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thomblake comments on 2011 Less Wrong Census / Survey - Less Wrong
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I was wondering if the IQ-calibration question was referring to reported or actual IQ. It seems to be the latter, but the former would be much more fun to think about.
Also, are so many LWers comfortable estimating with high confidence that they are in the 99.9th percentile? Or even higher? Is this community really that smart? I mean, I know I'm smarter than the majority of people I meet, but 999 out of every 1000? Or am I just being overly enthusiastic in correcting for cognitive bias?
I'd estimate with high confidence that I'm higher than that. Subjectively, I've only met a couple of people in my life who seem definitely smarter than me. And I've barely met anyone who was malnourished or lacking in education. That said, there is the "everyone else is stupid" bias.
ETA: In case it wasn't clear from the outset, on the outside view, most people with this notion are wrong, and there's a recursive problem in justifying that I'm special. But intelligence tests, though imperfect, are a good hint.
I'm not contradicting you at all, but I'm just curious: how do you know that you are smarter than virtually everyone you meet? If there is anything more to it than an intuition, I'd love to know about it. I've always wondered if there was some secret smart-person handshake that I wasn't privy to.
Personally, I'd say the lower 80 or 90% immediately identify themselves as such, but beyond that I try to give others the benefit of the doubt. Maybe they aren't interested in the conversation, don't want to seem intelligent, or or just plain out of my leauge. I don't value humility very highly at all; but there aren't many things that would convince me I or someone else was demonstrably in the top fraction of the top percentile.
Also, I've been intuitively aware of the optimism bias for as long as I can remember, and estimates like ".1% and 99.9%" trigger my skepticism module hard.
I was mostly going by the handshake.
I'd agree with that statement, revising it up to at least 95%. Once you've got it down to more than 19 in 20 people you meet being obviously-dumb, it's worth the effort to inspect the others more carefully, since it's always good having really smart people around.
I'm much more familiar with people thinking 95% is an orders-of-magnitude higher estimate than 80%, and so I tend to adjust others' carefully-thought-out estimates outward rather than inward, unless they are 0 or 1.
ETA: It's worth noting that one of the huge signals smart people give off is the "OMG you're talking about something that requires intelligence I'm so happy to have met a smart person because that happens to me less than 5% of the time" reaction, which if rarer than I think would significantly throw off my estimates.
Seeming "obviously" dumb and actually not being in the top 5% are very, very different. A person might just be tired, or stressed, or distracted and so not exude intelligence. Or, they might be acting a little less intelligent than they actually are, maybe for social reasons.