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ChristianKl comments on Open thread, Nov. 02 - Nov. 08, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (194)
How strong are your math skills? Did you have IQ testing done?
Mathematicians don't give a shit about IQ. When was the last time you heard Terry Tao talk about IQ?
Writing papers >>>>> psychometrics.
That's because they are an exclusive high-IQ club to start with.
Take someone who scored in 300s on his SAT -- would you recommend him to try to become a mathematician?
What do you suppose Ramanujan's IQ was? Do you think Hardy cared?
No one has any idea since he lived before IQ tests.
That's like saying a basketball coach doesn't care about the player's height, he only cares how high can he jump.
IQ is not like height. Height is a fairly objective physical measurement that is directly relevant for basketball because of the game setup. IQ is the result of a projection of an extremely high dimensional space into a single number that is not directly relevant for mathematics (people do mathematics in an extremely heterogeneous way). Erdos, Ramanujan, and Groethendieck were all top notch and were all very very different from each other. Erdos I think couldn't tie his shoes. Ramanujan was an Indian peasant. Groethendieck wasn't exactly a high functioning individual.
A better analogy would be if a basketball coach cared about "hit points" (determined by whatever methods doctors use, slatestar would know more).
Ramanujan was a Brahmin. "Peasant' isn't quite appropriate.
"Peasant" is also technically wrong since neither he nor his parents tilled the soil (his father was a clerk).
How is it not "directly relevant"? What do you think the average IQ of mathematicians is, do you imagine it's anywhere close to the population average?
Being able (or not) to tie one's shoes or being an Indian peasant are NOT indicators of IQ. Not being socially successful is not an indicator of low IQ either.
I understand your point that genius mathematicians are really, really weird people. But I see no contradiction there, it's perfectly possible to have high IQ and be really weird.
My point isn't just that they are really weird, but that people think about mathematics in an extremely heterogeneous way, and reducing human brains to one number as some sort of "math hit points" is silly for that reason. You are just ignoring most relevant information.
What made Erdos good and what made Ramanujan good were weird complicated facts about their brains (I expect Ramanujan's IQ wouldn't be very different from his cohort in India, e.g. likely not super high, but for some reason he just "saw" natural numbers). This does not make Ramanujan or his cohort stupid. I just don't think "smart" and "stupid" is what IQ measures in any interesting way.
Telling people to go take an IQ test as a way to selecting themselves out from trying math is an especially toxic practice (especially if this advice is not coming from a mathematician).
I prove theorems for a living, and I say: ignore the haters, just read about math that interests you, try your hand at following and constructing arguments, etc. Math is hard (for everyone), don't worry about it. It's fun, too.
Sure, that's true.
And I agree. But consider the setup: we have a person who doesn't quite know what he wants to do and who has shown no signs of possessing any "supernatural" math abilities. Could he turn out to be another Groethendieck? Well, sure, it's possible, but we are talking about the base population rate here, the chances are, let's say, not very high.
Now, it so happens that most math professionals have high IQ. That's not a coincidence, of course -- if your brain is insufficiently weird to see math "directly", you have to rely on the same dimensions of performance (working memory, etc.) which are reflected in the IQ score.
Trying out a profession has costs, sometimes considerable. You can't try everything on the off chance that it might work out -- you want to focus on the areas where you expect to do well. And someone with an IQ of 130 has much, MUCH better chances of becoming a mathematician than someone with the IQ of 80.
Heterogeneous compared to what? It's a lot more homogeneous then how people think about nearly any other subject.
I suppose I will defer to your expertise on how people think about everything, Eugene.
Aaaanyway I haven't had a crude IQ test done but I've had a tailored subset of psychometric tests including subscales from the WAIS from which IQ is derived which indicate my maths skills are above average. The same tests indicated my concentration skills are below average....
Hmm. I haven't put much thought into what professions are a good fit for someone with concentration as a comparative disadvantage.
I would suspect that research, and mathematics research in particular, is a bad bet. Much of a day will be spent just thinking about ideas, and being able to think about the same idea all day long is necessary to reach the end of long and complicated chains of reasoning. The difference between Newton and his contemporaries, for example, seems to have mostly been superior concentration ability on Newton's part, not considerably higher intelligence.
But people use machine learning many other places; you might be able to work as an industrial data scientist or analyst. It's not clear to me whether low concentration ability would be a smaller or larger handicap there.
In NFL they do care about intelligence tests.
I don't claim that they do.
Clarity speaks of himself as stupid and the fact that he failed to learn python is indication of that. If his IQ is <100, I think that would be a valid ground on which to advice him against seeking a career in machine learning.
That's exactly the purpose for which IQ test were designed.
This is only a weak evidence for non-high IQ.
I know a few people who had bad opinion about their IQ, and when I convinced them to take the test, they scored above 130. It's because they believed the stereotype of "high IQ = math prodigy", and they happened to be average at math simply because they focused their lives on something else.
I haven't implied that it's strong evidence, for me the available evidence was enough to raise the question. The answer to that question matters for whether or not to tell him not to seek a career in machine learning.
I do think that for this purpose the testing that tells him that he's above average in math might be enough.
I think it would be useful to taboo "stupid." It is not a useful word.
Tabooing "stupid" is what asking for IQ is about and why I asked about IQ in this context.
Except you are not tabooing anything then, you are just substituing "low IQ" for "stupid." The point of tabooing stupid is to get binary classification out of an inherently complicated multidimensional problem.
The request of tabooing in general is a request for more cognitive work.
Scoring low on a specific test is something more complex than a label. Changing a vague term with a operationalised term is something that often makes sense for tabooing.
I think you confuse cognitive work with explicitely describing cognitive work. When it comes to speaking about negative features of other people it's worthwhile not to say every negative thing that can be said publically.