(a) It is very difficult to perceive qualitative differences for people 1 sigma+ above “you” (for any value of “you”), but it is enormous.
(b) How much “science process” does this community actually understand? How many are practicing scientists, as in publish real stuff in journals?
The outside view worry is there might be a bit of a “twenty something knowitall” going on. You read some stuff, and liked it. That’s great! If the stuff isn’t universally adopted by very smart folks, there are probably very good reasons for that! Read more!
My argument boils down to: “no, really, very smart people are actually very smart.”
The median IQ at LessWrong is 139, the average Nobel laureate is reputed to have an IQ of 145. Presumably that means many people at LessWrong are in a position to understand the reasoning of Nobel laureates, at least.
I calculate about 128 for the average IQ of a survey respondent who provides one and I suspect that nonresponse means the actual average is closer to 124 or so. (Thus I agree with you that there is a significant gap between the average Nobel laureate and the average LWer.)
I think the right way to look at LW’s intellectual endowment is that it’s very similar to a top technical college, like Harvey Mudd. There are a handful of professor/postdoc/TA types running around, but as a whole the group skews very young (graph here, 40 is 90th percentile) and so even when people are extraordinarily clever they don’t necessarily have the accomplishments or the breadth for that to be obvious. (And because of how IQ distributions work, especially truncated ones with a threshold, we should expect most people to be close to the threshold.)
I agree with this. I think looking at a typical LWer as a typical undergrad at Harvey Mudd is a good model. (This is not a slur, btw, Harvey Mudd is great).
I look at the IQ results for the survey every year. A selected handful of comments:
Karma vs. multiple IQ tests: positive correlation (.45) between self-report and Raven’s for users with positive karma, negative correlation (-.11) between self-report and Raven’s for users without positive karma.
SATs are very high: 96th percentile in the general population is lower quartile here. (First place I make the Harvey Mudd comparison.)
SAT self-report vs. IQ self-report: average SAT, depending on which one you look at and how you correct it, suggests that the average LWer is somewhere between 98th and 99.5th percentile. (IQ self-report average is above 99.5th percentile, and so I call the first “very high” and the second “extremely high.”)
I’ve interacted with a handful of Nobel laureates, I’m familiar with the professors and students at two top 15 graduate physics programs, and I’ve interacted with a bunch of LWers. LW as whole seems roughly comparable to a undergraduate physics department, active LWers roughly comparable to a graduate physics department, and there are top LWers at the level of the Nobel laureates (but aging means the ~60 year old Nobel laureates are not a fair comparison to the ~30 year old top LWers, and this is selecting just the math genius types from the top LWers, not the most popular top LWers). Recall Marcello comparing Conway and Yudkowsky.
Because I hung out with some top academic people, I know what actual genius is like.
Incidentally, when I talk about people being “very smart” I don’t mean “as measured by IQ.” As I mentioned lots of times before, I think IQ is a very poor measure of math smarts, and a very poor measure of generalized smarts at the top end. Intelligence is too heterogeneous, and too high dimensional. But there is such as thing as being “very smart,” it’s just a multidimensional thing.
So in this case, I just don’t think there is a lot of info in the data. I much prefer looking at what people have done as a proxy for their smarts. “If you are so smart, where are all your revolutionary papers?” This also correctly adjusts for people who actually are very smart, but who bury their talents (and so their hypothetical smarts are not super interesting to talk about).
I’ve already had this discussion with someone else, about another topic: I pointed out that statistically, lottery winners end up not happier than they were before winning. He said that he knew how to spend them well to be effectively much happier. In our discussion, you have some insight that from my perspective are biased, but from your point of view are not. Unfortunately, your data rely on uncommunicable evidence, so we should just disagree and call it a day.
But the situation is not as hopeless as it seems. Try to find some people at the top of their game, and hang out with them for a bit. Honestly, if you think “Mr. Average Less Wrong” and Ed Witten are playing in the same stadium, you are being a bit myopic. But this is the kind of thing more info can help with. You say you can’t use my info (and don’t want to take my word for it), but you can generate your own if you care.
the average Nobel laureate is reputed to have an IQ of 145.
Is there a reliable source for this?
[1] is one source. Its method is: “Jewish IQ is distributed like American-of-European-ancestry IQ, but a standard deviation higher. If you look at the population above a certain IQ threshold, you see a higher fraction of Jews than in the normal population. If you use the threshold of 139, you see 27% Jews, which is the fraction of Jews who are Nobel laureates. So let’s assume that Nobel laureate IQ is distributed like AOEA IQ after you cut off everyone with IQ below 139. It follows that Nobel laureates have an average IQ of 144.”
I hope you’ll agree that this seems dubious.
[2] agrees that it’s dubious, and tries to calculate it a different way (still based on fraction of Jews), and gets 136. (It’s only reported by field, but it would be the same as chemistry and literature, because they’re both 27% Jews.) It gets that number by doing a bunch of multiplications which I suspect are the wrong multiplications to do. (Apparently, if IQ tests had less g loading, and if self-identified ethnicity correlated less with ancestry, then the g loading of Jewishness would go up?) But even if the calculations do what they’re supposed to, it feels like a long chain of strong assumptions and noisy data, and this method seems about equally dubious to me.
Re: your last question: yes.
(a) It is very difficult to perceive qualitative differences for people 1 sigma+ above “you” (for any value of “you”), but it is enormous.
(b) How much “science process” does this community actually understand? How many are practicing scientists, as in publish real stuff in journals?
The outside view worry is there might be a bit of a “twenty something knowitall” going on. You read some stuff, and liked it. That’s great! If the stuff isn’t universally adopted by very smart folks, there are probably very good reasons for that! Read more!
My argument boils down to: “no, really, very smart people are actually very smart.”
The median IQ at LessWrong is 139, the average Nobel laureate is reputed to have an IQ of 145. Presumably that means many people at LessWrong are in a position to understand the reasoning of Nobel laureates, at least.
The gap between the average Nobel laureate (in physics, say) and the average LWer is enormous. If your measure says it isn’t, it’s a crappy measure.
I calculate about 128 for the average IQ of a survey respondent who provides one and I suspect that nonresponse means the actual average is closer to 124 or so. (Thus I agree with you that there is a significant gap between the average Nobel laureate and the average LWer.)
I think the right way to look at LW’s intellectual endowment is that it’s very similar to a top technical college, like Harvey Mudd. There are a handful of professor/postdoc/TA types running around, but as a whole the group skews very young (graph here, 40 is 90th percentile) and so even when people are extraordinarily clever they don’t necessarily have the accomplishments or the breadth for that to be obvious. (And because of how IQ distributions work, especially truncated ones with a threshold, we should expect most people to be close to the threshold.)
I agree with this. I think looking at a typical LWer as a typical undergrad at Harvey Mudd is a good model. (This is not a slur, btw, Harvey Mudd is great).
I was confused for a moment.
What makes you so confident that your model is correct, instead of the data disproving it?
No sarcasm, it’s a honest question.
I look at the IQ results for the survey every year. A selected handful of comments:
Karma vs. multiple IQ tests: positive correlation (.45) between self-report and Raven’s for users with positive karma, negative correlation (-.11) between self-report and Raven’s for users without positive karma.
SATs are very high: 96th percentile in the general population is lower quartile here. (First place I make the Harvey Mudd comparison.)
SAT self-report vs. IQ self-report: average SAT, depending on which one you look at and how you correct it, suggests that the average LWer is somewhere between 98th and 99.5th percentile. (IQ self-report average is above 99.5th percentile, and so I call the first “very high” and the second “extremely high.”)
I’ve interacted with a handful of Nobel laureates, I’m familiar with the professors and students at two top 15 graduate physics programs, and I’ve interacted with a bunch of LWers. LW as whole seems roughly comparable to a undergraduate physics department, active LWers roughly comparable to a graduate physics department, and there are top LWers at the level of the Nobel laureates (but aging means the ~60 year old Nobel laureates are not a fair comparison to the ~30 year old top LWers, and this is selecting just the math genius types from the top LWers, not the most popular top LWers). Recall Marcello comparing Conway and Yudkowsky.
That last link is kinda cringeworthy.
I just spent the last minute or so trying to figure out what you didn’t like about my percentile comparisons. ;)
The underlying subject is often painful to discuss, so even handled well there will be things to cringe about.
I don’t know if you knew that my question was directed at IlyaShpitser and not at you… I do not doubt your data.
Because I hung out with some top academic people, I know what actual genius is like.
Incidentally, when I talk about people being “very smart” I don’t mean “as measured by IQ.” As I mentioned lots of times before, I think IQ is a very poor measure of math smarts, and a very poor measure of generalized smarts at the top end. Intelligence is too heterogeneous, and too high dimensional. But there is such as thing as being “very smart,” it’s just a multidimensional thing.
So in this case, I just don’t think there is a lot of info in the data. I much prefer looking at what people have done as a proxy for their smarts. “If you are so smart, where are all your revolutionary papers?” This also correctly adjusts for people who actually are very smart, but who bury their talents (and so their hypothetical smarts are not super interesting to talk about).
I’ve already had this discussion with someone else, about another topic: I pointed out that statistically, lottery winners end up not happier than they were before winning. He said that he knew how to spend them well to be effectively much happier.
In our discussion, you have some insight that from my perspective are biased, but from your point of view are not. Unfortunately, your data rely on uncommunicable evidence, so we should just disagree and call it a day.
Lottery winners do end up happier.
Thanks, I updated!
Well, you don’t have to agree if you don’t want.
But the situation is not as hopeless as it seems. Try to find some people at the top of their game, and hang out with them for a bit. Honestly, if you think “Mr. Average Less Wrong” and Ed Witten are playing in the same stadium, you are being a bit myopic. But this is the kind of thing more info can help with. You say you can’t use my info (and don’t want to take my word for it), but you can generate your own if you care.
Will do! We’ll see how it pans out :D
Is there a reliable source for this?
[1] is one source. Its method is: “Jewish IQ is distributed like American-of-European-ancestry IQ, but a standard deviation higher. If you look at the population above a certain IQ threshold, you see a higher fraction of Jews than in the normal population. If you use the threshold of 139, you see 27% Jews, which is the fraction of Jews who are Nobel laureates. So let’s assume that Nobel laureate IQ is distributed like AOEA IQ after you cut off everyone with IQ below 139. It follows that Nobel laureates have an average IQ of 144.”
I hope you’ll agree that this seems dubious.
[2] agrees that it’s dubious, and tries to calculate it a different way (still based on fraction of Jews), and gets 136. (It’s only reported by field, but it would be the same as chemistry and literature, because they’re both 27% Jews.) It gets that number by doing a bunch of multiplications which I suspect are the wrong multiplications to do. (Apparently, if IQ tests had less g loading, and if self-identified ethnicity correlated less with ancestry, then the g loading of Jewishness would go up?) But even if the calculations do what they’re supposed to, it feels like a long chain of strong assumptions and noisy data, and this method seems about equally dubious to me.