alt Hacker NewsIntelligent people are better judges of the intelligence of others
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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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And today in obvious headlines: "Game recognize game"
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
Does that mean we should use a larger model as judge for evals, not a smaller one?
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
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).
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.
i.e. dumb people don't know they are dumb
game recognize game
Well, I mean, tone deaf people cannot accurately judge musical talent.
Link to the referenced study (open access): "The good judge of intelligence" https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028962...
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...
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.
So that means I'm either an exceptional judge of character, or and idiot and don't know it. /s
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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.