Too Smart
collaborativefund.com
collaborativefund.com
To me, it seems that there are at least two major components: breadth and depth. "Depth" people are probably what we normally call smart people. They have excellent memory, analytical precision, quick decision, etc. They're good at navigating through a well-defined problem space quickly and confidently. They're more like athletes. They are intelligent as machines are intelligent.
On the other hand, there are "breadth" people. They are much more distracted. They're always looking for different viewpoints and hidden variables, and sometimes they worry too much about what depth people would think trivial. But sometimes their worry turned out to be crucial. Their intelligence can be sometimes characterized as "thoughtful".
The thing is that, breadth people often look slow or dumb to depth people, because they tend to digress to a seemingly irrelevant tangent. Their intelligence is more subtle and hard to measure. But I think they're definitely "smart" in their own way. We need both kinds of intelligence, but we tend to be attracted to more visible kinds of intelligence, which I think is unfortunate.
When thinking broadly, it translates to speed of flipping through different patterns and frameworks to see which applies. This process is often silent and appears dumb because you end up rejecting most of the inapplicable patterns. It is difficult to verbalize these patterns because they are often in pictures. Some people with a high verbal fluency e.g. Patrick Collison can describe their thought process quite verbosely and the sheer speed of thought comes across but it’s not a very common trait which is why broad thinkers are often slow talkers e.g. Musk.
When thinking deeply, the path is often linear and requires recalling and describing known concepts and perhaps incorporating figures to come to a conclusion. This is similar to solving a math problem on a test where the inferences are mostly linear but lead to a non obvious conclusion. When someone can do this process fast, they’re also seen as smart. Certainly it relies on similar faculties as broad thinking like a good memory and sheer speed of thought and verbalization.
I think peoples life experiences and domain of study/work determime which kind of thinking they prefer and are more comfortable with but the underlying horsepower for both types of thinking are the same thing.
Others can process quickly and deal with a lot of inputs (RAM). Both are “smart” in different ways.
Scary smart people have both and draw connections between a lot of different facts very quickly and easily.
My wife and I are “smart” on paper (literally printed degrees), but we’ve been blessed to be relatable. More than one time I’ve had people say “oh we won’t have anything in common since you studied there”. But we do. We eat the same food, drink the same water, and 95% of life is a shared experience. I’ve not met someone who doesn’t have 5% more knowledge about something than I do. Sure I’ve got a lot of RAM, I can probably pick it up quickly, but I still have something to learn. And there are things where I’m way out of my element and that 5% is way different (a second language I’ve never studied).
This article also seems to not be very attentive to the literature regarding intelligence. There is no threshold after which intelligence stops being beneficial to things like income and wealth. So we can confidently declare that the more intelligent someone is, the better the actions they take (at least the actions that lead them to acquire more resources).
There are some ideas here that I think are worth investigating, though. The fact that smart people can hold confident opinions about very contentious topics (for example, republicans arguing that global warming is a scam) is a curious phenomenon. The interaction between intelligence and ideology can indeed be a very dangerous one.
What about spatial, verbal, and the other one that I forgot?
I'm very erratic, distracted. In a recent project with some peers I did something "trivial" but it led to a major change in the project. Mty peers were impressed with my finding. I figure they think it's trivial. They probably don't (maybe?).
I didn't get good grades in school, due to my mental state. But after school and into University I'm suddenly performing better than I could have ever thought I would have. This comes with some impostor syndrome. I think my course is easy - but it can't jusy be "easy", I passed that one class notorious for a 75% fail rate with a distinction, that was _me_. But still, my mind is ripe with doubts.
I've experienced something similar. I have a PhD in astronomy, and that tends to attract a certain sort. I became friends with a guy a while back who had discovered a group of geocentrists and was genuinely curious if there was anything to it. He lent me a book he had bought from them that was about 800 pages long making the case for geocentrism.
Now you might think that it's an easy enough thing to prove that geocentrism is wrong. What about the Foucault pendulum? Surely that at least proves that the Earth rotates! But the geocentrists had considered that and a whole lot more to boot. The book was meticulously researched and went through dozens of historical experiments that demonstrate the motion of the Earth and then presented an explanation as to how these results were, in fact, consistent with their geocentric model. Many of these experiments are so obscure that they've pretty much been forgotten by everyone except historians of science.
Of course it was all nonsense, but it was a surprisingly sophisticated form of nonsense. Fortunately for me by the time they were trying to explain away certain results in quantum physics they started to get pretty obviously out of their depth and were making easy to catch mistakes. But without that knowledge, discovering where they went wrong in their logic was non-trivial. I could certainly see how it could be a plausible argument for someone without a background in physics.
Science doesn’t really say anything about where the center of the universe is. Surely the geocentrists don’t think earth is bigger than the sun or even other stars anymore.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/17tEc9ETL4tjfTmNbpwJJ5OSx...
Did they ever address it?
If one is really smart, you'd not find what's boring to mass is boring, such as spend less save more.
There is a difference between delusional self-fulfill prophecy and evidence based deduction. More importantly it's an acquired skill. Despite intelligent or not, the author appears to be terribly lack of intellectual training.
William F. Buckley was very intelligent, but so was Gore Vidal.
There are many, many topics where increasing intelligence does not mean increasing convergence of conclusions. The further away you get from hard science, the easier it is to diverge... building (intelligently) upon incorrect and hard-to-falsify foundations.
Somewhat predictive.
> The DOD considers it real enough that all recruits must pass a cogntive screening test, the AFQT, which is like a proxy for measuring IQ.
The DOD also often requires polygraph tests, so not the best endorsement.
IQ is a predictor of success in almost any particular metric for which it's reasonable to measure (so things like success in visual art and music don't correlate as well. ) In finances, career paths, academia, social status, politics, writing and so on, IQ strongly correlates to relative performance.
IQ may be a poor proxy for some strictly well derived fundamental of cognition, but we don't have that quite yet.
Maybe we'll be able to ask gpt-9000 and get a sensible answer?
Sometimes, I have the feeling there are too many dumb people with money.
And I don't even mean people like Bezos, but just people with a few millions. Buying a bunch of cars they never use, or house and estate that is much too big for them.
A friend of mine has an IQ of 140 and she is one of least successful person I know.
She said it's like a useless superpower. But on the other hand, she was never in an academic context, because of family.
At the risk of oversimplification, non-ergodicity means that you have to be stupid to get rich. A simple way to see that is gamblers ruin. If you start with $1 and 20 pulls on a slot machine that pays out double with 51% probability, only a complete moron could become a millionaire, but of course they would point to the 51% showing how they outsmarted everybody else.
What would a smart person do? They would determine a utility function for money, definitely sub linear, and bet the amount that would maximize their high probability minimum return. Most likely, that would be zero.
Life is like that. You only get so many pulls on the lever.
Knowing a lot of things is not the same as being intelligent. People think intelligence is something that expresses itself on its own. It doesn't, which is why it's hard to define.
IIRC, if you have an IQ of about 125, you can handle any mental task set before you. If you want to become a world-class X, you can, with enough work.
The thing is, intelligence is more like a multiplying force. It doesn't do anything on its own. What's 1 times 0? Zero. What's 1000 times 0? Still zero. Now, what if we multiply by 2 instead of 0? Or 3?
So someone with a higher intelligence would need to put in less time to get good at a mental task, but they still need to actually put in the time. They need the knowledge.
I think you get it on an intuitive level. Because you say from your "perspective that the number of actually smart people is vanishingly small". That's likely true. Because intelligence isn't measured in degrees or being able to rattle off trivia, it's in being able to make the connections and work out the logic better, faster, and with fewer details than someone else.
I've found this to be true. There's an art to taking extremely complex ideas and distilling them down into something simple. In this, Feynman was a virtuoso.
[0]: https://prometheussociety.org/wp/articles/the-outsiders/