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Grognor comments on Open Thread, January 15-31, 2012 - Less Wrong
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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.)