Furthermore, it's kind of weird to talk about intelligence in terms of levels. I know plenty of people who are smarter than me in certain fields, but I don't think I've ever met someone who was objectively smarter than me in every way, to the point where I could separate us into different classes of intelligence. In my experience, the IQ model is flawed: intelligence is much more fluid, and exists on many more axes, than we give it credit for.
There was a Reddit comment I read a while ago — I wish I could find it again! — where the author tried to describe what it would be like to have a Lex Luthor level of genius. You'd be able to effortlessly do anything you wanted. Ideas would immediately come together in your head. Even the most complex branches of science would be as easy as basic algebra. Everyone's problems would seem so simple and naive, but it would make it hard to relate to people. That's kinda what this comment read like to me.
(Sorry if I'm wrong, bane.)
This is actually a very well studied and successful field. In fact it's so successful, it makes those kinds of predictions possible, if you follow me.
Certain things are marketed to certain kinds of people because they're inclined to buy them, based on that person's self-perception.
The products/neighborhoods that are successful are the ones that are most successful at predicting what particular people will like, which in turn makes those choices more predictable for a given individual.
It's a Darwinian feedback process, almost. If the choices weren't predictable, they wouldn't have been available to have been made.
There's a specific reason I'm not inserting IQ into what I'm talking about, I agree that it's not a good focal point for a discussion about intelligence.
And I'm not saying I have perfect prediction of human behavior. Just that, with many people, if I spend enough time observing them, I can start to predict what they'll do or say with better than chance accuracy. The best analogy I can give is not Sherlock Holmes, but Groundhog day. What people miss in that movie is that the main character (Phil Connors played by Bill Murray) is spending his time mapping out the behavior patterns of the girl of his dreams (Rita by Andie MacDowell) to see if he can find the behavior pathways that will lead to her falling in love with him (or sleeping with him depending on your take on the story). Many people follow routines and habits, and if you observe them long enough it's like spending the same "day" over and over with them. You can start to mentally note and map out their behavior and then start making predictions about that behavior.
Most people do it all the time, we track what foods or films or whatever our friends like and dislike, and then make recommendations to them, or buy them presents based on that. We know them, so we think we can predict their behavior on a like/dislike vector. But what if you observed other things? Say you find a friend has an extreme allergy to milk and milk products. You can guess then that, if they drink coffee, they'll use a milk substitute, maybe soy. If they use soy, and you know what stores in their area carry soy milk and which don't and the ones that do are only the vegetarian stores, then you might be able to make a probabilistic guess that they're vegetarian. If they're vegetarian, you know there aren't many restaurants that are vegetarian in their area, so they probably cook at home, meaning they have a decent kitchen. So you can guess they have decent cookware, guessing at their income level you can guess if it's $100 an item cookware of $1000 an item cookware. There's only so many vendors at each price point for that, and only so many sell in my area etc., and on and on to yoga studio and car choice and neighborhood.
You can probabilistically guess all kinds of things from a cup of coffee. A little more observation, a comment here and there, a couple questions from you to direct your guesses and you can improve your chances and before you know it you can run down the list of consumer choices many individuals make which defines their space.
Even singular biases or opinions can tell you worlds about a person. It's kind of like stereotyping, but it's a little more informed than that. You can guess, for example, a person with strong opinions on say gun rights is likely aligned with several other related categories. Differences in those aligned categories might tell you other things, and let you know if they're conservative, liberal, anarchist or something else. Even a single comment can inform your predictive model about a person and set boundaries on what they would or wouldn't do.
You also have to know things. I couldn't do this with somebody from a country or area I don't know anything about. I don't know the politics, neighborhoods, social signals, in and out group dynamics and on and on.
Another example, there's an old phrase, "everybody skis in Aspen", meaning that knowing a person is from Aspen implies they do snow sports, but knowing that doesn't inform you of much other than they probably own a pair of skis or a snowboard and there's a fair chance they come from money.
But knowing a person you meet in someplace like Tampa, is an avid skier (an outlier) tells you all kinds of things about them. That they travel, that they probably don't go to anywhere on the East Coast (the snow sucks), that they probably have a passport (to go to the Canadian Rockies or the Alps), and gives you an idea of their disposable income they set aside for trips and skiing, which then can inform you of their total income and on and on and on.
People are like chaotic systems, and every piece of information you know restricts the space they can operate in. Within limits you can infer many many things. And it's not superhuman.
It's funny that you say it's more Groundhog Day than Sherlock Holmes when your soy milk example, to me, is pretty much as Holmesian as it gets. I've never intentionally tried the kind of deduction that you describe, but at least for me and my circle of friends, I can see it easily falling apart just a few steps in. Plenty of stores carry soy milk nowadays, not just vegetarian ones. I can't possibly hope to know all the restaurants where my friends live. Most of my friends who cook at home get by with dull knives and ancient cookware. And not only do I have no idea which stores sell kitchen supplies, but it's not always obvious whether someone does their shopping in person or on Amazon. This is especially the case for hobbies and activities I'm less familiar with, such as yoga.
I suppose if I had meticulous knowledge of my area and practiced a lot, I could get my guesses above 50%. But it seems like something I'd have to put a lot of effort in, not a skill I would just acquire casually.
Do you find that this comes easily to you?
(I'm not saying that figuring things out about people is impossible, of course. It makes sense to divide up the probability space and increase your odds. Again with your coffee example, you could probably make a reasonable educated guess that the person is vegetarian, or even that they cook at home. But where they shop? Where they eat? There's so many choices these days, and people like trying new things. Even if I had a hunch, I certainly couldn't outright tell them with specificity about all their consumer habits, like you described with your coworker. The probability of me being right would just be way too low.)
I appreciate you posting here, it's pretty interesting to read.
> Holmesian as it gets
Yeah, it wasn't a great example, just sprung to mind. But I think you got the basic gist of how it works. I think the difference is that Holmes deduces his conclusions by following clues, but Groundhog Day aggregates information to find patterns...which can then be used to make deductive guesses. I guess it's more of an inductive approach at the beginning.
> Do you find that this comes easily to you?
If I don't put effort into turning it off, which I do most of the time these days because I associate doing it with bad feelings, it's just part of the normal process my brain goes through when I'm getting to know somebody. So about as much effort as having a bunch of conversations and remembering a few things. I have a terrible memory so I have to spend some effort reinforcing a few key facts. But I can then usually derive the rest with reasonable accuracy without having to remember it all.
Why remember things when I can just figure them out each time?
It's actually part of the classic "gifted curse" I personally deal with. I never really bothered to learn good memorization techniques because I can usually figure things out from the few kernels I do remember. But when topics get too complex, or I'm just outright missing data, the jenga pile falls over and I'm rather lost.
I'm also slightly dyscalculic and dyslexic (took a few tests and everything for formal and second diagnoses), which provides their own sets of challenges -- this is surprisingly common among the very gifted, but we usually "solve" it ourselves internally and thus the research on it is pitifully poor. I didn't personally find out about it conclusively till I was well into my mid-twenties, though some early childhood tests raised the possibility.
It's hard to get tone across when talking about one's own experiences. In my case my experience is about having the attribute of high intelligence.
If this was a discussion about being tall instead of being intelligent, and I happened to be very tall, would it change your opinion if my deduction had been that tall people can dunk basketballs more easily than short people and then relayed an experience where I, though I don't play basketball, demonstrated this to a short fanatical basketball fanatic by dunking a ball?
It doesn't mean I'm always right, or that my deductions are always correct. I'm not omniscient. In that anecdote it turns out I was, and it was destructive to my relationship.
Being highly intelligent is like walking around with a bomb in your head. You have to be very careful how you approach other people because your mere existence is hard for them to accept. It's not a good feeling to hurt or scare people by doing what you were born to do.
Just being tall, and doing tall people things, like grabbing something off of a high shelf, is not likely to elicit the same response.
You have to constantly translate the complex interconnected mental world you swim in into a simpler model you can communicate with. When I meet another high-intelligence person, I don't have to do that beyond establishing a common vocabulary. It's a fun thrill to have a conversation with somebody who's mind races along like yours, just like it's fun for a tall person to be around other tall people.
One of the issues with being highly intelligent is that you're right more than most people, which makes it difficult to trust the input of more normal folks. So you end up trusting yourself all the time, which means that when you are wrong, you don't know or recognize it until it explodes spectacularly in your face.
You have a good metaphor here, but what kinds of ball are you dunking when you have higher IQ than other people? Do you do anything productive to take advantage of your high IQ? I didn't see it yet.
I agree that being super intelligent is a disaster to people around you. But if you can make something to benefit people, you will be accepted as a hero by the people eventually. That's how heroes are generated.
But to answer the spirit of your question. It depends.
What's the cognitive task I'm gifted at? Did I do that task? Why should I feel shameful for doing that?
If I'm good at rational reasoning, is doing the act of reasoning bad?
If I'm good at advanced physics, is doing physics bad?
If I'm good at painting, or music, or solving rubik's cubes, or biology or psychology, is the act of doing those things I'm good at something I should be bothered about?
There's a significant social stigma about being smarter than everybody else in the room. They're elevated on a weird kind of pedestal both to celebrate, but also to make sure they don't get in too close of contact with the normal folks. It's not fun. Most really smart folks just want to contribute and be useful and use their gifts. Just like tall people tend to play basketball or musically gifted people want to play music.
We don't really celebrate demonstrations of intelligence. It's weird and bizarre and worthy of study and research, but not use. The really really intelligent folks find themselves locked away solving other people's problems for them, rather than being engaged.
> Do you do anything productive to take advantage of your high IQ? I didn't see it yet.
If I'm good at a cognitive task, is there something useful I can do with it?
A criticism that I think is rightfully levied on people like Marilyn Vos Savant is that she doesn't use her gifts for anything particularly useful. Solving other people's brain teasers every week is pretty low on the accomplishment scale.
I try to put what I can do to good use, but outside of the startup sphere I've worked on some very hard, very vexing World problems and been successful in some cases, less successful in others. A byproduct of that work is some cool and elegant technology and approaches that I try to share with others, some of which has had some pretty big impacts on the world which I'm very proud of. It hasn't made me FU rich, but that's never been what I was aiming for. I live very comfortably.
I've also, quite literally, been the guy locked away in a room to solve a hard problem. It's not fun, and it brings up those deep feelings of social isolation. I'm not a person, I'm a functional black box nobody knows quite how to deal with.
But, something I really enjoy, figuring out how to take the advanced work and make it usable by regular folks is a pretty engaging and pretty striking challenge.
I guess there is a gap in your heart which needs to be bridged with your social life. Advanced research can be seen as a type of work, all the scientists are kind of isolated with the regular groups of people. But they can still have their social life to enjoy food, art and something else outside the work.
On the other hand, my doubt came from the fact that you have a wife who is more intelligent than you. If you did, you would never feel lonely. No matter what you do in this world, you have companion who can really understand your value is. You should not feel lonely and you would not feel it so weird when you see the majority of people cannot understand you. If you wish to get rid of the social isolation, there are always ways to enjoy other types of pleasure life brings to you. I still think you are too narrow on a certain spot over the entire spectrum of life.
At any moment when I see any small achievement I get, I feel so fulfilled, especially when some people may understand my work. That's enough.
I think you are right. When I think on my wife, the loneliness goes away, but it's tempting to fall back into old thinking patterns and habits, no? Sometimes bad feelings you've carried around for a long time are comfortable, like an old pair of shoes.
Another angle to see the loneliness is from a long historic point of view. We are all lonely on the way to be born. See the story here: http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html by Andy Weir. So try to forget about it or ignore the feeling and find every piece of joy in your daily life.
As far as userids, neither you or I should be making guesses about people based on such things. :-)