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MileyCyrus comments on Open Thread, January 15-31, 2012 - Less Wrong
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What are some efficient ways to signal intelligence? Earning an advanced degree from a selective university seems rather cost intensive.
In a Dark-Arts-y way, glasses?
(A brief search indicates there are several studies that suggest wearing glasses increases percieved intelligence (e.g. this and this (paywall)), but there are also some that suggest that it has no effect (e.g. this (abstract only)))
There definitely exists a stereotype that people that wear glasses are more intelligent. The cause of this common stereotype is probably that people that wear glasses are more intelligent.
But what's the purported effect size?
The best ways to signal intelligence are to write, say, or do something impressive. The details depend on the target audience. If you're trying to impress employers, do something hard and worthwhile, or write something good and get it published. If you're a techie and trying to impress techies, writing neat software (or adding useful features to existing software) is a way to go.
if you are asking about signalling intelligence in social situations, I suggest reading interesting books and thinking about them. Often, people use "does this person read serious books and think about them" as a filter for smarts.
I figured someone would have said this by now, and it seems obvious to me, but I'm going to keep in mind the general principle that what seems obvious to me may not be obvious to others.
You said efficient ways to signal intelligence. Any signaling worth salt is going to have costs, and the magnitude of these costs may matter less than their direction. So one way to signal intelligence is to act awkwardly, make obscure references, etc.; in other words, look nerdy. You optimize for seeming smart at the cost of signaling poor social skills.
Some less costly ones that vary intensely by region, situation, personality of those around you, and lots and lots of things, with intended signal in parentheses:
It was not intentional that all of these related to conversation. Maybe that's not a coincidence and I've been unconsciously optimizing for seeming smart my entire life.
Definitely this. Tutoring is a very strong signal of intelligence, but is really a matter of learned technique. I was able to tutor effectively in Statistics before I had taken any classes or fully understood the material by using tutoring techniques I had learned by teaching other subjects (notably Physics). The most common question I found myself asking was "what rule do we apply in situations like this," a question you do not actually need to know the subject material to ask.
I'd be interested if you were to expand on this.
It has worked for me. People are impressed when I point out their own sentence structure, things like how many phonemes are in the word "she", etc. I don't know if this also helps signal intelligence, but I also rarely get confused by things people say. Instead of saying, "What?" I say "Oh, I get it. You're trying to say X even though you actually said Y."
Also, I guess it seems like a subject only smart people are interested in. And not even most of them. Guess I got lucky in that regard.
I'm not the OP of that comment, but as a linguistics student I can corroborate. I think there are a couple of reasons that occasionally throwing a relevant piece of linguistic information into a conversation can produce the smartness impression. Firstly, conversations never fail to involve language, so opportunities to comment on language are practically constant if you're attuned to noticing interesting bits and pieces. This means that even occasional relevant comments mean you're saying something interesting and relevant quite frequently. This is an advantage that linguistics has over, say, marine biology. Secondly, I have the impression that most people are vaguely interested in language and under the equally vague impression that they know just how it works -- after all, they use it all the time, right? So even imparting a mundane little piece of extremely basic linguistics can create the impression that you're delivering serious cutting-edge expert-level stuff: after all, your listener didn't know that, and yet they obviously know a pretty decent amount about language!
I perhaps should work on this one. It might improve my signal/noise ratio.
Your list is quite wisely written.
It, of course, depends who you're signalling to. These sound to me like ways of signalling that you are intelligent to the unintelligent. (If that. They're good possibilities but I'm skeptical of about half of them.)
Here's a few suggestions, some sillier than others, in no particular order:
Much depends on the audience one is signalling to.
To stupid or average people, this is a signal of intelligence. To other intelligent people, my impression is that Mensa membership mostly distinguishes the subset of "intelligent and pompous about it" from the larger set of "intelligent people".
Again this works as a signal to people who are at a remove from these activities, because the average player is smarter than the average human. People who themselves actually play, however, will have encountered many people who happen to be good at certain specific things that lend themselves to abstract strategy games, but are otherwise rather dim.
Agree with this one. It's especially useful because it has the opposite sorting effect of the previous two. Other intelligent people will pick up on it as a sign of intelligence. Conspicuously unintelligent people will fail to get it.
This one seems like it might vary by geography. It's a lot less of a distinction for a European than an American. In the US, the status signal from "speaks English and Spanish" is different from the status signal from "speaks English and some language other than Spanish".
My experience seems to support this. The desire to signal intelligence is often so strong that it eliminates much of the benefits gained from high intelligence. It is almost impossible to have a serious discussion about something, because people habitually disagree just to signal higher intelligence, and immediately jump to topics that are better for signalling. Rationality and mathematics are boring, conspiracy theories are welcome. And of course, Einstein was wrong; an extraordinarily intelligent person can see obvious flaws in theory of relativity, even if they don't know anything about physics.
Mensa membership will not impress people who want to become stronger and have some experience with Mensa. Many interesting people make the Mensa entry test, come to the first Mensa meeting... and then run away.
My experience with Mensa was similar to yours. I joined, read a couple issues of their magazine without having time to go to a meeting, and realized that if the meetings were like the magazine they weren't worth the time. There was far less original thought in Mensa then I had expected.
Saying this about Mensa is a much better way to signal intelligence to other intelligent people than actually being a Mensa member.
Well, it's worth being a little careful here. Saying dismissive things about an outgroup is an effective way to present myself as a higher-status member of the ingroup; that works as well for "us intelligent people" and "those Mensa dweebs" as any other ingroup/outgroup pairing. Which makes it hard to tell whether I'm really signalling intelligence at all.
Yes, and I knew that when I said it. But it's also true.
Right now my question is: Is abandoning Mensa the most useful thing, or can it be used to increase rationality somehow?
Seems to me that the selection process in Mensa has two steps. First, one must decide to make a Mensa entry test. Second, one must decide to be a Mensa member, despite seeing that Mensa is only good for signalling -- this is sometimes not so obvious to a non-Member. For example when I was 15, I imagined that Mensa would be something like... I guess like I now imagine the LW meetups. I expected there people who are trying to win, not only to signal intelligence to other members.
So I conclude that people who pass the first filter are better material than people who pass both filters. A good strategy could be this: Start a local rationalist group. Become a member of Mensa, so you know when Mensa does tests. Prepare a flyer describing your rationalist group and give it to everyone that completes the Mensa test -- they will probably come to the first following Mensa meeting, but many of them will not appear again.
This is what I want to do, when I overcome my laziness. Also I will give a talk in Mensa about rationality and LW, though (judging by reactions on our facebook group) most members will not be really interested.
Be interested in lots of things that other people might not find interesting. I think it's the way that I personally signal intelligence the most. For example, if someone has a herpolhoder on their desk, I try to ask intelligent questions about it. Or if the rain on the window is dripping in nice straight lines because of the screen occasionally pressing against the glass, notice that.
Do something prohibitively difficult that not a lot of people are competent enough to do.
Of course, make sure it's something people "know" is hard, like rocket science.
I have to admit, I'm mystified as to why this one got downvoted.
Likely because it could be read as a sarcastic remark resolving to "become intelligent for real, and you wouldn't need to fake anything, you lazy cheating bastard". I wouldn't have downvoted for that, but such a reading had indeed occured to me at first, before I remembered that I'm at a website of a better sort.
I guess there are two different questions: signalling intelligence to top-intelligence people and signalling intelligence to people above average and higher.
In the first case, it is a good plan. In the second case, you would fail.
upvoted. I am also confused.
I have a different perspective on this compared with other commenters... Intelligence is very hard to fake.
What's the best way to signal guitar playing skills? Play the guitar, and play it well!
The efficient way to signal intelligence is: to do worthwhile things, intelligently!
How can you tell if someone is doing things intelligently?
Fair question, but difficult to answer in brief, I might try to do this later. For now let me answer with a couple of questions:
How can you tell if someone is playing a guitar well?
In general, can YOU tell the difference between someone doing things intelligently, and doing things unintelligently?
a) Listen to them playing.
b) Do they have concerts, CDs, fans, other symbols of "being a successful guitar player"? Do they write blogs or books about guitar playing? Do people write guitar-playing-related blogs and books about them?
The second option is less reliable and easier to fake, but it is an option that even a deaf person can use.
Speaking as a guitar and piano player. I can do things on guitar and piano that are fairly easy, but look very impressive to someone who doesn't play the instrument. You actually need to play an instrument before you can judge how good someone is accurately.
(Obviously, it's pretty obvious if someone is distinctly bad. But distinguishing different levels of "good" is hard.)
First question: A good guitar player a steady rhythm and hit the appropriate notes with appropriate volume and tone. At a higher level, they improvise in a way that sounds good. Sounding good seems to involve sticking to a standard scale with only a few deviations, and varying the rhythms. At the level above that, I really don't know.
Second question: I really don't know, at least that generally. I think I may use proxies such as the ability to find novel (good) solutions to problems and draw on multiple domains, then aggregate them into one linear value that I call "intelligence". I am probably also influenced by the person's attractiveness and how close their solution is to the one I would have proposed. I would definitely like your take on this as well.
Why are you asking?
Depending on the selective university, an advanced degree might not cost much at all. Harvard, for example, only recently started paying the way of its undergraduates, but it has paid the way of its graduate students for a long time.
True, but free tuition or not, it's plenty costly in terms of opportunity.
(This is true to an almost hilarious extent if you're a humanities scholar like me: I'm not getting those ten (!!!!!!!) years of my life back.)
Is that the reason for "grouchy"musicologist?
Haha, no. I'm only grouchy because people occasionally say ill-informed things about musicology. Other than that, I really like my job and my chosen field. I rarely think I'd be much happier if I had chosen to pursue some lucrative but non-musicological career.
What's it like being a musicologist? What do you spend your days doing?
How many instruments do you play?
What's better out of Mozart's Jupiter Symphony and Holst's Jupiter movement?
Well, I wrote a bit about what musicologists do here. In terms of research areas, I myself am the score-analyzing type of musicologist, so I spend my days analyzing music and writing about my findings. I'm an academic, so teaching is ordinarily a large part of what I do, although this year I have a fellowship that lets me do research full-time. Pseudonymity prevents me from saying more in public about what I research, although I could go into it by PM if you are really interested.
I am (well, was -- I don't play much any more) what I once described as a "low professional-level [classical] pianist." That is, I play classical piano really well by most standards, but would never have gotten famous. At a much lower level, I can also play jazz piano and Baroque harpsichord. I never learned to play organ, and never learned any non-keyboard instruments. Among professional musicologists, I'm pretty much average for both number of instruments I can play and level of skill.
As to pieces about Jupiter, I can only offer you my personal opinion -- being a musicologist doesn't make my musical preferences more valid than yours. Both pieces are great, and I had a special fondness for the Holst when I was a kid (I heard it in a concert hall when I was about 11, and spent the whole 40 minutes grinning hard enough I should have burst a blood vessel). But I'll take the Jupiter Symphony without the slightest hesitation. Here you have one of the greatest works of one of the tiny handful of greatest composers ever, versus an excellent piece by a one-hit wonder among classical composers.
Really, though, I don't much like picking favorites among pieces of music, and always want to preface my answers with "Thank goodness I don't really have to choose!"
Weird. I, too, was super into "The Planets" when I was 11ish. I also had well-worn cassettes of Copland and a bunch of the Russian composers... and lots of comedy albums. That was pretty much it until grunge.
I blame Carl Stalling.