Individual intelligence differences are NOT thought of as okay. Try introducing yourself on a random message board with each of these and see what happens:
Hi, I’m Joe and the main thing I’m good at is art.
Hi, I’m Joe and I’m proud of my Native American ancestry.
Hi, I’m Joe and my IQ is 170.
Joe with the IQ of 170 will be called arrogant, a liar, an elitist, treated like a scam artist, or told he has no social skills. That’s not telling Joe he’s okay. That’s telling Joe not to talk about his difference. Let’s explore what it means to be told you can’t talk about your difference for a moment. Imagine going into a room and saying each of the following:
Hey, don’t say you’ve got Native American blood, that’s socially inept.
^ This comment will surely be interpreted as racism.
Hey, don’t say you’re good at art, you’re a liar.
^ This comment will be interpreted as an extremely rude or even oppressive comment. Making judgments about whether artists are “good” or “bad” is taboo and considered, by many, to be oppressive to self-expression.
Hey, don’t say your IQ is 170, don’t be an elitist.
^ This comment prejudges the person. It assumes that they’re an elitist when they’re just talking about an intellectual difference that doesn’t prove anything about your personality.
So, why doesn’t Joe get to have the same freedom to express himself without society oppressing that? Why doesn’t he get to talk about his difference without expecting prejudiced remarks that jump to conclusions about who he is?
We have a million excuses for this. “People feel threatened by intellect.” Well, they used to feel threatened by black people, but that doesn’t excuse society from working on removing their prejudices about black people and it doesn’t excuse them from working on removing their prejudices about gifted people.
“That’s just not polite.” ← This is an interesting excuse. I’ll explain why:
Imagine you go into a room and say “Hi, I’m white.” (I realize that people of any race may read this comment, I am asking you to humor my hypothetical situation for a moment.)
Your race is evident. This is a neutral statement of fact.
If someone tells you “That’s just not polite.” why are they saying that? They’re probably confusing it with an expression of the white pride attitude that is associated with the KKK. They’re assuming that you’re prejudiced.
What if you went up to a bunch of random white people and accused them of hating black people? Since this doesn’t happen frequently, they’d probably be mostly bewildered. But imagine if random people did that to them every day.
Prejudice is a very serious offense to be accused of. It would stress them out. They’d wonder what kinds of social and career opportunities they might be missing out on. They might become more cautious to guard their physical safety—after all, prejudice is the kind of thing people get really heated about and some people get violent when they’re upset. They’d start to hide hints that they’re white on things like resumes. They would be oppressed by an assumption that they’re prejudiced, just the same way that they’d be oppressed by an assumption that they’re all criminals.
Accusing a person of prejudice simply for being part of a certain group is, in and of itself, prejudiced. That’s prejudging them based on some trait that they can’t control, not on their behavior. Yet, if you claim to have a high IQ, you are very likely to be accused of elitism. People act like this prejudice against people with a high IQ is okay and that gifted people should behave like an oppressed minority by hiding their difference.
I’m glad you think it’s okay with the rest of the world for people to talk about their intelligence differences, I think that’s okay. But a looooooot of people don’t!
My personal reaction seems to be traceable to a potential vs achievement view of status.
Imagine a 10 year old who introduces himself and says he’s been tested and found to be gifted/~150 IQ. My intuitive reaction is to be a little happy for the kid and maybe talk to him.
Imagine a 40 year old who introduces himself to the group and says he’s been tested at 150; same IQ, same introduction, but my reaction is instantly negative—because why did he introduce himself based on his IQ? At age 40, shouldn’t he have something to show for it, some personal identity beyond ‘a smart person’? Be a doctor, a researcher somewhere, an entrepreneur, etc. His failure to mention anything more substantive seems like decent evidence that there is nothing better to mention, and he’s simply failed at life—yet he still seems to think a lot of himself. An arrogant failure is not someone I wish to know or think highly of, and so I don’t.
The most important difference here is that the first two statements, in addition to being boasts, also convey a non-boasting fact about the particular area you are interested in. For example “I’m good at art” strikes me less as conveying information about being especially talented, as saying that art is the particular subject you like and work on.
Compare someone who goes into an artists’ workshop or an art class or something. They introduce themselves with “Hi, I’m Joe, and I’m really good at art.” Now it is boasting. Everyone there is interested in art, and Joe is making a claim of being especially good at it compared to all the other artists. (This is even more true if we add some kind of number or statistic to it. “Hi, I’m Joe, and I’m in the 99th percentile for art skills.”. Now he’s definitely boasting, since the statistic doesn’t do anything to help describe his interest.)
Intelligence is very general, and it’s something you have rather than something you’re interested in. That might make claims to it seem more boastful.
“I am a woman”—is that a boast? No, it’s just a fact.
“I am African American”—is that a boast?
“I am white.”—is that a boast? It could be. Why do we perceive it that way?
All three are a difference you might have, rather than a thing you’re interested in. They are also all things that can influence you. Gender stereotypes are criticized for numerous reasons, and I don’t think they’re perfect, but we can’t deny that a lot of men and women have a set of differences they associate with gender. For many, it’s part of their identity. At times, members of both genders have had issues with excessive pride in their gender such that it became a sort of prejudice against and oppression of the other gender. Yet, when I say “I am a woman.” does it sound like a boast? Does any part of your mind want to jump to the conclusion that I am a feminazi or a man hater? Where does this perception of excessive pride come from when people talk about giftedness?
You might argue “It implies you’re really good at something”—okay, so does the phrase “I’m a doctor.”
If being good at something makes a statement a boast, why is it okay to say “I’m a doctor.” as part of an introduction?
That you perceive the example IQ statement as a boast is a sign of bias. How do you know that it is a boast? It isn’t objective. It is a subjective sense. You’re guessing at the person’s motive. If you wouldn’t guess the same motive for “I’m a woman.” and “I’m a doctor.” then why do you guess it for “My IQ is 170.”?
Specifically when it comes to speaking about IQ and giftedness, I want to know how we discern the difference between boasting and making a neutral statement of fact about what makes one different? Put another way, here is the problem: Being gifted and/or having a high IQ makes one different. It frequently makes sense to refer to this difference in order to provide a context in which to be correctly understood. Some examples: Gifted people are frequently misdiagnosed with mental disorders. They have numerous traits (like being really intense and sensitive) that make them look a bit crazy—but they’re not necessarily crazy, even though they may have these unusual traits. Gifted people tend to have different interests and are more likely to have certain personality traits. People who are gifted enough sometimes feel like outsiders, or aliens—they feel completely different. Saying “I’m gifted.” could be a shortcut way to refer to all of those differences and others and give people an idea of how to interact with them and how to interpret their different behaviors without having to explain every single one of them individually. The same way that people tend to be gentler to women, who tend to identify as sensitive, but yet don’t do that to men, because many men interpret it as condescension.
There must be thousands of different ways we interpret the people around us in order to meet in the middle that makes our interactions go far more smoothly… think of all the protocols we follow when we’re around children, or people of a different religion. Gifted people are not able to request that people attempt to get along with them more smoothly by simply referring to their set of differences. Imagine if a computer could not specify it’s protocol. This wreaks all sorts of havoc. This could be part of why we hear that gifted people feel misunderstood, alienated, and why they’re labelled as having “social skills issues”—if OTHER people aren’t trying to bridge the gap, and they’re not allowed to freely discuss their difference and it’s details, it makes it a lot harder for everybody to get along.
It’s not easy to say you’re gifted in such a way that it does not make people upset. All of the ways that I know of involve some sort of compensation for bias. That is what tells me that people are biased about statements of IQ and giftedness. People frequently assume the person’s motive is to boast, as if there’s no other reason you would want to mention it.
Can you think of a way that a person can freely state that they’re gifted, or have a high IQ, and make it sound neutral, without sugar-coating, without having to hide it, and without using code words to obscure it, or cheating in some other way?
If not, then something is off, isn’t it? If we can’t think of a way to present it neutrally, or it turns out to be extremely hard, this would be a sign that our cultural perceptions of speaking about high IQ and giftedness contain assumptions, am I right?
“I am a woman”—is that a boast? No, it’s just a fact.
It needn’t be. For example, if this is said at a gathering at which trans folk are particularly visible, it might be perceived as a boast, since the whole question of who is and isn’t a woman is foregrounded and has status associated with it. (Of course, at most gatherings this is not a reading that would occur to anyone, since trans folk are not typically visible.)
“I am African American”—is that a boast?
Again, it depends. In a gathering where being an African American is a high-status marker within the group, it can be.
“I am white.”—is that a boast? It could be. Why do we perceive it that way?
Again, in gatherings where being white is a high-status marker within the group, it’s a boast. For most of LW’s readers, this is probably far more common than either of the other two examples.
Can you think of a way that a person can freely state that they’re gifted, or have a high IQ, and make it sound neutral, without sugar-coating, without having to hide it, and without using code words to obscure it, or cheating in some other way?
In a gathering where high intelligence is a status marker, no. Claiming a high-status marker within a group is never a neutral move.
If we can’t think of a way to present it neutrally, or it turns out to be extremely hard, this would be a sign that our cultural perceptions of speaking about high IQ and giftedness contain assumptions, am I right?
Sure. In particular, as I’ve said, I think the assumptions they contain is that high IQ and giftedness are status markers.
Hiding IQ is the rule not the exception, do you agree with that? I agree that talking about just about any trait might be perceived as boastful or rude in very specific contexts. But when something isn’t okay to talk about in most contexts, that’s how we know that there’s a widespread bias that can be said to be cultural. Do you agree with this?
Claiming a high-status marker within a group is never a neutral move.
What if I introduced myself with “Hi, I’m Sue. I like sports and I am a doctor. What about you?”
That would be interpreted as talking about a difference you have that affects who you are, not a boast, am I right?
I think the assumptions they contain is that high IQ and giftedness are status markers.
Okay, that’s a really good point. To be clear, you do agree with me, then, that there is a cultural bias against talking about giftedness and IQ—am I correct?
I’m also interested in knowing whether you agree with these:
If talking about high IQ and giftedness are usually seen as a status marker, this makes them socially unacceptable to talk about most of the time.
Do you agree that when both of these conditions are true, it is sign of oppression:
A.) There is a group of people that have significant social differences, for example, how the queer community dates differently from and sometimes express gender differently from hetero people.
B.) It is socially unacceptable to talk about the difference that makes them part of the group, for instance, the “Don’t ask, don’t tell.” policy that the U.S. military had.
Do you agree that gifted / high IQ people meet the two definitions above of having significant social differences, and that it is considered socially unacceptable for them to talk freely about their differences? If so, then does this qualify as a form of oppression? Fine distinction: I don’t think that most people KNOW they’re doing something that may be considered oppressive. To me, if a prejudiced person doesn’t see their prejudices as prejudiced, it doesn’t mean that their behavior doesn’t oppress the people they’re prejudiced against. That just means their oppression is unintentional.
I don’t blame people for the prejudice that I see. But that doesn’t make it any less real to me.
Hiding IQ is the rule not the exception, do you agree with that?
Depends on the social group. I hang out in a number of social circles where signalling high intelligence is highly endorsed. But, sure, I agree that’s the exception and not the rule; in most social circles, signalling high intelligence is seen as a status grab.
But when something isn’t okay to talk about in most contexts, that’s how we know that there’s a widespread bias that can be said to be cultural. Do you agree with this?
Sure.
What if I introduced myself with “Hi, I’m Sue. I like sports and I am a doctor. What about you?” That would be interpreted as talking about a difference you have that affects who you are, not a boast, am I right?
Again, that depends on the status implications of those claims in the context of the group you’re introducing yourself to. There are many contexts in which introducing yourself as a doctor would be seen as boastful, and many contexts in which it would not. (There are few contexts where introducing yourself as liking sports would be seen as boastful.)
To be clear, you do agree with me, then, that there is a cultural bias against talking about giftedness and IQ—am I correct?
I would agree that there are contexts where talking about my giftedness and my high IQ is seen as a status grab, and therefore rejected. Many of those are contexts in which talking about giftedness and IQ in general is seen as OK.
If talking about high IQ and giftedness are usually seen as a status marker, this makes them socially unacceptable to talk about most of the time
Again: where high IQ and giftedness are seen as status markers, talking about my high IQ and my giftedness is usually unacceptable. (Similarly, talking about my wealth or my really beautiful spouse or various other status markers is usually unacceptable.)
Do you agree that when [there is a group of people that have significant social differences, and it is socially unacceptable to talk about the difference] it is sign of oppression:
I agree that these things are frequently present where oppression exists. But they are also frequently present where oppression does not exist.
For example, if I’m a white-collar millionaire participating in a social group that is primarily lower-middle-class blue-collar workers, that’s a significant social difference that is socially unacceptable to talk about, but I would not agree that I was being oppressed, or that millionaires are generally being oppressed by blue-collar workers.
Relative levels of power and status matter, here.
Do you agree that gifted / high IQ people meet the two definitions above of having significant social differences, and that it is considered socially unacceptable for them to talk freely about their differences?
In many contexts, yes.
If so, then does this qualify as a form of oppression?
If talking about high IQ and giftedness are usually seen as a status marker, this makes them socially unacceptable to talk about most of the time
Again: where high IQ and giftedness are seen as status markers, talking about my high IQ and my giftedness is usually unacceptable. (Similarly, talking about my wealth or my really beautiful spouse or various other status markers is usually unacceptable.)
You make my verbiage look sloppy. (:
Sorry for seeming to ignore this comment for a few weeks. I was busy.
Right now the way I’m seeing this is that because IQ differences are not seen as something that can cause a person a prolific number of differences that are socially relevant for lots of things other than status, it’s often perceived as a status grab when it’s not.
The result was that he was accused (in the context of the experiment, by people who, I realize, probably do not literally believe these things) of lying by Alicorn and gwern and later suspected to be a psychopath by gwern and shminux.
I was the only one that showed willingness to entertain the idea that OrphanWilde might not be a liar or a psychopath. I suppose, technically that’s not oppression against people you believe to be gifted, it’s discouragement toward people you believe not to be gifted. However, what happens when people have the same attitude of not believing other types of people about their differences? “Oh you’re not really homosexual, let’s send you to the psychologist and have that fixed.” They may have good intentions but the result is definitely oppressive. If people jump to conclusions about a group of people—even the conclusion that the specific individuals in question aren’t part of the group—then those assumptions can oppress the group in question.
Then there’s the fact that 50% of gifted children in America are never given an IQ test, yet they require special education to prevent them from developing problems like learned helplessness due to being placed in the wrong environment.
Terman did a study that challenged commonly held beliefs that gifted people tended to be ugly, and have a lot of problems, and revealed various myths. That was in 1921, but there are still echos of that mentality—people frequently associate negative things with giftedness as if trying to balance things out and make everyone equal again on some imaginary scale—when we shouldn’t be viewing our equality any differently regardless of intellectual differences anyway.
As I see it, people are having a hard time dealing with intellectual inequalities and frequently react as if they are going to equate to rights inequalities.
This leads them to oppress.
Do you have observations that would be relevant to my perspective, supportive or unsupportive?
OrphanWilde was only doing an experiment. I didn’t mean to say those guys were serious about their accusations. They behaved that way in the context of the experiment. Most likely they do know better than to take the experiment literally. I realize this. (:
I hate pointing out the obvious, but I guess I have to now. edits my post
Here gwern states that someone possessing transcendent charm is not sufficient evidence for one to conclude that they possess a 200+ IQ. (He mentions other possibilities of them having a “mere” 140+ IQ or them being a psychopath.)
Here gwern states that the world contains more psychopaths than geniuses.
Here is a well-done ramble about the overlap between psychopathy and genius.
I cannot find any post by schminux that would explain why you think he was pretending to accuse OrphanWilde of being a psychopath.
Now to clarify: I am holding that gwern and schminux never publicly suspected OrphanWilde of being a psychopath. I am further holding that gwern and schminux never publicly pretended to suspect OrphanWilde of being a psychopath. These events did not occur, nor did events resembling them occur. Thus, this:
later suspected to be a psychopath by gwern and shminux
is almost a complete non sequitur, apropos of nothing.
You can’t find those because some wonderfully helpful person decided to hide my post. Search for “comment score below threshold” and look inside of there for “psychopath”.
Considering that the posts I linked to were descendents of your post (I assume you were referring to this one?), it would be safe for you to assume that I had read it. (I also do not filter posts by karma value.)
Is there, in fact, a post that you think would support the claim:
Either gwern or shminux either publicly suspected or pretended to suspect OrphanWilde of being a sociopath.
I can’t be certain, but it’s possible that the post which led to shminux’ inclusion on that list was this one—in which shminux quoted gwerm’s conclusion that a gifted conversationalist is at least as likely to be a psychopath as a genius.
There’s likely no single individual involved, wonderfully helpful or otherwise. If a comment dropped below the default display threshold, it’s probably because three more people operating independently downvoted the comment than upvoted it.
As I see it, people are having a hard time dealing with intellectual inequalities and frequently react as if they are going to equate to rights inequalities.
Yes, I agree that this is frequently true.
We also frequently react that way to wealth inequalities, power inequalities, and various other things that we fear (not always without justification) will allow a privileged minority to become a threat to us.
This leads them to oppress.
It isn’t clear to me that “oppress” is a clearly or consistently defined term here, but I agree with you that this sometimes leads us to act against the groups we see as potential threats.
Do you have observations that would be relevant to my perspective
The thing that most jumps out at me is that we seem to keep reiterating the same rhetorical pattern.
You point out scenarios where intelligent people end up in potential conflict with those around them because of their intelligence. I agree that that happens sometimes, and add that it’s a special case of a more general relationship that isn’t especially about intelligence. You continue to discuss how raw a deal intelligent people are given, from a slightly different perspective.
It mostly leaves me with the feeling that we don’t really disagree about any of the stuff that’s actually being said explicitly, but that there’s something more fundamental that isn’t getting said explicitly, about which we do disagree.
If I had to guess, I would guess that you’re motivated to maximize the relative status of intelligent people, and you’re framing the situation in terms of how oppressed intelligent people are in order to justify doing that, and you see my responses as interfering with that framing.
Good insight, TheOtherDave, it is time to clarify. I don’t want to “maximize the relative status” of anyone—I don’t believe in status. Oh, sure I see lots of people imagining one another to be at different points on a mental model, and I don’t deny that people behave that way, but to me, that doesn’t mean the mental model is at all accurate to reality. To me, they’re just imagining this—status is just a bias.
Also, I think the fact that people perceive intelligence as a “high status” thing is the entire problem. So unless “maximize the relative status” was meant more like “optimize the relative status” I don’t think that’d be a real solution.
I don’t really see your responses as interfering with the framing, but like you said they’re indicating that some clearer point needs to be made.
Here are some ideas:
No sort of oppression happens all the time, but that doesn’t mean a group is not oppressed.
I think the oppression of gifted people should recognized. I think people on both sides need to realize that most of it is unintentional. I think we need to knock it off with this status business, as a species, recognize that we all have rights regardless of intellectual abilities, and quit acting paranoid and grappling for control with one another.
Seeing this power struggle and status madness makes me sick to my stomach. Every time I see it, I have to question why I bother to make a difference if people are going to behave like this.
I see lots of people imagining one another to be at different points on a mental model, and I don’t deny that people behave that way, but to me, that doesn’t mean the mental model is at all accurate to reality.
I don’t think what you’re saying here makes sense. The “status model” only makes claims about people’s behavior. If people behave as though status were a thing, that makes status a thing.
By way of analogy, beauty is also imaginary in the sense that status is imaginary. Lots of people imagine each other to be at different points on the beauty scale, and act accordingly, but there’s nothing objective out there corresponding to beauty. Sure, there’s things that lots of people would agree are beautiful—symmetric faces, lack of disfiguring scars, whatever—but these are arbitrary—there’s nothing intrinsically beautiful about them. (Similarly, wearing a gold watch or whatever might be a sign of status, and is also arbitrary.)
Would you say that you “don’t believe in beauty” in the same way that you “don’t believe in status”? If not, what are the relevant differences?
I think we need to knock it off with this status business, as a species, recognize that we all have rights regardless of intellectual abilities, and quit acting paranoid and grappling for control with one another.
(nods) Sure, sounds great. Two questions:
Do you agree any more or less with that phrase if I remove the clause “regardless of intellectual abilities”? (Followup: if you don’t, what is that clause doing there?)
Do you have any strategies in mind for achieving that state?
I think the oppression of gifted people should recognized.
I recognize that gifted people are sometimes subjected to actions taken against their interests, which we can describe as “oppression” if we want to, though that word has other connotations in other contexts I don’t think apply to the condition of gifted people.
That said, I don’t care very much. Do you think I ought to care more? If so, why?
I think an obvious difference between the last one and the first two is that the last one includes a number. There is no uncertainty when comparing numbers, no wriggle room for subjectivity. A real number is either smaller, bigger, or equal to another real number. Period. This rigidity does not mesh well with the flexibility that comfortable social interaction requires. I don’t think this is the only reason why the third is so inappropriate, but it definitely contributes.
This is an interesting point, but let’s try a thought experiment to see if it holds up. Consider the following statements you could make about yourself
You are an X-level black belt in a martial art.
Your top bowling score is X.
You can benchpress X amount of weight.
You have an IQ of X.
Where X is some value that is impressive and/or noteworthy. How strong of a negative reaction do you think each of these would get?
Here’s what my intuition says:
Probably no negative reaction.
Probably no negative reaction.
Possibly somewhat negative, sounds like bragging.
Strong negative reaction.
Looking for a pattern in the results, I have a theory: it seems like what is most unacceptable is making it sound that you are superior to the other people in the room in an objective sense. The reason martial arts and bowling are acceptable is that skill in those pursuits is not relevant to the other people in the room who do not engage in them. On the other hand, bragging about your weightlifting is somewhat more annoying since it seems like you are saying you are more healthy/fit/muscular than other people in the room—traits which are more broadly valuable.
Claiming high intelligence gets the worst response of all because it is the most absolute and broad claim of superiority one can make, since being intelligent generally makes you better at a broad range of tasks in the modern world, all else being equal. Also, IQ is associated with controversy and suffers from addtional negativity from that—just like if you say you are for/against abortion. I think Andy may be right that the objective number makes it worse in some way. If you said “I am really smart” that wouldn’t be quite as offensive, since it is less objective.
If someone can think of counterexamples to my theory, replies are welcome.
I don’t think it’s superiority. A counterpoint in thought experiment form:
“Hi, I’m the president of the United States”
“Hi, I run my own business.”
“Hi, I’m a model.”
“Hi, I’m Albert, the guy who came up with E equals MC squared.”
“Hi, I’m a genius.”
I think the numbers do make statements sound bad (I couldn’t figure out a way to word the above using a number without making it sound like bragging) but that’s irrelevant to the question I’m trying to answer, so it’s essentially one of those factors that should be removed from an experiment. I added an additional statement in the same format (an introduction using an identity of some type) about intelligence which does not include a number so that we’ve got a comparable intelligence-related option.
Here’s what my intuition says:
No negative reaction (more likely a positive reaction like excitement).
No negative reaction (admiration seems as likely as jealousy).
Potentially some amount of negative feelings from jealous females, and some amount of excitement from males or lesbians.
No negative reaction (more likely a positive reaction like excitement).
Strong negative reaction.
What’s interesting here is that 1 and 4 are not only some of the biggest claims of superiority that you can make, but have also referred to something verifiable, which should theoretically intensify the reaction. If making a claim of superiority was the problem, those should trigger much worse reactions.
I think the difference between the genius claim and the others in my thought experiment is that all the others are claiming to be doing something constructive. This makes the superiority less threatening. Another possibility is that the claims to genius and high IQ are not verifiable with LinkedIn or other research, so they’re not as believable.
Here’s a thought experiment on with some non-verifiable claims, where there are varying levels of superiority and threat:
Hi, I’m a secret government agent.
Hi, I’m very powerful.
Hi, I’m an elite computer hacker.
Hi, I’m highly gifted.
I think the reaction to 1-3 would be curiosity while the reaction to the fourth would be extreme dislike. I’m interested in other people’s reactions because I think my own are too influenced by having thought about this previously. Interestingly:
Secret agents are probably far less common than gifted people. If I remember right, the entire government is 3% of the population whereas gifted people are 2% and I doubt that 2⁄3 of the government consists of secret agents.
Not all gifted people are powerful, as giftedness does not automatically lead to any type of success. Claiming to be gifted is not claiming as much power as “powerful” is.
My current idea is that if a person with a high IQ makes any type of claim to this, they are more likely to be accused of lying or regarded as a threat than is sensible, and that the negative reactions provoked are disproportionate when compared with reactions to other claims that are comparable but don’t involve IQ / giftedness / genius.
I found your comment refreshing and thoughtful. +1 karma.
If you can think of any good counterpoints, I’d like to read them. (:
I’d suggest something that is related to what you’re saying: the problem isn’t that “I’m a genius” is an objective statement. The problem is that a statement made with more objectivity than is warranted.
The person saying this thinks it makes him objectively better. It doens’t just apply to intelligence; consider “I’m a model” versus “I’m beautiful”. The latter would get negative reactions. Stating that you’re a secret agent is actually an objective statement; you either are or you’re not. Stating that you’re a genius is likely to be interpreted as a general claim of mental superiority that is somewhat based on objective characteristics, but not by as much as you’re claiming it to be.
Even if the person claiming to be a genius says “I have high IQ” instead, I’ve observed that people on Less Wrong give much higher credence to IQ than people outside Less Wrong. Telling an average person that you have a high IQ is telling him “I believe I am objectively superior, but I’m basing my belief on this number that is very narrowly applicable, doesn’t capture all of what we mean by intelligence, and many of whose past uses have been discredited.”
Oh good point. Okay. I think that objectivity might be the problem with “Hi, I’m a genius.” but I’m not sure that’s the problem with “Hi, I’m gifted.” I’ll try another thought experiment on non-objective statements:
“Hi, I’m nice.”
“Hi, I’m gifted.”
“Hi, I’m beautiful.”
“Hi, I’m awesome.”
“Hi, I’m wonderful.”
Hmm, the problem with these is that nice, awesome, wonderful and beautiful all refer to traits that are too small in scope or too vague to make good identity claims. As such, my instinct is to question them with “Why are you saying this?” and the default motive that comes to mind is that the person is arrogant. However, being gifted is correlated with a lot of personality traits and neurological differences—so it is large enough in scope to be a key part of a person’s identity. The reason I’m interested in this is because it appears to me that if a key part of your identity is that you are an artist, a dyslexic, or a Southerner, you can say so without being instantly rejected by most of the population for being “arrogant” while the closest you can get, it seems, to being able to make a claim having to do with a gifted identity (without being rejected for arrogance) is to say “Hi, I’m a nerd.”—but that has the opposite problem. People reject it because nerdiness is automatically associated with being socially undesirable.
I want to try a different angle. Two questions:
Do you think giftedness or high IQ are likely to play a large role in influencing a person’s personality, views or lifestyle?
Do you see any way to make a claim that giftedness or high IQ are a large part of one’s identity without a high risk of rejection?
If you do not see any way to make such a claim without a high risk, then why do you think that is?
I think what you’re telling me in the last paragraph is “Making claims about your IQ makes you sound dodgy because people feel really skeptical about IQ scores.” If that’s it, that is a really good point, too. +1 Karma.
Do you think giftedness or high IQ are likely to play a large role in influencing a person’s personality, views or lifestyle?
I think this is probably more true in the US than in a lot of other places. Our cultural habit of steering intellectually (and especially mathematically) gifted kids into the “nerd” pigeonhole and concomitant subculture doesn’t seem to be well reflected in the rest of the world.
I am interested in finding out what the rest of the world does and how you found out about their reactions to intellectually gifted people. I’d also be interested in finding out why you think this happens in America but not everywhere else. Would you mind sharing?
The nerd subculture certainly exists (with local variations) in Europe and East Asia, but the impression I get is that it’s coupled less to childhood intelligence and more to that subculture’s various touchstones: you’re about as likely to identify as a nerd if you like, say, literary sci-fi, but being smarter than the average bear isn’t as good a predictor of liking SF.
I don’t know why this happens, but I suspect it has something to do with the American educational system. It’s pretty uncommon among industrialized countries to keep education (more or less) unified as late as 12th grade, and under these circumstances I can see intellectuality coming to be associated with a subcultural alignment; whereas under something like the German system, classes would end up being fragmented along giftedness lines before strong subcultural cliques form. Still, I’m looking at this through American eyes, and people that’ve actually been through those systems might have a more accurate take on it.
I’ve also been reading some stuff lately that suggests the association was much weaker as late as the Fifties and early Sixties, even in the US, but I’m not sure how much I trust it.
One of the more distinctive features of the US system is the the connection to youth sports. Other countries play sports, obviously, but the US model tends to locate competitive sports programs inside schools, from middle school on up through college.
That started in the mid-1800′s, in the northeast, and it spread from there, both laterally to other colleges and vertically, down to high schools. But it took a long time for it to become as effort-intensive as it is now, and there was a pretty significant spike in intensity after World War II, when colleges grew quickly and families bought more televisions and radios and schools could afford to field more teams.
Pretty slim connection, obviously. But if you’re looking for an effect that could plausibly rearrange social groups in age-segregated communities, sports fits the bill. And if you’re looking for a another milieu that tends to brand and shun obsessive pursuits (NOT giftedness—but earnest, obsessive pursuits like we tend to identify with nerd subculture), you might look to the concept of sprezzatura among the sporting aristocracy.
if you’re looking for a another milieu that tends to brand and shun obsessive pursuits … you might look to the concept of sprezzatura among the sporting aristocracy.
Hmm… that’s an interesting idea—that the existence of a mainstream sporting culture which shuns one of the traits that nerds have in common might have scared off a larger proportion of the people who are not gifted from the nerd subculture? Thanks for this idea. +1 karma.
I have never heard of this “sporting aristrocracy”—is that a term you made up on the spot for this context, or am I just unaware of this term?
I don’t think “sporting aristocracy” has much currency as a phrase. I mean the class of European aristocrats to whom the trades and business and educations suitable for the trades and business were mostly taboo (they could be warriors or clergy or, until the field was professionalized, scientists). The men hunted and sailed and raced and rowed. They also invented the various types of football, and started intercollegiate athletics in the US.
See The Shooting Party for an example: Lord Hartlip is a good shot, but is ashamed to be seen practicing. Also Chariots of Fire in which Lord Lindsay “trains” by jumping hurdles topped with flutes of champaign and is contrasted with Harold Abrahams, the Jewish runner who hires a professional coach. Goes all the way back past Baldassare Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier, which discusses the way a true gentleman does everything right while making it seem easy and unpracticed.
It’s pretty uncommon among industrialized countries to keep education (more or less) unified as late as 12th grade, and under these circumstances I can see intellectuality coming to be associated with a subcultural alignment; whereas under something like the German system, classes would end up being fragmented along giftedness lines before strong subcultural cliques form.
That’s an interesting factor, but I question whether it is a cause, or a symptom (which potentially has effects similar to the original cause). I ask “Why did America choose to deny gifted and talented children a chance to develop their abilities to the fullest for longer than any other country?” (I’d love to see a citation for that by the way!)
I think the root cause might actually be the “immortal declaration” of Thomas Jefferson, located in the opening of the United States Declaration of Independence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights…
When a country’s most important concept is human rights, and the most prominent argument in support of human rights is the belief that you are created equal, you’re essentially in a situation where your country was founded on the belief that giftedness does not exist.
It seems to me that when people reject gifted identity claims, their true objection is not that it’s arrogant to claim high status or that it’s socially unacceptable to say good things about yourself but that they’re interpreting “created equal” to mean something similar to “equal abilities” or “mentally equal” and experience conflict(s) along the lines of:
If I some people are not equal, does that mean human rights don’t exist?
If I agree that this person is unequal and they’re the better one, do I have to give up my rights to them or give them special treatment?
If this person is claiming to be unequal, are they also trying to demand the right to take my rights away or extract something extra from me so they can have unequal rights?
If I let myself believe that people aren’t equals, is that morally wrong?
Even though I think the problem runs deeper than the theory you presented, I am glad to have it. If America is denying children the chance to develop to the fullest for longer than other countries, that’s certainly going to have some kind of an effect and it’s good additional information to have. Thank you; +1 karma.
* There are plenty of other status claims and good things you can say about yourself that don’t provoke negative reactions—see the thought experiments in this thread.
Hmm, the problem with these is that nice, awesome, wonderful and beautiful all refer to traits that are too small in scope or too vague to make good identity claims.
I would argue that 1) “too vague” is just a subclass of “claims to be more objective than is warranted” and 2) “gifted” is in fact as vague as the other examples.
I think what you’re telling me in the last paragraph is “Making claims about your IQ makes you sound dodgy because people feel really skeptical about IQ scores.”
Yes, but that’s not all of it. The point is that because people are skeptical about IQ, making a claim about your IQ says (to such people) “I think I am objectively better, but I’m basing that claim on something which cannot support it”.
I want to try a different angle. Two questions:
Three, sir.
If you do not see any way to make such a claim without a high risk, then why do you think that is?
Because you can’t disentangle such a claim from a claim of being objectively superior (and specifically, an unjustified claim of being objectively superior). Being nice or beautiful can certainly influence your personality, views, or lifestyle and you can’t go around claiming those either. It’s not a problem unique to giftedness.
There’s plenty of uncertainty when comparing numbers when there’s uncertainty in how the numbers were generated. IQ tests aren’t completely uniform across space and time. Worst case, 170 IQ Joe might have taken some random online test.
I think the simplest explanation is the Bayesian one: most people who introduce themselves using their IQ are socially inept, so introducing yourself using your IQ is Bayesian evidence of social ineptitude and other unpleasant things.
How about, “I’m Joe and I make $200,000 a year”? or; “I’m Joe and I drive a 2011 Lexus”?
If someone needs to be that specific about themselves, people are right to wonder about that person’s motives. There is information we have about ourselves that’s not supposed to be secret, but it is considered private- no the first thing you say aloud at a party.
Context is important here too: A mensa board is unlikely to take offense with an IQ comment. If you talk about your interest in DeviantArt, people might want you to be even more specific. A geneology board is a good place to talk about one’s ancestry.
In each case, it’s people’s interpretation of Joe’s social ability that we are reacting to, not just what he’s saying.
What’s wrong with “I’m Joe and I’m doing my doctorate in string theory”? People do pick on IQ-boasters specficially, and there are reasons for that.
I don’t know, but there definitely IS something wrong with it. “I’m doing my doctorate in string theory” quite often gets responded to by “so you’re saying you’ll never do anything practical, then”, or the like.
Individual intelligence differences are NOT thought of as okay. Try introducing yourself on a random message board with each of these and see what happens:
Hi, I’m Joe and the main thing I’m good at is art.
Hi, I’m Joe and I’m proud of my Native American ancestry.
Hi, I’m Joe and my IQ is 170.
One of these is not like the other two. How about:
Hi, I’m Joe and I’m good at 3D games (or some other activity that is representative of high IQ scores). This replaces the apparent status seeking with a proper introduction.
This statement strikes you as having a major, obvious difference. If it’s so obvious, then there probably really is a difference, right? Well obviousness has a lot in common with first impressions—they’re both instant, they’re both compelling, and they both happen so fast that when you first experience them, there hasn’t been any time to scrutinize them yet.
This “one of these is not like the other” reaction IS the experience of bias. By arguing that one statement is different, you have underlined your bias.
One way to determine whether there is any bias in the way people interpret mentions of giftedness and IQ is to attempt to conceive of contexts in which they’ll be perceived neutrally. If this is a lot harder than presenting things like gender and race, then this may indicate bias.
Try coming up with some contexts in which a mention of IQ or giftedness will be perceived neutrally—without “cheating” by applying an opposite bias (like wrapping it in a sugar coating by telling people you’re an example of a Mensan who isn’t elitist for instance) or suppressing the information (for instance waiting until someone asks, or hiding it from everyone except your developmental psychologist) and without using code words to obscure it (Because evidently, my question is not always being interpreted as a request to know a way to talk about it directly.) If you have to hide the information to avoid being chided, that’s basically the definition of oppression, and how do you get oppression without bias?
What I want to know is “How do you freely tell people you’re gifted or have a high IQ in a way that is entirely neutral?”
What I want to know is “How do you freely tell people you’re gifted or have a high IQ in a way that is entirely neutral?”
Not sure why you ignored my original example. As I said, you tell them that you are good at something that implies high IQ score, but is not perceived as status seeking. “Hi, I’m Joe and the main thing I’m good at is art.” is not the same as “I draw better than 99.9998% of all people”, which would be the equivalent of “my IQ is 170”, and would also be perceived as status seeking.
That doesn’t qualify as an example of how to talk about IQ and giftedness. You’re talking about 3D games. Your suggestion was to hide the fact that you’re talking about IQ by talking in code. That’s why I ignored the example—I didn’t see that you were trying to present me with a neutral IQ statement.
I’m still waiting to see whether anyone can come up with a way to freely tell people you’re gifted or have a high IQ in a way that sounds neutral—without cheating in any way. Without sugar coating, without having to hide it, and without using code words to obscure it (Because evidently, my question was not interpreted as a request to know a way to talk about it directly.) . (:
Saying you’re proud of your Native American ancestry often won’t be interpreted as a claim of superiority because such statements are saiid in a social context where everyone knows that Native Americans have suffered and saying you’re proud of your ancestry is not asserting that you’re superior, but rather than you’re not inferior.
Furthermore, to the extent that it is a claim of superiority but objecting to it will be called racist, that’s a problem with the ease of making accusations of racism, not a problem with the objection.
People act like this prejudice against people with a high IQ is okay and that gifted people should behave like an oppressed minority by hiding their difference.
There isn’t prejudice against people with a high IQ. There’s prejudice against stating that you have a high IQ, unlike for minorities, where even minorities that try to “pass” for the majority will be the target of prejudice if found out.
And there’s only prejudice against stating you have a high IQ because stating you have a high IQ is stating that you are superior based on flimsy reasons. (And no, you can’t state your IQ without claiming you’re superior, since you can’t escape the social context.)
There isn’t prejudice against people with a high IQ.
Perhaps you intended that within a specific context from the comment above like “These introduction examples don’t cause a problem because of prejudice, but because they sound like claims to superiority”, in which case I’d agree with you. However, I disagree about whether there exists prejudice against people with high IQs in the broader context. If that’s truly what you meant, I’d be happy to elaborate, but please specify so I am not accidentally arguing with a strawman.
And no, you can’t state your IQ without claiming you’re superior, since you can’t escape the social context.
I am very interested in this concept of superiority, because “superiority” seems to be an important key here. What does it mean to you? If a person is superior, is it okay to treat them differently? What sort of differently and why? If someone makes a claim to superiority, how do you think people should react, and why?
Perhaps you intended that within a specific context from the comment above like “These introduction examples don’t cause a problem because of prejudice, but because they sound like claims to superiority”, in which case I’d agree with you.
I’m sure you could find one specific example in the world of someone prejudiced against someone because of high IQ, but I’d say that in general, there isn’t such prejudice. There may be prejudice against intelligence, but that’s not the same thing, and even that only exists in a few limited situations.
If a person is superior, is it okay to treat them differently?
I don’t see the relevance. A claim of superiority (especially an unwarranted one) isn’t the same thing as actual superiority.
I’m sure you could find one specific example in the world of someone prejudiced against someone because of high IQ, but I’d say that in general, there isn’t such prejudice. There may be prejudice against intelligence, but that’s not the same thing, and even that only exists in a few limited situations.
I’m not clear what the difference here is between being prejudiced against someone because of IQ, and because of intelligence; since IQ is a pretty good measure of intelligence, it’d be pretty hard to be prejudiced against one and not the other...
In any case, there do seem to be historically a lot of cases of anti-intellectualism (I like the Khmer Rouge targeting people with glasses), and traditional societies do favor high Openness a lot less than modern societies (see Miller).
That subclause is doing an awful lot of work in your argument.
I’d say that IQ measures part of what most people consider intelligence, but isn’t the same as it, and even as a measure of that it isn’t an exact measure.
That subclause is doing an awful lot of work in your argument.
Well, it’s a good thing we’ve got a century or so of work on the positive manifold/g. I wouldn’t want to make anything but one of the best established tests do so much work in my argument!
I’d say that IQ measures part of what most people consider intelligence, but isn’t the same as it, and even as a measure of that it isn’t an exact measure.
It does not measure all cognitive traits, no, and as a measure it has a pretty precisely known amount of unreliability in it.
Yet I fail to see how either of your sentences are a reply to my comment.
The issue is more the circumstances that lead to talking about your IQ. In an argument about something else, it is almost certainly an appeal to authority, and should be avoided. Brought up out of the blue it -is- socially inept. A discussion which turns to IQ might be an appropriate place to bring it up. (I bring up my own exceptional IQ as an argument against elitism or eugenics, such as people who think low-IQ people shouldn’t be allowed to reproduce. “Do you want me applying the same standard you’re applying to other people to you?” is a pretty effective argument when you’re more standard deviations above the other person than they are over the people they think are too stupid to reproduce/make their own decisions.)
I agree that using IQ as an appeal to authority will draw negative attention, and that bringing it up in order to use yourself as an example of a smart person who isn’t elitist would probably go over very well. But those examples are black and white. You’re not making distinctions outside the black and white “easy to interpret” areas where people begin to behave funny, so, in effect, you’re ignoring the problem I presented.
As for your “out of nowhere” comment, what would they do if I said “I’m a woman.” out of nowhere? What if I said “I’m African-American.” If they don’t react in a negative way to those, but they DO react in a negative way when IQ is brought up, that says something. Why do they react to it negatively, instead of neutrally, when there is no context in which to interpret?
Joe with the IQ of 170 will be called arrogant, a liar, an elitist, treated like a scam artist, or told he has no social skills. That’s not telling Joe he’s okay. That’s telling Joe not to talk about his difference. Let’s explore what it means to be told you can’t talk about your difference for a moment. Imagine going into a room and saying each of the following...
It’s worse then that: What do you think they think you are thinking?
People generally assume purpose, correctly or incorrectly. If you bring up your IQ, your audience is going to ask themselves -why- you are bringing up your IQ. And they’re unlikely to find any good reasons, which leave only the bad.
(Not to mention that most people who bring up IQ -are- socially inept, precisely because of social policies against bringing up IQ. It’s unfortunately a stable equilibrium. You’d need a popular movement to change the social mores there, and I don’t think most people are going to care enough to get involved in it, compared to the other social problems our society faces.)
Indeed. At the usual standard deviation norm of ~15, a 220 IQ would be 8 standard deviations out and make him ~1 in 8*10^14 (100 trillion).
Inasmuch as only 100 billion humans are estimated to have ever lived, the overwhelming majority of that having an average IQ far lower than 100 and so being essentially irrelevant, we can conclude that he is either lying or from the future.
220+ IQ scores DO happen—due to the fact that IQ tests cannot be made accurate for such an uncommon group of people, they’re far more common than they’re mathematically supposed to be. A collection of research on that can be found online right here:
I’ve actually talked with people in that IQ vicinity, and based on the absolutely sublime intelligent conversation they’re capable of providing, and considering the likelihood of specifically them being dishonest about that within the context of their other behaviors, I just don’t think they’re lying.
Superintelligent people do exist. And they have to actually BE somewhere, right? Where do they go?
Do you think that none of them would be attracted to a website like LessWrong? I think this site is likely to be a genius magnet.
If it turns out that this person’s IQ really is over 220, I totally want to have intelligent conversation with them. If you give people the benefit of the doubt in situations like this, sometimes the result is more than worth the effort to withhold judgment for a while.
P.S. Yes, I realize the claim is that it was estimated at over 220, not that they received that score. The obvious argument here is “What professional would estimate it that high knowing how rare those scores are SUPPOSED to be?” but if you’re not basing your estimation on observations about people who have received that score, all you are left with is attempting to deduce the characteristics of a person with such an IQ out of the numbers themselves, with no actual experience to base it on. Or, this person may be referring to the practice of adjusting a young child’s IQ score upward in order to reflect the age at which they took the test. For instance, if you are 2 years old and get an IQ of 100 on an IQ test, that’s really incredible. You definitely have to give that kid a higher score than 100. The only way I know of to get a score in the 200 ballpark is to have that sort of age adjustment done after taking the test with the highest limit before a certain age.
220+ IQ scores DO happen—due to the fact that IQ tests cannot be made accurate for such an uncommon group of people, they’re far more common than they’re mathematically supposed to be. A collection of research on that can be found online right here: http://hiqnews.megafoundation.org/Terman_Summary.htm …You definitely have to give that kid a higher score than 100. The only way I know of to get a score in the 200 ballpark is to have that sort of age adjustment done after taking the test with the highest limit before a certain age.
And that’s a limitation of the tests being ratio tests or not being normed on the sufficiently large population they’re supposed to be normed on. (Why are all the datapoints on that page so old?) That’s why modern IQ tests come with listed ceilings! ‘Past this point, who knows what it’s measuring if anything’. With a short test, even random guessing will eventually throw up some remarkable scores...
I’ve actually talked with people in that IQ vicinity, and based on the absolutely sublime intelligent conversation they’re capable of providing, and considering the likelihood of specifically them being dishonest about that within the context of their other behaviors, I just don’t think they’re lying.
Perfectly consistent with them having more earthly IQs >140. (If even that; I have been reading up on psychopathy lately, and one of the diagnosable traits is being gifted conversationalists and creators of emotional ‘bonds’, despite psychopathy being, if correlated with IQ at all, negatively correlated.)
Living people with 220+ IQs do exist—you say the words “modern IQ tests” as if the ratio tests were invented in the dark ages. This only changed in recent decades. Regardless of which method is the best, the fact that there are plenty of people still alive today who can honestly claim that they were given an IQ score that high means that this person is not automatically a liar or “from the future”.
“Perfectly consistent with them having more earthly IQs >140”
Which is perfectly consistent with them having IQs over 220, if you think about it...
And, no, they weren’t like the people with scores of 140. There are differences that they have that I have not encountered in anyone else. Things stood out.
Why are you bringing up psychopathy? That’s totally out of left field. Do you mean to imply that people claiming that IQ are probably psychopaths?
Living people with 220+ IQs do exist—you say the words “modern IQ tests” as if the ratio tests were invented in the dark ages. This only changed in recent decades.
Very well then, let us discuss the cases of people recorded to be hundreds of years old by less than modern documentation, like Methuselah as verified by the Book of Genesis. Wait, you don’t think people actually live to thousands of years? But you just said we can use datapoints from any kind of test we please!
Whatever cutoff you choose to exclude things like Genesis or scientific results from hundreds of years ago while still including largely obsolete ratio tests, I will shift it slightly to include only better IQ tests. I think this is perfectly legitimate, as one should strive to use the best available data, and regard your ‘but old obsolete scores!’ as quibbling.
Which is perfectly consistent with them having IQs over 220, if you think about it...
And it’s also consistent with IQs over 9000!!!
Occam’s razor. Use it, love it. The base rate of IQs like 140 are by definition higher than >220.
There are differences that they have that I have not encountered in anyone else. Things stood out.
“But I was so impressed, don’t you understand?” You’ll pardon me if I ignore some rubbish anecdotes about them seeming like shining special snowflakes.
Why are you bringing up psychopathy? That’s totally out of left field. Do you mean to imply that people claiming that IQ are probably psychopaths?
My argument was perfectly clear: brilliant conversation is far from a flawless indicator of intelligence. That you don’t understand why I would bring up an example of how this indicator can fail catastrophically or interpret it as implying that...
More fun base-rate reasoning: psychopaths make up 1-2% of the population, and most are great manipulators; the top 1% of the population IQ-wise is sometimes taken as being the genius fragment; even if we assume the 1% IQ are all gifted conversationalists, if all we know about someone is their gifted conversation, we wind up inferring that they are equally or more likely to be a psychopath than a genius!
Looking closer, I think there are several points of confusion. Neither of us carefully distinguished between meanings like “An IQ score / estimation that really was that high but not accurate.” versus “An IQ score / estimation that high that is NOT accurate.” and I guess that neither of us noticed the possibility for multiple meanings. We also did not address the possibility that this person’s (inaccurate) IQ could be that high while incidentally, the person does have an intelligence level to truly match an IQ of 220. That sort of person would be more likely to get an IQ of 220 on a test/estimate, no? There may be people with that (true) IQ who also have a nearby (inaccurate) IQ result to match it. After all, that is what the developmental psychologists are aiming for—that they’re right sometimes but not all the time is possible.
Given that IQ is a measurement of intelligence, and there is no way to measure a number that is that high, all 4 apply. If you are still confused about the meaning of the verb “measure”, here it is:
to ascertain the extent, dimensions, quantity, capacity, etc., of, especially by comparison with a standard
Agreed: You can’t create an accurate IQ test for that.
Disagreed: You can’t generate an estimate IQ that high. Estimates can be made, but their accuracy can’t be verified. Estimates are, by definition, an approximation. An estimated IQ that high is not automatically invalid, as long as it’s expressed as an estimate, the statement can still be true.
Disagreed: None of the IQ tests developed provide any method to generate an IQ that high. Some IQ tests can be adjusted upward based on a child’s age. I’m not claiming it’s accurate. I’m claiming it exists.
Disagreed: You can’t have an IQ that high. Saying a person can’t get an IQ score that high is not the same thing as saying they can’t get an IQ that high. You can be born with an intelligence level beyond what is statistically probable. Whether it can be measured may be another story. But it can still happen. William Sidis is my cite for that—his estimated IQ was 250-300. If you read enough about developmental psychology, you’ll probably agree that Sidis not only qualifies as a person having abilities consistent with what an person with an IQ of > 220 should have, but that he had such great abilities that by using him as an example I am doing something more along the lines of killing an ant with a nuke. You can claim that because it’s improbable, it can’t happen, but that’s would be an appeal to probability (or a reverse of that appeal, if you want to be really technical.)
Since IQ scores are calculated to conform to a normal distribution, your IQ is in exact correspondence with your percentile ranking in the general population. If f(x) is the CDF of the Normal(100,15) distribution, and your percentile ranking is p, then your “true IQ” is precisely the value of x such that f(x)=p. Since there are only roughly 7 billion people alive, the smartest person on Earth is ranked above 99.99999998578% of other people, which corresponds to an IQ of 195. If we include all people that have ever lived (I believe the number is roughly 100 billion), the smartest would have an IQ of 201.
William Sidis’s IQ of 250-300 is using a different scale, which is no longer used: it claims that his intellectual age, as a child at the time he took the exam (if in fact he did, there is some doubt about this) was 2.5 to 3 times his physical age. This isn’t really a meaningful assessment of how smart he was as an adult, nor does it have any relationship to the modern system of IQ scores (on a normal curve, such a score is 1 in 10^23, which I think we all agree is ridiculous).
I suppose that if you mean that it is possible to make an invalid extrapolation based on age adjustment, then you are right, it is indeed possible, if meaningless. It is not, however, how IQ is measured (by comparing how well you did vs other people who took the same test).
Disagreed: You can’t have an IQ that high. Saying a person can’t get an IQ score that high is not the same thing as saying they can’t get an IQ that high.
It is exactly the same thing, because IQ is not intelligence, it’s one (not very accurate) way to measure it. Thus there is no such thing as person’s IQ, only person’s IQ score. Just because IQ is commonly confused with intelligence, does not mean it is the same thing.
You can estimate someone’s IQ testing skills from one or more of their IQ test scores, and this skill is indeed a property of (your model of) the individual, not of a piece of paper with the number on it, and this skill is correlated with other measures of intelligence. This skill can conceivably be shorted to “person’s IQ”. However, there is no standard procedure of calculating anything like that (should it be the average? mode? geometric mean? maximum? minimum? any of those have merits, depending on your model of how the hypothetical innate IQ testing skill is translated into IQ test scores).
William Sidis is my cite for that—his estimated IQ was 250-300
Funny that you bring him up. Says Wikipedia:
never before have I found a topic so satiated with lies, myths, half-truths, exaggerations, and other forms of misinformation as is in the history behind William Sidis
I suppose that if you mean that it is possible to make an invalid extrapolation based on age adjustment, then you are right, it is indeed possible, if meaningless.
It is possible, and they’ve done it. Whether it is meaningless is outside the scope of our particular debate as, if I remember correctly, we started arguing after Gwern said that claiming an IQ of 220+ is proof that a person is “either a lying or from the future”.
So, this supports my point that such a claim is not proof that a person is lying. I’ll just disregard the “from the future” comment for now. ;)
It is not, however, how IQ is measured (by comparing how well you did vs other people who took the same test).
Not sure if you’re saying “IQ test scores aren’t generated based on how you compare.” or, within the context of the previous sentence “IQ tests are not scored using age adjustment.”
For the former, you’re partly right and partly wrong. The ratio tests were scored using a bell curve. If your IQ was relatively close to normal, you’d get a score that would tell you how you compare to average. If your IQ was super high like 160, it was likely to be inaccurate, because those people are rare.
As for age adjustments—of course they make age adjustments. Otherwise, how would they test children of different ages on the same test? If a child of the age of 3 gets the same questions right as children who are 10 years old, do you give the ten year olds a toddler’s score or do you give the toddler a score closer to that of a ten year old? It would be inappropriate to imply that the ten year olds and the toddler have the same amount of intelligence.
I imagine this is fairly meaningful at least when it concerns testing average children of different ages, since it’s not too difficult to find lots of children to make the test more accurate with. When it comes to testing child prodigies, the exact score (say “exactly 223” or something) would be meaningless, but the fact that, say, a 7 year old got a perfect score on an IQ test suitable for adults, we’ll say, that would be very meaningful—though their score should be taken as more of a ballpark figure than an exact measurement.
Saying a person can’t get an IQ score that high is not the same thing as saying they can’t get an IQ that high.
It is exactly the same thing, because IQ is not intelligence, it’s one (not very accurate) way to measure it. Thus there is no such thing as person’s IQ, only person’s IQ score. Just because IQ is commonly confused with intelligence, does not mean it is the same thing.
It depends on how you use the word in the sentence. You make a distinction between IQ and intelligence which is good, but I am making a different distinction. Even if I haven’t measured the number of degrees Fahrenheit in a particular igloo near the North pole, that does not mean it has no temperature or that it’s temperature does not correspond to a specific number of degrees Fahrenheit. This is more like the debate “If a tree falls in a forest does it make a sound?”—my answer is yes because I’m using a definition that involves physics, disrupted air waves and decibels. Just because you didn’t measure the number of decibels doesn’t mean they weren’t there.
the point
Anyway, your point is “it’s physically impossible to measure an IQ score that high” but that does nothing to refute my point that “this claim is not proof the person is a liar.”
brilliant conversation is far from a flawless indicator of intelligence
Maybe, but if someone talks to me about quantum field theory and actually makes sense, my posterior probability that their IQ is < 80 suddenly goes down to epsilon.
But how do you know that? Plenty of nutters sound convincing on quantum matters (as judging by the sales into millions of such folk as Deepak Chopra and abominations like The Dancing Wu-li Masters), so I assume you have some expertise in the matter—and now you’re just judging based on that. (And what if they sound convincing on a topic you have no expertise in...)
I think one of the main reason they “sound“ convincing (though the readers’ ignorance is also a necessary condition) is motivated cognition: the kind of people who read such books would like to believe what they say. Lose that, and your strength as a rationalist kicks in. (And anyway, I don’t think Chopra et al. are idiots; they are either misguided or bullshitting the readers for fun and profit.)
And what if they sound convincing on a topic you have no expertise in
I’d have to test that. Anyone willing to give me a few paragraphs of either something “serious” or crackpottery (or a spoof à la Sokal), without telling me which it is, about a topic other than physics?
More fun base-rate reasoning: psychopaths make up 1-2% of the population, and most are great manipulators; the top 1% of the population IQ-wise is sometimes taken as being the genius fragment; even if we assume the 1% IQ are all gifted conversationalists, if all we know about someone is their gifted conversation, we wind up inferring that they are equally or more likely to be a psychopath than a genius!
I’m actually somewhat curious about the degree overlap between those two groups.
Well, assuming complete independence would just be 1% 1%; but there does seem to be a slight negative correlation between psychopathy & IQ. Complicating matters is Hare and Babiak’s research into business psychopaths, where they estimate they are over-represented by a factor of 2-3 or so, suggesting that the negative correlation may be skewed by the ‘failures’ in prison samples (which are the samples for most studies, for obvious reasons); smarter psychopaths are far less likely to resort to violence\*, further hindering identification (since impulsive violence is one of the major diagnostic hallmarks). To the extent that the gifted 1% avoid business, that may restore a negative correlation / underepresentation. Finally, psychopath’s impulsivity and few long-range goals or efforts (another part of the diagnosis along with glibness/manipulation) suggests that to the extent genuine objective achievements cause you to be considered a gifted 1%, we can expect still more underrepresentation*.
So guesstimating further, I’d say in a population of 300m people (eg. the US), we could expect substantially fewer than 30,000 gifted psychopaths (0.01 0.01 300,000,000). Phew!
On the other hand, they would be the ones who would do the most damage and be least likely to ever be diagnosed, so we may never know for sure...
* Which makes me wonder about high IQ societies, now that I think about it. My vague impression was that they tend to collect those with poor social skills, and also with fewer objective accomplishments & success. So if you meet someone in a high IQ societies who seems very charming and empathetic but lacks objective accomplishments, just how much does this increase the psychopath possibility over the 1% base rate..? ** Covered multiple times in the Handbook; first relevant paper seems to be “Psychopathy and Aggression”, Porter & Woodworth.
IQ is defined to be a normal distribution with mu = 100 and sigma = 15, so “IQ 220” means ‘99.9999999999999th percentile¹’; if more than a person in 10^15 gets such a score, then the test is miscalibrated. (But most tests are, beyond a few standard deviations away from the mean.)
I didn’t count the nines, I just copied and pasted the output of pr norm(8) in gnuplot and moved the decimal point.
I’m not sure what a super intelligent thought would look like; there’s a limit on how intelligent a thought could be, as a thought that gets too clever ceases to be clever at all. But if that’s your internal reaction as well, I don’t have any room to argue/criticize on this front, as you’re being fully consistent.
(Strictly speaking, incidentally, any score above 180 is merely an estimate; IQ tests cease to perform reliably above that level.)
I loved your experiment. (: As for what a super-intelligent thought would look like, there are multiple ways of interpreting you:
You might be saying that a person with an IQ of 220 could be prone to over-thinking things. In that case, it would cease to qualify as cleverness due to a failure to maintain a good cost-benefit ratio between the amount of brainpower put in and the results coming out.
You may mean that if someone were to say something significantly more clever than what is commonly thought of as “clever” it may not be recognized as such, may not even be observable to most minds once pointed out, and therefore might never end up recognized as “clever” by anyone.
There’s a much more interesting possibility—that a super-intelligent thought may transcend cleverness, take on emergent properties, or otherwise be so advanced that our current definitions of intelligence can’t express it.
I agree that there are cases where claiming high IQ is an exception to some social rules, but I think that a lot of the differences between that and the other self-claims you use as examples here come down to a social norm against unsolicited boasting.
“The main thing I’m good at is art” isn’t a boast, because it makes no claim about how good the individual is at art relative to other individuals, or about the relative value of art to other talents. You wouldn’t assume this person is claiming superiority to someone else who would say that “my main talent is singing,” for instance.
A more comparable statement would be introducing oneself with the claim “I’m Joe, and I can bench press 500 pounds.”
To contribute my analogy, I think introducing yourself by saying “Hi, my IQ is 170” is kinda like introducing yourself by saying “Hi, my net worth is $100 million”, which would definitely be obnoxious. Though the IQ thing is maybe even more obnoxious to me because at least you had to make the money yourself, whereas the IQ you got almost purely as a matter of luck.
I’m glad you think individual intelligence differences are okay.
Did you even read the post? He doesn’t think they’re okay:
Am I the only one who’s every bit as horrified by the proposition that there’s any way whatsoever to be screwed before you even start, whether it’s genes or lead-based paint or Down’s Syndrome?
For clarity: My interpretation of his main point is “the rest of the world seems to think that individual genetic differences are okay” and my main point in that comment is “Individual intelligence differences are NOT thought of as okay (by the rest of the world).”
The sentence you singled out is an oversimplified version of what I was actually trying to convey. What I was trying to convey was “I’m glad you think it’s okay with the rest of the world for people to talk about their intelligence differences, but it’s not okay.” It looks like my verbal processor took a shortcut without me noticing it. I’ll fix that to prevent any confusion. Thanks for pointing it out.
I don’t appreciate hearing “Did you even read the post?” yes, I read the post (and responded to other aspects of it also).
How would that play out with athletic accomplishments?
Compare: I’m Joe, and I have an Olympic gold medal in [famous|obscure] sport. I’m Joe, and I just finished a marathon. I’m Joe, and I’ve won a local marathon. I’m Joe, and I run half a dozen marathons a year
One more: I have the optimal physiology for [some sport]. I think this is the closest to announcing a a high IQ..
I am not a sports person, so I have no idea, but I suspect they’d be cheered on. Unless they were seen as part of an enemy team. I think people feel a sense of pride in the people that play on local teams. My imagination says that might go something like this: “That guy’s probably eaten some of the hotdogs from the factory I work in. I probably played some small part in this famous guy’s awesome sports abilities somehow.”
I’m really itching to do an experiment now. (: Maybe I will...
Individual intelligence differences are NOT thought of as okay. Try introducing yourself on a random message board with each of these and see what happens:
Hi, I’m Joe and the main thing I’m good at is art.
Hi, I’m Joe and I’m proud of my Native American ancestry.
Hi, I’m Joe and my IQ is 170.
Joe with the IQ of 170 will be called arrogant, a liar, an elitist, treated like a scam artist, or told he has no social skills. That’s not telling Joe he’s okay. That’s telling Joe not to talk about his difference. Let’s explore what it means to be told you can’t talk about your difference for a moment. Imagine going into a room and saying each of the following:
Hey, don’t say you’ve got Native American blood, that’s socially inept.
^ This comment will surely be interpreted as racism.
Hey, don’t say you’re good at art, you’re a liar.
^ This comment will be interpreted as an extremely rude or even oppressive comment. Making judgments about whether artists are “good” or “bad” is taboo and considered, by many, to be oppressive to self-expression.
Hey, don’t say your IQ is 170, don’t be an elitist.
^ This comment prejudges the person. It assumes that they’re an elitist when they’re just talking about an intellectual difference that doesn’t prove anything about your personality.
So, why doesn’t Joe get to have the same freedom to express himself without society oppressing that? Why doesn’t he get to talk about his difference without expecting prejudiced remarks that jump to conclusions about who he is?
We have a million excuses for this. “People feel threatened by intellect.” Well, they used to feel threatened by black people, but that doesn’t excuse society from working on removing their prejudices about black people and it doesn’t excuse them from working on removing their prejudices about gifted people.
“That’s just not polite.” ← This is an interesting excuse. I’ll explain why:
Imagine you go into a room and say “Hi, I’m white.” (I realize that people of any race may read this comment, I am asking you to humor my hypothetical situation for a moment.)
Your race is evident. This is a neutral statement of fact.
If someone tells you “That’s just not polite.” why are they saying that? They’re probably confusing it with an expression of the white pride attitude that is associated with the KKK. They’re assuming that you’re prejudiced.
What if you went up to a bunch of random white people and accused them of hating black people? Since this doesn’t happen frequently, they’d probably be mostly bewildered. But imagine if random people did that to them every day.
Prejudice is a very serious offense to be accused of. It would stress them out. They’d wonder what kinds of social and career opportunities they might be missing out on. They might become more cautious to guard their physical safety—after all, prejudice is the kind of thing people get really heated about and some people get violent when they’re upset. They’d start to hide hints that they’re white on things like resumes. They would be oppressed by an assumption that they’re prejudiced, just the same way that they’d be oppressed by an assumption that they’re all criminals.
Accusing a person of prejudice simply for being part of a certain group is, in and of itself, prejudiced. That’s prejudging them based on some trait that they can’t control, not on their behavior. Yet, if you claim to have a high IQ, you are very likely to be accused of elitism. People act like this prejudice against people with a high IQ is okay and that gifted people should behave like an oppressed minority by hiding their difference.
I’m glad you think it’s okay with the rest of the world for people to talk about their intelligence differences, I think that’s okay. But a looooooot of people don’t!
My personal reaction seems to be traceable to a potential vs achievement view of status.
Imagine a 10 year old who introduces himself and says he’s been tested and found to be gifted/~150 IQ. My intuitive reaction is to be a little happy for the kid and maybe talk to him.
Imagine a 40 year old who introduces himself to the group and says he’s been tested at 150; same IQ, same introduction, but my reaction is instantly negative—because why did he introduce himself based on his IQ? At age 40, shouldn’t he have something to show for it, some personal identity beyond ‘a smart person’? Be a doctor, a researcher somewhere, an entrepreneur, etc. His failure to mention anything more substantive seems like decent evidence that there is nothing better to mention, and he’s simply failed at life—yet he still seems to think a lot of himself. An arrogant failure is not someone I wish to know or think highly of, and so I don’t.
The most important difference here is that the first two statements, in addition to being boasts, also convey a non-boasting fact about the particular area you are interested in. For example “I’m good at art” strikes me less as conveying information about being especially talented, as saying that art is the particular subject you like and work on.
Compare someone who goes into an artists’ workshop or an art class or something. They introduce themselves with “Hi, I’m Joe, and I’m really good at art.” Now it is boasting. Everyone there is interested in art, and Joe is making a claim of being especially good at it compared to all the other artists. (This is even more true if we add some kind of number or statistic to it. “Hi, I’m Joe, and I’m in the 99th percentile for art skills.”. Now he’s definitely boasting, since the statistic doesn’t do anything to help describe his interest.)
Intelligence is very general, and it’s something you have rather than something you’re interested in. That might make claims to it seem more boastful.
“I am a woman”—is that a boast? No, it’s just a fact.
“I am African American”—is that a boast?
“I am white.”—is that a boast? It could be. Why do we perceive it that way?
All three are a difference you might have, rather than a thing you’re interested in. They are also all things that can influence you. Gender stereotypes are criticized for numerous reasons, and I don’t think they’re perfect, but we can’t deny that a lot of men and women have a set of differences they associate with gender. For many, it’s part of their identity. At times, members of both genders have had issues with excessive pride in their gender such that it became a sort of prejudice against and oppression of the other gender. Yet, when I say “I am a woman.” does it sound like a boast? Does any part of your mind want to jump to the conclusion that I am a feminazi or a man hater? Where does this perception of excessive pride come from when people talk about giftedness?
You might argue “It implies you’re really good at something”—okay, so does the phrase “I’m a doctor.”
If being good at something makes a statement a boast, why is it okay to say “I’m a doctor.” as part of an introduction?
That you perceive the example IQ statement as a boast is a sign of bias. How do you know that it is a boast? It isn’t objective. It is a subjective sense. You’re guessing at the person’s motive. If you wouldn’t guess the same motive for “I’m a woman.” and “I’m a doctor.” then why do you guess it for “My IQ is 170.”?
Specifically when it comes to speaking about IQ and giftedness, I want to know how we discern the difference between boasting and making a neutral statement of fact about what makes one different? Put another way, here is the problem: Being gifted and/or having a high IQ makes one different. It frequently makes sense to refer to this difference in order to provide a context in which to be correctly understood. Some examples: Gifted people are frequently misdiagnosed with mental disorders. They have numerous traits (like being really intense and sensitive) that make them look a bit crazy—but they’re not necessarily crazy, even though they may have these unusual traits. Gifted people tend to have different interests and are more likely to have certain personality traits. People who are gifted enough sometimes feel like outsiders, or aliens—they feel completely different. Saying “I’m gifted.” could be a shortcut way to refer to all of those differences and others and give people an idea of how to interact with them and how to interpret their different behaviors without having to explain every single one of them individually. The same way that people tend to be gentler to women, who tend to identify as sensitive, but yet don’t do that to men, because many men interpret it as condescension.
There must be thousands of different ways we interpret the people around us in order to meet in the middle that makes our interactions go far more smoothly… think of all the protocols we follow when we’re around children, or people of a different religion. Gifted people are not able to request that people attempt to get along with them more smoothly by simply referring to their set of differences. Imagine if a computer could not specify it’s protocol. This wreaks all sorts of havoc. This could be part of why we hear that gifted people feel misunderstood, alienated, and why they’re labelled as having “social skills issues”—if OTHER people aren’t trying to bridge the gap, and they’re not allowed to freely discuss their difference and it’s details, it makes it a lot harder for everybody to get along.
It’s not easy to say you’re gifted in such a way that it does not make people upset. All of the ways that I know of involve some sort of compensation for bias. That is what tells me that people are biased about statements of IQ and giftedness. People frequently assume the person’s motive is to boast, as if there’s no other reason you would want to mention it.
Can you think of a way that a person can freely state that they’re gifted, or have a high IQ, and make it sound neutral, without sugar-coating, without having to hide it, and without using code words to obscure it, or cheating in some other way?
If not, then something is off, isn’t it? If we can’t think of a way to present it neutrally, or it turns out to be extremely hard, this would be a sign that our cultural perceptions of speaking about high IQ and giftedness contain assumptions, am I right?
It needn’t be. For example, if this is said at a gathering at which trans folk are particularly visible, it might be perceived as a boast, since the whole question of who is and isn’t a woman is foregrounded and has status associated with it. (Of course, at most gatherings this is not a reading that would occur to anyone, since trans folk are not typically visible.)
Again, it depends. In a gathering where being an African American is a high-status marker within the group, it can be.
Again, in gatherings where being white is a high-status marker within the group, it’s a boast. For most of LW’s readers, this is probably far more common than either of the other two examples.
In a gathering where high intelligence is a status marker, no.
Claiming a high-status marker within a group is never a neutral move.
Sure. In particular, as I’ve said, I think the assumptions they contain is that high IQ and giftedness are status markers.
Hiding IQ is the rule not the exception, do you agree with that? I agree that talking about just about any trait might be perceived as boastful or rude in very specific contexts. But when something isn’t okay to talk about in most contexts, that’s how we know that there’s a widespread bias that can be said to be cultural. Do you agree with this?
What if I introduced myself with “Hi, I’m Sue. I like sports and I am a doctor. What about you?”
That would be interpreted as talking about a difference you have that affects who you are, not a boast, am I right?
Okay, that’s a really good point. To be clear, you do agree with me, then, that there is a cultural bias against talking about giftedness and IQ—am I correct?
I’m also interested in knowing whether you agree with these:
If talking about high IQ and giftedness are usually seen as a status marker, this makes them socially unacceptable to talk about most of the time.
Do you agree that when both of these conditions are true, it is sign of oppression:
A.) There is a group of people that have significant social differences, for example, how the queer community dates differently from and sometimes express gender differently from hetero people.
B.) It is socially unacceptable to talk about the difference that makes them part of the group, for instance, the “Don’t ask, don’t tell.” policy that the U.S. military had.
Do you agree that gifted / high IQ people meet the two definitions above of having significant social differences, and that it is considered socially unacceptable for them to talk freely about their differences? If so, then does this qualify as a form of oppression? Fine distinction: I don’t think that most people KNOW they’re doing something that may be considered oppressive. To me, if a prejudiced person doesn’t see their prejudices as prejudiced, it doesn’t mean that their behavior doesn’t oppress the people they’re prejudiced against. That just means their oppression is unintentional.
I don’t blame people for the prejudice that I see. But that doesn’t make it any less real to me.
Depends on the social group. I hang out in a number of social circles where signalling high intelligence is highly endorsed. But, sure, I agree that’s the exception and not the rule; in most social circles, signalling high intelligence is seen as a status grab.
Sure.
Again, that depends on the status implications of those claims in the context of the group you’re introducing yourself to. There are many contexts in which introducing yourself as a doctor would be seen as boastful, and many contexts in which it would not. (There are few contexts where introducing yourself as liking sports would be seen as boastful.)
I would agree that there are contexts where talking about my giftedness and my high IQ is seen as a status grab, and therefore rejected. Many of those are contexts in which talking about giftedness and IQ in general is seen as OK.
Again: where high IQ and giftedness are seen as status markers, talking about my high IQ and my giftedness is usually unacceptable. (Similarly, talking about my wealth or my really beautiful spouse or various other status markers is usually unacceptable.)
I agree that these things are frequently present where oppression exists. But they are also frequently present where oppression does not exist.
For example, if I’m a white-collar millionaire participating in a social group that is primarily lower-middle-class blue-collar workers, that’s a significant social difference that is socially unacceptable to talk about, but I would not agree that I was being oppressed, or that millionaires are generally being oppressed by blue-collar workers.
Relative levels of power and status matter, here.
In many contexts, yes.
In some contexts, yes. Not many.
I enjoy your precision.
You make my verbiage look sloppy. (:
Sorry for seeming to ignore this comment for a few weeks. I was busy.
Right now the way I’m seeing this is that because IQ differences are not seen as something that can cause a person a prolific number of differences that are socially relevant for lots of things other than status, it’s often perceived as a status grab when it’s not.
There are also a whole bunch of other problems that, combined, paint a picture of oppression. OrphanWilde did an experiment in this very thread, asking “Actually, let’s try an experiment: My IQ is estimated to be in the vicinity of 220. What is your reaction?”
The result was that he was accused (in the context of the experiment, by people who, I realize, probably do not literally believe these things) of lying by Alicorn and gwern and later suspected to be a psychopath by gwern and shminux.
I was the only one that showed willingness to entertain the idea that OrphanWilde might not be a liar or a psychopath. I suppose, technically that’s not oppression against people you believe to be gifted, it’s discouragement toward people you believe not to be gifted. However, what happens when people have the same attitude of not believing other types of people about their differences? “Oh you’re not really homosexual, let’s send you to the psychologist and have that fixed.” They may have good intentions but the result is definitely oppressive. If people jump to conclusions about a group of people—even the conclusion that the specific individuals in question aren’t part of the group—then those assumptions can oppress the group in question.
Then there’s the fact that 50% of gifted children in America are never given an IQ test, yet they require special education to prevent them from developing problems like learned helplessness due to being placed in the wrong environment.
Terman did a study that challenged commonly held beliefs that gifted people tended to be ugly, and have a lot of problems, and revealed various myths. That was in 1921, but there are still echos of that mentality—people frequently associate negative things with giftedness as if trying to balance things out and make everyone equal again on some imaginary scale—when we shouldn’t be viewing our equality any differently regardless of intellectual differences anyway.
As I see it, people are having a hard time dealing with intellectual inequalities and frequently react as if they are going to equate to rights inequalities.
This leads them to oppress.
Do you have observations that would be relevant to my perspective, supportive or unsupportive?
If gwern suspected OrphanWilde of being a sociopath, surely he would have made a PredictionBook post.
But seriously, I’ve read the posts I think you are talking about. Nobody has such suspicions.
OrphanWilde was only doing an experiment. I didn’t mean to say those guys were serious about their accusations. They behaved that way in the context of the experiment. Most likely they do know better than to take the experiment literally. I realize this. (:
I hate pointing out the obvious, but I guess I have to now. edits my post
I apologize for my lack of explicitness.
Here gwern states that someone possessing transcendent charm is not sufficient evidence for one to conclude that they possess a 200+ IQ. (He mentions other possibilities of them having a “mere” 140+ IQ or them being a psychopath.)
Here gwern states that the world contains more psychopaths than geniuses.
Here is a well-done ramble about the overlap between psychopathy and genius.
I cannot find any post by schminux that would explain why you think he was pretending to accuse OrphanWilde of being a psychopath.
Now to clarify: I am holding that gwern and schminux never publicly suspected OrphanWilde of being a psychopath. I am further holding that gwern and schminux never publicly pretended to suspect OrphanWilde of being a psychopath. These events did not occur, nor did events resembling them occur. Thus, this:
is almost a complete non sequitur, apropos of nothing.
You can’t find those because some wonderfully helpful person decided to hide my post. Search for “comment score below threshold” and look inside of there for “psychopath”.
Ctrl-F is helpful if you didn’t know about it.
Considering that the posts I linked to were descendents of your post (I assume you were referring to this one?), it would be safe for you to assume that I had read it. (I also do not filter posts by karma value.)
Is there, in fact, a post that you think would support the claim:
? If so, could you please post a hyperlink?
I can’t be certain, but it’s possible that the post which led to shminux’ inclusion on that list was this one—in which shminux quoted gwerm’s conclusion that a gifted conversationalist is at least as likely to be a psychopath as a genius.
There’s likely no single individual involved, wonderfully helpful or otherwise. If a comment dropped below the default display threshold, it’s probably because three more people operating independently downvoted the comment than upvoted it.
Yes, I agree that this is frequently true.
We also frequently react that way to wealth inequalities, power inequalities, and various other things that we fear (not always without justification) will allow a privileged minority to become a threat to us.
It isn’t clear to me that “oppress” is a clearly or consistently defined term here, but I agree with you that this sometimes leads us to act against the groups we see as potential threats.
The thing that most jumps out at me is that we seem to keep reiterating the same rhetorical pattern.
You point out scenarios where intelligent people end up in potential conflict with those around them because of their intelligence. I agree that that happens sometimes, and add that it’s a special case of a more general relationship that isn’t especially about intelligence. You continue to discuss how raw a deal intelligent people are given, from a slightly different perspective.
It mostly leaves me with the feeling that we don’t really disagree about any of the stuff that’s actually being said explicitly, but that there’s something more fundamental that isn’t getting said explicitly, about which we do disagree.
If I had to guess, I would guess that you’re motivated to maximize the relative status of intelligent people, and you’re framing the situation in terms of how oppressed intelligent people are in order to justify doing that, and you see my responses as interfering with that framing.
But that’s just a guess.
Good insight, TheOtherDave, it is time to clarify. I don’t want to “maximize the relative status” of anyone—I don’t believe in status. Oh, sure I see lots of people imagining one another to be at different points on a mental model, and I don’t deny that people behave that way, but to me, that doesn’t mean the mental model is at all accurate to reality. To me, they’re just imagining this—status is just a bias.
Also, I think the fact that people perceive intelligence as a “high status” thing is the entire problem. So unless “maximize the relative status” was meant more like “optimize the relative status” I don’t think that’d be a real solution.
I don’t really see your responses as interfering with the framing, but like you said they’re indicating that some clearer point needs to be made.
Here are some ideas:
No sort of oppression happens all the time, but that doesn’t mean a group is not oppressed.
I think the oppression of gifted people should recognized. I think people on both sides need to realize that most of it is unintentional. I think we need to knock it off with this status business, as a species, recognize that we all have rights regardless of intellectual abilities, and quit acting paranoid and grappling for control with one another.
Seeing this power struggle and status madness makes me sick to my stomach. Every time I see it, I have to question why I bother to make a difference if people are going to behave like this.
I don’t think what you’re saying here makes sense. The “status model” only makes claims about people’s behavior. If people behave as though status were a thing, that makes status a thing.
By way of analogy, beauty is also imaginary in the sense that status is imaginary. Lots of people imagine each other to be at different points on the beauty scale, and act accordingly, but there’s nothing objective out there corresponding to beauty. Sure, there’s things that lots of people would agree are beautiful—symmetric faces, lack of disfiguring scars, whatever—but these are arbitrary—there’s nothing intrinsically beautiful about them. (Similarly, wearing a gold watch or whatever might be a sign of status, and is also arbitrary.)
Would you say that you “don’t believe in beauty” in the same way that you “don’t believe in status”? If not, what are the relevant differences?
(nods) Sure, sounds great. Two questions:
Do you agree any more or less with that phrase if I remove the clause “regardless of intellectual abilities”? (Followup: if you don’t, what is that clause doing there?)
Do you have any strategies in mind for achieving that state?
I recognize that gifted people are sometimes subjected to actions taken against their interests, which we can describe as “oppression” if we want to, though that word has other connotations in other contexts I don’t think apply to the condition of gifted people.
That said, I don’t care very much.
Do you think I ought to care more?
If so, why?
Try going to an art forum and proclaim “Hi, I’m Joe, and I’m very, very good at art.”
The key is: are you using a form of words that imply that you’re better than other people?
I think an obvious difference between the last one and the first two is that the last one includes a number. There is no uncertainty when comparing numbers, no wriggle room for subjectivity. A real number is either smaller, bigger, or equal to another real number. Period. This rigidity does not mesh well with the flexibility that comfortable social interaction requires. I don’t think this is the only reason why the third is so inappropriate, but it definitely contributes.
An unexpected point. Thank you.
This is an interesting point, but let’s try a thought experiment to see if it holds up. Consider the following statements you could make about yourself
You are an X-level black belt in a martial art.
Your top bowling score is X.
You can benchpress X amount of weight.
You have an IQ of X.
Where X is some value that is impressive and/or noteworthy. How strong of a negative reaction do you think each of these would get?
Here’s what my intuition says:
Probably no negative reaction.
Probably no negative reaction.
Possibly somewhat negative, sounds like bragging.
Strong negative reaction.
Looking for a pattern in the results, I have a theory: it seems like what is most unacceptable is making it sound that you are superior to the other people in the room in an objective sense. The reason martial arts and bowling are acceptable is that skill in those pursuits is not relevant to the other people in the room who do not engage in them. On the other hand, bragging about your weightlifting is somewhat more annoying since it seems like you are saying you are more healthy/fit/muscular than other people in the room—traits which are more broadly valuable.
Claiming high intelligence gets the worst response of all because it is the most absolute and broad claim of superiority one can make, since being intelligent generally makes you better at a broad range of tasks in the modern world, all else being equal. Also, IQ is associated with controversy and suffers from addtional negativity from that—just like if you say you are for/against abortion. I think Andy may be right that the objective number makes it worse in some way. If you said “I am really smart” that wouldn’t be quite as offensive, since it is less objective.
If someone can think of counterexamples to my theory, replies are welcome.
I don’t think it’s superiority. A counterpoint in thought experiment form:
“Hi, I’m the president of the United States”
“Hi, I run my own business.”
“Hi, I’m a model.”
“Hi, I’m Albert, the guy who came up with E equals MC squared.”
“Hi, I’m a genius.”
I think the numbers do make statements sound bad (I couldn’t figure out a way to word the above using a number without making it sound like bragging) but that’s irrelevant to the question I’m trying to answer, so it’s essentially one of those factors that should be removed from an experiment. I added an additional statement in the same format (an introduction using an identity of some type) about intelligence which does not include a number so that we’ve got a comparable intelligence-related option.
Here’s what my intuition says:
No negative reaction (more likely a positive reaction like excitement).
No negative reaction (admiration seems as likely as jealousy).
Potentially some amount of negative feelings from jealous females, and some amount of excitement from males or lesbians.
No negative reaction (more likely a positive reaction like excitement).
Strong negative reaction.
What’s interesting here is that 1 and 4 are not only some of the biggest claims of superiority that you can make, but have also referred to something verifiable, which should theoretically intensify the reaction. If making a claim of superiority was the problem, those should trigger much worse reactions.
I think the difference between the genius claim and the others in my thought experiment is that all the others are claiming to be doing something constructive. This makes the superiority less threatening. Another possibility is that the claims to genius and high IQ are not verifiable with LinkedIn or other research, so they’re not as believable.
Here’s a thought experiment on with some non-verifiable claims, where there are varying levels of superiority and threat:
Hi, I’m a secret government agent.
Hi, I’m very powerful.
Hi, I’m an elite computer hacker.
Hi, I’m highly gifted.
I think the reaction to 1-3 would be curiosity while the reaction to the fourth would be extreme dislike. I’m interested in other people’s reactions because I think my own are too influenced by having thought about this previously. Interestingly:
Secret agents are probably far less common than gifted people. If I remember right, the entire government is 3% of the population whereas gifted people are 2% and I doubt that 2⁄3 of the government consists of secret agents.
Not all gifted people are powerful, as giftedness does not automatically lead to any type of success. Claiming to be gifted is not claiming as much power as “powerful” is.
My current idea is that if a person with a high IQ makes any type of claim to this, they are more likely to be accused of lying or regarded as a threat than is sensible, and that the negative reactions provoked are disproportionate when compared with reactions to other claims that are comparable but don’t involve IQ / giftedness / genius.
I found your comment refreshing and thoughtful. +1 karma.
If you can think of any good counterpoints, I’d like to read them. (:
I’d suggest something that is related to what you’re saying: the problem isn’t that “I’m a genius” is an objective statement. The problem is that a statement made with more objectivity than is warranted.
The person saying this thinks it makes him objectively better. It doens’t just apply to intelligence; consider “I’m a model” versus “I’m beautiful”. The latter would get negative reactions. Stating that you’re a secret agent is actually an objective statement; you either are or you’re not. Stating that you’re a genius is likely to be interpreted as a general claim of mental superiority that is somewhat based on objective characteristics, but not by as much as you’re claiming it to be.
Even if the person claiming to be a genius says “I have high IQ” instead, I’ve observed that people on Less Wrong give much higher credence to IQ than people outside Less Wrong. Telling an average person that you have a high IQ is telling him “I believe I am objectively superior, but I’m basing my belief on this number that is very narrowly applicable, doesn’t capture all of what we mean by intelligence, and many of whose past uses have been discredited.”
Oh good point. Okay. I think that objectivity might be the problem with “Hi, I’m a genius.” but I’m not sure that’s the problem with “Hi, I’m gifted.” I’ll try another thought experiment on non-objective statements:
“Hi, I’m nice.”
“Hi, I’m gifted.”
“Hi, I’m beautiful.”
“Hi, I’m awesome.”
“Hi, I’m wonderful.”
Hmm, the problem with these is that nice, awesome, wonderful and beautiful all refer to traits that are too small in scope or too vague to make good identity claims. As such, my instinct is to question them with “Why are you saying this?” and the default motive that comes to mind is that the person is arrogant. However, being gifted is correlated with a lot of personality traits and neurological differences—so it is large enough in scope to be a key part of a person’s identity. The reason I’m interested in this is because it appears to me that if a key part of your identity is that you are an artist, a dyslexic, or a Southerner, you can say so without being instantly rejected by most of the population for being “arrogant” while the closest you can get, it seems, to being able to make a claim having to do with a gifted identity (without being rejected for arrogance) is to say “Hi, I’m a nerd.”—but that has the opposite problem. People reject it because nerdiness is automatically associated with being socially undesirable.
I want to try a different angle. Two questions:
Do you think giftedness or high IQ are likely to play a large role in influencing a person’s personality, views or lifestyle?
Do you see any way to make a claim that giftedness or high IQ are a large part of one’s identity without a high risk of rejection?
If you do not see any way to make such a claim without a high risk, then why do you think that is?
I think what you’re telling me in the last paragraph is “Making claims about your IQ makes you sound dodgy because people feel really skeptical about IQ scores.” If that’s it, that is a really good point, too. +1 Karma.
I think this is probably more true in the US than in a lot of other places. Our cultural habit of steering intellectually (and especially mathematically) gifted kids into the “nerd” pigeonhole and concomitant subculture doesn’t seem to be well reflected in the rest of the world.
I am interested in finding out what the rest of the world does and how you found out about their reactions to intellectually gifted people. I’d also be interested in finding out why you think this happens in America but not everywhere else. Would you mind sharing?
The nerd subculture certainly exists (with local variations) in Europe and East Asia, but the impression I get is that it’s coupled less to childhood intelligence and more to that subculture’s various touchstones: you’re about as likely to identify as a nerd if you like, say, literary sci-fi, but being smarter than the average bear isn’t as good a predictor of liking SF.
I don’t know why this happens, but I suspect it has something to do with the American educational system. It’s pretty uncommon among industrialized countries to keep education (more or less) unified as late as 12th grade, and under these circumstances I can see intellectuality coming to be associated with a subcultural alignment; whereas under something like the German system, classes would end up being fragmented along giftedness lines before strong subcultural cliques form. Still, I’m looking at this through American eyes, and people that’ve actually been through those systems might have a more accurate take on it.
I’ve also been reading some stuff lately that suggests the association was much weaker as late as the Fifties and early Sixties, even in the US, but I’m not sure how much I trust it.
One of the more distinctive features of the US system is the the connection to youth sports. Other countries play sports, obviously, but the US model tends to locate competitive sports programs inside schools, from middle school on up through college.
That started in the mid-1800′s, in the northeast, and it spread from there, both laterally to other colleges and vertically, down to high schools. But it took a long time for it to become as effort-intensive as it is now, and there was a pretty significant spike in intensity after World War II, when colleges grew quickly and families bought more televisions and radios and schools could afford to field more teams.
Pretty slim connection, obviously. But if you’re looking for an effect that could plausibly rearrange social groups in age-segregated communities, sports fits the bill. And if you’re looking for a another milieu that tends to brand and shun obsessive pursuits (NOT giftedness—but earnest, obsessive pursuits like we tend to identify with nerd subculture), you might look to the concept of sprezzatura among the sporting aristocracy.
Hmm… that’s an interesting idea—that the existence of a mainstream sporting culture which shuns one of the traits that nerds have in common might have scared off a larger proportion of the people who are not gifted from the nerd subculture? Thanks for this idea. +1 karma.
I have never heard of this “sporting aristrocracy”—is that a term you made up on the spot for this context, or am I just unaware of this term?
I don’t think “sporting aristocracy” has much currency as a phrase. I mean the class of European aristocrats to whom the trades and business and educations suitable for the trades and business were mostly taboo (they could be warriors or clergy or, until the field was professionalized, scientists). The men hunted and sailed and raced and rowed. They also invented the various types of football, and started intercollegiate athletics in the US.
See The Shooting Party for an example: Lord Hartlip is a good shot, but is ashamed to be seen practicing. Also Chariots of Fire in which Lord Lindsay “trains” by jumping hurdles topped with flutes of champaign and is contrasted with Harold Abrahams, the Jewish runner who hires a professional coach. Goes all the way back past Baldassare Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier, which discusses the way a true gentleman does everything right while making it seem easy and unpracticed.
There is a much stronger cause for that, namely it being effectively school policy to arrange social groups by age.
Sorry, I was unclear. I mean, in an already age-segregated community, such as a school, sports might conceivably rearrange social groups.
I doubt they would have that effect in a multigenerational community. Your family and your work trump team sports as social signifiers.
That’s an interesting factor, but I question whether it is a cause, or a symptom (which potentially has effects similar to the original cause). I ask “Why did America choose to deny gifted and talented children a chance to develop their abilities to the fullest for longer than any other country?” (I’d love to see a citation for that by the way!)
I think the root cause might actually be the “immortal declaration” of Thomas Jefferson, located in the opening of the United States Declaration of Independence:
When a country’s most important concept is human rights, and the most prominent argument in support of human rights is the belief that you are created equal, you’re essentially in a situation where your country was founded on the belief that giftedness does not exist.
It seems to me that when people reject gifted identity claims, their true objection is not that it’s arrogant to claim high status or that it’s socially unacceptable to say good things about yourself but that they’re interpreting “created equal” to mean something similar to “equal abilities” or “mentally equal” and experience conflict(s) along the lines of:
If I some people are not equal, does that mean human rights don’t exist?
If I agree that this person is unequal and they’re the better one, do I have to give up my rights to them or give them special treatment?
If this person is claiming to be unequal, are they also trying to demand the right to take my rights away or extract something extra from me so they can have unequal rights?
If I let myself believe that people aren’t equals, is that morally wrong?
Even though I think the problem runs deeper than the theory you presented, I am glad to have it. If America is denying children the chance to develop to the fullest for longer than other countries, that’s certainly going to have some kind of an effect and it’s good additional information to have. Thank you; +1 karma.
* There are plenty of other status claims and good things you can say about yourself that don’t provoke negative reactions—see the thought experiments in this thread.
I would argue that 1) “too vague” is just a subclass of “claims to be more objective than is warranted” and 2) “gifted” is in fact as vague as the other examples.
Yes, but that’s not all of it. The point is that because people are skeptical about IQ, making a claim about your IQ says (to such people) “I think I am objectively better, but I’m basing that claim on something which cannot support it”.
Three, sir.
Because you can’t disentangle such a claim from a claim of being objectively superior (and specifically, an unjustified claim of being objectively superior). Being nice or beautiful can certainly influence your personality, views, or lifestyle and you can’t go around claiming those either. It’s not a problem unique to giftedness.
There’s plenty of uncertainty when comparing numbers when there’s uncertainty in how the numbers were generated. IQ tests aren’t completely uniform across space and time. Worst case, 170 IQ Joe might have taken some random online test.
I think the simplest explanation is the Bayesian one: most people who introduce themselves using their IQ are socially inept, so introducing yourself using your IQ is Bayesian evidence of social ineptitude and other unpleasant things.
How about, “I’m Joe and I make $200,000 a year”? or; “I’m Joe and I drive a 2011 Lexus”?
If someone needs to be that specific about themselves, people are right to wonder about that person’s motives. There is information we have about ourselves that’s not supposed to be secret, but it is considered private- no the first thing you say aloud at a party.
Context is important here too: A mensa board is unlikely to take offense with an IQ comment. If you talk about your interest in DeviantArt, people might want you to be even more specific. A geneology board is a good place to talk about one’s ancestry.
In each case, it’s people’s interpretation of Joe’s social ability that we are reacting to, not just what he’s saying.
What’s wrong with “I’m Joe and I’m doing my doctorate in string theory”? People do pick on IQ-boasters specficially, and there are reasons for that.
I don’t know, but there definitely IS something wrong with it. “I’m doing my doctorate in string theory” quite often gets responded to by “so you’re saying you’ll never do anything practical, then”, or the like.
Does it? You could also say that to an artist Or a derivatives trader.
One of these is not like the other two. How about:
Hi, I’m Joe and I’m good at 3D games (or some other activity that is representative of high IQ scores). This replaces the apparent status seeking with a proper introduction.
You make my point better than I do.
This statement strikes you as having a major, obvious difference. If it’s so obvious, then there probably really is a difference, right? Well obviousness has a lot in common with first impressions—they’re both instant, they’re both compelling, and they both happen so fast that when you first experience them, there hasn’t been any time to scrutinize them yet.
This “one of these is not like the other” reaction IS the experience of bias. By arguing that one statement is different, you have underlined your bias.
One way to determine whether there is any bias in the way people interpret mentions of giftedness and IQ is to attempt to conceive of contexts in which they’ll be perceived neutrally. If this is a lot harder than presenting things like gender and race, then this may indicate bias.
Try coming up with some contexts in which a mention of IQ or giftedness will be perceived neutrally—without “cheating” by applying an opposite bias (like wrapping it in a sugar coating by telling people you’re an example of a Mensan who isn’t elitist for instance) or suppressing the information (for instance waiting until someone asks, or hiding it from everyone except your developmental psychologist) and without using code words to obscure it (Because evidently, my question is not always being interpreted as a request to know a way to talk about it directly.) If you have to hide the information to avoid being chided, that’s basically the definition of oppression, and how do you get oppression without bias?
What I want to know is “How do you freely tell people you’re gifted or have a high IQ in a way that is entirely neutral?”
Not sure why you ignored my original example. As I said, you tell them that you are good at something that implies high IQ score, but is not perceived as status seeking. “Hi, I’m Joe and the main thing I’m good at is art.” is not the same as “I draw better than 99.9998% of all people”, which would be the equivalent of “my IQ is 170”, and would also be perceived as status seeking.
That doesn’t qualify as an example of how to talk about IQ and giftedness. You’re talking about 3D games. Your suggestion was to hide the fact that you’re talking about IQ by talking in code. That’s why I ignored the example—I didn’t see that you were trying to present me with a neutral IQ statement.
I’m still waiting to see whether anyone can come up with a way to freely tell people you’re gifted or have a high IQ in a way that sounds neutral—without cheating in any way. Without sugar coating, without having to hide it, and without using code words to obscure it (Because evidently, my question was not interpreted as a request to know a way to talk about it directly.) . (:
‘Hi, I’m Joe and I’m a smart guy.’
Saying you’re proud of your Native American ancestry often won’t be interpreted as a claim of superiority because such statements are saiid in a social context where everyone knows that Native Americans have suffered and saying you’re proud of your ancestry is not asserting that you’re superior, but rather than you’re not inferior.
Furthermore, to the extent that it is a claim of superiority but objecting to it will be called racist, that’s a problem with the ease of making accusations of racism, not a problem with the objection.
There isn’t prejudice against people with a high IQ. There’s prejudice against stating that you have a high IQ, unlike for minorities, where even minorities that try to “pass” for the majority will be the target of prejudice if found out.
And there’s only prejudice against stating you have a high IQ because stating you have a high IQ is stating that you are superior based on flimsy reasons. (And no, you can’t state your IQ without claiming you’re superior, since you can’t escape the social context.)
Perhaps you intended that within a specific context from the comment above like “These introduction examples don’t cause a problem because of prejudice, but because they sound like claims to superiority”, in which case I’d agree with you. However, I disagree about whether there exists prejudice against people with high IQs in the broader context. If that’s truly what you meant, I’d be happy to elaborate, but please specify so I am not accidentally arguing with a strawman.
I am very interested in this concept of superiority, because “superiority” seems to be an important key here. What does it mean to you? If a person is superior, is it okay to treat them differently? What sort of differently and why? If someone makes a claim to superiority, how do you think people should react, and why?
I’m sure you could find one specific example in the world of someone prejudiced against someone because of high IQ, but I’d say that in general, there isn’t such prejudice. There may be prejudice against intelligence, but that’s not the same thing, and even that only exists in a few limited situations.
I don’t see the relevance. A claim of superiority (especially an unwarranted one) isn’t the same thing as actual superiority.
I’m not clear what the difference here is between being prejudiced against someone because of IQ, and because of intelligence; since IQ is a pretty good measure of intelligence, it’d be pretty hard to be prejudiced against one and not the other...
In any case, there do seem to be historically a lot of cases of anti-intellectualism (I like the Khmer Rouge targeting people with glasses), and traditional societies do favor high Openness a lot less than modern societies (see Miller).
That subclause is doing an awful lot of work in your argument.
I’d say that IQ measures part of what most people consider intelligence, but isn’t the same as it, and even as a measure of that it isn’t an exact measure.
Well, it’s a good thing we’ve got a century or so of work on the positive manifold/g. I wouldn’t want to make anything but one of the best established tests do so much work in my argument!
It does not measure all cognitive traits, no, and as a measure it has a pretty precisely known amount of unreliability in it.
Yet I fail to see how either of your sentences are a reply to my comment.
The issue is more the circumstances that lead to talking about your IQ. In an argument about something else, it is almost certainly an appeal to authority, and should be avoided. Brought up out of the blue it -is- socially inept. A discussion which turns to IQ might be an appropriate place to bring it up. (I bring up my own exceptional IQ as an argument against elitism or eugenics, such as people who think low-IQ people shouldn’t be allowed to reproduce. “Do you want me applying the same standard you’re applying to other people to you?” is a pretty effective argument when you’re more standard deviations above the other person than they are over the people they think are too stupid to reproduce/make their own decisions.)
I agree that using IQ as an appeal to authority will draw negative attention, and that bringing it up in order to use yourself as an example of a smart person who isn’t elitist would probably go over very well. But those examples are black and white. You’re not making distinctions outside the black and white “easy to interpret” areas where people begin to behave funny, so, in effect, you’re ignoring the problem I presented.
As for your “out of nowhere” comment, what would they do if I said “I’m a woman.” out of nowhere? What if I said “I’m African-American.” If they don’t react in a negative way to those, but they DO react in a negative way when IQ is brought up, that says something. Why do they react to it negatively, instead of neutrally, when there is no context in which to interpret?
They would assume you have a reason for bringing those things up. (Or, if they couldn’t find one, assume you were a bit daft.)
What reason would you have, in their model of you, for bringing up your IQ? None of them are good.
Judgments often made about IQ statements:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/kk/why_are_individual_iq_differences_ok/76x6
I think you were asking “What do I think they think?”—your wording felt a bit tricky to interpret.
It’s worse then that: What do you think they think you are thinking?
People generally assume purpose, correctly or incorrectly. If you bring up your IQ, your audience is going to ask themselves -why- you are bringing up your IQ. And they’re unlikely to find any good reasons, which leave only the bad.
(Not to mention that most people who bring up IQ -are- socially inept, precisely because of social policies against bringing up IQ. It’s unfortunately a stable equilibrium. You’d need a popular movement to change the social mores there, and I don’t think most people are going to care enough to get involved in it, compared to the other social problems our society faces.)
Actually, let’s try an experiment:
My IQ is estimated to be in the vicinity of 220.
What is your reaction?
I think you’re lying.
Indeed. At the usual standard deviation norm of ~15, a 220 IQ would be 8 standard deviations out and make him ~1 in 8*10^14 (100 trillion).
Inasmuch as only 100 billion humans are estimated to have ever lived, the overwhelming majority of that having an average IQ far lower than 100 and so being essentially irrelevant, we can conclude that he is either lying or from the future.
220+ IQ scores DO happen—due to the fact that IQ tests cannot be made accurate for such an uncommon group of people, they’re far more common than they’re mathematically supposed to be. A collection of research on that can be found online right here:
http://hiqnews.megafoundation.org/Terman_Summary.htm
I’ve actually talked with people in that IQ vicinity, and based on the absolutely sublime intelligent conversation they’re capable of providing, and considering the likelihood of specifically them being dishonest about that within the context of their other behaviors, I just don’t think they’re lying.
Superintelligent people do exist. And they have to actually BE somewhere, right? Where do they go?
Do you think that none of them would be attracted to a website like LessWrong? I think this site is likely to be a genius magnet.
If it turns out that this person’s IQ really is over 220, I totally want to have intelligent conversation with them. If you give people the benefit of the doubt in situations like this, sometimes the result is more than worth the effort to withhold judgment for a while.
P.S. Yes, I realize the claim is that it was estimated at over 220, not that they received that score. The obvious argument here is “What professional would estimate it that high knowing how rare those scores are SUPPOSED to be?” but if you’re not basing your estimation on observations about people who have received that score, all you are left with is attempting to deduce the characteristics of a person with such an IQ out of the numbers themselves, with no actual experience to base it on. Or, this person may be referring to the practice of adjusting a young child’s IQ score upward in order to reflect the age at which they took the test. For instance, if you are 2 years old and get an IQ of 100 on an IQ test, that’s really incredible. You definitely have to give that kid a higher score than 100. The only way I know of to get a score in the 200 ballpark is to have that sort of age adjustment done after taking the test with the highest limit before a certain age.
And that’s a limitation of the tests being ratio tests or not being normed on the sufficiently large population they’re supposed to be normed on. (Why are all the datapoints on that page so old?) That’s why modern IQ tests come with listed ceilings! ‘Past this point, who knows what it’s measuring if anything’. With a short test, even random guessing will eventually throw up some remarkable scores...
Perfectly consistent with them having more earthly IQs >140. (If even that; I have been reading up on psychopathy lately, and one of the diagnosable traits is being gifted conversationalists and creators of emotional ‘bonds’, despite psychopathy being, if correlated with IQ at all, negatively correlated.)
Living people with 220+ IQs do exist—you say the words “modern IQ tests” as if the ratio tests were invented in the dark ages. This only changed in recent decades. Regardless of which method is the best, the fact that there are plenty of people still alive today who can honestly claim that they were given an IQ score that high means that this person is not automatically a liar or “from the future”.
“Perfectly consistent with them having more earthly IQs >140”
Which is perfectly consistent with them having IQs over 220, if you think about it...
And, no, they weren’t like the people with scores of 140. There are differences that they have that I have not encountered in anyone else. Things stood out.
Why are you bringing up psychopathy? That’s totally out of left field. Do you mean to imply that people claiming that IQ are probably psychopaths?
Very well then, let us discuss the cases of people recorded to be hundreds of years old by less than modern documentation, like Methuselah as verified by the Book of Genesis. Wait, you don’t think people actually live to thousands of years? But you just said we can use datapoints from any kind of test we please!
Whatever cutoff you choose to exclude things like Genesis or scientific results from hundreds of years ago while still including largely obsolete ratio tests, I will shift it slightly to include only better IQ tests. I think this is perfectly legitimate, as one should strive to use the best available data, and regard your ‘but old obsolete scores!’ as quibbling.
And it’s also consistent with IQs over 9000!!!
Occam’s razor. Use it, love it. The base rate of IQs like 140 are by definition higher than >220.
“But I was so impressed, don’t you understand?” You’ll pardon me if I ignore some rubbish anecdotes about them seeming like shining special snowflakes.
My argument was perfectly clear: brilliant conversation is far from a flawless indicator of intelligence. That you don’t understand why I would bring up an example of how this indicator can fail catastrophically or interpret it as implying that...
More fun base-rate reasoning: psychopaths make up 1-2% of the population, and most are great manipulators; the top 1% of the population IQ-wise is sometimes taken as being the genius fragment; even if we assume the 1% IQ are all gifted conversationalists, if all we know about someone is their gifted conversation, we wind up inferring that they are equally or more likely to be a psychopath than a genius!
...And able to convince you that they have IQ > 220, regardless of whether it means anything,
I wish I could do that, imagine how much “funding” I could get for my perpetual motion machine.
Some, but apparently not that much.
Damn, back to selling bridges.
Upvoted (also) for this.
Looking closer, I think there are several points of confusion. Neither of us carefully distinguished between meanings like “An IQ score / estimation that really was that high but not accurate.” versus “An IQ score / estimation that high that is NOT accurate.” and I guess that neither of us noticed the possibility for multiple meanings. We also did not address the possibility that this person’s (inaccurate) IQ could be that high while incidentally, the person does have an intelligence level to truly match an IQ of 220. That sort of person would be more likely to get an IQ of 220 on a test/estimate, no? There may be people with that (true) IQ who also have a nearby (inaccurate) IQ result to match it. After all, that is what the developmental psychologists are aiming for—that they’re right sometimes but not all the time is possible.
I thought this was great, BTW:
Note that it is physically impossible to measure IQ > 200:
It’s not clear whether you’re saying:
You can’t create an accurate IQ test for that.
You can’t generate an estimate IQ that high.
None of the IQ tests developed provide any method to generate an IQ that high.
You can’t have an IQ that high.
Given that IQ is a measurement of intelligence, and there is no way to measure a number that is that high, all 4 apply. If you are still confused about the meaning of the verb “measure”, here it is:
Agreed: You can’t create an accurate IQ test for that.
Disagreed: You can’t generate an estimate IQ that high. Estimates can be made, but their accuracy can’t be verified. Estimates are, by definition, an approximation. An estimated IQ that high is not automatically invalid, as long as it’s expressed as an estimate, the statement can still be true.
Disagreed: None of the IQ tests developed provide any method to generate an IQ that high. Some IQ tests can be adjusted upward based on a child’s age. I’m not claiming it’s accurate. I’m claiming it exists.
Disagreed: You can’t have an IQ that high. Saying a person can’t get an IQ score that high is not the same thing as saying they can’t get an IQ that high. You can be born with an intelligence level beyond what is statistically probable. Whether it can be measured may be another story. But it can still happen. William Sidis is my cite for that—his estimated IQ was 250-300. If you read enough about developmental psychology, you’ll probably agree that Sidis not only qualifies as a person having abilities consistent with what an person with an IQ of > 220 should have, but that he had such great abilities that by using him as an example I am doing something more along the lines of killing an ant with a nuke. You can claim that because it’s improbable, it can’t happen, but that’s would be an appeal to probability (or a reverse of that appeal, if you want to be really technical.)
Since IQ scores are calculated to conform to a normal distribution, your IQ is in exact correspondence with your percentile ranking in the general population. If f(x) is the CDF of the Normal(100,15) distribution, and your percentile ranking is p, then your “true IQ” is precisely the value of x such that f(x)=p. Since there are only roughly 7 billion people alive, the smartest person on Earth is ranked above 99.99999998578% of other people, which corresponds to an IQ of 195. If we include all people that have ever lived (I believe the number is roughly 100 billion), the smartest would have an IQ of 201.
William Sidis’s IQ of 250-300 is using a different scale, which is no longer used: it claims that his intellectual age, as a child at the time he took the exam (if in fact he did, there is some doubt about this) was 2.5 to 3 times his physical age. This isn’t really a meaningful assessment of how smart he was as an adult, nor does it have any relationship to the modern system of IQ scores (on a normal curve, such a score is 1 in 10^23, which I think we all agree is ridiculous).
I suppose that if you mean that it is possible to make an invalid extrapolation based on age adjustment, then you are right, it is indeed possible, if meaningless. It is not, however, how IQ is measured (by comparing how well you did vs other people who took the same test).
It is exactly the same thing, because IQ is not intelligence, it’s one (not very accurate) way to measure it. Thus there is no such thing as person’s IQ, only person’s IQ score. Just because IQ is commonly confused with intelligence, does not mean it is the same thing.
You can estimate someone’s IQ testing skills from one or more of their IQ test scores, and this skill is indeed a property of (your model of) the individual, not of a piece of paper with the number on it, and this skill is correlated with other measures of intelligence. This skill can conceivably be shorted to “person’s IQ”. However, there is no standard procedure of calculating anything like that (should it be the average? mode? geometric mean? maximum? minimum? any of those have merits, depending on your model of how the hypothetical innate IQ testing skill is translated into IQ test scores).
Funny that you bring him up. Says Wikipedia:
It is possible, and they’ve done it. Whether it is meaningless is outside the scope of our particular debate as, if I remember correctly, we started arguing after Gwern said that claiming an IQ of 220+ is proof that a person is “either a lying or from the future”.
So, this supports my point that such a claim is not proof that a person is lying. I’ll just disregard the “from the future” comment for now. ;)
Not sure if you’re saying “IQ test scores aren’t generated based on how you compare.” or, within the context of the previous sentence “IQ tests are not scored using age adjustment.”
For the former, you’re partly right and partly wrong. The ratio tests were scored using a bell curve. If your IQ was relatively close to normal, you’d get a score that would tell you how you compare to average. If your IQ was super high like 160, it was likely to be inaccurate, because those people are rare.
As for age adjustments—of course they make age adjustments. Otherwise, how would they test children of different ages on the same test? If a child of the age of 3 gets the same questions right as children who are 10 years old, do you give the ten year olds a toddler’s score or do you give the toddler a score closer to that of a ten year old? It would be inappropriate to imply that the ten year olds and the toddler have the same amount of intelligence.
I imagine this is fairly meaningful at least when it concerns testing average children of different ages, since it’s not too difficult to find lots of children to make the test more accurate with. When it comes to testing child prodigies, the exact score (say “exactly 223” or something) would be meaningless, but the fact that, say, a 7 year old got a perfect score on an IQ test suitable for adults, we’ll say, that would be very meaningful—though their score should be taken as more of a ballpark figure than an exact measurement.
It depends on how you use the word in the sentence. You make a distinction between IQ and intelligence which is good, but I am making a different distinction. Even if I haven’t measured the number of degrees Fahrenheit in a particular igloo near the North pole, that does not mean it has no temperature or that it’s temperature does not correspond to a specific number of degrees Fahrenheit. This is more like the debate “If a tree falls in a forest does it make a sound?”—my answer is yes because I’m using a definition that involves physics, disrupted air waves and decibels. Just because you didn’t measure the number of decibels doesn’t mean they weren’t there.
the point
Anyway, your point is “it’s physically impossible to measure an IQ score that high” but that does nothing to refute my point that “this claim is not proof the person is a liar.”
It’s a red herring.
Maybe I should verify my info on him then.
Maybe, but if someone talks to me about quantum field theory and actually makes sense, my posterior probability that their IQ is < 80 suddenly goes down to epsilon.
But how do you know that? Plenty of nutters sound convincing on quantum matters (as judging by the sales into millions of such folk as Deepak Chopra and abominations like The Dancing Wu-li Masters), so I assume you have some expertise in the matter—and now you’re just judging based on that. (And what if they sound convincing on a topic you have no expertise in...)
I think one of the main reason they “sound“ convincing (though the readers’ ignorance is also a necessary condition) is motivated cognition: the kind of people who read such books would like to believe what they say. Lose that, and your strength as a rationalist kicks in. (And anyway, I don’t think Chopra et al. are idiots; they are either misguided or bullshitting the readers for fun and profit.)
I’d have to test that. Anyone willing to give me a few paragraphs of either something “serious” or crackpottery (or a spoof à la Sokal), without telling me which it is, about a topic other than physics?
I’m actually somewhat curious about the degree overlap between those two groups.
Well, assuming complete independence would just be 1% 1%; but there does seem to be a slight negative correlation between psychopathy & IQ. Complicating matters is Hare and Babiak’s research into business psychopaths, where they estimate they are over-represented by a factor of 2-3 or so, suggesting that the negative correlation may be skewed by the ‘failures’ in prison samples (which are the samples for most studies, for obvious reasons); smarter psychopaths are far less likely to resort to violence\*, further hindering identification (since impulsive violence is one of the major diagnostic hallmarks). To the extent that the gifted 1% avoid business, that may restore a negative correlation / underepresentation. Finally, psychopath’s impulsivity and few long-range goals or efforts (another part of the diagnosis along with glibness/manipulation) suggests that to the extent genuine objective achievements cause you to be considered a gifted 1%, we can expect still more underrepresentation*.
So guesstimating further, I’d say in a population of 300m people (eg. the US), we could expect substantially fewer than 30,000 gifted psychopaths (0.01 0.01 300,000,000). Phew!
On the other hand, they would be the ones who would do the most damage and be least likely to ever be diagnosed, so we may never know for sure...
* Which makes me wonder about high IQ societies, now that I think about it. My vague impression was that they tend to collect those with poor social skills, and also with fewer objective accomplishments & success. So if you meet someone in a high IQ societies who seems very charming and empathetic but lacks objective accomplishments, just how much does this increase the psychopath possibility over the 1% base rate..?
** Covered multiple times in the Handbook; first relevant paper seems to be “Psychopathy and Aggression”, Porter & Woodworth.
IQ is defined to be a normal distribution with mu = 100 and sigma = 15, so “IQ 220” means ‘99.9999999999999th percentile¹’; if more than a person in 10^15 gets such a score, then the test is miscalibrated. (But most tests are, beyond a few standard deviations away from the mean.)
I didn’t count the nines, I just copied and pasted the output of
pr norm(8)in gnuplot and moved the decimal point.Estimated by whom?
You’re taking my experiment literally.
Awesome! Tell me super-intelligent thoughts? Have you met the others? (Nope, not gullibility. Explaining below in re to gwern.)
I’m not sure what a super intelligent thought would look like; there’s a limit on how intelligent a thought could be, as a thought that gets too clever ceases to be clever at all. But if that’s your internal reaction as well, I don’t have any room to argue/criticize on this front, as you’re being fully consistent.
(Strictly speaking, incidentally, any score above 180 is merely an estimate; IQ tests cease to perform reliably above that level.)
I loved your experiment. (: As for what a super-intelligent thought would look like, there are multiple ways of interpreting you:
You might be saying that a person with an IQ of 220 could be prone to over-thinking things. In that case, it would cease to qualify as cleverness due to a failure to maintain a good cost-benefit ratio between the amount of brainpower put in and the results coming out.
You may mean that if someone were to say something significantly more clever than what is commonly thought of as “clever” it may not be recognized as such, may not even be observable to most minds once pointed out, and therefore might never end up recognized as “clever” by anyone.
There’s a much more interesting possibility—that a super-intelligent thought may transcend cleverness, take on emergent properties, or otherwise be so advanced that our current definitions of intelligence can’t express it.
I’m having trouble coming up with a scenario where any of the three sounds like a natural and non-awkward way to introduce oneself.
I agree that there are cases where claiming high IQ is an exception to some social rules, but I think that a lot of the differences between that and the other self-claims you use as examples here come down to a social norm against unsolicited boasting.
“The main thing I’m good at is art” isn’t a boast, because it makes no claim about how good the individual is at art relative to other individuals, or about the relative value of art to other talents. You wouldn’t assume this person is claiming superiority to someone else who would say that “my main talent is singing,” for instance.
A more comparable statement would be introducing oneself with the claim “I’m Joe, and I can bench press 500 pounds.”
To contribute my analogy, I think introducing yourself by saying “Hi, my IQ is 170” is kinda like introducing yourself by saying “Hi, my net worth is $100 million”, which would definitely be obnoxious. Though the IQ thing is maybe even more obnoxious to me because at least you had to make the money yourself, whereas the IQ you got almost purely as a matter of luck.
Or inherited it.
Did you even read the post? He doesn’t think they’re okay:
For clarity: My interpretation of his main point is “the rest of the world seems to think that individual genetic differences are okay” and my main point in that comment is “Individual intelligence differences are NOT thought of as okay (by the rest of the world).”
The sentence you singled out is an oversimplified version of what I was actually trying to convey. What I was trying to convey was “I’m glad you think it’s okay with the rest of the world for people to talk about their intelligence differences, but it’s not okay.” It looks like my verbal processor took a shortcut without me noticing it. I’ll fix that to prevent any confusion. Thanks for pointing it out.
I don’t appreciate hearing “Did you even read the post?” yes, I read the post (and responded to other aspects of it also).
How would that play out with athletic accomplishments?
Compare: I’m Joe, and I have an Olympic gold medal in [famous|obscure] sport.
I’m Joe, and I just finished a marathon.
I’m Joe, and I’ve won a local marathon.
I’m Joe, and I run half a dozen marathons a year
One more: I have the optimal physiology for [some sport]. I think this is the closest to announcing a a high IQ..
I am not a sports person, so I have no idea, but I suspect they’d be cheered on. Unless they were seen as part of an enemy team. I think people feel a sense of pride in the people that play on local teams. My imagination says that might go something like this: “That guy’s probably eaten some of the hotdogs from the factory I work in. I probably played some small part in this famous guy’s awesome sports abilities somehow.”
I’m really itching to do an experiment now. (: Maybe I will...