Alternate explanation for “insanity”: If your IQ is high enough, you’re likely to have problems fitting in with others. Normally I wouldn’t suggest high IQ as a reason for not fitting in since an IQ high enough to cause that problem occurs in less than 1% of the population. However, here you are posting on LessWrong, a place that is known for it’s intelligent members. (See Yvain’s surveys to discover that most claim a high enough IQ for the average to be in the 140′s). Not only that, but if you were using Bayesian techniques as a child and experimenting with making AIs as a teen, I’d say you’re very likely to be smarter than the average bear.
If you want to look into this further:
Try researching a concept called “socially optimal IQ range”.
Check out this article by the Prometheus Society: The Outsiders
Consider reading this book: Misdiagnosis and Dual Diagnosis of Gifted Children and Adults
Research the term: Existential depression (common to gifted adults, and your inability to hack utility table complaint is reminiscent of this).
If you or someone reading this needs a concierge into the subject of gifted adults, I can be one. If the prospect of being flamed for claiming giftedness / looking into giftedness is a concern, use PM.
Schools do not cater to every IQ ballpark. If your IQ is 130 (about 1 in 50 people) sure you could find a school that caters to that. If your IQ is 160 (one in thousands, exactly how rare is controversial), good luck.
I don’t know what this person’s IQ is, but I do know that colleges have to mind their finances and it simply does not make sense from a business standpoint for colleges to invest in creating a curriculum in various subjects for customers beyond a certain level of rarity. Harvard is rumored to have an average IQ of 130. If even Harvard is targeted for 130, where would people outside the socially optimal IQ range (the range ends somewhere beyond 145) go to meet each other?
Add to that that this person sounds like they’re living in the middle of bufu and it really would not surprise me if they’re gifted and haven’t met others. Also, according to one testing center 50% of gifted children weren’t given an IQ test, so if that’s the case, or if they got one and nobody explained what the score means (they almost never do) then they may not even realize they’re gifted, or may have no idea what giftedness means.
They may not even know that it means anything at all, let alone that it means they need to find others, and then there’s not a good answer to “where do you find people this rare” let alone “how am I going to find them in bufu?”
Even for those of IQ 160 there is a huge difference between interacting with people whose average IQ is 130, and interacting with the general population. Further, supposing IQ 160 is one-in-X in the world, it’s one-in-X/10, or even X/50, in academia. Shifting the average has all kinds of effects on thin tails.
Also consider that in addition to raw intelligence, academia tends to concentrate various forms of neuro-atypicality, and to be relatively tolerant of unusual interests.
Even for those of IQ 160 there is a huge difference between interacting with people whose average IQ is 130, and interacting with the general population.
This does not mean they will experience group bonding with those people.
Further, supposing IQ 160 is one-in-X in the world, it’s one-in-X/10, or even X/50, in academia. Shifting the average has all kinds of effects on thin tails.
Okay, but you’ve got to consider that the students are broken up into different classes and the classes only contain something like 30 students each, depending, and they’re broken up into levels (that correspond more or less to how many years they’ve spent in college). So if a rare person is 1 in 1000 in the wild, and they’re 1 in 100 in a school, and a school has 10,000 students...
10,000 \ 4 levels = 2,500 possible students who might get classes at your level (25 people like you)
The 25 people like you will be divided between 83 different classes if the class size is 30 each.
So you’ve got about a 30% chance that there’s somebody like you is in a given class. Now, since there are 28 other students in each class (aside from you and them), what’s the chance you’ll actually identify each other out of the crowd? After that, what’s the chance you’ll have anything in common? Maybe you won’t like their personality. Maybe they’re shy and never say anything. Maybe you sit on opposite ends of the room and never talk. There are a lot of factors influencing whether you might meet someone and whether you figure out if they’re compatible.
If you are 1 in 100 and take 6 classes per semester, you may have an opportunity to meet 4 people like yourself in class each year. An opportunity to meet a total of 16 people like you over the course of your four year college career would actually be pretty crappy odds, especially considering all of the other factors.
Ok; now do the same calculation for the world outside academia, making similar assumptions—no going up to every random person on the street and asking what their IQ is, if you please. You can’t do any better than maximising your odds; showing that the odds are still bad is unpersuasive, you have to show that they are the same as, or worse than, the alternative course of action.
you have to show that they are the same as, or worse than, the alternative course of action.
No I don’t. That WOULD be the way to go IF the argument was “Academia is a better place to meet people than on the street.” But that wasn’t the disagreement. My original suggestion was “If your IQ is high enough, it can be really hard to find people to bond with.” the counterargument was “Academia is a playground (implying that it’s a solution, not just that it’s better.)” and my rebuttal was “Academia is not a solution to this problem.” Don’t straw man me.
All I had to do is explain why academia wasn’t a solution. Since you seem to agree:
showing that the odds are still bad...
I am going to guess that I’ve convinced you of my point that academia isn’t a solution. Have I?
If the problem is “X is hard”, then “X is easier if you do Y” is good information, and “Y only improves X-easiness by so much” is no rebuttal. Arguing about whether it’s “a solution” is semantics. Also, you’re reading way too much into that ‘playground’.
If the problem is “X is hard”, then “X is easier if you do Y” is good information
If that were true, then concepts like these would not exist:
an ineffective strategy
false hope
false sense of security
a waste of time
If spending 5 dollars on a small chance of a good thing is a Pascal’s mugging, the suggestion that spending tens of thousands of dollars plus multiple years in academia is a good idea for rare people to meet teach other is an all out Pascal’s burglary.
Your arguments are getting ridiculous. I’m ending this discussion.
Alternate explanation for “insanity”: If your IQ is high enough, you’re likely to have problems fitting in with others.
Do you have a reference?
As far as I know, there is positive correlation beween social skills and IQ up to an IQ of about 120. There are claims that for a very high IQ (> 140) the correlation may be negative, but this is disputed.
I cannot give you anything good and I am questioning whether such a thing is possible in psychology right now. ):
I have a lot of experience interacting with gifted adults and have read a lot about them, so I think I have some useful insight when it comes to making the correct distinctions that help with untangling this controversy. First, there’s a difference between feeling lonely and being unable to fit in socially. There’s another gigantic difference between being unable to fit in and being able to fit in but only with a huge effort.
What I’m seeing is that most of the very gifted adults are able to fit in by putting in a lot of effort and hiding most of their thoughts and feelings (which would not make sense to others since their thoughts are often complex and difficult to explain and their feelings are often in reaction to complex thoughts), but they do not enjoy those social experiences which are so demanding of their energy, and so they end up lonely. The profoundly gifted people I’ve met are so frustrated by things like explaining across inferential distances that it’s practically characteristic of them. Their way of dealing with the differences seems to be to reduce social contact and learn specialized social skills for interacting in environments that are unavoidable like workplaces. They often succeed with these specialized social skills in limited environments and usually prevent social disasters simply by staying quiet, not leaving the house, or avoiding social environments with people who aren’t like minded. So, they have usually had coping mechanisms that work for them to prevent social ineptness. However, when it comes down to it, there’s nothing that improving one’s social skills can do to solve the problem of loneliness. The issue is not that people don’t respect or like them, the problem is that people do not relate to them when they try to share their inner worlds. You can build one-way rapport by learning what your audience cares about and keeping your conversations within the boundaries of their comfort zone. If the audience cannot build rapport the other way you end up feeling lonely and misunderstood. This is what I’m seeing.
Sorry for the delay. I haven’t memorized all my citations and it can be a bit of a pain to dig them up (I’m thinking about the best way to organize them right now) so I’m kind of burnt out on digging up citations right now which is resulting in some procrastination when answering comments like this.
Somehow the phrase “existential depression” clicked with me. For context, I’m an otherwise cheery person who breaks down with terrible fear (sometimes involving crying episodes) when I contemplate death. The fear generally lasts for a few hours, but is extremely potent.
Are there instances of existential depression which are more chronic, as opposed to acute, like mine? Is that what the phrase is referring to?
Higher IQ can allow you to figure out faster which things to learn to fit in with others, but you still have to put in the time & effort to learn those things, and then cultivate the corresponding social habits.
Higher IQ can allow you to figure out faster which things to learn to fit in with others
Faster than lower IQ people? Should be, but the scenario being discussed is the opposite: the highly intelligent doing far worse than the rest. For how the highly intelligent should perform at social skills, see, for example, Feynman. If someone of high intelligence is not outperforming those of lower intelligence, it does not make much sense to blame the intelligence.
“We are likely to have started out socially awkward—failing to automatically perceive all the social subtleties that our normal cohort noticed instinctively. Some of us have figured out social belonging using parts of our brain not adapted for this purpose; but most of us experience the normal human ache for social belonging, friendship, bonding, and sex, even more so if we have been unlucky in securing it. ”
Alternate explanation for “insanity”: If your IQ is high enough, you’re likely to have problems fitting in with others. Normally I wouldn’t suggest high IQ as a reason for not fitting in since an IQ high enough to cause that problem occurs in less than 1% of the population. However, here you are posting on LessWrong, a place that is known for it’s intelligent members. (See Yvain’s surveys to discover that most claim a high enough IQ for the average to be in the 140′s). Not only that, but if you were using Bayesian techniques as a child and experimenting with making AIs as a teen, I’d say you’re very likely to be smarter than the average bear.
If you want to look into this further:
Try researching a concept called “socially optimal IQ range”.
Check out this article by the Prometheus Society: The Outsiders
Consider reading this book: Misdiagnosis and Dual Diagnosis of Gifted Children and Adults
Research the term: Existential depression (common to gifted adults, and your inability to hack utility table complaint is reminiscent of this).
If you or someone reading this needs a concierge into the subject of gifted adults, I can be one. If the prospect of being flamed for claiming giftedness / looking into giftedness is a concern, use PM.
There’s a playground for smart adults looking to meet their likes. It’s called academia and it’s full of shiny toys.
Schools do not cater to every IQ ballpark. If your IQ is 130 (about 1 in 50 people) sure you could find a school that caters to that. If your IQ is 160 (one in thousands, exactly how rare is controversial), good luck.
I don’t know what this person’s IQ is, but I do know that colleges have to mind their finances and it simply does not make sense from a business standpoint for colleges to invest in creating a curriculum in various subjects for customers beyond a certain level of rarity. Harvard is rumored to have an average IQ of 130. If even Harvard is targeted for 130, where would people outside the socially optimal IQ range (the range ends somewhere beyond 145) go to meet each other?
Add to that that this person sounds like they’re living in the middle of bufu and it really would not surprise me if they’re gifted and haven’t met others. Also, according to one testing center 50% of gifted children weren’t given an IQ test, so if that’s the case, or if they got one and nobody explained what the score means (they almost never do) then they may not even realize they’re gifted, or may have no idea what giftedness means.
They may not even know that it means anything at all, let alone that it means they need to find others, and then there’s not a good answer to “where do you find people this rare” let alone “how am I going to find them in bufu?”
Even for those of IQ 160 there is a huge difference between interacting with people whose average IQ is 130, and interacting with the general population. Further, supposing IQ 160 is one-in-X in the world, it’s one-in-X/10, or even X/50, in academia. Shifting the average has all kinds of effects on thin tails.
Also consider that in addition to raw intelligence, academia tends to concentrate various forms of neuro-atypicality, and to be relatively tolerant of unusual interests.
This does not mean they will experience group bonding with those people.
Okay, but you’ve got to consider that the students are broken up into different classes and the classes only contain something like 30 students each, depending, and they’re broken up into levels (that correspond more or less to how many years they’ve spent in college). So if a rare person is 1 in 1000 in the wild, and they’re 1 in 100 in a school, and a school has 10,000 students...
10,000 \ 4 levels = 2,500 possible students who might get classes at your level (25 people like you)
The 25 people like you will be divided between 83 different classes if the class size is 30 each.
So you’ve got about a 30% chance that there’s somebody like you is in a given class. Now, since there are 28 other students in each class (aside from you and them), what’s the chance you’ll actually identify each other out of the crowd? After that, what’s the chance you’ll have anything in common? Maybe you won’t like their personality. Maybe they’re shy and never say anything. Maybe you sit on opposite ends of the room and never talk. There are a lot of factors influencing whether you might meet someone and whether you figure out if they’re compatible.
If you are 1 in 100 and take 6 classes per semester, you may have an opportunity to meet 4 people like yourself in class each year. An opportunity to meet a total of 16 people like you over the course of your four year college career would actually be pretty crappy odds, especially considering all of the other factors.
Ok; now do the same calculation for the world outside academia, making similar assumptions—no going up to every random person on the street and asking what their IQ is, if you please. You can’t do any better than maximising your odds; showing that the odds are still bad is unpersuasive, you have to show that they are the same as, or worse than, the alternative course of action.
No I don’t. That WOULD be the way to go IF the argument was “Academia is a better place to meet people than on the street.” But that wasn’t the disagreement. My original suggestion was “If your IQ is high enough, it can be really hard to find people to bond with.” the counterargument was “Academia is a playground (implying that it’s a solution, not just that it’s better.)” and my rebuttal was “Academia is not a solution to this problem.” Don’t straw man me.
All I had to do is explain why academia wasn’t a solution. Since you seem to agree:
I am going to guess that I’ve convinced you of my point that academia isn’t a solution. Have I?
If the problem is “X is hard”, then “X is easier if you do Y” is good information, and “Y only improves X-easiness by so much” is no rebuttal. Arguing about whether it’s “a solution” is semantics. Also, you’re reading way too much into that ‘playground’.
Yes, it really is a rebuttal and a good one too, for sane values of “so much”, “hard” and “Y”.
If that were true, then concepts like these would not exist:
an ineffective strategy
false hope
false sense of security
a waste of time
If spending 5 dollars on a small chance of a good thing is a Pascal’s mugging, the suggestion that spending tens of thousands of dollars plus multiple years in academia is a good idea for rare people to meet teach other is an all out Pascal’s burglary.
Your arguments are getting ridiculous. I’m ending this discussion.
Do you have a reference?
As far as I know, there is positive correlation beween social skills and IQ up to an IQ of about 120. There are claims that for a very high IQ (> 140) the correlation may be negative, but this is disputed.
I’m in “Halt, melt, and catch fire” mode right now regarding psychology knowledge and research in general.
I cannot give you anything good and I am questioning whether such a thing is possible in psychology right now. ):
I have a lot of experience interacting with gifted adults and have read a lot about them, so I think I have some useful insight when it comes to making the correct distinctions that help with untangling this controversy. First, there’s a difference between feeling lonely and being unable to fit in socially. There’s another gigantic difference between being unable to fit in and being able to fit in but only with a huge effort.
What I’m seeing is that most of the very gifted adults are able to fit in by putting in a lot of effort and hiding most of their thoughts and feelings (which would not make sense to others since their thoughts are often complex and difficult to explain and their feelings are often in reaction to complex thoughts), but they do not enjoy those social experiences which are so demanding of their energy, and so they end up lonely. The profoundly gifted people I’ve met are so frustrated by things like explaining across inferential distances that it’s practically characteristic of them. Their way of dealing with the differences seems to be to reduce social contact and learn specialized social skills for interacting in environments that are unavoidable like workplaces. They often succeed with these specialized social skills in limited environments and usually prevent social disasters simply by staying quiet, not leaving the house, or avoiding social environments with people who aren’t like minded. So, they have usually had coping mechanisms that work for them to prevent social ineptness. However, when it comes down to it, there’s nothing that improving one’s social skills can do to solve the problem of loneliness. The issue is not that people don’t respect or like them, the problem is that people do not relate to them when they try to share their inner worlds. You can build one-way rapport by learning what your audience cares about and keeping your conversations within the boundaries of their comfort zone. If the audience cannot build rapport the other way you end up feeling lonely and misunderstood. This is what I’m seeing.
Sorry for the delay. I haven’t memorized all my citations and it can be a bit of a pain to dig them up (I’m thinking about the best way to organize them right now) so I’m kind of burnt out on digging up citations right now which is resulting in some procrastination when answering comments like this.
Somehow the phrase “existential depression” clicked with me. For context, I’m an otherwise cheery person who breaks down with terrible fear (sometimes involving crying episodes) when I contemplate death. The fear generally lasts for a few hours, but is extremely potent.
Are there instances of existential depression which are more chronic, as opposed to acute, like mine? Is that what the phrase is referring to?
Shouldn’t high intelligence also enable you to solve this problem? Winning is what rationalists do, and all that.
Higher IQ can allow you to figure out faster which things to learn to fit in with others, but you still have to put in the time & effort to learn those things, and then cultivate the corresponding social habits.
Faster than lower IQ people? Should be, but the scenario being discussed is the opposite: the highly intelligent doing far worse than the rest. For how the highly intelligent should perform at social skills, see, for example, Feynman. If someone of high intelligence is not outperforming those of lower intelligence, it does not make much sense to blame the intelligence.
Oh, I see what you mean now. Didn’t originally realize your question was rhetorical so I didn’t infer what you were getting at.
“We are likely to have started out socially awkward—failing to automatically perceive all the social subtleties that our normal cohort noticed instinctively. Some of us have figured out social belonging using parts of our brain not adapted for this purpose; but most of us experience the normal human ache for social belonging, friendship, bonding, and sex, even more so if we have been unlucky in securing it. ”
http://theviewfromhell.blogspot.com/2012/09/trying-to-see-through-unified-theory-of.html