Intelligent people are better judges of the intelligence of others
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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.
Funny, because Kary Mullis, Nobel Prize winner for inventing PCR, one of the most important tools in the history of molecular biology, the technique that made modern genetics and COVID testing possible, could not recognize that his ideas about AIDS being a hoax were half baked. Or his belief in astrology. Nobel laureate. Astrology...
Linus Pauling with his two Nobel Prizes, could not recognize that his vitamin C cures cancer crusade was half baked. James Watson decoded DNA itself and could not recognize that his ideas about race were half-baked.
William Shockley another Nobel Prize...for inventing the transistor, probably the most consequential invention of the 20th century, could not recognize that touring college campuses promoting eugenics and forced sterilization was half-baked.
Bill Gates could not recognize that hanging out with a convicted sex trafficker after the conviction was half baked. Larry Summers could not recognize that speculating about womens brains at a public conference was half baked.
Intelligent people are great at recognizing which of your ideas are half-baked and they can also be catastrophically bad at recognizing which of their own are.The smarter they are, the more elaborate the justification, the more airtight the rationalization, and the more spectacular the eventual collapse. Peter Thiel being the prime example...
Watch out for smart people... they are the worst judges of their own stupidity...
Especially if you ask them to elaborate their disagreement, the argument is often trite and one-dimensional.
The study is about 198 German psychology students watching 1-minute video clips...
That is your entire evidentiary base for a sweeping claim about intelligence and judgment. The “valid cues” that drove accuracy were speech clarity and vocabulary...meaning the finding is essentially “people who are good at verbal processing noticed verbal cues.”. That is close to tautological, not some profound discovery about social perception. ;-)
But here is the part you really missed. The original commenter I replied to was not making the paper narrow claim. They said intelligent people “can recognize which of my ideas are intelligent and which of my ideas are half-baked.”
That is a much broader claim about intelligent people general judgment quality and exactly the kind of overreach my examples were dismantling. I was not arguing against the paper. I was arguing against the commenter extrapolation, which you are now also making by hiding behind the paper :-) as if it supports what was actually said.
Now...even if we stay strictly within the paper own claims: Correlational design, no causal inference possible, tiny unrepresentative sample, restricted intelligence range, zero validity (a 1-min clip vs. actual human interaction), multiple predictors tested with no correction for multiple comparisons, and half the authors own hypotheses failed.
The effect size could be trivially small for all the headline tells you. You are defending a study you probably read only as a headline, against criticisms you did not understand and were aimed at something else entirely.
The irony of confidently misjudging what argument you are even responding to, in a thread about people ability to judge accurately, is not lost on me.
The conclusion is pretty clear: intelligent people are better at discerning intelligence in others. The effect is weak but statistically significant.
This result lines up with mine (and others) experience, which is that it is significantly harder to bullshit a smart person than a stupid person about your own intelligence. It's fair game to discuss anecdotes in the context of a study like this because human beings don't understand the world in CIs and z-scores, they understand it in narratives.
> That is close to tautological, not some profound discovery about social perception. ;-)
So is my statement above. It would have been a profound discovery if the study found out that intelligent people were no more accurate at judging others' intelligence than anyone else.
This seems different than the astrology or AIDS or cancer ideas mentioned above it as it's scientifically sound, just widely considered unethical.
Thank you for this. I’ve experienced this firsthand, so it’s helpful to have an explanation.
I worked with someone who was arguably a genius. However, they were the "stupidest smart person" in many situations; specifically in the way you described. You could tell they had an "airtight rationalization," and no amount of explanation would help; you just had to wait for the eventual collapse. Very frustrating.
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.
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!
Just like anyone else with a disadvantage, people who aren't that smart develop diverse compensatory strategies to work around their intellectual limitations, and these can look very different from popular caricatures of "dumb guy". A stupid person is not as simple as a smart person might imagine.
* If it’s an interactive conversation, anyway
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.
It doesn't help that intelligence is many-dimensional.
Because they're smart enough to know neither money nor leisure is not the be all end all...
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.
My social acuity has developed slowly, only after being repeatedly pounded into shape from mistakes, and quickly reading people is something that does not happen intuitively for me. I've been misled multiple times by people who, overall, I would now describe as just not that bright, with horrible consequences as the relationship developed. What they had in common is that they were all good at mirroring. Eg, They hear me use a technical term in an early conversation, they drop one or two confidently not much later, and before I picked up on what they were doing, I mistook them for an intellectual peer and let that early impression colour later ones. These days I'm much more attuned to it and have caught people doing it, along with the little microexpressions they pull when they think they've successfully deceived me. It's fun now, but it certainly didn't start that way.
1. Intelligence is associated with higher impulse control.
2. Intelligent criminals are probably less likely to be caught. They might also have a better chance at working to lower their sentences after being caught.
3. It is harder to be successful with a lower IQ (although I would posit it is far from the most important factor), and economic hardship is strongly correlated with crime.
I've noticed the smarter a person is, the fewer qualms they have about sharing exactly what they're aiming to do.
This approach is also a simple way to identify stupid people, but for stupid people there are much quicker methods. And stupid people tend to be cagey, because they have fewer tools for identifying when somebody is trying to take advantage of them, and because they've got experience being taken advantage of.
Being taken advantage of is not only a function of intelligence. It's also a function of emotional health. Sure, if the person is incapable of understanding they are being taken advantage of, they will be. But one can be perfectly capable of understanding that, see it happen in real time, and let it happen anyway. That has been the case with me for a long time. I could see, but I could not stop it, because I have been emotionally conditioned to allow it. Took a long time to fix.
There is also a risk of confusing a smart person with a person who speaks well. We have a built-in heuristic, that language signals intelligence. To a large extent it does, of course, but it can be deceptive. I've grown very weary of well-spoken people, who seem to want me to think they are also very smart.
Lastly, higher intelligence does not mean the person is a better human being. I find that there is an obsession with intelligence in the West. "Stupid" people can be really lovely and better companions than smart ones. There is something to be said about kindness and honesty.
> I've noticed the smarter a person is, the fewer qualms they have about sharing exactly what they're aiming to do.
I used to be like that. Openly speaking about what I aim to do and how. I ended up moderating that quality a fair bit after noticing some people began copying my ideas or outright stealing them. I was to slow to execute.
I've found that especially smart people have preternatural bullshit detectors, even when they lack "emotional health" or the ability to socialize well with others.
Smart people can be lovely, stupid people can be lovely, golden retrievers can be lovely... but that's tangential.
I really disagree with that. So many smart people fell for obvious bullshit because it appealed to their intellectualism. Look at all the communist sympathizers in the West. Morons, but also intelligent people most of the time. They believed stories spread by the soviet propaganda, because they wanted to believe them.
> The nice thing about observing whether someone is accomplishing what they set out to accomplish is it doesn't matter how well spoken they seemed.
It's funny that you say that - there's another poster in this thready who claims that looking at the output is the stupid people's way of evaluating intelligence. Seems like we really have no idea how to tell (except for an actual IQ test)
> Smart people can be lovely, stupid people can be lovely, golden retrievers can be lovely... but that's tangential.
Yep, I was just making a note, that intelligence might be overrated as a trait.
Because when I say "smart people", I'm not saying "every single smart person on the planet".
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.
Or if it's a collaborative situation, they might propose an idea you are already kind of thinking about, but they do it faster and clearer.
Now, 5 and 6 are basically locked in. You might see 5 and 6 swap or 5 swap with one of the top 4 to put him in fourth and that person in fifth.
But basically assume they've hit around the middle of their ability.
And yes, the black haired woman did harp on their credentials a lot. But a lot of them did and then there was the casual racism in putting the clean-cut Asian guy first and classism by putting the military guy last.
All-in-all, Jubilee is trash, as always.
EDIT: And, at the end... Yeah~
If I may blather a bit myself, 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. People like 5, IME, are quite intelligent, and I wonder if the circumstances affected their performance (4's too, possibly even 3's). 6... Well, I think that says a lot about where we are as a society. Though that might be the schadenfreude talking.
On the other hand, you could look at the ultimate ranking as one that leans heavily on each individual's confidence and comfort in the situation. 6's oversharing might have been rooted in nervousness and a sense of inferiority (the kind that might drive someone to, say, a push for high levels of formal accomplishment). Whereas, as someone in the comments pointed out, 3 was calm and relaxed even as they were being told that they were definitely the dumbest person in the room repeatedly. 1 is tall, male, stereotyped as intelligent, academically-accomplished, and acknowledged as such by everyone else; he had the best situational advantage for his headspace, entering the test.
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.
The opposite conclusion would also be obvious. We're a social species that might have deep primitives for evaluating the intelligence of another without needing to simulate the whole shebang.
You can't replace the larger simulation required (i.e. more state/RAM) with a faster processor.
This places an upper bound on the complexity of the patterns you can learn. At the limit you could spend 100% of resources building a maximally accurate model of a single thing but there are limits to ROI. Pre-digested learning makes it more efficient to acquire heuristics but it doesn't change the cost of representing it.
Some simple state machines are resistant to induction by design e.g. encryption algorithms.
Sometimes you can given more time. Many times being more intelligent is arriving at a conclusion faster without wasting as much on dead ends.
A bad analogy: Magnus Carlson making a move in seconds and still defeating his opponent which has minutes for a move.
This is also a common basis for the concept of "free will": no computer can model its own behavior such that it can reliably predict it.
To a squirrel all humans are equally, unfathomably intelligent.
=> "Human Intelligence" soon may be over. Even I did not - someone warn me then I stop - not as any could ever 'aftermind'.. - But can He..? - He would not (make such rock) ..it's another level. Or DNA, KISS ;).
Also imo is very difficult to come up with a universal definition of intelligence. For example, I hold Lionel Messi to be a very "intelligent" footballer, but I would judge his intelligence to be of vastly different nature to that of Albert Einstein.
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.
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.
In other words, smarter people are better able to gauge people's emotions as well.
Pseudoscience.
But some problems are easy and you can get away with a smaller model.
(Good Soldier Švejk is _dark_ _comedy_ - but not necessary an answer someone could take or like, moreover some people may happen to be smart differently.. some with high IQ still be dumb - or, the.. reverse?? ..really? - but howTF ??? ;)
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?
I don't know for sure, but my own anecdotal experience is that yes, there most certainly are challenges when a person from one culture assesses the intelligence of someone else from another culture.
It would be nice to know whether this is supported by scientific evidence, or whether this is simply my own personal bias at play.
^1: https://www.psypost.org/intelligent-people-are-better-judges...
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.
If you are only looking at the call site, sure that could be confusing, but if you are looking at the definition as provided in your post, surely anyone that is able understand the concept of a function can see the problem?
I'm not arguing they don't exist, sure they do, but I'm confused as to how you came up with it as a litmus test? Is it that common?
Surely we can agree in a real scenario renaming it (or fixing implementation to match name) is likely appropriate, but to completely miss the error?
Hope this comes across as curiousity, because I am curious about this one from your list in particular.
But I think if someone already is comfortable with working with abstractions such as "function" the thing is trivial, so it's a bit of a weird litmus test.
I think anyone that can understand a function can understand this, but one might not be happy accepting it's the case, and endeavor to change it.
I think it can be easy to lose sight of that distinction, and eagerness to fix it can be confused with not accepting it could be, but is also probably wrong.
What do you mean by "themselves" here? Grok is RL'd to behave like a Grok, so it trivially knows the qualities that define Grok better than Gemini does, which can only go by second hand sources.
How does it know? Where did he get that knowledge from? Did they train Grok, check it's qualities and included them in next training set? Was his source code and summarization of weights included, or maybe he has access to them for "introspection"?