I think it gets a bit more complicated than that because there are feedback loops. The problem is that an expression of the “s/he is dumb” sort is not necessarily a bona fide evaluation of someone’s smarts. It may well be (and often is) just an insult—and insults are more or less fungible.
I definitely don’t discount the “sour grapes” scenario as something that probably happens a lot. In fact, I think that a lot of people’s assessments of other people’s intelligence involve, to put it kindly, subjective judgments along those lines, which is part of why I’m advocating trying to disrupt those.
That problem is likely to be mostly a function of two things: (1) How large a social network do you want to have (or are capable of maintaining); and (2) What’s the quality of the fish in the pond in which you are fishing?
I definitely agree that those factors are pretty relevant to the aforementioned problem, but they’re kind of moot. After all, (1) is equivalent to “Having a utility function that defines this as a problem”, and (2) is something you can’t necessarily control (If you see it as enough of a problem to move, I suppose you can, but that seems pretty expensive and it would be a shame to come to that solution without trying something like what I’m suggesting first). I’m merely suggesting that the perception of (2) may sometimes arise from an ill-formed manner of assessing “quality of fish”.
How do you define and measure intelligence, then? When you say “Alice is more (or less) intelligent than Bob”, what exactly do you mean?
Um, well, I guess I should quote myself here:
I think that IQ is a pretty good measurement for a lot of purposes, and that there’s a tendency in lay circles to undervalue it as a measure of a person’s intelligence (In the vague socially-applicable sense we’re talking about. Let’s say “thinking correctly and clearly” for the sake of argument)
I think that as far as things we can assign cardinal values to and compare on a continuum, IQ is our best bet, but there do seem to be some nebulous other contributing factors (Maybe the much-touted EQ, a decent education, or some other “general life experience” factors? I dunno) which can make someone at least appear more or less intelligent than their IQ might imply (Again, operationally defined as “seeming to think clearly, correctly, and quickly”. If you’d like to revise this operational definition to “exactly IQ” we can do that, and I’ll still argue that it’s not something most people are good at detecting from a first impression). Like I actually said, I think IQ is fine, and that most people undervalue its importance. I’m not sure where you got mixed up here. We could redefine “clear, correctly, quickly” as “interesting” rather than “intelligent,” although for me personally that’s necessary but not sufficient
I would agree there is a lot of self-fulfilling prophesies happening here, but I think they have much more to do with things like self-confidence and much less with making correct intelligence estimates, especially ex ante.
Self-confidence may be some people’s problem, but it’s definitely not everyone’s problem. Does it strike you as impossible or even unlikely that some people have the problem of dismissing people out of hand and thus drastically decreasing their potential social circle in undesirable ways?
These things are not exclusionary—you start with a speed-optimization and you continue with a better scheme as you get more information. If you get stuck on your cache hit, that’s a general problem not specifically tied to evaluating other people.
I agree that getting stuck on one’s cache hits in social assessment is not somehow a special case rather than a specific instance of a more general phenomenon. I would argue that social situations are a great problem domain in which to apply general rationality techniques, and that the method for ameliorating a problem I perceive some (but not all) people dealing with social isolation to have can be generalized to “Tabooing concepts,” something that’s already gotten coverage here. I think that the domain is of enough interest to many people that this application of said technique may be worthwhile to mention, and is perhaps even a means of attacking the general “getting stuck on a cache hit” problem in a domain that might yield some immediately useful results for a non-negligible number of people. If said application is too obvious, I apologize for stating the obvious.
Does it strike you as impossible or even unlikely that some people have the problem of dismissing people out of hand and thus drastically decreasing their potential social circle in undesirable ways?
That is very likely, but you are assuming a large social circle is an unalloyed blessing. I think there are at least two failure modes here: one is to assume the mantle of the suffering lone genius and descend into misanthropy; but the other one is to suppress one’s weirdness, start talking mostly about beer and baseball (or makeup and gossip) and descend into mediocrity.
the method for ameliorating a problem I perceive some (but not all) people dealing with social isolation to have can be generalized to “Tabooing concepts,”
I don’t know if getting stuck on the definition of intelligence is the underlying problem such people are having. I would probably reformulate your position as advice to see people as diverse and multidimensional, to recognize that there are multiple qualities which might make people attractive and interesting. You are basically arguing against a single-axis evaluation of others and that’s a valid point but I think it can be made directly without the whole “tabooing the word” context.
That is very likely, but you are assuming a large social circle is an unalloyed blessing.
I definitely don’t think it is. Too large a social circle can be unwieldy to manage, eating up a ton of someone’s time for the sake of a huge variety of shallow and uninteresting relationships, even if somehow every person in said social circle is interesting. I don’t mean to imply that everyone should strive to broaden their social circle by any means. There are plenty of people who don’t feel socially isolated at all, and there are even plenty of people with the opposite problem.
I think there are at least two failure modes here: one is to assume the mantle of the suffering lone genius and descent into misanthropy; but the other one is to suppress one’s weirdness, start talking mostly about beer and baseball (or makeup and gossip) and descent into mediocrity.
I don’t deny the existence of uninteresting people, but I think the descent into misanthropy failure mode is more common to high-intelligence people who feel socially isolated than the other failure mode, and hope that trying to more accurately assess people based on varied criteria and hack one’s perception to see more people as interesting will not necessarily lead to dumbing down one’s interests in order to relate to people on a more least-common-denominator basis. That’s a choice that can be made once you’ve assessed people more accurately or favorably, and definitely one that doesn’t have to be made just because you’ve updated your beliefs about the people you encounter.
I don’t know if getting stuck on the definition of intelligence is the underlying problem such people are having. I would probably reformulate your position as advice to see people as diverse and multidimensional, to recognize that there are multiple qualities which might make people attractive and interesting. You are basically arguing against a single-axis evaluation of others and that’s a valid point but I think it can be made directly without the whole “tabooing the word” context.
I agree with you, and in fact my original comment mentioned that “intelligence” is not the only single-axis evaluation label that people use. I think a more general phrasing might be “identify social single-axis fast-comparators that may be causing you to have cached first impressions about people. Fix your assessments by tabooing whatever label you happen to use, and making new assessments based on trying to counter your initial impression (Identify strengths of people you initially dislike, weaknesses of people you initially like too much). You may not change your mind about those people upon closer inspection, but it’s still worthwhile to do as an exercise, particularly if you are unsatisfied with your social circle in general or your relationships with particular people.”
Intelligence happens to be a pretty common single-axis comparator people I know (and relevant clusters to the LW population) use often.
I definitely don’t discount the “sour grapes” scenario as something that probably happens a lot. In fact, I think that a lot of people’s assessments of other people’s intelligence involve, to put it kindly, subjective judgments along those lines, which is part of why I’m advocating trying to disrupt those.
I definitely agree that those factors are pretty relevant to the aforementioned problem, but they’re kind of moot. After all, (1) is equivalent to “Having a utility function that defines this as a problem”, and (2) is something you can’t necessarily control (If you see it as enough of a problem to move, I suppose you can, but that seems pretty expensive and it would be a shame to come to that solution without trying something like what I’m suggesting first). I’m merely suggesting that the perception of (2) may sometimes arise from an ill-formed manner of assessing “quality of fish”.
Um, well, I guess I should quote myself here:
I think that as far as things we can assign cardinal values to and compare on a continuum, IQ is our best bet, but there do seem to be some nebulous other contributing factors (Maybe the much-touted EQ, a decent education, or some other “general life experience” factors? I dunno) which can make someone at least appear more or less intelligent than their IQ might imply (Again, operationally defined as “seeming to think clearly, correctly, and quickly”. If you’d like to revise this operational definition to “exactly IQ” we can do that, and I’ll still argue that it’s not something most people are good at detecting from a first impression). Like I actually said, I think IQ is fine, and that most people undervalue its importance. I’m not sure where you got mixed up here. We could redefine “clear, correctly, quickly” as “interesting” rather than “intelligent,” although for me personally that’s necessary but not sufficient
Self-confidence may be some people’s problem, but it’s definitely not everyone’s problem. Does it strike you as impossible or even unlikely that some people have the problem of dismissing people out of hand and thus drastically decreasing their potential social circle in undesirable ways?
I agree that getting stuck on one’s cache hits in social assessment is not somehow a special case rather than a specific instance of a more general phenomenon. I would argue that social situations are a great problem domain in which to apply general rationality techniques, and that the method for ameliorating a problem I perceive some (but not all) people dealing with social isolation to have can be generalized to “Tabooing concepts,” something that’s already gotten coverage here. I think that the domain is of enough interest to many people that this application of said technique may be worthwhile to mention, and is perhaps even a means of attacking the general “getting stuck on a cache hit” problem in a domain that might yield some immediately useful results for a non-negligible number of people. If said application is too obvious, I apologize for stating the obvious.
That is very likely, but you are assuming a large social circle is an unalloyed blessing. I think there are at least two failure modes here: one is to assume the mantle of the suffering lone genius and descend into misanthropy; but the other one is to suppress one’s weirdness, start talking mostly about beer and baseball (or makeup and gossip) and descend into mediocrity.
I don’t know if getting stuck on the definition of intelligence is the underlying problem such people are having. I would probably reformulate your position as advice to see people as diverse and multidimensional, to recognize that there are multiple qualities which might make people attractive and interesting. You are basically arguing against a single-axis evaluation of others and that’s a valid point but I think it can be made directly without the whole “tabooing the word” context.
I definitely don’t think it is. Too large a social circle can be unwieldy to manage, eating up a ton of someone’s time for the sake of a huge variety of shallow and uninteresting relationships, even if somehow every person in said social circle is interesting. I don’t mean to imply that everyone should strive to broaden their social circle by any means. There are plenty of people who don’t feel socially isolated at all, and there are even plenty of people with the opposite problem.
I don’t deny the existence of uninteresting people, but I think the descent into misanthropy failure mode is more common to high-intelligence people who feel socially isolated than the other failure mode, and hope that trying to more accurately assess people based on varied criteria and hack one’s perception to see more people as interesting will not necessarily lead to dumbing down one’s interests in order to relate to people on a more least-common-denominator basis. That’s a choice that can be made once you’ve assessed people more accurately or favorably, and definitely one that doesn’t have to be made just because you’ve updated your beliefs about the people you encounter.
I agree with you, and in fact my original comment mentioned that “intelligence” is not the only single-axis evaluation label that people use. I think a more general phrasing might be “identify social single-axis fast-comparators that may be causing you to have cached first impressions about people. Fix your assessments by tabooing whatever label you happen to use, and making new assessments based on trying to counter your initial impression (Identify strengths of people you initially dislike, weaknesses of people you initially like too much). You may not change your mind about those people upon closer inspection, but it’s still worthwhile to do as an exercise, particularly if you are unsatisfied with your social circle in general or your relationships with particular people.”
Intelligence happens to be a pretty common single-axis comparator people I know (and relevant clusters to the LW population) use often.
I think we’re in general agreement :-)