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Comment by sejje | Hacker News Reader

Can you elaborate on ways people are intelligent that we don't value?

Maybe it's not that we don't value it, but that we don't recognize it. I've run into a number of ostensibly less-educated people who nonetheless made astute observations about their economic incentives. Generally a lot of game-like situations seem to have players who understand the game in some way without having any formal instruction, and without being what we normally think of a being particularly intelligent.

I have a relative who does well at poker, despite not finishing school. A drainage guy I know has a good understanding of the business and where the opportunities are. In general a bunch of people in the trades seem to "get it". I've run into a bunch of these people who you don't think of as being intelligent, but if you frame something as a game, they know how to play.

None of these people could be taught high school calculus, for instance, but they are still intelligent in a way that's useful to them.

If we're talking about kids, from about the age of four they learn to trick you. "Dad, you have to give me ice cream. Mom says so. Don't wake her up." And it gets more and more sophisticated as they get older.

> a bunch of people in the trades seem to "get it".

I think this is a few things:

- The people in the trades who get to running their own business have (by nature of survival bias) developed two skills at a good level: doing that trade and running a business

- Trades, because they involve material output and safety, have relatively little tolerance for the kinds of bozos who can slip under the radar in the white-collar and service sector worlds.

Socially, emotionally, physically for example are ways people can be intelligent that is ignored in regular schooling.

Intelligence is largely related to STEM and memory in most instances. But there are a vast number of other ways to be intelligent. Perhaps you excel at emotionally connecting with people, maybe you're really good at cooking or tooling approaches. All of these are ignored in school.

School is nothing more then a checkbox along your path, you need to be able to read, write, do math, etc. But we ignore a large amount of our populace who may excel at grunt work, or maybe they are really good at leadership.

Just because you don't know y=mx+b or struggle at reasoning/logistical challenges does not mean you are not valuable to society. Maybe your 300lbs of rock solid muscle and in a past live would have been a top tier hunter. We do appreciate some amount of sports, but even that stops unless you're in the top 1-2% of the country.

This is off base. Socially intelligent people occupy all of the best paid and most powerful positions in society. Social manipulation is the most valued kind of intelligence in America, far more than academic intelligence.

Social intelligence is how you capture all of the added value of a trade, leaving none for the other guy. But you have to generate value in the first place, otherwise you can use social intelligence only for theft.

Exactly, it's useful for theft. Taking the value other people produce is the whole benefit of social intelligence. If you can convince someone that a scam is a good deal, you don't need to create any value at all. This is the origin of, among others, the political class.

>Taking the value other people produce is the whole benefit of social intelligence.

This is myopic almost to the point of satire. You really can't think of a single other benefit of social intelligence?

Of course it has other benefits. The context of the conversation was in terms of advancement in society,

The question was not about if being manipulative socially later in life is not a benefit. Of course it is a benefit.

But you get graded based on your ability to read, write, do math, memorize data points. Not on your ability to lie to your teacher in a believable manner.

You may excel later in life, but it's not like you can enter Yale because you can manipulate people.

You also need a certain level of other intelligence to properly manipulate people, or at least a certain level of self narcissism.

I mean you kind of proved my point, perhaps we should be teaching/discussing social skills.

General intelligence and social intelligence are correlated, which makes discussion difficult. Yale's a good example, though. Applicants need a base level of academic achievement to get in, but it's not actually that high. They didn't even require test scores for the last few years. If that were the main criterion, the whole school would be East Asian. Instead, what matters is marketing yourself. Knowing people, or building a narrative the admissions committee is looking for. Social intelligence.

I completely agree that social skills should be emphasized in school-not to reward the people who are already adept, but to impress on the others that they're the primary determinant of success.

> Social manipulation is the most valued kind of intelligence in America

It's incorrect to think that's limited to America. Humans are mostly powerless against the charm of narcissists and other sociopaths.

You see it over and over throughout human history all over the world.

One thing that always strikes me in assessments of intelligence in young children (specially in comparisons with animals) is that they focus on what children can do, where as the really remarkable thing about young children is how fast they can learn.

I think society highly values fast learners.

People put it on applications all the time.

In adults, certainly.

In things like the study in the article, and in young children in general, not really.

Some languages are supposed to be very difficult & mentally taxing to learn, because they have many conjugations. But a native speaker with very low intelligence (however you measure it) has zero trouble conjugating it all correctly.

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