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Comment by everdrive | Hacker News Reader

Something I have always appreciated. I'm much less anxious working with very intelligent people, even if their intelligence eclipses mine. They don't have unusual ideas about what I should or should not be able to grasp. They can recognize which of my ideas are intelligent and which of my ideas are half-baked.

Working with unintelligent people, you need to spend more time building up a reputation. They cannot tell if you're intelligent based on what you say, or how you explain things -- only if you get results. This is nerve wracking for multiple reasons, but chiefly because intelligent people can be wrong, or unlucky, etc, and so only judging someone based on results is partially to judge based on luck.

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>> I'm much less anxious working with very intelligent people, even if their intelligence eclipses mine. They don't have unusual ideas about what I should or should not be able to grasp. They can recognize which of my ideas are intelligent and which of my ideas are half-baked.

Funny, because Kary Mullis, Nobel Prize winner for inventing PCR, one of the most important tools in the history of molecular biology, the technique that made modern genetics and COVID testing possible, could not recognize that his ideas about AIDS being a hoax were half baked. Or his belief in astrology. Nobel laureate. Astrology...

Linus Pauling with his two Nobel Prizes, could not recognize that his vitamin C cures cancer crusade was half baked. James Watson decoded DNA itself and could not recognize that his ideas about race were half-baked.

William Shockley another Nobel Prize...for inventing the transistor, probably the most consequential invention of the 20th century, could not recognize that touring college campuses promoting eugenics and forced sterilization was half-baked.

Bill Gates could not recognize that hanging out with a convicted sex trafficker after the conviction was half baked. Larry Summers could not recognize that speculating about womens brains at a public conference was half baked.

Intelligent people are great at recognizing which of your ideas are half-baked and they can also be catastrophically bad at recognizing which of their own are.The smarter they are, the more elaborate the justification, the more airtight the rationalization, and the more spectacular the eventual collapse. Peter Thiel being the prime example...

Watch out for smart people... they are the worst judges of their own stupidity...

The paper is about more intelligent people having higher accuracy judging other's intelligence. Nobody is claiming that intelligent people are completely infallible, nobody is claiming that they're incapable of ever believing in incorrect things.

You say “the paper is about more intelligent people having higher accuracy judging others intelligence.” Lets talk about what the paper actually shows...since you all and the rest of this HN thread :-) are confidently defending a claim you apparently... have not even scrutinized...It says so much, that from the hundreds of comments mine is the only downvoted.

The study is about 198 German psychology students watching 1-minute video clips...

That is your entire evidentiary base for a sweeping claim about intelligence and judgment. The “valid cues” that drove accuracy were speech clarity and vocabulary...meaning the finding is essentially “people who are good at verbal processing noticed verbal cues.”. That is close to tautological, not some profound discovery about social perception. ;-)

But here is the part you really missed. The original commenter I replied to was not making the paper narrow claim. They said intelligent people “can recognize which of my ideas are intelligent and which of my ideas are half-baked.”

That is a much broader claim about intelligent people general judgment quality and exactly the kind of overreach my examples were dismantling. I was not arguing against the paper. I was arguing against the commenter extrapolation, which you are now also making by hiding behind the paper :-) as if it supports what was actually said.

Now...even if we stay strictly within the paper own claims: Correlational design, no causal inference possible, tiny unrepresentative sample, restricted intelligence range, zero validity (a 1-min clip vs. actual human interaction), multiple predictors tested with no correction for multiple comparisons, and half the authors own hypotheses failed.

The effect size could be trivially small for all the headline tells you. You are defending a study you probably read only as a headline, against criticisms you did not understand and were aimed at something else entirely.

The irony of confidently misjudging what argument you are even responding to, in a thread about people ability to judge accurately, is not lost on me.

The methodology is about as sound as a sociology study ever gets - respectable n and in a domain where "only college students" is probably OK.

The conclusion is pretty clear: intelligent people are better at discerning intelligence in others. The effect is weak but statistically significant.

This result lines up with mine (and others) experience, which is that it is significantly harder to bullshit a smart person than a stupid person about your own intelligence. It's fair game to discuss anecdotes in the context of a study like this because human beings don't understand the world in CIs and z-scores, they understand it in narratives.

> That is close to tautological, not some profound discovery about social perception. ;-)

So is my statement above. It would have been a profound discovery if the study found out that intelligent people were no more accurate at judging others' intelligence than anyone else.

My experience is that smart people more often refrain from judgement of intelligence in others. Those that judge quickly, especially after a single statement that may have been stupendous or trivially illogical, almost certainly aren't the brightest stars in the night sky. That includes excentric people, perhaps not those that state something like that in an overly emotional state. But otherwise it is quite a good giveaway in my opinion.

Especially if you ask them to elaborate their disagreement, the argument is often trite and one-dimensional.

"I don't have enough information to render a judgement" is itself a judgement, and often a wise one. Some of the scariest folks think they really know a lot about a candidate after a job interview with some canned questions.

This is honestly a tell about you. “Smart people” doesn’t imply that everything that comes from them is smart like they’re a branch of life with left-handed proteins. It’s much more complex.

> William Shockley another Nobel Prize...for inventing the transistor, probably the most consequential invention of the 20th century, could not recognize that touring college campuses promoting eugenics and forced sterilization was half-baked.

This seems different than the astrology or AIDS or cancer ideas mentioned above it as it's scientifically sound, just widely considered unethical.

That's just Nobel Syndrome.

> Intelligent people are great at recognizing which of your ideas are half-baked and they can also be catastrophically bad at recognizing which of their own are. The smarter they are, the more elaborate the justification, the more airtight the rationalization, and the more spectacular the eventual collapse.

Thank you for this. I’ve experienced this firsthand, so it’s helpful to have an explanation.

I worked with someone who was arguably a genius. However, they were the "stupidest smart person" in many situations; specifically in the way you described. You could tell they had an "airtight rationalization," and no amount of explanation would help; you just had to wait for the eventual collapse. Very frustrating.

Unintelligent people can also be right, or lucky, etc, and someone judging on those criteria can end up getting swept up in making some very bad decisions based on dubious advice.

One the most important lessons I ever learned in my career was not to mindlessly disregard a known bullshitter. He'll be right enough that you'll look foolish even if he hasn't earned his reputation.

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