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gwern comments on Is g a measure of ability to absorb information in a non-inductive way? - Less Wrong
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Comments (20)
If g is about social intelligence, why does it sometimes seem to be practically inversely correlated with 'emotional intelligence' and other such things? Those with high IQ are not known for their keen social skills.
This is a popular stereotype, both among those without high IQ and those with, but is there any evidence? I cannot say I have noticed this among the people I know. On the contrary, if anything, the keenest minds I have been fortunate enough to meet have generally been socially successful as well.
Alright, I'll put it another way. This theory suggests an extremely high correlation between social skills and intelligence, perhaps as high as 1. Let's say 0.9. The average LWer, if I remember the survey results right, tends to have IQs in the 120-150 range, putting them in a high percentile of the populace, perhaps in the top 3% or so. Would you say the average LWer is even in the top 10% of the populace for social skills?
Something has gone wrong somewhere if you think that is my theory.
Social information is not supposed to be equal to body language/subtext.
I'll change the wording.
I don't know what theory you're referring to, or where that figure of 1 or 0.9 comes from. It certainly doesn't come from me. Neither do I know enough LWers well enough to form any judgment of their average competence.
My understanding is that high IQ per se is positively correlated with social skills (as well as with physical attractiveness, health and lifespan, even after correcting for lifestyle). It's a different story when you look at technical intelligence of the high functioning Asperger's variety, of course; the reason seems to be that this kind of technical intelligence is basically a combination of high IQ with a trading away of social aptitude - literally, a reallocation of some computing power that would normally be dedicated to that function, like a computer designer spending fewer transistors on the GPU to be able to spend more on the CPU.
Bearing in mind that the style and content of discussion on this site tends to specifically attract people with that sort of technical intelligence (geeks, to use the colloquial term for us), surveys on Less Wrong shouldn't be treated as representative of high IQ people in general.
That's a plausible explanation. But that suggests a lot of predictions. For example, if I'm following your analogy right, we ought to see that the subpopulation which has high IQ scores and low math scores would also have higher social skills, since the high IQ proves they have lots of transistors but the low math scores show they haven't spent any transistors on the GPU. Do they?
It would certainly seem that they should. Anecdotally, it seems to me the answer is yes, but I don't know offhand whether statistical evidence has been gathered.
Hmm maybe "ability to absorb social information" was a bit of poorly chosen terminology. I didn't mean to imply that people with it would be good at solving social problems. I wanted to contrast book reading and following a teacher with inferring information from experience or experiments. What pigeons sometimes beat humans at. The first two are social because they involve an author and a teacher, where as the latter are asocial, no other agent has to be involved.
Perhaps "linguistic information" would have been better.
Linguistic information isn't much better, because that sounds like 'crystallized' intelligence as opposed to 'fluid' intelligence, where the most common tests - the matrix tests - make a determined effort to avoid anything even remotely like verbal or linguistic material.
You seem to be trying to equate intelligence as the ability to generalize and learn from experience ("inferring information from experience or experiments") as opposed to the ability to follow received rules ("book reading and following a teacher"). Your use of "social" in this context is irrelevant.
ADDED: Also Frank Herbert said something similar in Chapterhouse:Dune