I think my comment was rather vague, and people aren’t sure what I meant.
This is all my impressions, as far as I can tell evidence of all that is rather underwhelming; I’m writing this more to explain my thought than to “prove” anything.
It seems to me that people come in different level of smartness. There are some people with all sort of problems that make them incapable of even human normal, but let’s ignore them entirely here.
Then, there are normal people who are pretty much incapable of original highly insightful thought, critical thinking, rationality etc. They can usually do OK in normal life, and can even be quite capable in their narrow area of expertise and that’s about it. They often make the most basic logic mistakes etc.
Then there are “smart” people who are capable of original insight, and don’t get too stupid too often. They’re not measuring example the same thing, but IQ tests are capable of distinguishing between those and the normal people reasonably well. With smart people both their top performance and their average performance is a lot better than with average people. In spite of that, all of them very often fail basic rationality for some particular domains they feel too strongly about.
Now I’m conflicted if people who are so much above “smart” as “smart” is above normal really exists. A canonical example of such person would be Feynman—from my limited information he seems to be just so ridiculously smart. Eliezer seems to believe Einstein is like that, but I have even less information about him. You can probably think of a few such other people.
Unfortunately there’s a second observation—there’s no reason to believe such people existed only in the past, or would have aversion to blogging—so if super-smart people exist, it’s fairly certain that some blogs of such people exist. And if such blogs existed, I would expect to have found a few by now.
And yet, every time it seemed to me that someone might just be that smart and I started reading their blog—it turned out very quickly that my estimate of their smartness suffered from rapid regression to the mean. All my super-smart candidates managed to say such horrible things, and be deaf to such obvious arguments that I doubt any of them really qualifies.
So here’s an alternative theory. No human alive is much smarter than the “normally smart”. Of population of normally smart people, thanks to domain expertise, wit and writing skill, compatibility with my beliefs (or at least happening to avoid my red flags), higher productivity, luck etc. some people simply seem much smarter than that.
I’m not trolling here, but consider Eliezer—I’ve picked the example because it’s well known here. For some time he was exactly such a candidate, however:
he is ridiculously good at writing—just look at his fanfics, biasing my perception
he manages to avoid many of my red flags, biasing my perception
he has cultural background pretty similar to mine, biasing my perception
his writing style is very good at avoiding unwarranted certainty—this might seem more rational, but it’s really more of a style issue—people like Eliezer and Tyler Cowen who write cautiously just seem far smarter to me than people like Robin Hanson who write in “no disclaimer” style—even though I know very well that Robin is fully aware that contrarian theories he proposes are usually wrong, and there are usually other factors in addition to one he happens to write at the moment—and says that every time he’s asked. Style differences bias my perception again.
Eliezer usually manages to avoid writing about things I know more than him about, so he usually has advantage of expertise, biasing my perception.
So it’s safe to guess that however smart Eliezer is, I’m overestimating him—nearly all biases point in identical way.
On the other hand he sometimes makes ridiculously wrong statements, like his calculations of cost of cryonics which was blatantly order of magnitude off—I still don’t know if this was a massive brain failure (this and other such disqualifying him as a supersmart candidate), or conscious attempt at dark arts (in which case he might still qualify, but he loses points for other reasons).
On the other hand, and this provides some counter-evidence to my theory—let’s look at myself. I publish anything on my blog and in comments everywhere that seems to have expected public value higher than zero, and very often I’m in hurry / sleep-depraved, or otherwise far below my top performance. I exaggerate to get the point across very often. I write outside my area of expertise a lot, not uncommonly making severe mistakes. I’m not that good at writing (not to mention that English is not my first language) so things I say may be very unclear.
Unfortunately a normally smart person with my behaviour patterns, and a super-smart person with my behaviour patterns, would probably both fail my super-smartness test.
As you can see, I’m not even terribly convinced that my “super-smart people don’t exist” theory is true. I would love to see if other people have good evidence or insight one way or the other.
Another by-the-way: Very often blatantly wrong belief might still be the least-wrong belief given someone’s web of beliefs. Often it’s easier to believe some minor wrong than to rebuild your whole belief system risking far more damage just to make something small come out correct. So perhaps even my test for being really really wrong is not really all that useful.
Interesting picks. I hadn’t thought of Cosma Shalizi as ‘super-smart’ before, just erudite and with a better memory for the books and papers he’s read than me. Will have to think about that...
Then, there are normal people who are pretty much incapable of original highly insightful thought, critical thinking, rationality etc. They can usually do OK in normal life, and can even be quite capable in their narrow area of expertise and that’s about it. They often make the most basic logic mistakes etc.
I think you’re giving the “normal person” too little credit.
Agreed. If nothing else, refugee situations aren’t that uncommon in human history, and the majority are able to migrate and adapt if they’re physically permitted to do so.
It doesn’t seem to me that you have an accurate description of what a super-smart person would do/say other than match your beliefs and providing insightful thought. For example, do you expect super-smart people to be proficient in most areas of knowledge or even able to quickly grasp the foundations of different areas through super-abstraction? Would you expect them to be mostly unbiased? Your definition needs to be more objective and predictive, instead of descriptive.
I don’t know what’s the correct super-smartness cluster, so I cannot make objective predictive definition, at least yet. There’s no need to suffer from physics envy here—a lot of useful knowledge has this kind of vagueness. Nobody managed to define “pornography” yet, and it’s far easier concept than “super-smartness”. This kind of speculation might end up with something useful with some luck (or not).
Even defining by example would be difficult. My canonical examples would be Feynman and Einstein—they seem far smarter than the “normally smart” people.
Let’s say I collected a sufficiently large sample of “people who seem super-smart”, got as accurate information about them as possible, and did a proper comparison between them and background of normally smart people (it’s pretty easy to get good data on those, even by generic proxies like education—so I’m least worried about that) in a way that would be robust against even large number of data errors. That’s about the best I can think of.
Unfortunately it will be of no use as my sample will be not random super-smart people but those super-smart people who are also sufficiently famous for me to know about them and be aware of their super-smartness. This isn’t what I want to measure at all. And I cannot think of any reasonable way to separate these.
So the project is most likely doomed. It was interesting to think about this anyway.
if super-smart people exist, it’s fairly certain that some blogs of such people exist. And if such blogs existed, I would expect to have found a few by now.
Why would they blog? They would already know that most people have nothing of interest to tell them; and if they want to tell other people something, they can do it through other channels. If such a person had a blog, it might be for a very narrow reason, and they would simply refrain from talking about matters guaranteed to produce nothing but time-consuming stupidity in response.
I’m not sure that the ability to have original thoughts is at all closely connected to the ability to think rationally. What makes you reach that conclusion?
Unfortunately there’s a second observation—there’s no reason to believe such people existed only in the past, or would have aversion to blogging—so if super-smart people exist, it’s fairly certain that some blogs of such people exist. And if such blogs existed, I would expect to have found a few by now.
Have you tried looking at Terence Tao’s blog? I think he fits your model, but it may be that many of his posts will be too technical for a non-mathematician. I’m not sure in general if blogging is a good medium for actually finding this sort of thing. It is easy to see if a blogger isn’t very smart. it isn’t clear to me that it is a medium that allows one to easily tell if someone is very smart.
I doubt your disproof of super-smart people, for the very same reasons you do, perhaps with a greater weight assigned to those reasons.
I am also not sure about your definition of super-smart. Is idiot savant (in math, say) super-smart? If you mean super-smart=consistently rational, I suspect nothing prevents people of normal-smart IQ from scoring (super) well there, trading off quantity of ideas for quality. There is a ceiling there as good ideas get more complex and require more processing power, but I suspect given how crazy this world is Norm Smart the Rationalist can score surprisingly highly on relative basis.
As a data point you might want to look at “Monster Minds” chapter of Feynman’s “Surely you’re joking”. Since you mentioned Feynman. The chapter is about Einstein.
As for the actual meat of your comment, I don’t have much to add. ‘Smart’ is a slippery enough word that I’d guess one’s belief in ‘super-smart people’ depends on how one defines ‘smart.’
There is an important systematic bias you only tangentially mention in your analysis. Super-smart people (more generally, very successful people) don’t feel they have to prove themselves all the time. (Especially if they are tenured. :) ) Many of them like to talk before they think. There are very smart people around them who quickly spot the obvious mistakes and laboriously complete the half-baked ideas. It is just more economic this way.
How would you describe the writing patterns of super-smart people? Similarly, how would meeting/talking/debating them would feel like?
I think my comment was rather vague, and people aren’t sure what I meant.
This is all my impressions, as far as I can tell evidence of all that is rather underwhelming; I’m writing this more to explain my thought than to “prove” anything.
It seems to me that people come in different level of smartness. There are some people with all sort of problems that make them incapable of even human normal, but let’s ignore them entirely here.
Then, there are normal people who are pretty much incapable of original highly insightful thought, critical thinking, rationality etc. They can usually do OK in normal life, and can even be quite capable in their narrow area of expertise and that’s about it. They often make the most basic logic mistakes etc.
Then there are “smart” people who are capable of original insight, and don’t get too stupid too often. They’re not measuring example the same thing, but IQ tests are capable of distinguishing between those and the normal people reasonably well. With smart people both their top performance and their average performance is a lot better than with average people. In spite of that, all of them very often fail basic rationality for some particular domains they feel too strongly about.
Now I’m conflicted if people who are so much above “smart” as “smart” is above normal really exists. A canonical example of such person would be Feynman—from my limited information he seems to be just so ridiculously smart. Eliezer seems to believe Einstein is like that, but I have even less information about him. You can probably think of a few such other people.
Unfortunately there’s a second observation—there’s no reason to believe such people existed only in the past, or would have aversion to blogging—so if super-smart people exist, it’s fairly certain that some blogs of such people exist. And if such blogs existed, I would expect to have found a few by now.
And yet, every time it seemed to me that someone might just be that smart and I started reading their blog—it turned out very quickly that my estimate of their smartness suffered from rapid regression to the mean. All my super-smart candidates managed to say such horrible things, and be deaf to such obvious arguments that I doubt any of them really qualifies.
So here’s an alternative theory. No human alive is much smarter than the “normally smart”. Of population of normally smart people, thanks to domain expertise, wit and writing skill, compatibility with my beliefs (or at least happening to avoid my red flags), higher productivity, luck etc. some people simply seem much smarter than that.
I’m not trolling here, but consider Eliezer—I’ve picked the example because it’s well known here. For some time he was exactly such a candidate, however:
he is ridiculously good at writing—just look at his fanfics, biasing my perception
he manages to avoid many of my red flags, biasing my perception
he has cultural background pretty similar to mine, biasing my perception
his writing style is very good at avoiding unwarranted certainty—this might seem more rational, but it’s really more of a style issue—people like Eliezer and Tyler Cowen who write cautiously just seem far smarter to me than people like Robin Hanson who write in “no disclaimer” style—even though I know very well that Robin is fully aware that contrarian theories he proposes are usually wrong, and there are usually other factors in addition to one he happens to write at the moment—and says that every time he’s asked. Style differences bias my perception again.
Eliezer usually manages to avoid writing about things I know more than him about, so he usually has advantage of expertise, biasing my perception.
So it’s safe to guess that however smart Eliezer is, I’m overestimating him—nearly all biases point in identical way.
On the other hand he sometimes makes ridiculously wrong statements, like his calculations of cost of cryonics which was blatantly order of magnitude off—I still don’t know if this was a massive brain failure (this and other such disqualifying him as a supersmart candidate), or conscious attempt at dark arts (in which case he might still qualify, but he loses points for other reasons).
On the other hand, and this provides some counter-evidence to my theory—let’s look at myself. I publish anything on my blog and in comments everywhere that seems to have expected public value higher than zero, and very often I’m in hurry / sleep-depraved, or otherwise far below my top performance. I exaggerate to get the point across very often. I write outside my area of expertise a lot, not uncommonly making severe mistakes. I’m not that good at writing (not to mention that English is not my first language) so things I say may be very unclear.
Unfortunately a normally smart person with my behaviour patterns, and a super-smart person with my behaviour patterns, would probably both fail my super-smartness test.
As you can see, I’m not even terribly convinced that my “super-smart people don’t exist” theory is true. I would love to see if other people have good evidence or insight one way or the other.
Another by-the-way: Very often blatantly wrong belief might still be the least-wrong belief given someone’s web of beliefs. Often it’s easier to believe some minor wrong than to rebuild your whole belief system risking far more damage just to make something small come out correct. So perhaps even my test for being really really wrong is not really all that useful.
A few people who blog frequently and fit my criteria for “super-smart”: Terence Tao, Cosma Shalizi, John Baez.
I was thinking of Tao as well. Also, Oleg Kiselyov for programming/computer science.
Yep, seconding the recommendation of Oleg. I read a lot of his writings and I’d definitely have included him on the list.
Interesting picks. I hadn’t thought of Cosma Shalizi as ‘super-smart’ before, just erudite and with a better memory for the books and papers he’s read than me. Will have to think about that...
I think you’re giving the “normal person” too little credit.
Agreed. If nothing else, refugee situations aren’t that uncommon in human history, and the majority are able to migrate and adapt if they’re physically permitted to do so.
It doesn’t seem to me that you have an accurate description of what a super-smart person would do/say other than match your beliefs and providing insightful thought. For example, do you expect super-smart people to be proficient in most areas of knowledge or even able to quickly grasp the foundations of different areas through super-abstraction? Would you expect them to be mostly unbiased? Your definition needs to be more objective and predictive, instead of descriptive.
I don’t know what’s the correct super-smartness cluster, so I cannot make objective predictive definition, at least yet. There’s no need to suffer from physics envy here—a lot of useful knowledge has this kind of vagueness. Nobody managed to define “pornography” yet, and it’s far easier concept than “super-smartness”. This kind of speculation might end up with something useful with some luck (or not).
Even defining by example would be difficult. My canonical examples would be Feynman and Einstein—they seem far smarter than the “normally smart” people.
Let’s say I collected a sufficiently large sample of “people who seem super-smart”, got as accurate information about them as possible, and did a proper comparison between them and background of normally smart people (it’s pretty easy to get good data on those, even by generic proxies like education—so I’m least worried about that) in a way that would be robust against even large number of data errors. That’s about the best I can think of.
Unfortunately it will be of no use as my sample will be not random super-smart people but those super-smart people who are also sufficiently famous for me to know about them and be aware of their super-smartness. This isn’t what I want to measure at all. And I cannot think of any reasonable way to separate these.
So the project is most likely doomed. It was interesting to think about this anyway.
Why would they blog? They would already know that most people have nothing of interest to tell them; and if they want to tell other people something, they can do it through other channels. If such a person had a blog, it might be for a very narrow reason, and they would simply refrain from talking about matters guaranteed to produce nothing but time-consuming stupidity in response.
I’m not sure that the ability to have original thoughts is at all closely connected to the ability to think rationally. What makes you reach that conclusion?
Have you tried looking at Terence Tao’s blog? I think he fits your model, but it may be that many of his posts will be too technical for a non-mathematician. I’m not sure in general if blogging is a good medium for actually finding this sort of thing. It is easy to see if a blogger isn’t very smart. it isn’t clear to me that it is a medium that allows one to easily tell if someone is very smart.
I doubt your disproof of super-smart people, for the very same reasons you do, perhaps with a greater weight assigned to those reasons.
I am also not sure about your definition of super-smart. Is idiot savant (in math, say) super-smart? If you mean super-smart=consistently rational, I suspect nothing prevents people of normal-smart IQ from scoring (super) well there, trading off quantity of ideas for quality. There is a ceiling there as good ideas get more complex and require more processing power, but I suspect given how crazy this world is Norm Smart the Rationalist can score surprisingly highly on relative basis.
As a data point you might want to look at “Monster Minds” chapter of Feynman’s “Surely you’re joking”. Since you mentioned Feynman. The chapter is about Einstein.
Finally, where is your blog? ;)
My blog is here.
You can set that in “preferences”.
Reminds me of ‘My Childhood Role Model’.
As for the actual meat of your comment, I don’t have much to add. ‘Smart’ is a slippery enough word that I’d guess one’s belief in ‘super-smart people’ depends on how one defines ‘smart.’
There is an important systematic bias you only tangentially mention in your analysis. Super-smart people (more generally, very successful people) don’t feel they have to prove themselves all the time. (Especially if they are tenured. :) ) Many of them like to talk before they think. There are very smart people around them who quickly spot the obvious mistakes and laboriously complete the half-baked ideas. It is just more economic this way.