It seems to me that you can find out a lot about people’s intelligence by talking with them a little
This only works with people less intelligent than yourself. Someone with intelligence comparable to yours who’s good at smooth talking can easily convince you that he’s much smarter than you.
Ugh, can we taboo “smarter” please. Are we just playing with status markers? Can’t we just go do awesome things instead? If people start faking that, well “mission fucking accomplished,” as xkcd put it.
Much of concern with IQ seems to be about status, or more generally is purely about evaluating people without a stated purpose of the evaluation. Is your suggestion to just evaluate people based on awesome accomplishments just your way of playing along with this game, trying to divert status from IQ to accomplishments? If not, the usefulness of your proposal likely depends a lot on the purpose for which we’re ranking people: if you want to predict future performance in domain X, then past performance in domain X might well be superior to IQ; but to predict future performance in a different domain Y, IQ is probably still the best bet.
I predict that, ceteris paribus, people who just go do things will outperform people who talk about IQ all day. :)
All day, sure- the trope of Mensa underachievers is based in reality. But people who did some very awesome things reserved some time for IQ, and I think avoiding talk of IQ in order to avoid the low-status of Mensa is as silly as talking about IQ because of the high-status of intelligence.
Based on a diversity of high functioning folks I have seen, I think single parameter models are a hopeless waste of time.
This isn’t the right comparison, though- the question isn’t diversity among high-functioning folks, but the difference between high-functioning and low-functioning folks. (Now, social skills, energy, and so on are important parameters that a more complete model would have- but that doesn’t mean single parameter models aren’t worth the time they take to populate.)
I’m probably more gullible than average, but I’m pretty sure that people less intelligent than me have done this when talking to me too. A few times, I’ve made an estimate that a fellow programming student is the same or slightly higher skill level than me based on talking with them, but then when we work on the same problems in class, I have an easier time than they do. (Not the same thing as intelligence, but related.)
You believe that you’re more intelligent than they are because you are able to do one task better than them (coding), yet it sounds like they were able to do another task better than you (being able to successful convince you that they were more intelligent). I’m not sure why the latter should be ruled out as a sign of intelligence.
Actually, what I’d been getting at was that if they could convince me they were a better programmer than they really were, I could probably also be convinced that someone was more intelligent than they really were by similar means. If someone did convince me they were more intelligent than they really were, I’d have a harder time finding out I’d been fooled, for the same reason you mentioned.
I wouldn’t take fooling me as a sign of all that much intelligence, though. I don’t check the things people say about themselves for reasonableness very carefully. (Either not enough mental RAM, or force of habit from not having had enough RAM in the past—social interactions take more mental effort for me than for the typical person.)
Well, unless everyone is capable of fooling you, the ability to do so would seem to indicate at least some skill. I’m not sure of the intelligence conversion rate between “capability of deceiving you” and “capability of showing they’re better than you at programming in the particular class you share,” but your realization that the person is actually better at the former and not the latter seems to suggest the individual has a different set of skills, rather than merely being less skilled.
After reading this, I realized that I’d been conflating how easily I believe random information people tell me that I don’t have much of anything invested in and don’t expect them to have reason to lie about (which would probably not take much skill, since it often happens by accident when people are trying to make a joke), and things I’m actually trying to evaluate. I do have a sense of when someone is trying too hard to sound impressive, so then being able to pull it off would indicate skill. I see what you mean now.
I find that I don’t agree with this comment, though perhaps if I thought about it more I would..
I often categorize people as 10-points-smarter-than-me, 20-points-smarter-than-me, etc, just naturally as I go about my day, and I’m (currently) fairly confident of my evaluations.
Sometimes I can get a pretty good estimate by speaking with someone for 5 minutes—but I’m aware this is heavily weighted towards verbal acuity, which is just one dimension. A high verbal acuity for me is a marker of high IQ, though average verbal acuity is not strong evidence either way. (I also understand someone can have very high verbal skills while missing some others, so there is an upper bound to what I can predict.) I’m recently studying signs of high social acuity, and I think I’m getting more perceptive at noticing and distinguishing levels that are one or two levels above mine.
Someone that is relatively deficient in one of these parameters can recognize higher levels by evaluating in hind-site how effective and original a particular solution, choice of words or behavior was. It’s much easier to judge a behavior than come up with the best behavior yourself. For example, during a meeting I’ll realize that someone is manipulating me or others very well. It’s much easier to recognize that manipulation that to recreate it. Though it does take some compensatory experience—since recognizing these manipulations can be as subtle as realizing that a awkward situation has been avoided or people feel better about something that you would have predicted, and determining the intention of the manipulation, and whether it was deliberate or accidental, makes the computation more noisy.
The main way that I judge an IQ higher than mine is if they are faster or more clear on something I’ve already thought about (this translates to slight increases in IQ) or can succeed at things that I cannot do well or cannot do at all (this is where someone would be at least a level ahead). For example, I’m fairly good at solving problems, and working within a given frame, but I am not very good at choosing problems, because I’m not very strong in selecting frames—this is a higher order cognitive skill I cannot do well, and no amount of time will increase my success very much. Thus I seek out mentors that are “10 or 20 points above me” to help me with that bit… I consider myself to be ‘borrowing’ their IQ points for a very short amount of time, so that I can then go and work on a problem within the way they’ve chosen to frame it. (Again, while I’m not as good at picking a frame, I feel like I am competent at evaluating whether my problem can be well solved within one.)
What I find curious is how people successfully model people of higher IQ in fiction. For example, the doctor in House seems very witty. Is he modeled by someone at least that witty? Likewise with Sherlock Holmes. I realize that the scenarios are contrived, so that the intelligence is mostly illusory, but how intelligent must one be to write a story that convinces someone, say, more intelligent than themselves watching a film that the film is about someone vastly more intelligent than them?
I often categorize people as 10-points-smarter-than-me, 20-points-smarter-than-me, etc, just naturally as I go about my day, and I’m (currently) fairly confident of my evaluations.
So you don’t have any independent way to verify your evaluations. Let’s apply the outside view here: Would you trust the assessment of someone of average or below average intelligence about the relative intelligence of people smarter than him. Note that there exist entire cottage industries of quacks, charlatans, and scammers based on convincing people that someone is smarter than they really are.
The outside view is very good to apply, especially in this case where there hasn’t been much independent validation and lots of opportunity for confirmation bias. However, I would and do generally trust the assessment someone else makes about the intelligence of someone else. (With the exception of any assessments based on politics or tribe affiliation.) I guess I agree with the OP that intelligence is fairly straightforward to estimate with secondary signals.
I’m not familiar with any charlatans or scammers being successful by pretending to be smarter than they were. People pretending to be smarter than they are, are usually pretty transparent. I suspect this is just availability bias, though, do you have any examples in mind?
I’m not familiar with any charlatans or scammers being successful by pretending to be smarter than they were. People pretending to be smarter than they are, are usually pretty transparent.
They are if you’re smarter then they really are.
I suspect this is just availability bias, though, do you have any examples in mind?
Well, there’s Yvain’s tale of how he was almost convinced by Velikovsky’s pseudohistory.
It seems you are using ‘seeming smart’ as interchangeable with ‘convincing’ or ‘persuasive’?
However, these are quite independent. Someone can easily convince me of something, without my thinking they are more intelligent than I am, and without convincing me that they are more intelligent than they are.
Consider a ‘smooth talker’. I think people generally recognize that these smooth-talkers are more likable and persuasive on any topic, but there is no necessary correlation with having a higher IQ. In fiction, there are extreme examples like Forest Gump (low IQ, very smooth) and innumerable moderate examples like Peter Venkman in Ghostbusters. Whereas intelligent characters are often portrayed, though not always, as not very persuasive.
...Smooth-talkers and scammers will often break-down defenses by signaling equal intelligence when they actually have higher intelligence.
In the example you gave, how do we know Velikovsky wasn’t very intelligent? (We do know he had the ability to write very well, to make a false history seem true.) My question isn’t that he is or wasn’t intelligent, but whether his deception of Yvain was due to Yvain over-estimating his intelligence.
..Can you think of an example (a fictional one might be easiest) where a deception (or even any conflict) was actually about someone overestimating someone’s intelligence?
Can you think of an example (a fictional one might be easiest) where a deception (or even any conflict) was actually about someone overestimating someone’s intelligence?
This only works with people less intelligent than yourself. Someone with intelligence comparable to yours who’s good at smooth talking can easily convince you that he’s much smarter than you.
Ugh, can we taboo “smarter” please. Are we just playing with status markers? Can’t we just go do awesome things instead? If people start faking that, well “mission fucking accomplished,” as xkcd put it.
Much of concern with IQ seems to be about status, or more generally is purely about evaluating people without a stated purpose of the evaluation. Is your suggestion to just evaluate people based on awesome accomplishments just your way of playing along with this game, trying to divert status from IQ to accomplishments? If not, the usefulness of your proposal likely depends a lot on the purpose for which we’re ranking people: if you want to predict future performance in domain X, then past performance in domain X might well be superior to IQ; but to predict future performance in a different domain Y, IQ is probably still the best bet.
I predict that, ceteris paribus, people who just go do things will outperform people who talk about IQ all day. :)
Based on a diversity of high functioning folks I have seen, I think single parameter models are a hopeless waste of time.
All day, sure- the trope of Mensa underachievers is based in reality. But people who did some very awesome things reserved some time for IQ, and I think avoiding talk of IQ in order to avoid the low-status of Mensa is as silly as talking about IQ because of the high-status of intelligence.
This isn’t the right comparison, though- the question isn’t diversity among high-functioning folks, but the difference between high-functioning and low-functioning folks. (Now, social skills, energy, and so on are important parameters that a more complete model would have- but that doesn’t mean single parameter models aren’t worth the time they take to populate.)
It’s not as hard as it seems, is making cancer go away with the power of prayer awesome enough for you?
I’m probably more gullible than average, but I’m pretty sure that people less intelligent than me have done this when talking to me too. A few times, I’ve made an estimate that a fellow programming student is the same or slightly higher skill level than me based on talking with them, but then when we work on the same problems in class, I have an easier time than they do. (Not the same thing as intelligence, but related.)
You believe that you’re more intelligent than they are because you are able to do one task better than them (coding), yet it sounds like they were able to do another task better than you (being able to successful convince you that they were more intelligent). I’m not sure why the latter should be ruled out as a sign of intelligence.
Actually, what I’d been getting at was that if they could convince me they were a better programmer than they really were, I could probably also be convinced that someone was more intelligent than they really were by similar means. If someone did convince me they were more intelligent than they really were, I’d have a harder time finding out I’d been fooled, for the same reason you mentioned.
I wouldn’t take fooling me as a sign of all that much intelligence, though. I don’t check the things people say about themselves for reasonableness very carefully. (Either not enough mental RAM, or force of habit from not having had enough RAM in the past—social interactions take more mental effort for me than for the typical person.)
Well, unless everyone is capable of fooling you, the ability to do so would seem to indicate at least some skill. I’m not sure of the intelligence conversion rate between “capability of deceiving you” and “capability of showing they’re better than you at programming in the particular class you share,” but your realization that the person is actually better at the former and not the latter seems to suggest the individual has a different set of skills, rather than merely being less skilled.
After reading this, I realized that I’d been conflating how easily I believe random information people tell me that I don’t have much of anything invested in and don’t expect them to have reason to lie about (which would probably not take much skill, since it often happens by accident when people are trying to make a joke), and things I’m actually trying to evaluate. I do have a sense of when someone is trying too hard to sound impressive, so then being able to pull it off would indicate skill. I see what you mean now.
I find that I don’t agree with this comment, though perhaps if I thought about it more I would..
I often categorize people as 10-points-smarter-than-me, 20-points-smarter-than-me, etc, just naturally as I go about my day, and I’m (currently) fairly confident of my evaluations.
Sometimes I can get a pretty good estimate by speaking with someone for 5 minutes—but I’m aware this is heavily weighted towards verbal acuity, which is just one dimension. A high verbal acuity for me is a marker of high IQ, though average verbal acuity is not strong evidence either way. (I also understand someone can have very high verbal skills while missing some others, so there is an upper bound to what I can predict.) I’m recently studying signs of high social acuity, and I think I’m getting more perceptive at noticing and distinguishing levels that are one or two levels above mine.
Someone that is relatively deficient in one of these parameters can recognize higher levels by evaluating in hind-site how effective and original a particular solution, choice of words or behavior was. It’s much easier to judge a behavior than come up with the best behavior yourself. For example, during a meeting I’ll realize that someone is manipulating me or others very well. It’s much easier to recognize that manipulation that to recreate it. Though it does take some compensatory experience—since recognizing these manipulations can be as subtle as realizing that a awkward situation has been avoided or people feel better about something that you would have predicted, and determining the intention of the manipulation, and whether it was deliberate or accidental, makes the computation more noisy.
The main way that I judge an IQ higher than mine is if they are faster or more clear on something I’ve already thought about (this translates to slight increases in IQ) or can succeed at things that I cannot do well or cannot do at all (this is where someone would be at least a level ahead). For example, I’m fairly good at solving problems, and working within a given frame, but I am not very good at choosing problems, because I’m not very strong in selecting frames—this is a higher order cognitive skill I cannot do well, and no amount of time will increase my success very much. Thus I seek out mentors that are “10 or 20 points above me” to help me with that bit… I consider myself to be ‘borrowing’ their IQ points for a very short amount of time, so that I can then go and work on a problem within the way they’ve chosen to frame it. (Again, while I’m not as good at picking a frame, I feel like I am competent at evaluating whether my problem can be well solved within one.)
What I find curious is how people successfully model people of higher IQ in fiction. For example, the doctor in House seems very witty. Is he modeled by someone at least that witty? Likewise with Sherlock Holmes. I realize that the scenarios are contrived, so that the intelligence is mostly illusory, but how intelligent must one be to write a story that convinces someone, say, more intelligent than themselves watching a film that the film is about someone vastly more intelligent than them?
So you don’t have any independent way to verify your evaluations. Let’s apply the outside view here: Would you trust the assessment of someone of average or below average intelligence about the relative intelligence of people smarter than him. Note that there exist entire cottage industries of quacks, charlatans, and scammers based on convincing people that someone is smarter than they really are.
The outside view is very good to apply, especially in this case where there hasn’t been much independent validation and lots of opportunity for confirmation bias. However, I would and do generally trust the assessment someone else makes about the intelligence of someone else. (With the exception of any assessments based on politics or tribe affiliation.) I guess I agree with the OP that intelligence is fairly straightforward to estimate with secondary signals.
I’m not familiar with any charlatans or scammers being successful by pretending to be smarter than they were. People pretending to be smarter than they are, are usually pretty transparent. I suspect this is just availability bias, though, do you have any examples in mind?
They are if you’re smarter then they really are.
Well, there’s Yvain’s tale of how he was almost convinced by Velikovsky’s pseudohistory.
It seems you are using ‘seeming smart’ as interchangeable with ‘convincing’ or ‘persuasive’?
However, these are quite independent. Someone can easily convince me of something, without my thinking they are more intelligent than I am, and without convincing me that they are more intelligent than they are.
Consider a ‘smooth talker’. I think people generally recognize that these smooth-talkers are more likable and persuasive on any topic, but there is no necessary correlation with having a higher IQ. In fiction, there are extreme examples like Forest Gump (low IQ, very smooth) and innumerable moderate examples like Peter Venkman in Ghostbusters. Whereas intelligent characters are often portrayed, though not always, as not very persuasive.
...Smooth-talkers and scammers will often break-down defenses by signaling equal intelligence when they actually have higher intelligence.
In the example you gave, how do we know Velikovsky wasn’t very intelligent? (We do know he had the ability to write very well, to make a false history seem true.) My question isn’t that he is or wasn’t intelligent, but whether his deception of Yvain was due to Yvain over-estimating his intelligence.
..Can you think of an example (a fictional one might be easiest) where a deception (or even any conflict) was actually about someone overestimating someone’s intelligence?
Well, there are entire tropes about this.
I though the cartoon was a good example. The tiger convinced the boy that he was smarter than he actually was, with smooth talking.