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Grothor comments on Stupid Questions August 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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I was recently at a bar with some friends, most of which are from the same physics PhD program as me. We had a discussion about how hard it is to spend all your time around unusually intelligent people, and then go out into the real world and have conversations with normal people. It seems to be intelligence-related, because it's usually much easier to have a conversation with, for example, a psychology grad student from Singapore than with a fashion designer who lives in the same city as me.
Is this just because we have no practice talking to people of average-ish intelligence?
Is it because intelligence gaps are inherently difficult in social settings?
Is there some factor other than intelligence that's causing this?
Are we just socially inept?
(Is this more of an open thread question or stupid question?)
I believe a lot of practice would make talking to people with average intelligence easier. Not necessarily more satisfying, though. You will always have to debate with them at their level, while you probably enjoy debating at your level.
Could be. We naturally model other people by imagining what we would do in the same situation. If you use this algorithm to model people with much lower intelligence, you will get many predictions wrong.
Sure. Rationality, culture, past experiences. All of these make modelling each other more difficult.
Possibly; but what exactly do you mean by "inept"? Unable to learn? -- probably not. Haven't learned yet? -- probably yes. The question is whether learning "how to communicate with normal people" is the best use of your time.
Not all talking is debating.
I think this is mostly a function of the subculture to which you belong and, specifically, which things you find interesting, exciting, important, etc. IQ, of course, is a major underlying factor, but it's not just IQ.
Each subculture also has its own social rituals and implicit communication methods so when you cross over to a different one you are very likely to have conversation difficulties -- unless your social skills are highly developed and you have some idea about how that subculture works.
This was my first thought, too. The Singaporean psychology grad student is a member of the same culture as you; the local fashion designer is not.
I'm an economics professor at a good college. A fair number of my students are interested in fashion and have written on the topic for one of my "apply economics to anything" paper assignments. Fashion is a deeper topic than you might imagine and can justifiably attract bright minds.
Prediction: A typical fashion designer and physics PhD get into a conversation. If the fashion designer wanted the PhD to greatly enjoy the conversation she could easily do this (even without doing anything sexual) but the reverse probably doesn't hold true.
I didn't mean to suggest that being in the fashion industry implies that someone is unintelligent. I've known plenty of smart people in industries that are not traditionally thought of as being full of smart people. For this reason, I usually approach a conversation assuming that someone is good at something they do, has thought about it deeply, and has something interesting to say about it. It's usually much easier for me to tease this out with smarter people.
What do you mean by "hard"? Difficult? Frustrating? Boring?
I don't think that intelligence itself it causally related to any of those 3 things.
My guess is that intelligent people...
For a variety of reasons, I'm hesitant to share a specific example, but here is an exchange from the conversation I had recently:
<Some typical introductory stuff, in which she seemed pretty engaged, and in which she told me she was "in the fashion industry">
Me: To me, the fashion industry is this black box that has people in it, and clothing comes out of it
Her (surprised, confused): It's not like that at all!
Me: What I mean is that I don't know anything about how it works, except that it involves people who design clothing, and then somebody buys it
Her (still confused): Yeah...
<at this point I decided trying to get her to tell me about it wasn't going anywhere, so I moved on to attempt at embarrassing my friend who was standing nearby, who then got lots of unwanted attention from her>
So I guess it's mainly frustrating or boring?
That might be understood as you expressing that you consider the fashion industry low status with a challenge for her to prove otherwise.
The straightforward way to get her to tell you something about the fashion industry would be to ask her a question about it. You didn't.
Most people in parties don't focus on exchange of information. If you are talking to someone who thinks conversation is about finding a topic where meaningful information can be exchanged the purpose of your remarks is more obvious than if you are talking to someone who has other goals.
Hahahaha, that's really funny! "It's not like that at all" :)
My understanding is that the black box analogy is understood by some normal people, but not most.
How could you have made for a more enjoyable interaction? Some thoughts that come to my mind:
Right! And this is why I tried to get her talking about fashion. I think your suggestion of asking more specific questions is very helpful. I'll definitely try that next time I'm having trouble with the more generic "tell me about your expertise" type questions.
Yeah. One more thing - in some ways I'm a bit egocentric. So my instinct is to think about the thoughts that I have on the topic and discuss them (I tend to have a lot of thoughts about a lot of things. Or at least a lot of questions.). I notice that I didn't think too much about the strategy of evoking her strongly held opinions. But something about my more egocentric approach of pursuing lines of conversation that interest me feels more... natural/genuine, which I think often leads to good.
(Not that I've had much success. I've always done well in "natural" conversations and am outgoing, but I've never been motivated enough to overcome the awkwardness of initiating conversations with random people out of nothing.)
On what basis do you believe that fashion designers have lower IQ?
I will admit that when I wrote that, I was going off of blurry memories of seeing test scores. I will also admit that I kind of regret introducing the topic the way I did. I wanted to convey that I was comparing people who were both similarly removed from me culturally, but were from populations that would generally have different average intelligence from each other.
In that description, I was referring to literally just "some person who said they are in the fashion industry". This includes fashion designers, accountants, HR people, photographers, janitors, (materials engineers? computer graphics engineers?) etc. But sure, let's go with fashion designers.
Using IQ <==> SAT/GRE conversion tables, if you look up test scores for entering visual arts majors (I think that's what a college-educated fashion designer would study?), they average about 115 IQ, whereas GRE scores for entering psychology PhDs predict about 125-130 IQ (this one's hard, because I can only find "scaled" composite scores, rather than raw composite scores). This is about a one standard deviation difference.
I mainly believe in using SAT and GRE scores as a proxy for IQ because Scott Alexander believes in this enough to pay attention to it on the LW census. Also, I have skimmed some literature on it. I've not examined it carefully, and I'm interested to hear dissenting opinions.
This seems like clear evidence that your average college-educated fashion designer has a higher than average IQ, by a full standard deviation. Evidently, your average psychology PhD student (at the two competitive schools I looked at) has an IQ nearly a full standard deviation above that. Although what I said looks like the kind of thing someone would say if they thought fashion designers were stupid, that wasn't my intent.
We tend to get used to (read: lazy in a system 1 time-saving way.) the systems we are regularly engaged in. i.e. I don't often talk about the weather (and other small talk) with people of higher intelligence (unless in a meta-sense). So I sometimes feel off-guard when trying to respond in the "normal" way that people do.
I usually appeal to stereotypical behaviour where there is common ground. For example - "growth mindset vs fixed mindset", The last time I talked to someone in the fashion industry I equally had a "black box" discussion, and found the bad communication experience too. But then I went on to talk about how I don't know because I had never ever gotten into it, and asked them to "teach me everything you know", which is a way to stump them back in the other direction. At the very least it get's people thinking, at the most you might get the opportunity to learn, they might get the opportunity to think, and you establish a new connection with someone you didn't think was interesting.
There is something called "social intelligence" which you might not be optimising for. Which is completely fine, but can cause this sort of experience to happen. I have personally recently decided to invest more in social-intelligence. The main take-away from that concept is that there are only so many hours in the day. If you want to expend 100 hours on social intelligence learning, that's 100 less hours on learning programming or tackling UFAI, Or learning about music, fashion, communication, art, biotechnology, medicine, law... There are many things that people find valuable. Not everything is universal. I would consider social intelligence as a meta-skill, in a similar way to improving your memory, increasing your sleep quality, learning to communicate in another language, and 101 other things.
It's up to you whether you want to pursue social intelligence.
How does one do this, besides trial and very painful error?
update: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/mmu/how_to_learn_a_new_area_x_that_you_have_no_idea/
An excellent question! I have now written a meta document of "How do I learn X" which I have sent off to a friend to be checked before I post it on Lesswrong. I will post a link (probably in the next 24 hours) to a discussion thread. I think the meta-strategy is going to be more helpful and for more people. I can write a specific list after.
As a teaser:
This list is a teaser; there are more points, but you can probably cover 1-3 by the time I get to publish the list.
Your culture is bounded by lexography, not geography
and it simultaneously attracts and bestows the various qualities that it has defined as "intelligence".