There exist both merely clever and effectively smarter people.
Merely clever people are good with words and good at rapidly assimilating complex instructions and ideas, but don’t seem to maintain and update an explicit world-model, an explicit best current theory-of-everything. The feeling I get watching these people respond to topics and questions is that they respond reflexively, either (1) raising related topics and ideas they’ve encountered as something similar comes up, or (2) expressing their gut reactions to the topic or idea, or expressing the gut reactions that would be given by an all-encompassing political worldview. There isn’t much meta-level steering of the conversation.
Effectively smarter people actively maintain and update an explicit world-model, and so you feel queries directed at them reflecting off of a coherent theory of how everything works, developed to some level of detail (and so can quickly get a feel for what, concretely, they think). At the meta-level, conversations are actively refocused whenever they stop helping to revise someone’s world-model.
There exist both merely clever and effectively smarter people.
Merely clever people are good with words and good at rapidly assimilating complex instructions and ideas, but don’t seem to maintain and update an explicit world-model, an explicit best current theory-of-everything. The feeling I get watching these people respond to topics and questions is that they respond reflexively, either (1) raising related topics and ideas they’ve encountered as something similar comes up, or (2) expressing their gut reactions to the topic or idea, or expressing the gut reactions that would be given by an all-encompassing political worldview. There isn’t much meta-level steering of the conversation.
Effectively smarter people actively maintain and update an explicit world-model, and so you feel queries directed at them reflecting off of a coherent theory of how everything works, developed to some level of detail (and so can quickly get a feel for what, concretely, they think). At the meta-level, conversations are actively refocused whenever they stop helping to revise someone’s world-model.