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.
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.
>> 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...
I guess this supports a vague belief that I have held for decades: it is really difficult to rank the intelligence of people who are smarter than you
Through work I had the privilege of being around lots of people who were smarter than me, but if somebody asked me to rank them from "somewhat smarter" to "much smarter", I would have had a hard time.
Just an anecdote! I don't have any hard evidence.
I also wondered for many years why most of them didn't quit their jobs when on paper they would have been able to do so, but work is not a great place to ask those sorts of questions.
It's funny to imagine that's the reason why "aliens invading us" or "AI taking over" are finally defeated at the end of a movie with a really stupid trick.
Yeah no I totally agree. I feel like I have a strong sense of a person's intelligence and their psychological capacity/abilities. I just passively look for it or analyze it in my interactions with them. But, if I don't myself have a grasp of the subtle abstract layers of complexity "above" a certain level, I can't evaluate another person's strengths in those areas, so I can't sense where they sit compared to others (or myself)!
I also think the more you know about things, the more you can see how well other people have integrated those things into their own psyche and how they employ those things, if that makes sense. Two people might both know a certain physics principle but one may elicit a far deeper and insightful employment of that knowledge than the other, even in casual situations.
Always thought of this as two cars driving faster than you on the road. After a certain distance it's clear both are faster than you, but really hard to say which one is the fastest.
>I also wondered for many years why most of them didn't quit their jobs when on paper they would have been able to do so, but work is not a great place to ask those sorts of questions.
Because they're smart enough to know neither money nor leisure is not the be all end all...
I cannot remember the exact quote, but I thought Norm Macdonald nailed this idea a while back.
He said something to the effect of: it's easy for a smart person to pretend they're dumb, but it's impossible for a dumb person to pretend they're smart.
Norm himself was pretty good at convincing people he was dumb when very much the opposite was true.
> it's impossible for a dumb person to pretend they're smart.
Unfortunately, that's not true. It's actually pretty easy to convince dumb people that you're smart, and so even dumb people can learn that skill. Myriad successful careers and even entire industries have been built on that foundation.
It's fairly simple to identify very smart people, but it takes some time. You ask them what their goals and predictions are, and then watch for a while.
I've noticed the smarter a person is, the fewer qualms they have about sharing exactly what they're aiming to do.
This approach is also a simple way to identify stupid people, but for stupid people there are much quicker methods. And stupid people tend to be cagey, because they have fewer tools for identifying when somebody is trying to take advantage of them, and because they've got experience being taken advantage of.
Being taken advantage of is not only a function of intelligence. It's also a function of emotional health. Sure, if the person is incapable of understanding they are being taken advantage of, they will be. But one can be perfectly capable of understanding that, see it happen in real time, and let it happen anyway. That has been the case with me for a long time. I could see, but I could not stop it, because I have been emotionally conditioned to allow it. Took a long time to fix.
There is also a risk of confusing a smart person with a person who speaks well. We have a built-in heuristic, that language signals intelligence. To a large extent it does, of course, but it can be deceptive. I've grown very weary of well-spoken people, who seem to want me to think they are also very smart.
Lastly, higher intelligence does not mean the person is a better human being. I find that there is an obsession with intelligence in the West. "Stupid" people can be really lovely and better companions than smart ones. There is something to be said about kindness and honesty.
> I've noticed the smarter a person is, the fewer qualms they have about sharing exactly what they're aiming to do.
I used to be like that. Openly speaking about what I aim to do and how. I ended up moderating that quality a fair bit after noticing some people began copying my ideas or outright stealing them. I was to slow to execute.
The nice thing about observing whether someone is accomplishing what they set out to accomplish is it doesn't matter how well spoken they seemed.
I've found that especially smart people have preternatural bullshit detectors, even when they lack "emotional health" or the ability to socialize well with others.
Smart people can be lovely, stupid people can be lovely, golden retrievers can be lovely... but that's tangential.
> I've found that especially smart people have preternatural bullshit detectors
I really disagree with that. So many smart people fell for obvious bullshit because it appealed to their intellectualism. Look at all the communist sympathizers in the West. Morons, but also intelligent people most of the time. They believed stories spread by the soviet propaganda, because they wanted to believe them.
> The nice thing about observing whether someone is accomplishing what they set out to accomplish is it doesn't matter how well spoken they seemed.
It's funny that you say that - there's another poster in this thready who claims that looking at the output is the stupid people's way of evaluating intelligence. Seems like we really have no idea how to tell (except for an actual IQ test)
> Smart people can be lovely, stupid people can be lovely, golden retrievers can be lovely... but that's tangential.
Yep, I was just making a note, that intelligence might be overrated as a trait.
This general idea follows from the classic theorems on the limits of induction on finite computers. A computer can only build an inductive model of another computer that is substantially simpler than itself in a Kolmogorov sense. This process provides a measure for ordering simpler computers. Computers that are equally or more complex are indistinguishable via induction.
This is also a common basis for the concept of "free will": no computer can model its own behavior such that it can reliably predict it.
To a squirrel all humans are equally, unfathomably intelligent.
Like the point of being more intelligent than someone or something is to an extent being able to simulate their brain and thinking with your own brain.
We’re cleverer than animals because we can simulate all their actions before they do them.
You can’t simulate something more advanced than yourself.
The opposite conclusion would also be obvious. We're a social species that might have deep primitives for evaluating the intelligence of another without needing to simulate the whole shebang.
I don't see how that would follow. If we are talking about "intelligence" in the formal sense of induction/prediction then it is a profoundly memory-hard problem as a matter of theory. This is to "learning" what the speed of light is to physics.
You can't replace the larger simulation required (i.e. more state/RAM) with a faster processor.
Sticking with the computation analogy, it could be a long-term memory look up. If memories were passed down the generations, people could simply memorize actions of individuals deemed smarter. Over a large sample size, a heuristic would emerge. Kind of like knowing there is always a sunset following a sunrise without understanding the solar system.
While the linked study is interesting, using standardised tests is a terrible way to judge if someone is "intelligent".
Also imo is very difficult to come up with a universal definition of intelligence. For example, I hold Lionel Messi to be a very "intelligent" footballer, but I would judge his intelligence to be of vastly different nature to that of Albert Einstein.
People often see the Jungian personality traits of "judging" vs. "perceiving" etc as actual exogenous traits, but it's also a tendency to spend more time before coming to a conclusion.
A data point: the parent of an about 140 IQ son told me that her son was in a room with other 120+ IQ kids. They started to talk and quickly formed groups. Those groups turned out to include kids of very similar IQ. The ones between 140 and 143 thought that the ones between 137 and 139 were not interesting to talk with.
Bit surprised that empathy makes no difference in this. People with high empathy tend to be good at reading others in general so would have thought that at least partially translates here
Totally a hunch, but I always felt the (self proclaimed) "high EQ" people were people who generally hung out with other "high EQ", who generally were people that wear their emotions on their sleeve. Never mind mostly were interested in consuming content geared towards "people problems" rather than "thing problems".
People with high empathy tend to feel other's feelings more (sometimes to their own detriment). Emotional intelligence helps with reading other people.
Think of it as social intelligence if the term “emotional” bothers you.
Solitary intelligence, in the wild, is just a different beast from tracking the exponential complexity of a social system. Everything we see—in biology, psychology and artificial intelligence—indicates that while these functions seem to share resources (you can't be an emotionally-intelligent idiot), they are distinct, with folks (and animals) possessing a lot of one and little of the other being observed, and their handicaps resulting from the lacking part being observeable, too,
Having met many extremely intelligent people who struggle to understand the emotional state and responses of those around them, hell yeah I think it's a distinct category.
Doing math, or telling a joke, or catching a ball, or carrying a tune are all normal human behaviors. People's skills at any of them vary, and we don't refer to those with lower skill levels in that category as mentally deficient or ill.
Why not?
I know people who are very good at feeling other people’s emotions but very poor at analyzing them.
In kids you can see it all the time - like a kid started crying because he sees others cry, but if you ask them why they cry - the explanation is always ridiculous.
But even some adults are like that, interpreting your own or even others emotions is both a skill and a talent.
>In kids you can see it all the time - like a kid started crying because he sees others cry, but if you ask them why they cry - the explanation is always ridiculous.
Why can’t it be both? We have dedicated neural circuitry to mirroring others’ emotions, and pheromones that directly signal emotions between individuals.
It just isn't both. Emotional intelligence isn't mirroring others' emotions or smelling their pheromones, it is using the mind to actually understand rationally what is going through someone else's. It's how you can know what an octopus is thinking despite not having the neural circuitry to mirror its emotions or pick up its chemical signatures.
> It's how you can know what an octopus is thinking
You mean, it’s how you can assign anthropomorphised assumptions to the octopus. There’s a world difference between having semi reliable predictive power and actually knowing something.
I think your description would be perfect in describing a psychopath - i.e. someone who can rationalize and think about other beings logically, without actually being able to subconsciously empathize.
Not all people like that at all. Some people really do feel emotions of others before being able to rationalize it.
The only ways that comprehending emotions wouldn't belong in its own category of intelligence would be if everyone were equally capable of deducing the emotional state of others, or that performing such deduction is not something intellectual, or that such deduction is strictly a consequence of existing intellectual categories.
>The only ways that comprehending emotions wouldn't belong in its own category of intelligence would be if everyone were equally capable of deducing the emotional state of others
Not every skill gets a whole category of intelligence.
>that such deduction is strictly a consequence of existing intellectual categories
Someone could be extremely proficient in disciplines that are associated with 'raw' intelligence, and yet utterly fail at theory of mind. Anyone that has been in a college campus probably has seen examples e.g, Classmate might click instantly with real analysis but will routinely perplexed about why their girlfriend is mad, or why they are seen as abrasive.
To be clear, in my experience it wasn't even a case of being on the spectrum or other neurodivergence. They simply had a bad model of other people's thoughts and emotions. Of course this isn't DnD, I've met people a order of magnitude smarter than me in the usual academics and with a deeper understanding of people.
You might not like the terminology, but it's a real thing and can be independent from what we usually call intelligence.
Consider a computer with a cpu and gpu. The CPU is a general purpose computer. It can do literally anything. Including software rendering. But the GPU is purpose designed for graphics so it will be much more efficient at the job. These days the GPU is also a general purpose computer so it could in theory do anythign the CPU does too, but for many things again it will be less efficient.
It's the same with emotional intelligence. The brain has dedicated circuitry for understanding other people. You can reason it through abstractly but it will be less efficient. You can also solve problems about natural science with the emotional reasoning part of the brain. Ever heard the expression "the atom wants a full shell of electrons"? That's empathy.
No, it is more like software. You either grow up around others, socialise and train your intuition or you don't. To believe there is special circuitry really goes deep into the pseudoscience territory.
You're the only person here invoking "special circuitry". All intelligence is a mix of both learned and biological factors.
Plus one of the big ways we evaluate the intelligence of other species is trying to see if they have theory of mind, which is intrinsically linked to social intelligence.
Edit: Ah, the person you replied to also invoked special circuitry.
The thing about IQ and EQ being on different ends of a spectrum is kind of wrong. Turns out, those people whose minds work more efficiently, do so across the board.
In other words, smarter people are better able to gauge people's emotions as well.
How did you reach that conclusion? From the article: "Those who demonstrated a stronger ability to perceive emotions in others also judged intelligence more accurately."
I guess you're surprised that empathy is not more important than intelligence? My thought there is that perceptiveness is a large part of intelligence, and if you lack that, you won't recognize the signs of intelligence no matter how empathetic you are.
Reminds me of this game show episode. I was watching it with friends, and I'm not sure if we all picked out who the smartest person would be, but I do remember we definitely figured out who one of the lower-ranked people would be just based on her blathering (I won't give it away here since people may want to enjoy the episode themselves).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAlI0pbMQiM
To be fair, the range of results were from 112 to 136. Just over one standard deviation. Like if you gave those tests again, you'd likely get a slightly different order. Basically, 131 - 136 is kind of a tie.
Now, 5 and 6 are basically locked in. You might see 5 and 6 swap or 5 swap with one of the top 4 to put him in fourth and that person in fifth.
But basically assume they've hit around the middle of their ability.
And yes, the black haired woman did harp on their credentials a lot. But a lot of them did and then there was the casual racism in putting the clean-cut Asian guy first and classism by putting the military guy last.
I haven't gotten to the end yet, but I think it's strange that it was initially presented as the participants taking the IQ test BEFORE they spoke and ranked each other, when they actually did so afterwards. Stereotype threat says hi.
EDIT: And, at the end... Yeah~
If I may blather a bit myself, though, it's interesting to note that the top four are likely within a margin of error. Good day, bad day, their rank is probably malleable. People like 5, IME, are quite intelligent, and I wonder if the circumstances affected their performance (4's too, possibly even 3's). 6... Well, I think that says a lot about where we are as a society. Though that might be the schadenfreude talking.
On the other hand, you could look at the ultimate ranking as one that leans heavily on each individual's confidence and comfort in the situation. 6's oversharing might have been rooted in nervousness and a sense of inferiority (the kind that might drive someone to, say, a push for high levels of formal accomplishment). Whereas, as someone in the comments pointed out, 3 was calm and relaxed even as they were being told that they were definitely the dumbest person in the room repeatedly. 1 is tall, male, stereotyped as intelligent, academically-accomplished, and acknowledged as such by everyone else; he had the best situational advantage for his headspace, entering the test.
I interact with people who seem about as smart as me fairly often- my college professors for example. And, I certainly have been in many situations where my domain knowledge was vastly less than some other person with real expertise. But I have a hard time thinking of a time when I thought someone else was significantly smarter than me. Probably, that's an example of exactly what the article is talking about- maybe I've met those people but failed to recognize them. They certainly must be out there (unless i am the smartest person in the world, in which case we're all in serious trouble).
Similar to your observation - I can think of at least one person who is definetly a lot smarter than than me, and yeah, I’m not sure I could tell you why exactly.
Part of it looks like focus, I think I have a broader skill set than they do. But I don’t know that I could like rank a set of people smarter than me.
A few signs: they know what your about to say and give you refutations to your argument before you voice them. Or you find they tend to block your argumentation and you don't quite know how to respond. Could be domain expertise though.
Or if it's a collaborative situation, they might propose an idea you are already kind of thinking about, but they do it faster and clearer.
makes sense. I assume that smart people tend to hang out with other smart people more, and naturally learn to identify the cues & patterns of those.
where as, if you don't hang out with many smart people, there is not much to recognize.
Assuming your samples are not biased, 1000 subjects are generally far more than are necessary to demonstrate an effect. People who complain about sample size are generally not that well-educated in statistics.
A well-educated person in statistics would also mention that it requires a certain class of distribution. This is one of Nassim Taleb's favourite subject (imagine computing the average net worth of a random group of people and suddenly Bill Gates is among them)
>But why this matters is there a challenge judging intelligence cross cultures?
I don't know for sure, but my own anecdotal experience is that yes, there most certainly are challenges when a person from one culture assesses the intelligence of someone else from another culture.
It would be nice to know whether this is supported by scientific evidence, or whether this is simply my own personal bias at play.
1) Syntax/semantic split. Can the person accept that a function called "multiplyBy5(a,b) { return a+b }" doesn't actually multiply by five, but adds the numbers?
2) PR speak: Does the person recognize that public relation speak is usually intentionally misleading, as in "the Russian Ministry of Defense said that a fire [onboard the Moskva] had caused ammunition to explode" (obviously caused by an Ukrainian missile and not an accidental fire, even though that's what's implied.) [0]
3) They're, their, there: There easy to tell apart, since they're meaning is so different. /s
4) Viewpoints: Can this person understand and articulate viewpoints that they consider "wrong" or simply don't hold themselves?
5) (new) LLM introspection: Does the person understand that LLMs have no secret understanding of themselves? An LLM like "Grok" doesn't actually understand "Grok" better than Gemini understands "Grok" - apart from minor differences in model strength maybe.
What do you mean by "themselves" here? Grok is RL'd to behave like a Grok, so it trivially knows the qualities that define Grok better than Gemini does, which can only go by second hand sources.
Are there people that would legitimately argue point 1?
If you are only looking at the call site, sure that could be confusing, but if you are looking at the definition as provided in your post, surely anyone that is able understand the concept of a function can see the problem?
I'm not arguing they don't exist, sure they do, but I'm confused as to how you came up with it as a litmus test? Is it that common?
Surely we can agree in a real scenario renaming it (or fixing implementation to match name) is likely appropriate, but to completely miss the error?
Hope this comes across as curiousity, because I am curious about this one from your list in particular.
I think it's similar to the case of counterfactuals, hypotheticals, or steelmaning and how well you can handle them. ("Can you accept that there can be a function named multiplyBy5 that does something else instead").
But I think if someone already is comfortable with working with abstractions such as "function" the thing is trivial, so it's a bit of a weird litmus test.
I've heard that a non-Mensan asked a Mensan what it's like at a Mensa event. They replied, "If I have to explain something during a conversation, I only have to explain it _once_."
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.
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...
Through work I had the privilege of being around lots of people who were smarter than me, but if somebody asked me to rank them from "somewhat smarter" to "much smarter", I would have had a hard time.
Just an anecdote! I don't have any hard evidence.
I also wondered for many years why most of them didn't quit their jobs when on paper they would have been able to do so, but work is not a great place to ask those sorts of questions.
a comparative example that i think about quite often, in the realm of TTRPG's:
A smart person can play a dumb character well, usually, but a dumb person cannot play a smart character.
Or rather, they usually end up playing a character that can be described as 'dumb guys idea of a smart guy', which is... distinct than 'smart guy'
the broader point, ig: to model a level of intelligence well, it has to be 'within' your own, otherwise the model ends up too lossy!
I also think the more you know about things, the more you can see how well other people have integrated those things into their own psyche and how they employ those things, if that makes sense. Two people might both know a certain physics principle but one may elicit a far deeper and insightful employment of that knowledge than the other, even in casual situations.
It doesn't help that intelligence is many-dimensional.
Because they're smart enough to know neither money nor leisure is not the be all end all...
He said something to the effect of: it's easy for a smart person to pretend they're dumb, but it's impossible for a dumb person to pretend they're smart.
Norm himself was pretty good at convincing people he was dumb when very much the opposite was true.
Unfortunately, that's not true. It's actually pretty easy to convince dumb people that you're smart, and so even dumb people can learn that skill. Myriad successful careers and even entire industries have been built on that foundation.
I've noticed the smarter a person is, the fewer qualms they have about sharing exactly what they're aiming to do.
This approach is also a simple way to identify stupid people, but for stupid people there are much quicker methods. And stupid people tend to be cagey, because they have fewer tools for identifying when somebody is trying to take advantage of them, and because they've got experience being taken advantage of.
Being taken advantage of is not only a function of intelligence. It's also a function of emotional health. Sure, if the person is incapable of understanding they are being taken advantage of, they will be. But one can be perfectly capable of understanding that, see it happen in real time, and let it happen anyway. That has been the case with me for a long time. I could see, but I could not stop it, because I have been emotionally conditioned to allow it. Took a long time to fix.
There is also a risk of confusing a smart person with a person who speaks well. We have a built-in heuristic, that language signals intelligence. To a large extent it does, of course, but it can be deceptive. I've grown very weary of well-spoken people, who seem to want me to think they are also very smart.
Lastly, higher intelligence does not mean the person is a better human being. I find that there is an obsession with intelligence in the West. "Stupid" people can be really lovely and better companions than smart ones. There is something to be said about kindness and honesty.
> I've noticed the smarter a person is, the fewer qualms they have about sharing exactly what they're aiming to do.
I used to be like that. Openly speaking about what I aim to do and how. I ended up moderating that quality a fair bit after noticing some people began copying my ideas or outright stealing them. I was to slow to execute.
I've found that especially smart people have preternatural bullshit detectors, even when they lack "emotional health" or the ability to socialize well with others.
Smart people can be lovely, stupid people can be lovely, golden retrievers can be lovely... but that's tangential.
I really disagree with that. So many smart people fell for obvious bullshit because it appealed to their intellectualism. Look at all the communist sympathizers in the West. Morons, but also intelligent people most of the time. They believed stories spread by the soviet propaganda, because they wanted to believe them.
> The nice thing about observing whether someone is accomplishing what they set out to accomplish is it doesn't matter how well spoken they seemed.
It's funny that you say that - there's another poster in this thready who claims that looking at the output is the stupid people's way of evaluating intelligence. Seems like we really have no idea how to tell (except for an actual IQ test)
> Smart people can be lovely, stupid people can be lovely, golden retrievers can be lovely... but that's tangential.
Yep, I was just making a note, that intelligence might be overrated as a trait.
This is also a common basis for the concept of "free will": no computer can model its own behavior such that it can reliably predict it.
To a squirrel all humans are equally, unfathomably intelligent.
Hopefully the HN administrators will get around to noticing this domain eventually as well and banning it.
Like the point of being more intelligent than someone or something is to an extent being able to simulate their brain and thinking with your own brain.
We’re cleverer than animals because we can simulate all their actions before they do them.
You can’t simulate something more advanced than yourself.
The opposite conclusion would also be obvious. We're a social species that might have deep primitives for evaluating the intelligence of another without needing to simulate the whole shebang.
You can't replace the larger simulation required (i.e. more state/RAM) with a faster processor.
Sometimes you can given more time. Many times being more intelligent is arriving at a conclusion faster without wasting as much on dead ends.
A bad analogy: Magnus Carlson making a move in seconds and still defeating his opponent which has minutes for a move.
Also imo is very difficult to come up with a universal definition of intelligence. For example, I hold Lionel Messi to be a very "intelligent" footballer, but I would judge his intelligence to be of vastly different nature to that of Albert Einstein.
But some problems are easy and you can get away with a smaller model.
high empathy means you feel what you think the other person is feeling,
Highly empathetic people have horrible theory of mind issues a lot of the time.
Pseudoscience.
Solitary intelligence, in the wild, is just a different beast from tracking the exponential complexity of a social system. Everything we see—in biology, psychology and artificial intelligence—indicates that while these functions seem to share resources (you can't be an emotionally-intelligent idiot), they are distinct, with folks (and animals) possessing a lot of one and little of the other being observed, and their handicaps resulting from the lacking part being observeable, too,
In kids you can see it all the time - like a kid started crying because he sees others cry, but if you ask them why they cry - the explanation is always ridiculous.
But even some adults are like that, interpreting your own or even others emotions is both a skill and a talent.
That's just called empathy.
You mean, it’s how you can assign anthropomorphised assumptions to the octopus. There’s a world difference between having semi reliable predictive power and actually knowing something.
Not all people like that at all. Some people really do feel emotions of others before being able to rationalize it.
Not every skill gets a whole category of intelligence.
>that such deduction is strictly a consequence of existing intellectual categories
Yes.
The fact that you don't list these says a lot about how much you know on this topic.
To be clear, in my experience it wasn't even a case of being on the spectrum or other neurodivergence. They simply had a bad model of other people's thoughts and emotions. Of course this isn't DnD, I've met people a order of magnitude smarter than me in the usual academics and with a deeper understanding of people.
You might not like the terminology, but it's a real thing and can be independent from what we usually call intelligence.
It's the same with emotional intelligence. The brain has dedicated circuitry for understanding other people. You can reason it through abstractly but it will be less efficient. You can also solve problems about natural science with the emotional reasoning part of the brain. Ever heard the expression "the atom wants a full shell of electrons"? That's empathy.
Emotions are just another abstract concept.
Plus one of the big ways we evaluate the intelligence of other species is trying to see if they have theory of mind, which is intrinsically linked to social intelligence.
Edit: Ah, the person you replied to also invoked special circuitry.
In other words, smarter people are better able to gauge people's emotions as well.
I guess you're surprised that empathy is not more important than intelligence? My thought there is that perceptiveness is a large part of intelligence, and if you lack that, you won't recognize the signs of intelligence no matter how empathetic you are.
Now, 5 and 6 are basically locked in. You might see 5 and 6 swap or 5 swap with one of the top 4 to put him in fourth and that person in fifth.
But basically assume they've hit around the middle of their ability.
And yes, the black haired woman did harp on their credentials a lot. But a lot of them did and then there was the casual racism in putting the clean-cut Asian guy first and classism by putting the military guy last.
All-in-all, Jubilee is trash, as always.
EDIT: And, at the end... Yeah~
If I may blather a bit myself, though, it's interesting to note that the top four are likely within a margin of error. Good day, bad day, their rank is probably malleable. People like 5, IME, are quite intelligent, and I wonder if the circumstances affected their performance (4's too, possibly even 3's). 6... Well, I think that says a lot about where we are as a society. Though that might be the schadenfreude talking.
On the other hand, you could look at the ultimate ranking as one that leans heavily on each individual's confidence and comfort in the situation. 6's oversharing might have been rooted in nervousness and a sense of inferiority (the kind that might drive someone to, say, a push for high levels of formal accomplishment). Whereas, as someone in the comments pointed out, 3 was calm and relaxed even as they were being told that they were definitely the dumbest person in the room repeatedly. 1 is tall, male, stereotyped as intelligent, academically-accomplished, and acknowledged as such by everyone else; he had the best situational advantage for his headspace, entering the test.
Part of it looks like focus, I think I have a broader skill set than they do. But I don’t know that I could like rank a set of people smarter than me.
Or if it's a collaborative situation, they might propose an idea you are already kind of thinking about, but they do it faster and clearer.
The issue is not the sample size, it's that studies like these almost always involve a very homogenous population of young college students.
(Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic)
But why this matters is there a challenge judging intelligence cross cultures?
I don't know for sure, but my own anecdotal experience is that yes, there most certainly are challenges when a person from one culture assesses the intelligence of someone else from another culture.
It would be nice to know whether this is supported by scientific evidence, or whether this is simply my own personal bias at play.
1) Syntax/semantic split. Can the person accept that a function called "multiplyBy5(a,b) { return a+b }" doesn't actually multiply by five, but adds the numbers? 2) PR speak: Does the person recognize that public relation speak is usually intentionally misleading, as in "the Russian Ministry of Defense said that a fire [onboard the Moskva] had caused ammunition to explode" (obviously caused by an Ukrainian missile and not an accidental fire, even though that's what's implied.) [0] 3) They're, their, there: There easy to tell apart, since they're meaning is so different. /s 4) Viewpoints: Can this person understand and articulate viewpoints that they consider "wrong" or simply don't hold themselves? 5) (new) LLM introspection: Does the person understand that LLMs have no secret understanding of themselves? An LLM like "Grok" doesn't actually understand "Grok" better than Gemini understands "Grok" - apart from minor differences in model strength maybe.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_of_the_Moskva
What do you mean by "themselves" here? Grok is RL'd to behave like a Grok, so it trivially knows the qualities that define Grok better than Gemini does, which can only go by second hand sources.
If you are only looking at the call site, sure that could be confusing, but if you are looking at the definition as provided in your post, surely anyone that is able understand the concept of a function can see the problem?
I'm not arguing they don't exist, sure they do, but I'm confused as to how you came up with it as a litmus test? Is it that common?
Surely we can agree in a real scenario renaming it (or fixing implementation to match name) is likely appropriate, but to completely miss the error?
Hope this comes across as curiousity, because I am curious about this one from your list in particular.
But I think if someone already is comfortable with working with abstractions such as "function" the thing is trivial, so it's a bit of a weird litmus test.
^1: https://www.psypost.org/intelligent-people-are-better-judges...