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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   28212 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 14, 2024

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That stereotype is, as far as we know, incorrect. Intelligence is positively correlated with empathy, prosociality and morality. Academic success also seems to correlate with empathy.

Which makes sense, if you look outside of carefully curated bubbles. Who do you think is more empathetic, university graduates or unemployed members of the underclass?

But if you look at the highest IQ university graduates they seem more socially inept on average and sometimes less adept at managing poorly defined problems than their not-quite-as-high-IQ peers. Perhaps they don't even have some higher innate trait, they might just be more in their own worlds and thus more able to focus/get good at logic problems. And the thing is that, while logic problems and math are useful in certain contemporary professional and scientific settings, they are in a sense simpler to solve than social problems are to navigate. We could end up creating AI that can replace high IQ people but cannot replace people who are good at handling social and political complexity, or who are good at understanding what really motivates someone.

To be clear I have no proper evidence that very high IQ is associated with less good understanding of people, it just matches my experience so wouldn't surprise me. And I don't believe psychological studies are good enough to prove it either way.

Honestly I think this is just confirmation bias, like how people think short men are easily angered. You notice the smart people with poor social skills because they are good at everything else and it stands out, perhaps with a touch of the wishful thinking that leads to 'there are different kinds of intelligence and people who are good at one are bad at another'.

Like, let's consider well-known geniuses. Here's a quote about Richard Feynman:

He arrived with a huge friendly beaming smile, more cheerful, I might add, than all the other lecturers put together in our department had ever been. Smiling, he stated, “ you don't need this list, lets just chat freely amongst ourselves" and he screwed the piece of paper up with his hands and threw it in the wastepaper bin beside the lecture table. He talked freely about anything we liked to ask from the deepest theoretical ideas of modern physics, people he'd met and worked with, UFOs and pseudoscientific thinking and he loved jokes and joking around. I've NEVER met anyone so down to earth and so friendly as that. He was lovely! All of us graduate students were at ease and he gave us THREE hours of his time; freely! We didn't know at the time that the staff had asked to attend too. He refused saying this was the students' time..he didn't want us to feel ill at ease. My supervisor told me later he told our head of faculty off saying the staff were probably more interested in paying off their mortgages and worried about their next publishing than fundamental physics..lol. As the organisor, I met him later. I'm part Maori and he was very interested in the New Zealand Maori. He was lovely; nothing was a problem, he was ‘at home' with us students. I remembered seeing him sweat as he expended enormous energy with us. I thought, he's truly human! The most complicated theoretical ideas were made to appear so commonplace and simple, as if you were putting together an extension to your garage. Incredible! The terms in the various differential equations of physics were reduced to seemingly just the different sized nails you needed, with the purposes clearly recognised. Gosh he made it all sound joyful, fun and deceptively obvious. Truly a highlight of my student days. He wanted us students to take him out to a night club. The faculty closed that one down as they'd already accounted for his evenings at other professors' homes. Ohhh .the lost opportunities.

How about Terence Tao:

Tao, by contrast, is, as one colleague put it, ‘‘super-normal.’’ He has a gentle, self-­deprecating manner. He eschews job offers from prestigious East Coast institutions in favor of a relaxed, no-drama department in a place where he can enjoy the weather. In class, he conveys a sense that mathematics is fun. One of his students told me that he had recently joked with another about the many ways Tao defies all the Hollywood mad-­genius tropes. ‘‘They will never make a movie about him,’’ he said. ‘‘He doesn’t have a troubled life. He has a family, and they seem happy, and he’s usually smiling.’’

Albert Einstein:

"Einstein was a total rogue in his personal life," Isaacson said. "He was a runaway. He always got in trouble with his teachers. Falls in love with this wonderful physics student. They have a child before they're married. All of these things are this rebellious, impudent nature, which I think also leads him to challenge the basic tenets of science."

Marylin Vos Savant:

In conversation, Savant steers clear of fancy remarks. She is overtly normal. “People expect me to be a walking encyclopaedia or a human calculator,” she says, or to “have very unusual, very esoteric, very arcane gifts and I’m really not that way at all.” Instead, she talks with the practised clarity of her columns, the pedantry of someone wary of misinterpretation.

Von Neumann:

His nickname at the institute of advanced study was “good time Johnny”: he often organized parties in his large home in Princeton, whereby fine wines were consumed, served by a butler, while “Johnny” would divide his time between meeting friends, telling politically incorrect jokes, talking higher math, and telling the occasional dirty joke.

I promise I didn't select these deliberately. Einstein seems to have been an asshole, the same to a lesser extent seems to be true of Von Neumann, but these were not autistic nerds who didn't understand people.

I certainly wasn't suggesting that high IQ and social smarts are mutually exclusive. Just that the upper ends of both may be less likely to occur together.

Edit: perhaps I should add the reason I don't consider this refuting is that this is not a list of randomly chosen high iq people. It's a list of acknowledged geniuses, who are more likely to be socially able than your average high-iq person. They collaborate with others, they navigate institutions etc.

Good excerpts by the way.

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