Intelligent people take longer to solve hard problems: study
bigthink.com
bigthink.com
In other words if you have a weak short-term or working memory you have to, by necessity, deeply think through everything - whether simple or complex. This may allow spotting the rare inconsistency or opportunity others may not, but as it comes at a performance and time penalty which, under circumstances commonly encountered in one's educational career (timed examinations) it more typically results in filtering such people out of fields where excursive, highly lateral modes of thinking would be beneficial.
To survive this filter one must either acquire (or be gifted with) the talent of exceptionally swift traversal of a large and heterogeneous general knowledge graph, as one cannot rely on a handful of tightly knit but relatively isolated silos of memorized specialization.
But I also abhor rote memorization. Not because I don't think it's valuable, I just hate extremely repetitive tasks. Close friends of mine with zero interest in the subject just took everything at face level and preferred to rote memorize everything and slap it down as needed. And they tested much better than I did. Neither I or they are more intelligent than one another and these days we all excel at our own areas we enjoy. But for that subject in particular, in a rushed classroom standardized testing situation, I think their approach was "better".
Once my engineering school load got too big for me to continue to use that approach in my math classes, I took an alternative strategy of just accepting theories without deeply understanding them and I had a much harder time applying those particular math concepts outside of those classes.
Knowing the range of application of a technique is important.
I further suspect that this is also the mechanism responsible for some people's apparent tendency to do all the talking in a conversation, rather than allow a balanced share of time between conversants. The quick decay of short-term information requires constant refreshing, and talking is one means of augmenting this.
I'm reminded of the classic Feynman story about discovering the different mental models that he/his coworkers used, and how those models affected thinking: https://youtu.be/Si6NbKqYEd8?t=105
The discussions on this post have been the first time I've really hard people describe this phenomenon in such clarity. It's really nice to know there are other people who are similar to me in this way, as I very very often feel like the "odd one out" in this regard...
I really agree: this discussion is great!
I realized this when I saw one of the higher math geniuses in university, one who really understood most things better than most of us, learn equations and lemmas from flashcards one day.
That memorization may become superfluous after you worked with something for a while, but until then, it is not just tremendously useful, but downright necessary, to make an equation, or set of axioms, theorem, or whatever, just "pop up" in your head while you're thinking something through.
You say:
> I needed to deeply understand it at the most universally root level and create a painstaking mental model of it
That is my modus operandi in math. I want to fully understand it, down to every little detail. But in my experience, memorization is one step for that model to really build itself up, and actually stick.
Reading through the pages of a math book and going "oh, yeah, I totally understood that, neat" is useless if you later encounter a problem and go "huh, so, what was the exact equation of the Fourier transform again"?
And not just because you now have to look it up to apply it, but also because an equation for example is not just a jumble of symbols that you write down and fill in. It has structure, it has meaning. If you can recite it in your sleep, then you also immediately see properties of it when they are relevant, and are able to make further connections.
As Andrew Wiles said: "Math is not a spectator sport."
It's hard to fully bring across what memorization does for math, but since I started just using a flashcard app (Anki) several years ago, I literally sometimes lie in bed at night, eyes closed and no notepad, and work through math in my head, trying to further understand some aspects. And because I can "look" at what I memorized in my head, it works really well.
There is no way to pass through these obstacles (without spending the multiple lifetimes it took to forge them from first principles) except to memorize them and gradually extend understanding backwards from that memorization into the broader context of dependencies that converge into its formalization.
But having this predicament explained to me up front, ideally somewhere around the age one learns about something as basic as fractions, would have been enormously helpful.
That is not the only reason, but also a big part of it, yes. Some of the things (but not all) that I memorize I admittedly don't fully understand. I try to avoid that, but it happens. Usually though, the sudden realization comes at a later point, when I understood more of something else.
Literally happened last week to me. I had been memorizing a "stupid" theorem for a while[1], not realizing why it's useful, until something I read was about discontinuities in the n-th derivation of a function, and what that means for the terms of the function's Taylor series, and it all lit up in me, tying it all together.
It's a good feeling!
[1] https://www.dsprelated.com/freebooks/sasp/Spectral_Roll_Off....
I am definitely a "hands on" math person. Almost every piece of math I learn has application ultimately, personally I would not really be motivated otherwise. I learn math because I want to use it. I then also find joy in the abstract beauty, but I would not uncover that beauty without something I could use it for in the first place in mind. For me specifically, a large application of the math I'm learning is signal processing (both digital and analog), and analog circuits (e.g. "EE stuff").
And in that, some of the learning of "meaningless abstractions" first, and later entangling it with actual application, definitely, positively helped in getting a good understanding of the underlying math, which I can in turn integrate with what I'm doing in the "real world".
Not-memorizing forces you to practice more and develop deeper intuition which helps you reconstruct info. Memorization is a side-effect or learning, not a cause.
Our brains are connection machines, not encyclopedias.
But I got there by, at first, "blindly" memorizing FS, FT, DFT, DTFT, and Laplace and z transforms. This allowed me to not only apply them to problems while, at the time, not being fully comfortable with them yet, but also, and this is really the biggest part of the point I'm trying to make, to "look at them" while I was either solving problems or just furthering my understanding of the field when, say, lying in bed before falling asleep.
To an extent that would not have been possible if I had to "refer back" to their definitions on paper.
It was a tremendous tool (that is what memorization is, a tool) to just be able to recite, say, the DFT, or the DTFT, even while my intuition was still gradually building up. And to internally look at the differences between DFT and DTFT. The same is true for the countless other little factoids in my arsenal of flashcards. I literally built a lot of math understanding, both abstract and of actual engineering problems I was working on, when sitting in my car, on my 45 minutes commute to work or back home.
> Our brains are connection machines, not encyclopedias.
And memorization is a tool for making new connections.
Memorization leads to a different kind of knowledge, I think. You don't know the thing, you know the steps to reproduce.
It's like my grandmother who knows several songs by heart, but if you ask about the second line in the third verse she'll sing it from the start until she reaches the line in question. For a song this is sufficient, because it is analogous to the primary use cases.
I really can't operate on things for which I don't have a deep intuition. If I really have to treat something as a blackbox, I need to explicitly spell out the assumptions and "compress them enough" (which is actually probably also just about building an intuition on those assumptions).
I envy people a lot that can just "copy & paste" some knowledge in their thinking.
I think I now got to the point where I accepted that to be a part of me and made it "my brand" and I see that I can add value with being different in this aspect.
I often wonder how it must feel like to be able to "copy paste" knowledge. If you painstakingly have to sweat through all kinds of things that others can just "copy&paste", it can feel like others are "cheating" - but in the end it's just me being jealous.
I dropped out of my masters in Statistics because after a point, I had questions and due to circumstances, couldn't find answers by myself and couldn't find help (this is before the days of youtube explosion).
Eventually through serendipitous circumstances, I enrolled in a computer course and realized that I no longer had this "why" problem anymore when it came to programming - I could get answers quickly AND it allowed me to express myself the way I wanted. Didn't turn back after that.
I wonder if intelligent people with poor short term memories are more impressed with LLMs than those with good short term memories because that was my immediate reaction and why it is basically unthinkable for me to unsubscribe from chatGPT4.
As a paired cybernetic system I gain enormously more from LLMs compared to myself with a good short term memory and paired.
I think the deep thinker/modeler's time has come. The non-deep thinker/modeler with great flash memory time has come and gone.
However I do believe long term memory is more robust so if you're in a mentally compromised state, such as having a headache, it will be less affected. So if you have to work through a hard problem on a deadline but have a headache, you can rely on heuristics stored in long term memory rather than deriving everything in short term memory.
Adding on, there's a definite weird trade off going on between memory and creativity that I think is very under-appreciated. I think memory acts as a bind on creativity, and it's really easy to make this intuitive with any number of examples whether it be youth or marijuana/psychedelics. When you reduce your ability to access memory you seem to gain an ability to explore new spaces. Likewise the more you learn and build structures in your brain around concepts, the harder it is to accept and process novelties. Feels like there's some similar trade offs going on as with this deep vs fast thinking.
At some point you must memorize in math.
By rote memorization, it is available in my head immediately, and I can use it to reason through things, without having to derive anything. It helps tremendously.
Then, at some point, it will become so familiar and understood through working with it, that the rote memorization becomes superfluous. For example, I've worked with the Laplace Transforms and the various Fourier Transforms (FS, FT, DFT, DTFT) so intensely by now, that I can absolutely just recite them by concept and understanding of why they are what they are.
But until then, rote memorization is basically a necessary tool to work with math.
The moment that made me realize that was when I saw a math genius at university, one who clearly understood the topics extremely well, going through his flashcards.
About three weeks into my first undergraduate class on abstract algebra, it dawned on me that the instructor wasn't giving me math tests. He was giving me vocabulary tests. In that class, most of the answers to questions flow straight from the definitions. Once I broke out the flashcards and started memorizing definitions, that class became almost trivial.
I used flashcards in all my classes after that to memorize terms, definitions, and concepts. Math and engineering are, for me anyway, like a foreign language. To converse in that language fluently, one must be very comfortable with the vocabulary. It just makes sense.
For me, memorizing math means just working on problems until the theorems and definitions are like muscle memory. I know other people get by on flash cards but I can’t stand them.
Heck, I just wrote a midterm in network flow theory today and they gave us a sheet with all the theorems and definitions in the course up to this point. Needless to say, memorizing that sheet wouldn’t help you at all on the proofs. You have to actually practice writing proofs to get good at it.
I'm not a mathematician, but I've seen a similar bifurcation in programming styles and preferences: something like "debuggers" vs "abstraction builders". Would you rather have less to learn up front at the expense of needing to track more details as you're working, or would you rather spend time learning or developing a conceptual foundation to reduce ongoing pressure on your working memory?
I figure this is why discussions about keeping programming "simple" are so unproductive: people end up talking past each other because one camp values reducing up-front complexity, the other reducing ongoing complexity, but everybody talks about it as if there's only one simple–complex dimension.
Those short memory people (who I think I may be among) that GP said about relate to which group of mathematicians and programmers?
I am one of those that prefer to reduce complexity and prefer lower level programming. I think that such a type of person likes C for example.
Systemic thinking - considering the system as a whole. Systematic thinking - considering the components of a system step-by-step.
Of course both are important at a global scale. But one person can focus on one side and make an contribution.
Ben Stiller do it meme
I need to derive things to understand them, ie music theory. I'm jealous of people who can memorize and take at face value but if I'm looking at a chord, I need to know the components that create that chord, which gets frustrating because music has a lot of rules that seem to be based on vibe and closeness. Two things can be identical but distinct based on their context.
It used to take me 2-3x as long to do homeworks or labs compared to other classmates. Same with work assignments. It often triggers an imposter syndrome type feeling.
Yet I have proof that I'm capable of solving complex problems, I understand certain things almost immediately compared to others, other things I need to study for a long time.
I tend to rarely know an answer on the spot, but I know how to determine many things, by knowing how to find the information needed.
I don't pretend to be a genius, but I have proof via a degree, others opinions of me, and material results that basically say I'm intelligent to a point.
Once I get into a flow I can retain a fairly complex system in my head but before or after that state, it's a terrible blur where I can barely focus my eyes.
You are far smarter than you think.
Learn to get into flow, and also figure out how to get your state back faster... Once you do, it is a super power.
Simple things like leaving your editor/IDE open, create the same situation you left. I personally use music + IEMs to help me block sound and focus. -30-35 DB off the IEMs, and +70DB off my music... yeah, I don't hear anything.
I learned the editor trick recently, though I'd probably done it un-intentionally for years. I stopped, and I was wondering what the inertia I was facing was. It is only 2-3m to get setup... that's 2-3m to lose my thoughts, etc.
Good luck.
For me the best way to get into the flow is by directly getting back to where I left. If I take time to wake up, make breakfast or anything else I usually lost my ideas already and it takes me hours to get back to them.
Just writing it down, will help you remember. If not: You have the paper.
This is underrated. And, specifically...writing it down, with a pen or pencil. Typing it doesn't seem to have the same effect, even with some ritual of typing it into a fresh/separate document.
I used to use whatever cheap ballpoint was around, and I had terrible handwriting. But on a friend's recommendation I tried a fine point gel pen, the Uniball Signo DX 0.38mm. It's such a joy to write with and my handwriting is orders of magnitude more legible.
There's apparently a whole world of pens (and pen enthusiasts) out there: https://www.penaddict.com/top-5-pens
The only other software I usually have running on my work computer is a web browser.
People are always blown away by my ability to recall a story perfectly or create 2 page white boarded proofs, but inability to remember my SSN or why I entered a room.
A few years back I accepted a challenge to take a year off drinking from a family member.
I cannot tell you how much it improved my memory.
Before that I was always losing things, frustrated I couldn’t remember the names of things etc.
After about 3 months I felt like I had doubled my memory.
I wasn’t really a heavy drinker, but I would go for a few months having 1-2 beers a day.
Anyway just curious if you drink and have tried taking a break?
A related theory: being good at math, especially mental math, correlates with aphantasia (not being able to see pictures in your head). People who can see images in their head learn to do arithmetic early on with visual algorithms, which are fundamentally not good for understanding as well as rather error-prone (because the brain remembers gestalts, not finicky details like where a decimal is).
Aphantasiacs are forced to learn to do math differently, and use some different part of the brain as 'scratch space'. In my case it's the language brain: calculations which are set aside live in the same part of your brain that can repeat what was said a moment to you without understanding it. Turns out, though, that this verbal part is quite _accurate_ at remembering things, and this makes it easier to juggle multi-step calculations without paper.
This is the kind of condition I wonder if I have. Because on one hand, if I do a visualization exercise I would describe it as foggy at best. Then again, I struggle to understand how our brains could be wired that differently from person to person, that we could have or lack certain mental senses. I would suggest that everyone has some latent capability, whether they recognize it or not. After all the visual cortex is quite important.
In the context of your example, those good at mental math might see a chalkboard like image of the problem with all the detail. Those who struggle might be distracted visualizing the items that are being counted themselves, and all their detail.
For another riddle, consider the question of whether one recognizes their thoughts as an internal monologue or not, and how that relates to communication and action.
I agree, though, that visualization is probably latent even in people who can't do it. I notice it when half asleep for instance.
Experiments with chess players and memorization shed some light on this.
DeGroot’s research showed the average person is quite poor at recalling chess positions from real games, while chess masters have almost perfect recall even after seeing the board for only a few seconds.
However, when the chess masters were given completely random arrangements of pieces on the board (as opposed to positions from real chess games), they were no better than the average person.
This and other experiments suggest it’s not a visual snapshot, but functional knowledge and chunking, such as knowing pawns typically protect one another in diagonal chains, etc.
I recall from talking with high rated chess players, they rarely visualize the board in the mind’s eye, but they just know things without thinking, like, a bishop on d3 attacks the square h7 and not h6. Not from rote memorization, but from playing and seeing that sacrificing a bishop on h7 is a thematic attacking pattern.
as someone who used to do math competitions as a kid, everyone I knew who was "good" at mental math had a good number sense, a big bag of tricks for doing different things with numbers, and practiced with their bag of tricks.
A lot of this stuff seems highly related to ADHD. I exhibit them, and have done quite some amateur research myself on these behaviors and others seem to relate as well.
P.S: I am also an i3wm user btw ;)
I am working on a personal knowledge system to compensate. What are your ideas on this subject?
Popular PKS systems expect the user to adapt to "the system," rather than adapting to the user's particular set of needs. I consider each user to be a unique combination of common components.
I am more comfortable with deep thinking, or reflection, which allows me to come up with more complex analysis, while this process translates quite well when I have homework challenges.
I used to test some of my mental capacity with pseudo-IQ tests and realized that the factor that would penalize me the most was lack of time.
If you do a quick search for "IQ vs working memory", all the results show a positive correlation.
On the other hand, if my hypothesis was true, we would have discovered it already, so it's probably wrong.
It also may well be that the opposite is true — STM is prioritized by people who haven’t learned to properly recruit for profound structures. Speed may well have been a survival advantage a million years ago, but it’s not clear that this hasn’t changed since.
We also don’t know if the computing model of the brain is even appropriate at all. Humans have always assumed that the latest state of technology can represent the brain: clay and waterworks, mechanics, computers, etc.
At the end of the day, we don’t know how much we actually know about how the brain works because we don’t know what we don’t know…
https://shaungallagher.pressbin.com/blog/dogmatism.html
Without giving too much away, this tracks with the 2023 study's results, in that people with higher intelligence scores are less likely to trust their System 1 gut reaction and more likely to involve their System 2 deliberate, logical processes.
Can’t you test that hypothesis, or do you not have the data?
I also find it super annoying that one of the buttons to choose left is on the right and vice versa.
The explanation given at the end is interestingly to me. However, consider the following alternate: People more likely to answer honestly that they view others opinions as wrong or immoral (ie they would appear to have dogmatic thinking) are also people who consider the easy dot guesses as cheating and desire to avoid cheating. Whereas people who are more likely to want to win the dot guessing by any means are also more likely to lie about their negative views about the opinions of others.
It would be a stretch to consider the hints cheating; they are an integral part of the game, they are clearly explained and carry a penalty if used.
Interestingly enough the dogmatic view is that dogmatic thinking is linked with refusing to seek more information. And here I am trying to be charitable to the "dogmatic” by suggesting that we should look for more information...
The hints felt either like a trick or like cheating to me. That's not a stretch that was just my personal feelings. I didn't even consider that the hints were a game theoretic best way to go if you aren't sure until the end where the explanation hand fed you that exact logic.
Amusingly, I mistrust my attention and visual ~memory so much that I reasoned I would find the "easier" task just as hard unless it was literally like 1 vs 3 dots, or unless it stayed up so long that I could count (maybe harder, since I'd likely get more annoyed at myself for missing questions I believed to be easier). I ignored this option because I was fairly sure it'd just mostly waste 200 points.
I went back after completing to check out this option and don't feel like it made the task noticeably easier (to me).
In day to day life the major difference I notice in terms of speed and intelligence personally is that I'm often slow to respond to questions.
It didn't even occur to me to be self-conscious about this until eventually a friend pointed it out, but he kindly framed it as "you think before you speak" and this seems to have served me well.
E.g. the healthcare one doesn't work for my country where universal healthcare is a law and thus State truly has duty to provide it and anyone who believes otherwise is objectively wrong.
I have also received more points for being "dogmatic" in that having strong opinion (that is different than mine of "neutral") on migration is a bad person.
The irony is, faulting the question because "that's just the way it is here" beautifully illustrates the exact premise of the experiment. I'd say that explains a 3.4 score (at least in this game).
It's also not necessarily dogmatic to believe that you are more informed about an issue than the average person that disagrees with you. Like sure, it can be dogmatic, but it isn't necessarily dogmatic.
If you can accurately predict the future above random chance, that lends evidence that your internal state aligns with reality.
(There are obviously traps here, eg the conspiracy theorist who sees every outcome as proof of the conspiracy)
What makes you think there's any relationship between visual recognition and dogmatism?
Even your own results only show a 2.5% difference between the most dogmatic and least dogmatic participants, assuming they even answered the dogmatic portion of the test truthfully and thoughtfully. I can't see how that amounts to anything more than a statistical error.
Just in case, my score was 940/3.0, although again, I don't see anything to show there should be any relation.
The latter part of the test was 100% incriminating and I think I am quite dogmatic.
Your refusal to provide any data beyond averages is very telling. My guess is that there's a very wide distribution of scores, little trend, and very little correlation.
Share it again! The iron is hot!
I find the initial paragraphs of analysis rather insistent, one might say dogmatic, in their praise of non-dogmatism. Some later paragraphs express my immediate response: perhaps this dogmatism varies based on your relationship to your current information environment.
I'll suggest that consideration of these numbers might be better supported by tables to show participant and average numbers, and invite comparisons.
The conclusions it drew about this were that I was not open to new information, which is totally off. I DID ask for new information almost every single time, far and above what the average participant requests. The important thing isn't the performance on the test but how often the person requested new information, but then this metric is completely discarded in the final assessment! I'm not sure what exactly this is meant to measure. It feels like it's just smugly calling me dumb for thinking I know better than the average person (which, if I didn't, why would I believe what I believe?)
I only believe things I already have a high degree of confidence in, and it would take good evidence to sway me from those opinions. If this is close minded, being "open minded" seems like a good way for your brain to just fall out of your head.
I thought I would score lower than the average in dogmatism, but didn’t. So I’ll have to revise my belief about my own dogmatism. (:
I'm not quite sure what conclusion to take away from this result. While the low dogmatism score is no surprise to me the research results suggest that a low dogmatism-scoring person would be more likely to opt for the "easy version" handicap to verify their hunches but limit themselves to a maximum possible score of 800.
I don't FEEL like I have exceptional perceptual abilities for identifying dots, but I trusted my instincts and honestly rated my confidence as medium (7/10 times) and low confidence (3/10) times.
I'll also add that I'm a little tired and just finished a single beer, so I feel slightly dulled in my faculties right now. I'll probably go to sleep in an hour.
As someone else said, I can solve problems very quickly if the solutions don't have to be correct...
But more seriously, it seems like different people might have different thresholds for when they consider a problem solved?
If you decide to go back and review the problem and solution (even just mentally) to make sure you didn't make mistakes, of course that would take longer and give you more correct answers than the person who doesn't do that?
[1] https://www.bihealth.org/en/notices/intelligent-brains-take-...
Talk about conflating different aspects of something to arrive at faulty logic.
There clearly is a relationship between higher intelligence and a faster brain, to some degree. However faster thinking enables more sophisticated searching of complex problem spaces.
I don't think that's clear at all. The confusion is around different definitions of speed and different definitions of the task.
You have the speed to process data points or variables, and the speed to come to a result. You also have the number of variables used to calculate a result and the number of variables needed to come to a result.
It is reasonable to believe that some brains can process the same data faster than others. It is also reasonable to believe that some brains consider more variables than others.
However, more variables is not always better. You can process faster, and include more variables, but still perform worse overall if you are using too many unecessary variables.
In terms of computing, an example would be multiplying 2x2. A slower computer can give you a result faster if it is representing 2 as a 2-bit number than a faster computer representing it as a 64-bit number
Hence why systems and habits beat out raw intelligence on general life success, but why an intelligent person lives a simple life on easy mode and why those at the (uninherited) top are often scary smart AND hard core driven and organized.
I would only add that some computers are simply incapable of performing a sufficiently complicated computation given their hardware and programing.
Similarly, some computers with more limited hardware and programming can be more efficient at certian classes of computations.
Like how Von Neumann was able to solve the fly and trains problem the hard way instead of finding the simple solution: https://www.pleacher.com/mp/mlessons/calculus/mobinfin.html
Let me quote the actual research at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-38626-y :
"subjects with higher PMAT24_A_CR (fluid intelligence) made fewer mistakes, but were slower"
Yes, intelligent people took longer to solve hard problems. But they made fewer mistakes. Getting things right on the 1st try might be much faster than needing a 2nd attempt, even if the 1st try takes 20% longer.
The title could have been "Intelligent people take time to make sure their answer is more likely to be correct than not"
Try telling that to the time-tracking gestapo. As Dilbert says: "our boss can't judge the quality of our work, but he knows when it's late".
I thought he'd included an anecdote about a consultant tasked with solving an optimisation problem at an industrial concern who unveils his solution. A complaint is raised: yes, the method finds the correct solution, but it is slower than the old method (which didn't achieve the correct solution).
The consultant, perhaps something of a novice when it came to client relationships communications, responded that if he didn't have to find the correct answer to the problem, he could make his system much faster.
I don't find that in either PP or More Programming Pearls, however. Unfaithful memory.
It sure helps to be able to iterate quickly in software development for one.
It has reminded me of an exchange from Shirobako (best anime ever, 100/100, watch it even if you prefer other forms); older animator is telling their younger colleague to learn to draw faster, because while they can work on the quality for the rest of their life, but they won't be able to draw fast when they are older. Drawing faster means more iterations, means more experience gained overall.
Forgot where that's from but I think it's a Navy or Marine saying.
The most important motion is bring your weapon to bear on target in a mechanically efficient way and pulling the trigger as it comes on target in a single motion. That single integrated motion can only be learned by doing it slowly but it is very accurate and smooth. If you practice the motion enough it becomes very fast. It is fine muscle memory. This is virtually always faster in terms of putting a bullet on target than relying on raw muscle speed. Also why military firearm skills are perishable, it has to be constantly practiced to keep the latency down.
> Intelligence is here defined as the performance in psychometric tests in cognitive domains like verbal comprehension, perceptual reasoning or working memory. A consistent finding is that individuals who perform well in one domain tend to perform well in the others, which led to the derivation of a general factor of intelligence called g-factor
Whelp, I guess I broke the mold on this one. I have more than 1.5 standard deviations between some of my scores lol.
I do not put much faith in IQ tests to begin with. I do not think the tests are completely useless, but I do think their utility is vastly overstated and the meaning of one's results are highly misused.
Like, a lot of lower Elo game at 10-minute time controls end with the losing person having 8 minutes left. That's not good.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jordan-Barbone-2/public...
I would bet that quite a few people just guess when they find this type of question too difficult.
Psych research is such garbage. Of course people are going to start guessing if the problems are boring and they can't solve them. They tried to account for this by comparing timings of only correct answers. But on a multiple choice test, even random guessing will be correct (and fast!) sometimes.
I also wonder if they could see another part of the brain to see if intelligent people are more concerned of judgement from other intelligent people, or perhaps even from everyone in general for some intelligent people that intelligence is their identity.
Intelligent people might rely more on System 2 than ordinary people, which pushes latency up.
I'm usually the the guy in the group with the fewest notes. I've rarely see anything useful come out of these sessions, even though I've participated in hundreds of these with different people, companies, and settings.
It's worked well for my own work, but sometimes people are surprised that the slow seeming person, me, has useful ideas.
Intelligent people know they have what it takes to get the answer right, so they spend the time to do it.
Less intelligent people are familiar with their limits and their odds of getting the right answer, so they do some of the reasoning, quit, and guess from there.
That's why the intelligent people aren't just slower, but more accurate. They're actually solving the problems. The others are reaching the end of their ability much more quickly and guessing.
You take a test and receive a score (an "intelligence score" apparently) and if you are past X points you are intelligent. Now you are among the set of intelligent people in the world.
I know this is an agreed upon reality (especially among us nerdy types), but it always rubbed me the wrong way. Even bracketing off all the very real issues around measurement tools here, it always felt in general like neurotic pursuit to quantify the qualitative, or even an egoistic pursuit to claim superiority out of thin air.
And I read articles like these, and I can't help but feel slightly validated despite their presuppositions: maybe there isnt a spectrum of intelligences, but just heterogenous minds. We have come up with these tests, but they just show how well a person is at that test that we happen to call "an intelligence test." But you start digging deeply with the numbers... and of course you going to get counter intuitive results! You have investigated categories that are themselves sustained out of thinnest of scientific consensus and dubious ideological origins, delegating your measurement to fraught tools laden with cultural specificity. It just feels crazy to me, it feels like never leaving grade school.
But maybe they'll find "intelligence" one day, and then I'll have to eat my shoe while waiting in line to be recycled because I didn't pass muster as an intelligent human.
Let's say that I define being very intelligent as being able to rapidly solve hard problems. I think this is a reasonable definition of the word "intelligent". Indeed, I think that it is in many ways a more meaningful definition of "intelligence" than defining it as scoring well on intelligence tests.
Well, then the article title becomes self-contradictory.
TL;DW:
I have a rule and you need to figure it out. The rule relates to a sequence of three numbers. You can propose a sequence and I’ll tell you yes/no if it meets the rule.
I’ll give you the first sequence to get you started:
sequence: 2,4,8
passes: YesThe headline writing is known to be idiotic here (including mine) and everywhere. Article content is no better. I can get nothing else from this.
In timed standardized exams where work is not shown or graded, both results are equally assigned zero points. As AI, even the ersatz AI available currently, becomes more sophisticated and widespread the value of a human who can mimic the capabilities of a machine will diminish rapidly.
Creative and explorative thinkers will, provided they are not merely skilled at the derivative "craft" of performative creativity but are truly creating value without precedent, will accordingly become increasingly sought after.
I can't. My brain likes to zoom-zoom.
Normal person: typesets the book
Knuth: takes a decade to solve book typesetting once and for all
I wonder if the intelligent people tend to solve more general problem classes and then apply that to the specific problem at hand.
Correctness is the primary measure, and if two parties are correct then speed differentiates their level of intelligence. This is the only measure that has been quantified and scientifically correlated with many other attributes of human existence like success and happiness. This measure is is called IQ.
If both people get an answer correct, then literally, by definition, the stupider person will be the person who takes longer to arrive at the correct answer. Remember: IQ tests are timed.
This study is sort of a play on the very definition of what it means to be stupid. Again, IQ tests are timed for a reason.
The real title of this is should be:
Stupid people take less time to arrive at a wrong answer then smart people take to arrive at the correct answer.
This is sort of a useless study, because yeah, I can answer the hardest questions in the entire universe with the wrong answer almost instantaneously. Of course wrong answers will be faster.
The fact that most of you aren't noticing this says something about your intelligence. Maybe you guys are just taking too long to notice this, so in that case according to this study you're all smarter than a dumb dumb like me.
That said I'm pretty sure reaction time and "clock speed" are part of intelligence, just correlated well enough that you don't need a reflex test added onto the paper test.
Even without the concept of an IQ test the fact that if you were given two people who both answered 50 questions correctly, one person took a full day to complete the questions while another person answered them in all in 2 minutes. Clearly our conceptual intuition of intelligence says the Faster person by literal definition of "intelligence" is more intelligent.
Like what is the experiment in this article measuring here? If it's comparing people who got the exact same test scores then the experimenter can't identify differing levels of intelligence because everyone got everything right. How can they say the faster person is stupider then the slower person if the scores are the same?
The only way to truly compare is to find people who got the answers wrong, but in this case your measuring the speed of arrival at a wrong answer which is in itself a pointless measurement.
Obviously wrong answers are faster to come up with and obviously a person with more wrong answers is going to be faster and stupider then the person with right answers.