advael

Karma: 123

advael Sep 23, 2015, 11:02 PM
0 points
in reply to: James_Miller’s comment on: On Walmart, And Who Bears Responsibility For the Poor
That’s not exactly true. You can volunteer for far less than the minimum wage (Some would say infinitely less) if you want to. What you can’t do is employ someone for some non-zero amount of money that’s lower than the minimum wage.

advael Aug 27, 2015, 4:52 PM
17 points
on: Words per person year and intellectual rigor
I suspect that your model has been built to serve the hypothesis you started with.

First of all, I’m not sure what measure you’re using for “rigorous thought”. Is it a binary classification? Are there degrees of rigor? I can infer from some of your examples what kind of pattern you might be picking up on, but if we’re going to try and say things like “there’s a correlation between rigor and volume of publication”, I’d like to at least see a rough operational definition of what you mean by rigor. It may seem obvious to you what you mean, and it may seem like a subject many people on this site devoted to refining human rationality will have opinions on. That makes it more important to define your terms rigorously, not less, because your results shouldn’t explain variation in everyone’s definition of rigor.

For the sake of argument, we could use something like “ratio of bits of information implied by factual claims to bits of information contained in presented evidence supporting factual claims” if we want something vaguely quantifiable. It seems your initial set of examples uses a more heuristic approach, with the rigorous group consisting mostly of well-known scientists, artists, and philosophers who are well-liked and whose findings/writings are considered well-founded/meaningful/influential in our current era, and your non-rigorous group consisting of mostly philosophers and some scientists who are at least partially discredited in our current era. I suspect that this might not be a very predictive heuristic, as I think it implicitly relies on some hindsight and also would be vulnerable to exactly the effect you claim if your claim turns out to be true.

Also, I suspect that academic publication and publication of e.g. novels, self-help books, poetry, philosophical treatises, etc. would follow very different rules with respect to rigor versus volume of publication; there are structures in place to make them do exactly that. While journal publication and peer review rules are obviously far from perfect, I suspect that producing a large volume of non-rigorous work is a much better strategy for a fiction writer, philosopher, or artist than it is for a scientist who, if unable to sufficiently hide their non-rigor, will not get their paper published at all, and might start becoming discredited and losing grant money to do further research. In particular, I think the use of a wide temporal range of publishers is going to confound you a lot, because standards have changed and publication rates in general have gone way up in the last ~150 years.

Actually, I’m not even sure how a definition of “rigorous thought” that applies to scientific literature could apply cleanly to fiction-writing, unless it’s the “General Degree of Socially-Accepted Credibility” heuristic discussed earlier.

advael Jul 27, 2015, 9:01 PM
0 points
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Welcome to Less Wrong! (7th thread, December 2014)
Oh, I guess I misunderstood. I read it as “We should survey to determine whether terminal values differ (e.g. ‘The tradeoff is not worth it’) or whether factual beliefs differ (e.g. ‘There is no tradeoff’)”

But if we’re talking about seeing whether policies actually work as intended, then yes, probably that would involve some kind of intervention. Then again, that kind of thing is done all the time, and properly run, can be low-impact and extremely informative.

advael Jul 27, 2015, 7:00 PM
1 point
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Welcome to Less Wrong! (7th thread, December 2014)
What intervention would you suggest to study the incidence of factual versus terminal-value disagreements in opposing sides of a policy decision?

advael Jul 27, 2015, 5:41 PM
1 point
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Welcome to Less Wrong! (7th thread, December 2014)
A survey can be a reasonably designed experiment that simply gives us a weaker result than lots of other kinds of experiments.

There are many questions about humans that I would expect to be correlated with the noises humans make when given a few choices and asked to answer honestly. In many cases, that correlation is complicated or not very strong. Nonetheless, it’s not nothing, and might be worth doing, especially in the absence of a more-correlated test we can do given our technology, resources, and ethics.

advael Jul 24, 2015, 10:13 PM
3 points
in reply to: VoiceOfRa’s comment on: Welcome to Less Wrong! (7th thread, December 2014)
I’d argue that that little one-off comment was less patronizing and more… sarcastic and mean.

Yeah, not all that productive either way. My bad. I apologize.

But I think the larger point stands about how these ideological labels are super leaky and way too schizophrenically defined by way too many people to really even be able to meaningfully say something like “That’s not a representative sample of conservatives!”, let alone “You probably haven’t met people like that, you’re just confabulating your memory of them because you hate conservatism”

advael Jul 24, 2015, 6:58 PM
7 points
in reply to: Good_Burning_Plastic’s comment on: Welcome to Less Wrong! (7th thread, December 2014)
Because those vectors of argument are insufficiently patronizing, I’m guessing.

But in all seriousness, the “judging memeplexes from their worst members” issue is pretty interesting, because politicized ideologies and really any ideology that someone has a name for and integrates into their identity (“I am a conservative” or “I am a feminist” or “I am an objectivist” or whatever) are really fuzzily defined.

To use the example we’re talking about: Is conservatism about traditional values and bolstering the nuclear family? Is conservatism about defunding the government and encouraging private industry to flourish? Is conservatism about biblical literalism and establishing god’s law on earth? Is conservatism about privacy and individual liberties? Is conservatism about nationalism and purity and wariness of immigrants? I’ve encountered conservatives who care about all of these things. I’ve encountered conservatives who only care about some of them. I’ve encountered at least one conservative who has defined conservatism to me in terms of each of those things.

So when I go to my internal dictionary of terms-to-describe-ideologies, which conservatism do I pull? I know plenty of techie-libertarian-cluster people who call themselves conservatives who are atheists. I know plenty of religious people who call themselves conservatives who think that cryptography is a scary terrorist thing and should be outlawed. I know self-identified conservatives who think that the recent revelations about NSA surveillance are proof that the government is overreaching, and self-identified conservatives who think that if you have nothing to hide from the NSA then you have nothing to fear, so what’s the big deal?

I do not identify as a conservative. I can steelman lots of kinds of conservatism extremely well. Honestly I have some beliefs that some of my conservative-identifying friends would consider core conservative tenets. I still don’t know what the fuck a conservative is, because the term gets used by a ton of people who believe very strongly in its value but mean different things when they say it.

So I have no doubt that not only has Acty encountered conservatives who are stupid, but that their particular flavor of stupid are core tenets of what they consider conservatism. The problem is that this colors her beliefs about other kinds of conservatives, some of whom might only be in the same cluster in person-ideology-identity space because they use the same word. This is not an Acty-specific problem by any means. I know arguably no one who completely succeeds at not doing this, the labels are just that bad. Who gets to use the label? If I meet someone and they volunteer the information that they identify as a conservative, what conclusions should I draw about their ideological positions?

I think the problem has to stem from sticking the ideology-label onto one’s identity, because then when an individual has opinions, it’s really hard for them to separate their opinions from their ideology-identity-label, especially when they’re arguing with a standard enemy of that ideology-label, and thus can easily view themselves as standing in for the ideology itself. The conclusion I draw is that as soon as an ideology is an identity-label, it quickly becomes pretty close to useless as a bit of information by itself, and that the speed at which this happens is somewhat correlated to the popularity of the label.

advael Jul 22, 2015, 7:17 PM
3 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Welcome to Less Wrong! (7th thread, December 2014)
Um, I fail to see how people are making and doing less stuff than in previous generations. We’ve become obsessed with information technology, so a lot of that stuff tends to be things like “A new web application so that everyone can do X better”, but it fuels both the economy and academia, so who cares? With things like maker culture, the sheer overwhelming number of kids in their teens and 20s and 30s starting SAAS companies or whatever, and media becoming more distributed than it’s ever been in history, we have an absurd amount of productivity going on in this era, so I’m confused where you think we’re “braking”.

As for video games in particular (Which seems to be your go-to example for things characteristic of the modern era that are useless), games are just a computer-enabled medium for two kinds of things: Contests of will and media. The gamers of today are analogous in many ways to the novel-consumers or TV-consumers or mythology-consumers of yesterday and also today (Because rumors of the death of old kinds of media are often greatly exaggerated), except for the gamers that are more analogous to the sports-players or gladiators or chess-players of yesterday and also today. Also, the basically-overnight-gigantic indie game development industry is pretty analogous to other giant booms in some form of artistic expression. Video games aren’t a new human tendency, they’re a superstimulus that hijacks several (Storytelling, Artistic expression, Contests of will) and lowers entry barriers to them. Also, the advent of powerful parallel processors (GPUs), a huge part of the boom in AI research recently, has been driven primarily by the gaming industry. I think that’s a win regardless.

Basically, I just don’t buy any of your claims whatsoever. The “common sense” ideas about how society improving on measures of collaboration, nonviolence, and egalitarianism will make people lazy and complacent and stupid have pretty much never borne out on a large scale, so I’m more inclined to attribute their frequent repetition by smart people to some common human cognitive bias than some deep truth. As someone whose ancestors evolved in the same environment yours did, I too like stories of uber-competent tribal hero guys, but I don’t think that makes for a better society, given the overwhelming evidence that a more pluralistic, egalitarian, and nonviolent society tends to correlate with more life satisfaction for more people, as well as the acceleration of technology.

advael Jun 27, 2015, 1:31 AM
2 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: The Brain as a Universal Learning Machine
I’m inclined to agree. Actually I’ve been convinced for a while that this is a matter of degrees rather than being fully one way or the other (Modules versus learning rules), and am convinced by this article that the brain is more of a ULM than I had previously thought.

Still, when I read that part the alternative hypothesis sprung to mind, so I was curious what the literature had to say about it (Or the post author.)

advael Jun 25, 2015, 9:08 PM
2 points
in reply to: jacob_cannell’s comment on: The Brain as a Universal Learning Machine
For e.g. the ferret rewiring experiments, tongue based vision, etc., is a plausible alternative hypothesis that there are more general subtypes of regions that aren’t fully specialized but are more interoperable than others?

For example, (Playing devil’s advocate here) I could phrase all of the mentioned experiments as “sensory input remapping” among “sensory input processing modules.” Similarly, much of the work in BCI interfaces for e.g. controlling cursors or prosthetics could be called “motor control remapping”. Have we ever observed cortex being rewired for drastically dissimilar purposes? For example, motor cortex receiving sensory input?

If we can’t do stuff like that, then my assumption would be that at the very least, a lot of the initial configuration is prenatal and follows kind of a “script” that might be determined by either some genome-encoded fractal rule of tissue formation, or similarities in the general conditions present during gestation. Either way, I’m not yet convinced there’s a strong argument that all brain function can be explained as working like a ULM (Even if a lot of it can)

advael Jun 18, 2015, 6:47 PM
−1 points
in reply to: Nornagest’s comment on: Autism, or early isolation?
Negative, but it may be because of rollover?

advael Jun 18, 2015, 4:52 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Autism, or early isolation?
But without medicalizing, how can we generate significant-sounding labels for every aspect of our personalities?

How will we write lists of things “you should know” about dealing with (Insert familiar DSM-adjacent descriptor)?

Without a constant stream of important-sounding labels, how will I know what tiny ingroups I belong to? My whole identity might fall apart at the seams!

advael Jun 15, 2015, 8:32 PM
0 points
on: Rational Me or We?
I would guess that martial arts are so frequently used as a metaphor for things like rationality because their value is in the meta-skills learned by becoming good at them. Someone who becomes a competent martial artist in the modern world is:
- Patient enough to practice things they’re not good at. Many techniques in effective martial arts require some counter-intuitive use of body mechanics that takes non-trivial practice to get down, and involve a lot of failure before you achieve success. This is also true of a variety of other tasks.
- Possessing the fine balance of humility and confidence required to learn skills from other people. Generally if you’re going to get anywhere in martial arts, you’re not going to derive it from first principles. This is true of most human knowledge domains. Learning to be a student or apprentice is valuable, as is learning to respect the opinions of others when they demonstrate their competence.
- Practiced in remaining calm and thinking strategically under pressure. If one is taught to competently handle a high-stress situation such as a physical fight, one can make decisions quickly and confidently even when stressed. This skill is useful for reasons I hope I don’t have to go into depth on.
- Able to engage mirror neurons to understand and reason about the nonverbal behavior of other humans, and somewhat understand their intentions and strategies. This is useful in a fight and taught by many martial arts, but extremely useful in other contexts, not the least of which being negotiation with semi-cooperative individuals.
- Probably pretty physically fit. It’s a decent whole-body exercise regimen, and there are numerous benefits to exercising frequently and keeping in good shape. It is probably not the most efficient exercise regimen out there by a long shot, but it may be one that is intrinsically fun to do for a lot of people, and thus it’s likely that they’ll stick with it.
- Almost incidentally, reasonably capable of defending oneself in one of the few instances where civilized behavior temporarily breaks down (An argument with a seemingly reasonable person who quickly becomes unreasonable, perhaps alcohol is involved? I don’t know. Fights are low-stakes and uncommon these days but they still happen). This is kind of a weird edge case in a modern society but might non-trivially prevent injury or gain you status when it comes up.
Note that there are a lot of vectors by which one can gain these meta-skills. While there are a bunch of martial arts enthusiasts out there who would probably claim that martial arts have the exclusive ability to grant you one or more of these, I really doubt that’s the case. However, martial arts get a pretty good amount of coverage in real and fictional cultural reference frames that we can be reasonably confident most people are familiar with, and it’s not a bad example of a holistic activity that can hone a lot of these meta-skills.

It’s also worth noting that while the skills involved in interacting with a society of people you trust and want to work with are often different from the skills involved in becoming a competent individual, many of the latter can be helpful in the former. I would much rather be on a team with a bunch of people who understand the meta-skill of staying calm under pressure, or the meta-skill of making their beliefs pay rent, than be on a team with a bunch of people who don’t. Aggregated individual prowess isn’t the only factor for group success, and it may not even be the most important one, but it certainly doesn’t hurt.

advael Jun 12, 2015, 8:16 PM
1 point
in reply to: Jiro’s comment on: The Joy of Bias
I can’t say I always find that to be true for myself. There are truths that I wish weren’t true, and when I find that I was merely being overly pessimistic, that’s usually a good thing. Even though I want my beliefs to reflect reality, that doesn’t stop me from sometimes wishing certain beliefs I have weren’t true, even if I still think that they are. It’s possible that being wrong can be a good thing in and of itself, completely separate from it being good to find out that you’re wrong, if you’re wrong.

advael Jun 9, 2015, 5:14 PM
0 points
in reply to: ThomasRyan’s comment on: Welcome to Less Wrong!
A powerful computer with a bad algorithm or bad information can produce a high volume of bad results that are all internally consistent.

(IQ may not be directly analogous to computing power, but there are a lot of factors that matter more than the author’s intelligence when assessing whether a model bears out in reality.)

advael Jun 1, 2015, 7:39 PM
0 points
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: How my social skills went from horrible to mediocre

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.

advael Jun 1, 2015, 5:45 PM
0 points
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: How my social skills went from horrible to mediocre

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.

advael May 31, 2015, 9:09 PM
5 points
in reply to: James_Miller’s comment on: Rationality Quotes Thread June 2015
It’s less that he finds an argument whose premise is repugnant, and more that he realizes that he doesn’t have a good angle of attack for convincing the slavers to not mutilate/kill him at all, but does have one for delaying doing so. I’d argue it’s more of a “perfect is the enemy of the good” judgement on his part than a disagreeable argument (After all, Tyrion has gleefully made that clarification to several people before.)

advael May 29, 2015, 11:27 PM
1 point
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: How my social skills went from horrible to mediocre
Do you, by any chance, have any data to support that? I am sure there are people for whom it’s a problem, I’m not sure it’s true in general, even among the nerdy cluster.

Very good point. I don’t want to claim it’s a statistical tendency without statistics to back it up. Nonetheless, given articles like the OP, it seems like a lot of people in said clusters (Could be self-selecting, e.g. intelligent nerd-cluster-peeps are more likely to blog about it despite not having a higher rate, etc) have a problem that consists of feeling socially isolated, unable to relate to people, and unable to engage people in a conversation. I’m simply pointing to a plausible explanation for at least some cases of that phenomenon, which I’ve built up from some observation of myself and my peers, and some theoretical knowledge (For example, http://psiexp.ss.uci.edu/research/teaching/Tversky_Kahneman_1974.pdf , well-known social cognitive biases such as the Fundamental Attribution Error, the “cached thought” concept that is well-known to lesswrong readers, etc) and come up with a rough strategy for mitigating it, which I think has been reasonably successful. I’d be very interested in knowing through some rigorous means whether this bears out in aggregate, but I can’t point to any particular research that’s been done, so I’ll leave it as a fuzzy claim about a tendency I’ve observed, I don’t claim that I would need extremely strong evidence to be convinced otherwise

That’s a very common situation at parties where you circulate among a bunch of unknown to you people.

I agree, and I’m sure your heuristics are well-tuned for choosing who to talk to at parties given options that fit your criteria. The problem of having a social network limited by an unreasonably high minimum-intelligence requirement for interest in a person may not be one that you have, and even if you do, I suspect that it is seldom going to come up at a party you intentionally went to.

Nope, that is thinking correctly. Clear thinking is a bit difficult to put into words, it’s more of a “I know it when I see it” thing. Maybe define it as tactical awareness of one’s statements (or thoughts) -- being easily able to see the implications, consequences, contradictions, reinforcing connections, etc. of the claim that you’re making?

I’d think that would be more succinctly stated as “thorough” (It actually doesn’t matter, you defined your term well enough so I’m glad to use it, but it strikes me as a counterintuitive use of “clear”), but I still think it’s a poor indicator. People sufficiently good at rehearsed explanations of an opinion or knowledge domain can sound much more like they’ve thought through {implications, consequences, contradictions, reinforcing connections} of their statement than someone who is thinking clearly (Even in that sense) but improvising, even if the improviser has a significantly higher IQ, for example.

I also don’t deny that there may exist ways you can conversationally prod someone into revealing more about whatever intelligence measure you care about by e.g. forcing them to improvise, but a really well-articulated network of cached thoughts can be installed in a wide intelligence-variance of people, and it’s a lot easier to jump a small inferential distance from a cached thought quickly than to generate one on the fly, and the former can be accomplished by being well-read.

I don’t think I would agree. Making fine distinctions, maybe, but in a sufficiently diverse set there is rarely any confusion as to who’s in the left tail and who’s in the right tail. And I found that my perceptions of how smart people are correlate well with IQ proxies (like SAT scores).

I am willing to believe that some people are able to calibrate their IQ-sense well. I’m even more willing to believe that almost everyone believes that they are. I would bet that people who are around diverse groups of people willing to report proxy-IQ measures often are likely to get good at it over time. 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 there’s a tendency in high-IQ circles to overvalue it. I’ll agree that there’s definitely an IQ-floor below which I’ve seldom met interesting people, but beyond that, there’s too much variation in other factors to reliably rule out e.g. extremely smart but hidebound people who have domain-specific expertise and are not that interesting to talk to about anything else.

At any rate, I think we’ve moved off track here. Rest assured, I’m not trying to claim that no one is good at discerning the intelligence of other people (or especially just their IQ. If you’re willing to operationally equate those then moot point I guess), I’m just suggesting that most people are bad at it, and even people who are good at it probably aren’t as good as they think they are. I’m also suggesting that
1. It’s entirely plausible that people who feel isolated, socially inept, and unable to have meaningful conversations with people are in a self-fulfilling prophecy due to using bad heuristics to determine intelligence and getting into a confirmation-bias/social signaling feedback loop that makes them unable to change their mind about said people (Illusion of transparency notwithstanding, it’s not hard for a lot of people to pick up on someone thinking they’re an idiot and not wanting to open up to them as a consequence).
2. Ignoring the vague “intelligence” label and trying to get at more granular aspects of people’s personality, competencies, etc. is a good way to break what may be a cached speed-optimization rather than a good classification scheme. You can even use things you believe to be components of “intelligence” as your indicators if you like, that’s a good way to make your notion of “intelligence” more concrete at the very least.
3. Viewing people in terms of their strengths is a good exercise for respecting them more and being better able to relate to them and utilize them for things they are good at. Relatedly, viewing people in terms of their weaknesses is a good exercise that can help break the “idolization” anti-pattern (Or test your assumptions about how to compete with them)

advael May 29, 2015, 7:49 PM
0 points
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: How my social skills went from horrible to mediocre
I’ll admit that there’s a bit of strategic overcorrecting inherent in the method I’ve outlined. That said, it’s there for a good reason: First impressions are pretty famously resilient, and especially among certain cultures (Again, math-logic-arcane-cluster is a big one that’s relevant to me), there’s what I would argue is a clearly pathologically high false-positive rate for detecting “Dumb/Not worth my time”.

If you ever have the idealized ceteris paribus form of the “I may only talk to one of two people, I have no solid information on either” problem, I seldom see a problem in using whatever quick-and-dirty heuristic you choose to make that decision (Although with the caveat that I don’t endorse the general case for that being true: some people’s heuristics are especially bad). However, over longer patterns of interaction with a given person, this problem does still seem to emerge, and the reasons why are modeled well by assuming a classifier that values being fast over being accurate (A common feature of human heuristic reasoning, and an extremely easy blind spot to overlook).

Even with a simplified operational definition like the one you’ve provided, I have severe doubts that anyone should be confident in their ability to reasonably make that assessment accurately in a short amount of time, or even over a long period of time in a single context or limited set of contexts. Also, to be frank that operational definition isn’t doing much better than just saying “intelligent” with no clarification. To pick it apart:

-”Thinking clearly,” as in “not making reasoning mistakes I can immediately identify?” Very easily confounded by instantaneous mental state as well as inferential distance problems.

-”Thinking correctly,” okay, a success rate might be useful, except that anyone can regurgitate correct statements and anyone can draw mistaken conclusions based on bad information.

-”Thinking quickly” is really only useful given the other two.

As for intelligence not being someone’s entire worth, I’m definitely glad we agree on that, but given the above, I’d argue it’s not even all that useful. People often seem way more intelligent in contexts where they are knowlegeable, or in certain mental states, or when around certain other people. I don’t claim that I don’t value something called “intelligence,” but I would claim that humans, myself included, are notoriously bad at assessing it, generalizing it, or for that matter agreeing on what it means, and given how vague a notion it is, it’s very easy to short-circuit more useful assessments of people by coming up with a fast heuristic for “intelligence” that’s comically bad but masked by a vague enough label.

Tabooing “intelligence” in my assessments of other people doesn’t remove the concept from my vocabulary, it just slightly mitigates the problematic tendency to use bad heuristics and not apply enough effort to updating my model. I think it would serve a lot of people well as a technique for reasoning about people.