Comments
By mrspuratic 2025-06-2711:272 reply I prefer to think of "smart" as a vector, I'm more interested in the dot-product with the situation at hand.
By amy214 2025-06-2821:46 >I prefer to think of "smart" as a vector, I'm more interested in the dot-product with the situation at hand.
Same, but smarts is a tensor and I do a situational cross product for the hypervolume
By nunodonato 2025-06-2712:052 reply Interesting take! But don't you think that smartness would be something that would work across all/many domains?
By nemomarx 2025-06-2712:14 Which part of smartness? Knowing a lot of things? Ability to research and learn quickly? Fast decision making?
I'm not sure you can say that it's a single dimension, and plenty of people who are very educated or have had impressive careers in one field seem out of their depth in some other area. There's definitely some skill under that all that can transfer, but you'd need to cut through a lot of other traits to try and identify it and it might not be 'smarts'. (Persistence or motivation seem like large factors.)
Decades of research on the g factor seem to imply that most cognitive tasks are indeed heavily correlated.
By seec 2025-06-284:52 Yes and it's not just purely cognitive tasks. In fact, pretty much everything requires you to use your brain, so smarter people tend to do better on pretty much everything regardless of their familiarity/talent for the task at hand.
But this is something most people prefer to ignore because the implications are pretty big and we already had a war around that...
It's interesting how people always try to find some kind of number to race against.
Here's a simple theoretical situation. A brilliant mathematician with very high IQ crashes in the jungle, but is unhurt.
Not far from the crash site, there's a tribesman who lived in the jungle all his life. He doesn't know how to read or write.
The jungle is filled with predators, spiders and snakes. The sun is setting, the night starts soon.
Who has bigger chances of surviving ? I guess most people would bet on the tribesman. Why does nature select the person who would most likely score lower on the IQ score ?
The point is - intelligence is contextual and circumstantial. It's not one number, like width or length. Not sure why people still try to squeeze some sort of conclusion from it..
By switknee 2025-06-2712:33 I believe you're confusing knowledge and intelligence. This is effectively like saying intelligence is circumstantial because Mike Tyson could punch through the mathematician's head in the boxing ring. You're comparing an ability (intelligence) to a skill (jungle stuff).
To accurately test the jungle guy's intelligence you'd need to devise a test that doesn't require reading nor writing (skills he hasn't yet developed). The point is to test how well his brain works, not what he's learned. With physical testing there are similar situations, where two people can have the same strength and endurance but one of them can achieve more with it due to certain skills like dance or being Mike Tyson.
By everdrive 2025-06-2712:17 I think a more valid comparison would be that you have two tribesmen who have lived in the jungle all their lives, but one has a very low IQ, while one has a very high IQ. Both crash land in the jungle. Who has the bigger chance of surviving?
You're confusing 'adaptation', 'knowledge', and 'intelligence'. The scientific comparison would be to put the mathematician and (lower IQ for the example) tribesman in the same situation from birth and see which performs better.
Now it's still not a given in that situation that the high IQ individual would be better adapted to the environment as physical traits may matter more, but it is probable that the high IQ individual has a better model of the predators, spiders, snakes and environment in general.
The speed with which an individual develops accuracy in their model of something (ceteris paribus) does seem to be captured by an IQ-like score, according to the research.
The thing people that actually causes problems is that people mentally equate 'higher intelligence' with 'better' or 'more valuable' which goes against our desire for humans to all be equal(ly valuable). That is what generally leads people to come up with other forms of 'intelligence' (emotional intelligence, street smarts, etc.), even though that just redefines intelligence to the point where the original meaning is lost and a new word needs to be introduced. Much better imho is to keep the original word intact and use terms like 'emotional competence', which also capture the experience part rather than just the genetic part.
By ecocentrik 2025-06-2712:55 > but it is probable that the high IQ individual has a better model of the predators, spiders, snakes and environment in general.
In a hostile environment a lack of prior experience or a lack of guidance with prior experience can mean death in a few days. The mathematician has no time to update priors. A nutritional deficit or a lack of adequate shelter will result in a rapid cognitive decline.
IQ as a predictor of health seems like the most relevant point in the research to this hypothetical situation.
By seec 2025-06-285:07 Even so called "emotional intelligence" has been shown to been closely linked to general intelligence. Turns out being smarter makes you better at reading people's emotions from stimuli details. This kind of bullshit has been "invented" because there is a belief that intelligent people are "bad" socially when in fact they just don't care or are bored/annoyed when hanging around "regular" people. This study shows one of the reasons: it is difficult to communicate and reason with other people when their prediction/description of stuff is systematically very wrong.
Plenty of people are working very hard to redefine "intelligence" because reality hurts their egos. There is still nonsensical debate about being able to measure it and whatnot even though the research has constantly shown the truth for quite a while now.
I guess that at the start of formalized measures like the meter there were plenty of people to contest how "stupid" it was because it made them shorter than they liked to pretend.
The applicable experiment for IQ would be to take two ”equal” populations (say,1000 ppl with middle-class background each), sort by IQ, cut the sample set at the middle to lower than median, and higher than median group.
The statistics so far show that the upper median group will do better on average. One might end up in jungle but it does not really matter for our experiment.
For individuals, IQ is sort of statistical proxy for lots of things if your daily life is lived in a first world country.
But it’s insane to hold it as some sort of key indicator of fundamental human potential.
In population statistical situations, like when hiring, however, imho it does make sense to prefer high iq individuals. Not because of what it tells of a single candidate’s potential, but it acts as a sort of maxwells demon for the workforce as total. So you end up with a employee pool closer to above-median group in our experiment which may or may not provide better business outcomes.
By tptacek 2025-06-2718:11 This is basically false; you might make it true if you cut somewhere other than the middle, but famously IQ has non-uniform reliability (it's heteroskedastic? is that the way to say it?). Pop science and nerd culture have fixated on it as a global ranking of people by cognitive capability, but it's not that at all; past a threshold, the actual numbers (and test-test reliability) get really noisy.
This should make intuitive sense, because IQ was designed as a diagnostic, one in a battery of diagnostics, for people with cognitive dysfunction. It's a useful tool to deploy when you have a patient who, for instance, can't seem to progress in reading class or whatever. It's broadly misapplied in studies like this (but then, this study has deeper faults than that).
By 7thaccount 2025-06-2712:32 In this case you're talking about some information that the professor doesn't know. We don't know if he would or wouldn't have naturally excelled at that if he had been born in that environment.
I think there is learning ability like what kind of CPU your brain gets. Some people get a super computer that seems to break down at times. Some get an i7, some a Pentium III, and even some a TI-89 chip.
Then there is knowledge, which is what you take the time to learn and is kind of like an external storage drive to continue with the computing analogy. Even if you're not able to learn as fast as someone who is equipped with a better chip, you can outperform them at work if you know a lot more about the subject (you studied hard outside of work) and have taken the time to learn new skills like programming (you added new software programs to continue the analogy).
Then there is wisdom. You have a sort of common sense and ability to see the consequences of certain actions in a way that isn't so common.
Overall Intelligence in my eyes is then the sum total of someone's 1.) learning/processing ability, 2.) knowledge across multiple domains, and 3.) wisdom. Someone with a lot of #1 may be considered by many to be unintelligient if they have little of #2 and #3.
This is just my own stupid view on the subject though. I sometimes think we just haven't invented the vocabulary necessary to discuss this - that or I'm just not educated on the subject.
By rTX5CMRXIfFG 2025-06-2712:58 I could care less. If it isn't intelligence, it's net worth, or body count. People like to gloat what they have, and then complain about those who have what they don't.
> from a nationally representative English sample of participants aged over 50 (N = 3,946), we test whether IQ is associated with calibration.
> In line with MR studies, we leverage the randomness of genetic variants—captured by individual polygenic scores (PGSs) for IQ, a single quantitative measure of an individual’s genetic predisposition to IQ—as a plausibly valid IV for phenotypic IQ.
I'm uncomfortable about generating strong generalized conclusions based on such methodology.
You should be. This can't possibly work.
This is a journal that also published and later defended work premised on psychic ability, though.
It's a serious journal, as I understand it. But they take flyers. This definitely seems like one.
By ASalazarMX 2025-06-2718:261 reply While psychic powers have been thoroughly tested and debunked, isn't the point of science to entertain ideas that seem crazy, as long as they are tested scientifically?
By tptacek 2025-06-2718:32 I'm sure there's also a peer-reviewed journal of flat Earth science, too, with papers about the Atmosflat.
