps, though that's more general.

I had to read it multiple times. I think because I read too much statistics.

Normal(mu, sigma)

It would be cool to have a VM represented by a distribution though. :-)

> Is there a proper term for that cognitive routine?

I think it falls under the general term "Theory of Mind". Quoth Wikipedia:

> Having a theory of mind allows one to attribute thoughts, desires, and intentions to others, to predict or explain their actions, and to posit their intentions. As originally defined, it enables one to understand that mental states can be the cause of -- and thus be used to explain and predict -- the behavior of others.

... Unless I misinterpreted your post, and you're talking about the cognition behind spit-takes.

There's also a problem when SmartPerson runs NormalPersonVM(6.0) because that runs at three times NormalPerson speed. SmartPerson knows what NormalPerson is going to say a half hour ahead of time and gets bored easily, plus NormalPerson catches on that they are being anticipated consistently and that's bloody annoying or scary for them. Running NormalPersonVM at the right speed for the right person is tough. Raising children gives lots of practice with this, though. We're talking "mirror neurons", btw.

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