Intelligent people take longer to solve hard problems: study • Hacker News Board

Re: Intelligent people take longer to solve hard problems: study

#31

Post by Solvency » Thu, Jun 22, 2023, 6:27 PM UTC

ChainOfFools wrote: post #27

I strongly suspect this effect is correlated with a weakness in short-term or working memory. Independent of general intelligence is the necessity for those with a weak short-term or working memory to compensate by relying on long-term, in depth understanding in order to JIT the necessary short-term structures into being on the spot, (often repeatedly as these images decay rapidly) in order to solve a problem. Wherea…

I struggled in math in HS for this reason. Every time a concept was presented to me I felt like I needed to deeply understand it at the most universally root level and create a painstaking mental model of it, to a degree that I imposed on myself for some inexplicable reason. To answer "but WHY". Almost like a form of self-sabotage in hindsight because I think there are decreasing returns in "truly, deeply" grokking math if you're not going to be pursuing math as a career.

But I also abhor rote memorization. Not because I don't think it's valuable, I just hate extremely repetitive tasks. Close friends of mine with zero interest in the subject just took everything at face level and preferred to rote memorize everything and slap it down as needed. And they tested much better than I did. Neither I or they are more intelligent than one another and these days we all excel at our own areas we enjoy. But for that subject in particular, in a rushed classroom standardized testing situation, I think their approach was "better".

Re: Intelligent people take longer to solve hard problems: study

#32

Post by chankstein38 » Thu, Jun 22, 2023, 6:27 PM UTC

poomer wrote: post #21

These shape matching questions are the problems asked in the study: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jordan-Barbone-2/public... I would bet that quite a few people just guess when they find this type of question too difficult.

Honestly this makes the most sense to me. I guessed first before thinking it through and if I were doing the test and it were timed I might've just guessed.

Re: Intelligent people take longer to solve hard problems: study

#33

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jun 22, 2023, 6:32 PM UTC

pazimzadeh wrote: post #14

elcritch wrote: post #8

> The findings challenge the assumption that higher intelligence is the result of a faster brain. They suggest that faster is not necessarily better, and that under certain circumstances there is a tradeoff between speed and accuracy which results in better decisions. Talk about conflating different aspects of something to arrive at faulty logic. There clearly is a relationship between higher intelligence and a faste…

Faster thinking allows to you brute force problems, which means you may not look for a more elegant solution because you don't need to. Like how Von Neumann was able to solve the fly and trains problem the hard way instead of finding the simple solution: https://www.pleacher.com/mp/mlessons/calculus/mobinfin.html

[deleted]

Re: Intelligent people take longer to solve hard problems: study

#34

Post by wizeman » Thu, Jun 22, 2023, 6:37 PM UTC

> needed more time to solve challenging tasks but made fewer errors [1]

As someone else said, I can solve problems very quickly if the solutions don't have to be correct...

But more seriously, it seems like different people might have different thresholds for when they consider a problem solved?

If you decide to go back and review the problem and solution (even just mentally) to make sure you didn't make mistakes, of course that would take longer and give you more correct answers than the person who doesn't do that?

[1] https://www.bihealth.org/en/notices/intelligent-brains-take-...

Re: Intelligent people take longer to solve hard problems: study

#35

Post by Solvency » Thu, Jun 22, 2023, 6:37 PM UTC

pazimzadeh wrote: post #6

On the other hand, "more intelligent" people's brains work less hard during reasoning. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-04268-8

Something tells me trying to bluntly define "more" and "less intelligent" and then compare the two groups with blanket studies like this is utterly ridiculous.

Re: Intelligent people take longer to solve hard problems: study

#36

Post by dimal » Thu, Jun 22, 2023, 6:39 PM UTC

This must be why I can’t do well in any coding interviews. I’m just too damn smart.

Re: Intelligent people take longer to solve hard problems: study

#37

Post by eYrKEC2 » Thu, Jun 22, 2023, 6:40 PM UTC

Solvency wrote: post #31

ChainOfFools wrote: post #27

I strongly suspect this effect is correlated with a weakness in short-term or working memory. Independent of general intelligence is the necessity for those with a weak short-term or working memory to compensate by relying on long-term, in depth understanding in order to JIT the necessary short-term structures into being on the spot, (often repeatedly as these images decay rapidly) in order to solve a problem. Wherea…

I struggled in math in HS for this reason. Every time a concept was presented to me I felt like I needed to deeply understand it at the most universally root level and create a painstaking mental model of it, to a degree that I imposed on myself for some inexplicable reason. To answer "but WHY". Almost like a form of self-sabotage in hindsight because I think there are decreasing returns in "truly, deeply" grokking m…

I took your approach to math and it was vital to my scholastic success.

Once my engineering school load got too big for me to continue to use that approach in my math classes, I took an alternative strategy of just accepting theories without deeply understanding them and I had a much harder time applying those particular math concepts outside of those classes.

Re: Intelligent people take longer to solve hard problems: study

#38

Post by adverbly » Thu, Jun 22, 2023, 6:44 PM UTC

TL;DW:

I have a rule and you need to figure it out. The rule relates to a sequence of three numbers. You can propose a sequence and I’ll tell you yes/no if it meets the rule.

I’ll give you the first sequence to get you started:

  sequence: 2,4,8
  passes: Yes

Re: Intelligent people take longer to solve hard problems: study

#39

Post by paulpauper » Thu, Jun 22, 2023, 6:44 PM UTC

I think people are overreading into this, assuming the results even mean much anyway. people who score higher on timed tests which corelate well with IQ, such as the Wonderlic or the SATs, are smarter.

Re: Intelligent people take longer to solve hard problems: study

#40

Post by Verdex » Thu, Jun 22, 2023, 6:45 PM UTC

jawns wrote: post #15

A while back, I created an online experiment, based on a 2020 study, that identifies dogmatic thinking. https://shaungallagher.pressbin.com/blog/dogmatism.html Without giving too much away, this tracks with the 2023 study's results, in that people with higher intelligence scores are less likely to trust their System 1 gut reaction and more likely to involve their System 2 deliberate, logical processes.

Neat experiment. Although, I was able to guess a higher than average number of dots correctly, I wonder if I would feel differently had I been under the average.

The explanation given at the end is interestingly to me. However, consider the following alternate: People more likely to answer honestly that they view others opinions as wrong or immoral (ie they would appear to have dogmatic thinking) are also people who consider the easy dot guesses as cheating and desire to avoid cheating. Whereas people who are more likely to want to win the dot guessing by any means are also more likely to lie about their negative views about the opinions of others.