Imagine that you are a student, around 14 years old. You fall into the top 5%, not the extremely motivated startup founder or math prodigy that you hear about on the news, but comfortably more intelligent and curious than the others. The system sucks some of your free time with busywork, but you build up a knowledge base, and start working on small projects related to your area of interest. Now what?
The problem is, as a business owner, how do I tell this person apart from the average 14 year old?
Competent teens fall into apathy because the work is too easy, application of anything more difficult is inaccessible, and there’s only so much knowledge-gathering they can do before they want to do something.
Typical-mind fallacy warning. Just because you were like that as a teenager doesn’t mean that this is common. If it seems like a large fraction of people around are like this, that says more about your environment than it does about the overall population.
I agree that there is a certain amount of “wasted” talent among bright 14-year-olds. But it is not at all clear to me that the amount of talent wasted is sufficient to warrant companies throwing out the conventional wisdom on using years of education as a filter for hiring.
The problem is, as a business owner, how do I tell this person apart from the average 14 year old?
This is a limited and subjective answer but there are just some subtle conversational and lifestyle markers of potential (I’ve talked to a fair few “intelligent” people about this and they agree that you can just tell if someone is of their type). A more reasonable solution is to encourage cold emails along the lines of “hey, I’m taking initiative and pitching myself to you as a resource good for X, here’s what I’m interested in, here’s why there isn’t much application-wise knowledge of my interests, consider taking me as an unpaid intern”
Just because you were like that as a teenager doesn’t mean that this is common
Indeed. This may be biased by the fact that I intentionally sought out people like me (and found a fair few, many in similar situations).
This is a limited and subjective answer but there are just some subtle conversational and lifestyle markers of potential (I’ve talked to a fair few “intelligent” people about this and they agree that you can just tell if someone is of their type).
This is racist? The poster doesn’t mention race once. And his point is supported by research. Perceived intelligence tracks measured intelligence well even when the observer sees just a photo.
the problem is that such assessments are meaningfully noncausal in ways that have serious issues, in particular that attributes that do not cause low intelligence are correlated with perceived low intelligence due to incorrect training data—this doesn’t invalidate that it’s correlated by any means. quanticle points out that one of the concerning correlations is race. as I said in my comment—naming it racism is a bit odd to someone who tags racism as an agentic action on the part of a person (eg, you object that the post didn’t mention race), but quanticle raises an issue I agree with, and which I would continue to assert is an issue with both studies you link: these perceptual correlations also correlate with variables we’d like to causally normalize away, so that we can consistently detect intelligence across contexts. I do think that the use of the word “racism” is misleading in this context, and that the entire world should probably taboo the word and instead criticize things as being non-causal and correlated with attributes that are downstream of prejudice.
before reading the papers in depth: I’d bet that a significant portion of the findings turn out to be due to health causing intelligence to be higher, and so variables that let you predict health will predict intelligence as well. I also expect some detectable genetic correlate.
(but the long-term solution is that we should give everyone friendly-superintelligence healthcare that allows them to reach maximum human health and customize their own intelligence level ;)
I agree that with current cultural training data, training data collected from a lifetime of human experiences in a world where phrasing and behaviors enact racialization based on things like people’s bodily form, this method of verbal capability judgement is going to tend to have a correlation with people’s racialized attributes, because the cultural aesthetic you’re trying to match on by detecting verbal intelligence will present differently in people from different dialects and backgrounds.
different groups have different word bindings for the word racism based on whether it is an agentic action (“I’m not racist, dude, come on!”) or being synchronized with the correlated patterns of behavior that result in people being excluded (ie, the “I’m not racist, come on!” is probably being racist by this standard). IMO, because racism is such a high magnitude word for some people, there are going to be those who have the inclination to downvote because of your use of it.
but I agree that there’s a correlation that is worth highlighting: people’s verbal and aesthetic presentation does not represent intelligence the same way across different cultural aesthetic backgrounds, and so attempting to guess whether someone is competent from their presentation will tend to have a correlation with racialized groups—ie, people who others treat as being of a category because of their simple physical characteristics rather than their complex and agentic ones.
There’s, of course, some issue as well with actual intelligence probably being at least partially causally downstream from having a poor household in early childhood, and poor households being correlated with racialization—people tend to have less aggregate capability, including iq, when their nutritional, social, and chemical environment was bad growing up (eg poorer households are more likely to have undetected mold and chemical hazards hidden in the floor and walls). But I don’t think that was the key thing you were getting at.
companies throwing out the conventional wisdom on using years of education as a filter for hiring
This comment presumes that the reason companies aren’t hiring more under-18 people is because of their own executive decision rather than a result of onerous labor laws as the post posits. A quick test for this is to see what happens when there aren’t labor laws making it impossible or difficult for kids to work. History shows that even unskilled children were used as laborers. So I find the core of your comment kind of falls out.
I’m pretty sure that OP had something else in mind than twelve-year-olds working steam powered looms in sweatshop conditions, and losing the occasional finger or hand. Maybe I’m wrong, though. Maybe a return to the late-1800s is what OP has in mind.
The problem is, as a business owner, how do I tell this person apart from the average 14 year old?
Typical-mind fallacy warning. Just because you were like that as a teenager doesn’t mean that this is common. If it seems like a large fraction of people around are like this, that says more about your environment than it does about the overall population.
I agree that there is a certain amount of “wasted” talent among bright 14-year-olds. But it is not at all clear to me that the amount of talent wasted is sufficient to warrant companies throwing out the conventional wisdom on using years of education as a filter for hiring.
This is a limited and subjective answer but there are just some subtle conversational and lifestyle markers of potential (I’ve talked to a fair few “intelligent” people about this and they agree that you can just tell if someone is of their type). A more reasonable solution is to encourage cold emails along the lines of “hey, I’m taking initiative and pitching myself to you as a resource good for X, here’s what I’m interested in, here’s why there isn’t much application-wise knowledge of my interests, consider taking me as an unpaid intern”
Indeed. This may be biased by the fact that I intentionally sought out people like me (and found a fair few, many in similar situations).
That is both racist and, worse, ineffective.
It’s a strategy that gives you a lot of false negatives. If you are hiring in a competitive market having false negatives is a problem.
If you are hiring 14 or 15 year olds you are not in a competitive market, so you can live with more false negatives.
This is racist? The poster doesn’t mention race once. And his point is supported by research. Perceived intelligence tracks measured intelligence well even when the observer sees just a photo.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1467-6494.7103008
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3961208/
the problem is that such assessments are meaningfully noncausal in ways that have serious issues, in particular that attributes that do not cause low intelligence are correlated with perceived low intelligence due to incorrect training data—this doesn’t invalidate that it’s correlated by any means. quanticle points out that one of the concerning correlations is race. as I said in my comment—naming it racism is a bit odd to someone who tags racism as an agentic action on the part of a person (eg, you object that the post didn’t mention race), but quanticle raises an issue I agree with, and which I would continue to assert is an issue with both studies you link: these perceptual correlations also correlate with variables we’d like to causally normalize away, so that we can consistently detect intelligence across contexts. I do think that the use of the word “racism” is misleading in this context, and that the entire world should probably taboo the word and instead criticize things as being non-causal and correlated with attributes that are downstream of prejudice.
before reading the papers in depth: I’d bet that a significant portion of the findings turn out to be due to health causing intelligence to be higher, and so variables that let you predict health will predict intelligence as well. I also expect some detectable genetic correlate.
(but the long-term solution is that we should give everyone friendly-superintelligence healthcare that allows them to reach maximum human health and customize their own intelligence level ;)
I agree that with current cultural training data, training data collected from a lifetime of human experiences in a world where phrasing and behaviors enact racialization based on things like people’s bodily form, this method of verbal capability judgement is going to tend to have a correlation with people’s racialized attributes, because the cultural aesthetic you’re trying to match on by detecting verbal intelligence will present differently in people from different dialects and backgrounds.
different groups have different word bindings for the word racism based on whether it is an agentic action (“I’m not racist, dude, come on!”) or being synchronized with the correlated patterns of behavior that result in people being excluded (ie, the “I’m not racist, come on!” is probably being racist by this standard). IMO, because racism is such a high magnitude word for some people, there are going to be those who have the inclination to downvote because of your use of it.
but I agree that there’s a correlation that is worth highlighting: people’s verbal and aesthetic presentation does not represent intelligence the same way across different cultural aesthetic backgrounds, and so attempting to guess whether someone is competent from their presentation will tend to have a correlation with racialized groups—ie, people who others treat as being of a category because of their simple physical characteristics rather than their complex and agentic ones.
There’s, of course, some issue as well with actual intelligence probably being at least partially causally downstream from having a poor household in early childhood, and poor households being correlated with racialization—people tend to have less aggregate capability, including iq, when their nutritional, social, and chemical environment was bad growing up (eg poorer households are more likely to have undetected mold and chemical hazards hidden in the floor and walls). But I don’t think that was the key thing you were getting at.
This comment presumes that the reason companies aren’t hiring more under-18 people is because of their own executive decision rather than a result of onerous labor laws as the post posits. A quick test for this is to see what happens when there aren’t labor laws making it impossible or difficult for kids to work. History shows that even unskilled children were used as laborers. So I find the core of your comment kind of falls out.
I’m pretty sure that OP had something else in mind than twelve-year-olds working steam powered looms in sweatshop conditions, and losing the occasional finger or hand. Maybe I’m wrong, though. Maybe a return to the late-1800s is what OP has in mind.