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Comment by david-gpu | Hacker News Reader

I guess this supports a vague belief that I have held for decades: it is really difficult to rank the intelligence of people who are smarter than you

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.

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> it is really difficult to rank the intelligence of people who are smarter than you

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!

and: a smart person can write a movie script with a stupid character but stupid script writers fail badly when writing smart characters.

It's funny to imagine that's the reason why "aliens invading us" or "AI taking over" are finally defeated at the end of a movie with a really stupid trick.

The Big Bang Theory, explained.

I think this might not be true though. This is like saying a marathon runner can walk like an amputee using a prosthetic.

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.

But by talking to them you can tell. It doesn’t matter if they made a ton of money selling real estate or whatever or have lovely personality traits or… let me know if I’m missing something. You can still tell by talking to them, because the structure and detail of a smarter person’s thought process is impossible to fake*. If you are similarly smart you can mirror their structure in your head, but if you are not you will just think they are saying something weird or confusing. Whereas there is nothing stopping a smarter person from simplifying their thought process when communicating, or filtering out thoughts they don’t think will be understood by the listener. Extremely smart people can get very good at this if they are well socialized.

* If it’s an interactive conversation, anyway

Yeah no I totally agree. I feel like I have a strong sense of a person's intelligence and their psychological capacity/abilities. I just passively look for it or analyze it in my interactions with them. But, if I don't myself have a grasp of the subtle abstract layers of complexity "above" a certain level, I can't evaluate another person's strengths in those areas, so I can't sense where they sit compared to others (or myself)!

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.

Always thought of this as two cars driving faster than you on the road. After a certain distance it's clear both are faster than you, but really hard to say which one is the fastest.

> if somebody asked me to rank them from "somewhat smarter" to "much smarter", I would have had a hard time.

It doesn't help that intelligence is many-dimensional.

It's also difficult to write characters that are smarter than the writer. See how poorly TV and movie writers portray intelligent characters.

>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.

Because they're smart enough to know neither money nor leisure is not the be all end all...

So both are? Like, combined?

Maybe they are smart enough to realize when they have a good thing going (on balance).

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