I think this is a crucial part of a lot of psychological maladaption and social dysfunction, very salient to EAs. If you’re way more trait xyz than anyone you know for most of your life, your behavior and mindset will be massively effected, and depending on when in life / how much inertia you’ve accumulated by the time you end up in a different room where suddenly you’re average on xyz, you might lose out on a ton of opportunities for growth.
In other words, the concept of “big fish small pond” is deeply insightful and probably underrated.
Some IQ-adjacent idea is sorta the most salient to me, since my brother recently reminded me “quinn is the smartest person I know”, to which I was like, you should meet smarter people? Or I kinda did feel unusually smart before I was an EA, I can only reasonably claim to be average if you condition on EA or something similar. But this post is extremely important in terms of each of the Big 5, “grit”-adjacent things, etc.
For example, when you’re way more trait xyz than anyone around you, you form habits around adjusting for people to underperform relative to you at trait xyz. Sometimes those habits run very deep in your behavior and wordview, and sometimes they can be super ill-tuned (or at least a bit suboptimal) to becoming average. Plus, you develop a lot of “I have to pave my own way” assumptions about growth and leadership. Related to growth, you may cultivate lower standards for yourself than you otherwise might have. Related to leadership, I expect many people in leader roles at small ponds would be more productive, impactful, and happy if they had access to averageness. Pond size means they don’t get that luxury!
There’s a tightly related topic about failure to abolish meatspace / how you might think the internet corrects for this but later realize how much it doesn’t.
So, being a “big fish in a small pond” teaches you habits that become harmful when you later move to a larger pond. But if you don’t move, you can’t grow further.
I think the specific examples are more known that the generalization. For example:
Many people in Mensa are damaged this way. They learned to be the smartest ones, which they signal by solving pointless puzzles, or by talking about “smart topics” (relativity, quantum, etc.) despite the fact that they know almost nothing about these topics. Why did they learn these bad habits? Because this is how you most efficiently signal intelligence to people who are not themselves intelligent. But it fails to impress the intelligent people used to meeting other intelligent people, because they see the puzzles as pointless, they see the smart talk as bullshit if they ever read an introductory textbook on the topic, and will ask you about your work and achievements instead. The useful thing would instead be to learn how to cooperate with other intelligent people on reaching worthy goals.
People who are too smart or too popular at elementary school (or high school) may be quite shocked when they move to a high school (or university) and suddenly their relative superpowers are gone. If they learned to rely on them too much, they may have a problem adapting to normal hard work or normal friendships.
Staying at the same job for too long might have a similar effect. You feel like an expert because you are familiar with all systems in the company. Then at some moment fate makes you change jobs, and suddenly you realize that you know nothing, that the processes and technologies used in your former company were maybe obsolete. But the more you delay changing jobs, the harder it becomes.
I remember reading in a book by László Polgár, father of the famous female chess players, how he wanted his girls to play in the “men’s” chess league since the beginning, because that’s what he wanted them to win. He was afraid that playing in smaller leagues would learn them habits useful only for the smaller leagues. Technically, the “men’s” chess league was open for everyone, but because there were no women among the winners (yet), a separate league only for women was made. Polgár did not want his girls to compete in the league for women, and that offended many people.
From evolutionary perspective, when people lived in small tribes, if you were the best in your tribe, you remained the best in your tribe (maybe until someone younger than you outcompeted you a few years later). So it made sense to adapt to the situation you had. Our society is weirdly organized from this perspective—as an adult, you will be pushed to compete against the best (sometimes literally in the entire world), and yet as a small child you are put into an elementary school with average kids, where you get the wrong expectations of your future environment. A partial antidote to that are various competitions, where you can compete against similarly talented kids from other schools, so even if you are by far the best at your school, you still know there is much to learn.
Technically, the “men’s” chess league was open for everyone, but because there were no women among the winners
I think this wasn’t true at the time, at least in Hungary. The oldest sister and their father spent a lot of time fighting this, so it was ~true by the time the youngest sister got really competitive. This might prove the larger point, since the youngest sister also went the farthest.
Uh, good catch! Then I am surprised that they actually succeeded to win this. It would be too easy and possibly very tempting to just say “you broke the rules, disqualified!” Or at least, I would expect a debate to last for a decade, and then it would be too late for the Polgár sisters.
yeah IQ ish things or athletics are the most well-known examples, but I only generalized in the shortform cuz I was looking around at my friends and thinking about more Big Five oriented examples.
Certainly “conscientiousness seems good but I’m exposed to the mistake class of unhelpful navelgazing, so maybe I should be less conscientious” is so much harder to take seriously if you’re in a pond that tends to struggle with low conscientiousness. Or being so low on neuroticism that your redteam/pentest muscles atrophy.
How are people mistreated by bellcurves?
I think this is a crucial part of a lot of psychological maladaption and social dysfunction, very salient to EAs. If you’re way more trait xyz than anyone you know for most of your life, your behavior and mindset will be massively effected, and depending on when in life / how much inertia you’ve accumulated by the time you end up in a different room where suddenly you’re average on xyz, you might lose out on a ton of opportunities for growth.
In other words, the concept of “big fish small pond” is deeply insightful and probably underrated.
Some IQ-adjacent idea is sorta the most salient to me, since my brother recently reminded me “quinn is the smartest person I know”, to which I was like, you should meet smarter people? Or I kinda did feel unusually smart before I was an EA, I can only reasonably claim to be average if you condition on EA or something similar. But this post is extremely important in terms of each of the Big 5, “grit”-adjacent things, etc.
For example, when you’re way more trait xyz than anyone around you, you form habits around adjusting for people to underperform relative to you at trait xyz. Sometimes those habits run very deep in your behavior and wordview, and sometimes they can be super ill-tuned (or at least a bit suboptimal) to becoming average. Plus, you develop a lot of “I have to pave my own way” assumptions about growth and leadership. Related to growth, you may cultivate lower standards for yourself than you otherwise might have. Related to leadership, I expect many people in leader roles at small ponds would be more productive, impactful, and happy if they had access to averageness. Pond size means they don’t get that luxury!
There’s a tightly related topic about failure to abolish meatspace / how you might think the internet corrects for this but later realize how much it doesn’t.
So, being a “big fish in a small pond” teaches you habits that become harmful when you later move to a larger pond. But if you don’t move, you can’t grow further.
I think the specific examples are more known that the generalization. For example:
Many people in Mensa are damaged this way. They learned to be the smartest ones, which they signal by solving pointless puzzles, or by talking about “smart topics” (relativity, quantum, etc.) despite the fact that they know almost nothing about these topics. Why did they learn these bad habits? Because this is how you most efficiently signal intelligence to people who are not themselves intelligent. But it fails to impress the intelligent people used to meeting other intelligent people, because they see the puzzles as pointless, they see the smart talk as bullshit if they ever read an introductory textbook on the topic, and will ask you about your work and achievements instead. The useful thing would instead be to learn how to cooperate with other intelligent people on reaching worthy goals.
People who are too smart or too popular at elementary school (or high school) may be quite shocked when they move to a high school (or university) and suddenly their relative superpowers are gone. If they learned to rely on them too much, they may have a problem adapting to normal hard work or normal friendships.
Staying at the same job for too long might have a similar effect. You feel like an expert because you are familiar with all systems in the company. Then at some moment fate makes you change jobs, and suddenly you realize that you know nothing, that the processes and technologies used in your former company were maybe obsolete. But the more you delay changing jobs, the harder it becomes.
I remember reading in a book by László Polgár, father of the famous female chess players, how he wanted his girls to play in the “men’s” chess league since the beginning, because that’s what he wanted them to win. He was afraid that playing in smaller leagues would learn them habits useful only for the smaller leagues. Technically, the “men’s” chess league was open for everyone, but because there were no women among the winners (yet), a separate league only for women was made. Polgár did not want his girls to compete in the league for women, and that offended many people.
From evolutionary perspective, when people lived in small tribes, if you were the best in your tribe, you remained the best in your tribe (maybe until someone younger than you outcompeted you a few years later). So it made sense to adapt to the situation you had. Our society is weirdly organized from this perspective—as an adult, you will be pushed to compete against the best (sometimes literally in the entire world), and yet as a small child you are put into an elementary school with average kids, where you get the wrong expectations of your future environment. A partial antidote to that are various competitions, where you can compete against similarly talented kids from other schools, so even if you are by far the best at your school, you still know there is much to learn.
I think this wasn’t true at the time, at least in Hungary. The oldest sister and their father spent a lot of time fighting this, so it was ~true by the time the youngest sister got really competitive. This might prove the larger point, since the youngest sister also went the farthest.
Uh, good catch! Then I am surprised that they actually succeeded to win this. It would be too easy and possibly very tempting to just say “you broke the rules, disqualified!” Or at least, I would expect a debate to last for a decade, and then it would be too late for the Polgár sisters.
yeah IQ ish things or athletics are the most well-known examples, but I only generalized in the shortform cuz I was looking around at my friends and thinking about more Big Five oriented examples.
Certainly “conscientiousness seems good but I’m exposed to the mistake class of unhelpful navelgazing, so maybe I should be less conscientious” is so much harder to take seriously if you’re in a pond that tends to struggle with low conscientiousness. Or being so low on neuroticism that your redteam/pentest muscles atrophy.
That sounds intriguing. I would like to read an article with many specific (even if fictional) examples.