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Really? How many 10th percentile people do you meet?
The 10th percentile are the ones breaking into bald men's heads looking for gold or deflowering virgins to cure their AIDS. Or they star in the genre of youtube videos exposing how stupid and ignorant American university students are: https://youtube.com/watch?v=AkIUqH498PQ
The more cerebral of this cohort might subscribe to conspiracy theories about how the earth is flat, how everything is actually naval law and most countries are secretly enrolled as corporations in Delaware... They still cannot string a sentence together though, nor can they spell.
I'd say those people are more like 2nd percentile. Either that or I have too high an opinion of the average human being (I find that hard to believe but am open to the possibility). I think 10th percentile is more like the people manning the tills at your supermarket rather than the dangerously stupid as in your comment. Would you not agree? If not then what percentile human being would you say is doing menial supermarket work?
Where I’m from, most supermarket workers are a mix of 1st generation immigrants, highschoolers, and university students. Is this not the case where you live?
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Some 10%ers will be doing supermarket work of course, they might be perfectly fine, honest and upright people. Others will abuse welfare or spend their entire lives heading in and out of prison.
But on a global level, we see whole countries of the bottom 10% where nothing works: the bureaucracy is a complete shambles and infrastructure is a mess. The characteristic of the bottom 10% as a group is that they erode civilization, they're not merely pawns that do menial tasks.
Scott Alexander memorably pointed out that they do not have alphabetical organization in Haiti - this rather impedes efficient administration. They still have not managed to repair the National Palace where the President lives since the earthquake in 2010.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haitian_crisis_(2018%E2%80%93present)
Or from another angle, someone actually wrote this as a story and published it. A real adult thought other people would like to read this. It's pretty bad: https://www.webnovel.com/book/30212039405390805/81118027365538549
I believe that the difference between me and von Neumann is less than the gap between me and this guy. Not in our work capacity but in our general faculties and comprehension.
My church is putting together a big fund for sending Haitian children to school and privately I thought, what's the point of educating Haitians?
Still not sure what to make of it.
Other than possible extreme edge cases in some distant regions literacy doesn’t seem to be an issue for any major human population, certainly not Bantus, and can benefit almost anyone. So I would say your church is - if the money is not taken via corruption and actually goes toward education - doing a good and valuable thing.
Well there's teaching basic literacy, and then there's sending to school for years and years. If those are the same thing I'm not convinced it's worthwhile.
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I do not know what fractions of Haitians are educable, but I have worked professionally with educated Haitians who were able to perform the duties of a UMC professional job that normally requires a 120+ IQ. Of course Haiti, like most Caribbean countries, has a mixed-race elite and an almost-pure-black working class, and the people I worked with were from the Creole elite. So there is a separate question of what fraction of Haitians who are not already being privately educated are educable.
I have met intelligent and capable Haitians, they’re not hugely uncommon in Florida and there are a few in France too.
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The tenth percentile of the general population is living off some combination of government aid and crime. They’re certainly not cashiers; even restricting to college students, the tenth percentile will not have the work ethic or the numeracy for this.
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Yeah, people tend to flatter themselves that there is a huge gulf in abilities between their own tier and the tier immediately below them (but, strangely, never the tier immediately above them).
It's why so much internet energy is spent talking about "midwits".
A simpler and more accurate model : intelligence matters a lot at every level with no high or low cutoff.
I freely and openly admit that the people above me are much more exalted than I could ever hope to be. I recently interviewed a candidate at work who was applying for a quant job and he absolutely floored me with how intelligent he was, telling me things I hadn't realized about the mathematical question I ask people a few short tens of minutes after seeing the question for the first time. I came away from that interview thinking that I had just come into contact with someone blessed with true shape rotator greatness.
At least I am at the level where I could appreciate what I had just seen, unlike the average 95th percentile person who is so far removed from it that he wouldn't be able to tell the difference between me and this person had he been the one taking the interview instead.
What intellectual percentile would you rate yourself?
If I'm flattering myself probably 99.8, but in reality more like 99.5 or 99.4. (normalized to white western levels, compared to my own people I'm significantly higher).
One in 200 is probably how unique I think my intelligence really is. I'm quite conscientious and like learning about basically everything so I think I present as smarter than I really am because I can talk decently about a lot of things.
Back when I was a child I had delusions of being Great. Those were shattered very quickly when I began my maths degree at Oxbridge and got a chance to mingle with IMO hall of famers.
They were just at another level to me and despite initially foolishly thinking all I had to do was work harder and then I too could reach their level (note: I did not succeed, all that happened was I burnt out) eventually after getting smacked around enough by reality I learned to love my lot in life and go down a gear. I had a lot more fun too after I did this.
My dharma is not to achieve great things but at least I am at the point where I am capable of truly appreciating greatness when it is presented to me (unlike most humans) and I am thankful for that. It's much better to get into a state of resonance with the music of the universe ather than try and fight against it vainly. That way lies the path of Morgoth and we all know how that worked out...
I scored in the 99th percentile on verbal tests and somewhere around the 92-95th on spatial, so I’m not sure where that puts me overall, probably below you. Still, while I’ve met many much smarter people I find them generally easier to speak to and understand than people in the lower third of the population. Of course if the conversation turns to a niche special sub-field in theoretical physics or math or formal logic that I have never studied I’m not going to be able to follow, and my middling shape rotation ability means I’m not going to be able to hold my own with star traders at the poker table or when it comes to logic puzzles. But they don’t ever feel ‘foreign’ to me; I can understand the ideas even if I can’t derive them, if you want.
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Well, you're doing better than Salieri, then.
Honestly I think Salieri gets unfairly maligned a lot. Modern scholarship (forget that movie, I'm talking academic scholarship) thinks there was no real beef between him and Mozart but the rumours, even during his life, led to him having a nervious breakdown and even now in the modern day the general public (to they extent they know of him) still boo him even though they wouldn't be able to distinguish a piece by Mozart vs one by him.
The dude tutored both Schubert and Beethoven, give him some respect!
I'm just riffing on the subject of the movie, which is very much about fictionalized Salieri's inability to cope with the fact that he was unable to "speak with the voice of god".
I'm aware the real Salieri's story does not neatly fit a morality play.
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Fair enough.
For the record, I get midwit vibes from many doctors myself.
I think this is true for many professions with a deep moat around them, regardless of that is educational credentials or some level of career success. This doesn't have to be very highly compensated professions mind you.
In situations where you're "safe" once you're in many people check out mentally and this affects not only job performance.
Being a "midwit" is only partially an effect of intelligence but also of practiced intellectual rigour, often requiring a competitive environment, which typically means work. It's like if people who were professional athletes when they were young thought they're still competitive when they haven't really exercised in over a decade. Disconnect from competition and practice allows for personal preference rule uninhibited by reality.
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