Open Thread: March 2010, part 3

RobinZ

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The previous open thread has now exceeded 300 comments – new Open Thread posts may be made here.

This thread is for the discussion of Less Wrong topics that have not appeared in recent posts. If a discussion gets unwieldy, celebrate by turning it into a top-level post.

Mathematical ability seems to be a high sensitivity test for this. I cannot recall ever meeting someone who I concluded was smarter than me who was not also able to solve and understand math problems I cannot. But it seems to have a surprisingly low specificity-- people who are significantly better at math than me (and this includes probably everyone with a degree in a math heavy discipline) are still strangely very stupid.

Hypotheses:

The people who are better at math than me are actually smarter than me, I'm too dumb to realize it.
Intelligence has pretty significant domain variability and I happen to be especially low in mathematical intelligence relative to everything else.
My ADHD makes learning math especially hard, perhaps I'm quite good at grasping mathematical concepts but lack the discipline to pick up the procedural knowledge others have.
Lots of people of smart people compartmentalize their intelligence, they can't or won't apply it to areas other than math. (Don't know if this differs from #2 except that it makes the math people sound bad instead of me)

Ideas?

I'm going with number 2 on this one (possibly a result of doing 4 either 'actively' or 'passively').

I have a very high error rate when doing basic math and am also quite slow (maybe even before accounting for fixing errors). People who's ability to understand math tops out at basic calculus can still beat me on algebra tests. This effect is increased by the fact that due to mathematica and such, I have no reason to store things like the algorithm for doing polynomial long division. It takes more time and errors to rederive it on the spot.

At the higher lev... (read more)

0Mass_Driver16y

If you can't ever recall meeting someone who you concluded was smarter than you who wasn't good at X, and you didn't use any kind of objective criteria or evaluation system to reach that conclusion, then you're probably (consciously or otherwise) incorporating X into your definition of "smarter." There's a self-promotion trap here -- you have an incentive to act like the things you're good at are the things that really matter, both because (1) that way you can credibly claim that you're at least as smart as most people, and (2) that way you can justify your decision to continue to focus on activities that you're good at, and which you probably enjoy. I think the odds that you have fallen into this self-promotion trap are way higher than the odds for any of your other hypotheses. If you haven't already, you may want to check out the theory of multiple intelligences and the theory of intelligence as information processing

1RobinZ16y

The easiest of your hypotheses to examine is 1: can you describe (suitably anonymized, of course) three* of these stupid math wizzes and the evidence you used to infer their stupidity? * I picked "three" because more would be (a) a pain and (b) too many for a comment.

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Open Thread: March 2010, part 3

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Open Thread: March 2010, part 3

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