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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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
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.
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’re seeing—in biology, psychology and in artificial intelligence—indicates that while these functions seem to share resources (you can’t have a lot of one with almost none of the other), 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,
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
That was an interesting watch. Doesn't IQ rank you based on your demographic cohort ? That would make IQ useful for ranking within the cohort but not necessarily across.
On YouTube comments there seems to be a consensus that aligns with yours. I was quite surprised to find that I did not, at all, find her arrogant. The majority of the commenters did. I am still finding it hard to believe.
As far as IQ tests go, I know I will do poorly. I think way too slow. Which I am sure is part of what it is testing for.
I have encountered so many people who have fewer higher academic degrees than I do but are just wicked smart. They get a new concept so fast. Speed through a chain of consequences so fast. Unfamiliar board games of strategy may be a good test bed. I would be abysmal. On the other hand my brother would kill in them.
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.
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.
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.
I don't know how smart I am, but I learned in my 20s that nobody likes the smartest person in the room, so I stopped being that.
> 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.
I have my doubts about Nate Bargatze being half as dumb as he pretends to be as well. Great comedic niche to fill, in my opinion.
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.
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.
> it is really difficult to rank the intelligence of people who are smarter than you
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!
and: a smart person can write a movie script with a stupid character but stupid script writers fail badly when writing smart characters.
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...
So both are? Like, combined?
Maybe they are smart enough to realize when they have a good thing going (on balance).
> if somebody asked me to rank them from "somewhat smarter" to "much smarter", I would have had a hard time.
It doesn't help that intelligence is many-dimensional.
It's also difficult to write characters that are smarter than the writer. See how poorly TV and movie writers portray intelligent characters.
This seems pretty obvious doesn’t 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.
I'm going to point out that the submitter is posting their own site as regularly as clockwork (https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=comuniq.xyz) and has a very long history of self-promotion of their own domains under previous account names cannibalXxx, gorpo85, and saturn85, etc. Probably the most egregious example being https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=chat-to.dev which eventually got banned. The submitter identifies themselves as the owner of the site in the comment here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43531490 , meaning that it's the same individual.
Hopefully the HN administrators will get around to noticing this domain eventually as well and banning it.
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
i've found this to be wrong a lot actually
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.
Kids from abusive homes are fucking impeccable at reading emotions, their health depended on it.
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.
People with high empathy tend to feel other's feelings more (sometimes to their own detriment). Emotional intelligence helps with reading other people.
>Emotional intelligence
Pseudoscience.
Finally a comment which is clearly 100% human
If you believe comprehending emotions belongs in its own category of intelligence, I have a bridge to sell you.
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’re seeing—in biology, psychology and in artificial intelligence—indicates that while these functions seem to share resources (you can’t have a lot of one with almost none of the other), 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,
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.
That's just called empathy.
Their point is that empathy is a (very useful) emotional response. It doesn't give you a correct model of the other persons mind.
Why can’t it be both? We have dedicated neural circuitry to mirroring others’ emotions, and pheromones that directly signal emotions between individuals.
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
Yes.
>Yes.
The fact that you don't list these says a lot about how much you know on this topic.
We know that emotional intelligence, in the sense of Machiavellian intelligence, is really just completely normal intelligence.
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.
what you're describing is a mental deficiency or illness. Being able to understand emotional state should be considered normal human behavior.
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.
you thinking selling doesn't take emotional 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.
Emotions are just another abstract concept.
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.
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.
And today in obvious headlines: "Game recognize game"
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.
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.
Studies with fewer than 1,000 samples are not very meaningful.
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 sample size of 198 as per this study is more than sufficient to draw pretty strong conclusions.
The issue is not the sample size, it's that studies like these almost always involve a very homogenous population of young college students.
You mean WEIRD.
(Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic)
But why this matters is there a challenge judging intelligence cross cultures?
Also not replicated that I can see.
except they can be
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
That was an interesting watch. Doesn't IQ rank you based on your demographic cohort ? That would make IQ useful for ranking within the cohort but not necessarily across.
On YouTube comments there seems to be a consensus that aligns with yours. I was quite surprised to find that I did not, at all, find her arrogant. The majority of the commenters did. I am still finding it hard to believe.
As far as IQ tests go, I know I will do poorly. I think way too slow. Which I am sure is part of what it is testing for.
I have encountered so many people who have fewer higher academic degrees than I do but are just wicked smart. They get a new concept so fast. Speed through a chain of consequences so fast. Unfamiliar board games of strategy may be a good test bed. I would be abysmal. On the other hand my brother would kill in them.
Reminds me of "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt."
game recognize game
Well, I mean, tone deaf people cannot accurately judge musical talent.
i.e. dumb people don't know they are dumb
Link to the referenced study (open access): "The good judge of intelligence" https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028962...
I've got some personal litmus tests:
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
Not bad litmus tests. And yes a lot of idiots seem to fail at steel manning. I mean if you can't steel man your opponent what are you even doing?
This is a worthless AI slop summary of this article (^1), posted to a random forum to drive traffic.
^1: https://www.psypost.org/intelligent-people-are-better-judges...