Comment author: RichardKennaway 15 September 2015 07:53:33PM -3 points [-]

A child of four is just as intelligent as the adult they will eventually become. They just have less knowledge to work with.

Comment author: Grothor 15 September 2015 11:19:48PM *  2 points [-]

This sounds a lot like the theory of crystallized vs fluid intelligence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluid_and_crystallized_intelligence

As far as I know, by most any commonly used metric, both of these will increase well beyond four years of age. Vaniver mentions 15 years old, and I recall 19-20 years old being the number given for maximum fluid intelligence in the psychology textbook I had in undergrad.

Comment author: Grothor 15 September 2015 10:59:35PM 8 points [-]

A while back, I was having a discussion with a friend (or maybe more of a friendly acquaintance) about linguistic profiling. It was totally civil, but we disagreed. Thinking about it over lunch, I noticed that my argument felt forced, while his argument seemed very reasonable, and I decided that he was right, or at least that his position seemed better than mine. So, I changed my mind. Later that day I told him I'd changed my mind and I thought he was right. He didn't seem to know how to respond to that. I'm not sure he even thought I was being serious at first.

Have other people had similar experiences with this? Is there a way to tell someone you've changed your mind that lessens this response of incredulity?

Comment author: Grothor 03 September 2015 09:13:23PM 3 points [-]

Should I put my elephants in RAID 5, or should I just go with RAID 0, since they never forget?

Comment author: ChristianKl 05 August 2015 07:28:05PM 2 points [-]

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.

On what basis do you believe that fashion designers have lower IQ?

Comment author: Grothor 05 August 2015 09:40:14PM 3 points [-]

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.

Comment author: adamzerner 02 August 2015 08:13:59PM *  2 points [-]

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:

  • (Meta level: What's my goal? Enjoyable conversation? Where do our interests overlap? I like to have interesting conversations. She's probably not very smart, so her ability to have interesting conversations is probably limited to her domain. What interesting conversations could we have within her domain? What thoughts do I have about her domain? What are the likely ways she'd respond to those thoughts? Alternatives: skipping shallow talk and talking about emotional things is probably enjoyable. For some reason humans enjoy sharing their feelings. What's the line between interesting and creepy? Are you happy? What are your ambitions? What would you do if you didn't have to work?)
  • Our society's fashion seems really dark. Dark blues, blacks, browns, greys etc. I think it'd be cool if there were more color. I like to wear colorful clothing, but don't really. Mostly because it's more difficult to pair things up and I'm lazy. Which would lead to her probably giving advice, and maybe talking about color in a historical sense. Was it more colorful in the past? Will it be in the future? On that note, are there any trends in color? What about across cultures? Do any consistencies across culture say anything about design/color and human nature?
  • Maybe once she's been loosened up, I'd comment on how I love wearing pajama pants. Plus some stories of that. And my thoughts on how society seems to have chosen pretty uncomfortable clothes as its norms. There's probably nothing inherent about suits and khakis and jeans that look good. If we all agreed that something more comfortable was the new norm, we'd probably be better off. (Pet peeve: the "shoulder pads" on suits are just ridiculous. You can't even lift up your arms!) I wouldn't open with this though; it'd probably be seen as too controversial and weird right away. But it might be fun/funny once the person's been loosened up.
  • People who otherwise aren't intelligent often have somewhat smart things to say within their domain. So maybe you'd be able to have some sort of enjoyable conversations with her about fashion, and maybe she'd enjoy the cognitive psychology topics/spins.
Comment author: Grothor 02 August 2015 08:21:52PM 2 points [-]

People who otherwise aren't intelligent often have somewhat smart things to say within their domain.

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.

Comment author: James_Miller 02 August 2015 06:21:58AM *  4 points [-]

Could putting an 850 nm wavelength LED light array on my forehead for ten minutes or so a day do me any harm? It generates a small amount of heat.

Edit: See this video for a motivation: http://selfhacked.com/2015/07/18/interview-with-dr-michael-hamblin-harvard-professor-and-infrared-therapy-expert/

Comment author: Grothor 02 August 2015 07:45:37PM 4 points [-]

After trying to imagine a way this would fail badly, I think you should make sure that whatever you do, you can remove it quickly. It's common for homemade electronics to get hot or catch fire, and you don't want to have any trouble getting if off your head if that does happen.

Comment author: adamzerner 02 August 2015 05:20:10PM *  3 points [-]

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.

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.

  • You could be "intelligent" and have "social skills".
  • You could be "intelligent" and not be frustrated by normal people. Maybe you're a huge humanist who just loves people so much. Maybe you don't view normal people as being at fault. Maybe your expectations are low for a number of reasons.
  • You could be "intelligent" and find normal people enjoyable. You probably wouldn't get to be intellectually stimulated by interactions with normal people, but you might... enjoy the "mere exposure" (humans enjoy socializing), enjoy goofing around, enjoy teaching them, enjoy their kindness, enjoy observing them as a means to better understand cognitive psychology.

My guess is that intelligent people...

  • Who spend a lot of time in a certain in-group might "forget" what the norms of other groups are like. I mean "forget" in a "procedural" sense rather than a "declarative" one. A lot of times you might just acting according to the norms you're used to out of habit, but then realize, "oh yeah, normal people don't do this".
  • Intelligent people (feel that they) understand that and why a lot of the things normal people do aren't rational. I think that given a "default" perspective, this is very frustrating. But given a different perspective, it isn't necessarily frustrating (I'd love to hear more about this perspective...).
  • Intelligent people seem to be somewhat socialized to think that "normal pleasures" are sort of... "lesser". And so they don't derive as much joy from them, and instead need a certain amount of intellectual stimulation.
Comment author: Grothor 02 August 2015 07:37:16PM *  4 points [-]

What do you mean by "hard"? Difficult? Frustrating? Boring?

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?

Comment author: James_Miller 02 August 2015 06:07:32PM *  4 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Grothor 02 August 2015 07:16:08PM 3 points [-]

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.

Comment author: James_Miller 02 August 2015 06:21:58AM *  4 points [-]

Could putting an 850 nm wavelength LED light array on my forehead for ten minutes or so a day do me any harm? It generates a small amount of heat.

Edit: See this video for a motivation: http://selfhacked.com/2015/07/18/interview-with-dr-michael-hamblin-harvard-professor-and-infrared-therapy-expert/

Comment author: Grothor 02 August 2015 05:00:51PM 6 points [-]

I work with infrared lasers, and the main safety advice I will give you is that 850nm light will look very dim, even if it is very bright. So be careful about shining it in your eyes, because how bright it looks is misleading. That said, it does take a very bright source of visible or IR light to actually damage your eyes.

Comment author: Grothor 01 August 2015 11:46:49PM *  8 points [-]

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?)

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