Meh, I’m inclined to be somewhat cautious about those: they look too susceptible to the Barnum Effect, subjective validation etc. I mean, see this:
Svenson (1981) surveyed 161 students in Sweden and the United States, asking them to compare their driving safety and skill to the other people in the experiment. For driving skill, 93% of the US sample and 69% of the Swedish sample put themselves in the top 50% (above the median). For safety, 88% of the US group and 77% of the Swedish sample put themselves in the top 50%
I’d expect those numbers to be even worse for something as subjective as “the ability to see patterns in the world and derive a gist from complex situations” or “the ability to serenely monitor the movements of one’s own mind and correct for biases and shortcomings”.
I fully agree that IQ and GPA and the like probably don’t tell the whole story, but as far as I know the things he lists are harder to reliably measure.
LessWrong is pretty good at beating fuzzy concepts into usable form, and these terms seem (to me) to describe attributes of repeated interest to this crowd.
They are indeed a long way from being usable metrics for any kind of ranking, but the mere fact that the terms are in use is neat.
Meh, I’m inclined to be somewhat cautious about those: they look too susceptible to the Barnum Effect, subjective validation etc. I mean, see this:
I’d expect those numbers to be even worse for something as subjective as “the ability to see patterns in the world and derive a gist from complex situations” or “the ability to serenely monitor the movements of one’s own mind and correct for biases and shortcomings”.
I fully agree that IQ and GPA and the like probably don’t tell the whole story, but as far as I know the things he lists are harder to reliably measure.
LessWrong is pretty good at beating fuzzy concepts into usable form, and these terms seem (to me) to describe attributes of repeated interest to this crowd.
They are indeed a long way from being usable metrics for any kind of ranking, but the mere fact that the terms are in use is neat.