What’s your evidence that you’re a marginal IMO medalist?
I only ask because I’ve noticed that my perception of a person’s actual ability and my perception of their ego seem to be negatively correlated among the people I’ve met, including Less Wrong users. For example, I once met a guy at a party who told me he wasn’t much of a coder; next semester he left undergrad to be the CTO of a highly technical Y Combinator startup.
This is part of the reason why I’m a little skeptical of SI’s of telling people “send us an e-mail if you did well on the Putnam”—I would guess a large fraction of those who did well on the Putnam think they did well by pure luck. (Imposter syndrome.) SI might be better off trying to collect info on everyone who thinks they might want to work on FAI, no matter how untalented, and judge relative competence for themselves instead of letting FAI contributor wannabes judge themselves. (Or at least specify a score above which one should definitely contact them, regardless of how lucky one feels one got.)
One of the main effects of illusory superiority in IQ is the Downing effect. This describes the tendency of people with a below average IQ to overestimate their IQ, and of people with an above average IQ to underestimate their IQ.
(I personally am a very good example of this, because although I think I’m not terribly bright, I am in fact a genius.)
What’s your evidence that you’re a marginal IMO medalist?
I only ask because I’ve noticed that my perception of a person’s actual ability and my perception of their ego seem to be negatively correlated among the people I’ve met, including Less Wrong users. For example, I once met a guy at a party who told me he wasn’t much of a coder; next semester he left undergrad to be the CTO of a highly technical Y Combinator startup.
This is part of the reason why I’m a little skeptical of SI’s of telling people “send us an e-mail if you did well on the Putnam”—I would guess a large fraction of those who did well on the Putnam think they did well by pure luck. (Imposter syndrome.) SI might be better off trying to collect info on everyone who thinks they might want to work on FAI, no matter how untalented, and judge relative competence for themselves instead of letting FAI contributor wannabes judge themselves. (Or at least specify a score above which one should definitely contact them, regardless of how lucky one feels one got.)
Less Wrong post on mathematicians and status:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/2vb/vanity_and_ambition_in_mathematics/
IAWYC, and so does Wikipedia:
(I personally am a very good example of this, because although I think I’m not terribly bright, I am in fact a genius.)