My understanding is that high IQ per se is positively correlated with social skills (as well as with physical attractiveness, health and lifespan, even after correcting for lifestyle). It’s a different story when you look at technical intelligence of the high functioning Asperger’s variety, of course; the reason seems to be that this kind of technical intelligence is basically a combination of high IQ with a trading away of social aptitude—literally, a reallocation of some computing power that would normally be dedicated to that function, like a computer designer spending fewer transistors on the GPU to be able to spend more on the CPU.
Bearing in mind that the style and content of discussion on this site tends to specifically attract people with that sort of technical intelligence (geeks, to use the colloquial term for us), surveys on Less Wrong shouldn’t be treated as representative of high IQ people in general.
That’s a plausible explanation. But that suggests a lot of predictions. For example, if I’m following your analogy right, we ought to see that the subpopulation which has high IQ scores and low math scores would also have higher social skills, since the high IQ proves they have lots of transistors but the low math scores show they haven’t spent any transistors on the GPU. Do they?
It would certainly seem that they should. Anecdotally, it seems to me the answer is yes, but I don’t know offhand whether statistical evidence has been gathered.
My understanding is that high IQ per se is positively correlated with social skills (as well as with physical attractiveness, health and lifespan, even after correcting for lifestyle). It’s a different story when you look at technical intelligence of the high functioning Asperger’s variety, of course; the reason seems to be that this kind of technical intelligence is basically a combination of high IQ with a trading away of social aptitude—literally, a reallocation of some computing power that would normally be dedicated to that function, like a computer designer spending fewer transistors on the GPU to be able to spend more on the CPU.
Bearing in mind that the style and content of discussion on this site tends to specifically attract people with that sort of technical intelligence (geeks, to use the colloquial term for us), surveys on Less Wrong shouldn’t be treated as representative of high IQ people in general.
That’s a plausible explanation. But that suggests a lot of predictions. For example, if I’m following your analogy right, we ought to see that the subpopulation which has high IQ scores and low math scores would also have higher social skills, since the high IQ proves they have lots of transistors but the low math scores show they haven’t spent any transistors on the GPU. Do they?
It would certainly seem that they should. Anecdotally, it seems to me the answer is yes, but I don’t know offhand whether statistical evidence has been gathered.