When someone is smarter than you, you cannot tell if they’re one level above you or fifty because you literally cannot comprehend their reasoning.
I take issue with this claim, as I believe it to be vastly oversimplified. You can often, if not always, still comprehend their reasoning with additional effort on your behalf. By analogy, a device capable of performing 10 FLOPS can check the calculation of a device that can perform 10 GFLOPS by taking an additional 10^9 factor of time. Even in cases of extreme differences in ability, I think there can be simple methodologies for evaluating at levels above your own, though admitted it can quickly become infeasible for sufficiently large differences. That said, in my experience I think that I’ve been able to evaluate up to probably 2-3 std deviations of g above my own. That said, I admittedly haven’t taken the effort/social cost of asking these individuals their IQ as a proxy to semireliably validate my predictions.
Also coming up with a clever idea is much more difficult than evaluating if a clever idea is good. For example It’s hard to find a proof for a theorem, but easy to check if a proof is correct. Likewise you can evaluate someone’s intelligence even if he is way more intelligent than you.
Agreed. The difference is more pronounced in live social situations, and quite easy to quantify in situation such as a proof-heavy mathematics class in college. Many students who have done their work on the problem sets can present a correct solution and if not, usually follow the presented solution. For some, completing the problem sets took more time. Likewise, some people get more out of any spontaneous discussion of the problems. Some relatively rare people would pull out the proofs and points seemingly from thin air: look at the assignment, made some brief notes, and then present their solution intelligibly while talking about it.
I take issue with this claim, as I believe it to be vastly oversimplified. You can often, if not always, still comprehend their reasoning with additional effort on your behalf. By analogy, a device capable of performing 10 FLOPS can check the calculation of a device that can perform 10 GFLOPS by taking an additional 10^9 factor of time. Even in cases of extreme differences in ability, I think there can be simple methodologies for evaluating at levels above your own, though admitted it can quickly become infeasible for sufficiently large differences. That said, in my experience I think that I’ve been able to evaluate up to probably 2-3 std deviations of g above my own. That said, I admittedly haven’t taken the effort/social cost of asking these individuals their IQ as a proxy to semireliably validate my predictions.
Also coming up with a clever idea is much more difficult than evaluating if a clever idea is good. For example It’s hard to find a proof for a theorem, but easy to check if a proof is correct. Likewise you can evaluate someone’s intelligence even if he is way more intelligent than you.
Agreed. The difference is more pronounced in live social situations, and quite easy to quantify in situation such as a proof-heavy mathematics class in college. Many students who have done their work on the problem sets can present a correct solution and if not, usually follow the presented solution. For some, completing the problem sets took more time. Likewise, some people get more out of any spontaneous discussion of the problems. Some relatively rare people would pull out the proofs and points seemingly from thin air: look at the assignment, made some brief notes, and then present their solution intelligibly while talking about it.