Intelligent people tend to only on rare occasions tackle problems where it stretches the limit of their cognitive abilities to (predict how to) solve them. Thus, most of my exposure to this comes by way of, e.g., watching mathematicians at decision theory workshops prove things in domains where I am unfamiliar—then they can exceed my prediction abilities even when they are not tackling a problem which appears to them spectacularly difficult.
Where the task they are doing has a skill requirement that you do not meet, you cannot predict how they will solve the problem.
Does that sound right? It’s more obvious that the prediction is hard when the decision is “fake-punt, run the clock down, and take the safety instead of giving them the football with so much time left” rather than physical feats. Purely mental feats are a different kind of different.
My scepticism depends on how detailed your predictions are, though your fiction/rhetorical abilities likely stem in part form unusually good person-modelling abilities. Do you find yourself regularly and correctly predicting how creative friends will navigate difficult social situations or witty conversations, e.g, guessing punchlines to clever jokes, predicting the coarse of a status game?
I may be confused about the “resolution” of your predictions. Suppose you were trying to predict how intelligent person x will seduce intelligent person y. If you said, “X will appeal to Y’s vanity and then demonstrate social status.” I feel that kind of prediction is pretty trivial. But predicting more exactly how X would do this seems vastly more difficult. How would you rate your abilities in this situation if 1 equals predictions at the resolution of the given example and 10 equals “I could draw you a flow chart which will more-or-less describe the whole of their interaction.”
Intelligent people tend to only on rare occasions tackle problems where it stretches the limit of their cognitive abilities to (predict how to) solve them. Thus, most of my exposure to this comes by way of, e.g., watching mathematicians at decision theory workshops prove things in domains where I am unfamiliar—then they can exceed my prediction abilities even when they are not tackling a problem which appears to them spectacularly difficult.
Where the task they are doing has a skill requirement that you do not meet, you cannot predict how they will solve the problem.
Does that sound right? It’s more obvious that the prediction is hard when the decision is “fake-punt, run the clock down, and take the safety instead of giving them the football with so much time left” rather than physical feats. Purely mental feats are a different kind of different.
My scepticism depends on how detailed your predictions are, though your fiction/rhetorical abilities likely stem in part form unusually good person-modelling abilities. Do you find yourself regularly and correctly predicting how creative friends will navigate difficult social situations or witty conversations, e.g, guessing punchlines to clever jokes, predicting the coarse of a status game?
I may be confused about the “resolution” of your predictions. Suppose you were trying to predict how intelligent person x will seduce intelligent person y. If you said, “X will appeal to Y’s vanity and then demonstrate social status.” I feel that kind of prediction is pretty trivial. But predicting more exactly how X would do this seems vastly more difficult. How would you rate your abilities in this situation if 1 equals predictions at the resolution of the given example and 10 equals “I could draw you a flow chart which will more-or-less describe the whole of their interaction.”