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

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

#61

Post by SamPatt » Thu, Jun 22, 2023, 7:24 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.

That was fun, I scored lower (2.1) dogmatism and higher on the test (840), which they claim supports their hypothesis.

In day to day life the major difference I notice in terms of speed and intelligence personally is that I'm often slow to respond to questions.

It didn't even occur to me to be self-conscious about this until eventually a friend pointed it out, but he kindly framed it as "you think before you speak" and this seems to have served me well.

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

#62

Post by hax0ron3 » Thu, Jun 22, 2023, 7:26 PM UTC

The title of the article should be "People with higher intelligence scores take longer to solve complex problems".

Let's say that I define being very intelligent as being able to rapidly solve hard problems. I think this is a reasonable definition of the word "intelligent". Indeed, I think that it is in many ways a more meaningful definition of "intelligence" than defining it as scoring well on intelligence tests.

Well, then the article title becomes self-contradictory.

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

#63

Post by ChainOfFools » Thu, Jun 22, 2023, 7:28 PM UTC

anyfoo wrote: post #59

Solvency wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 elaborated as a reply to a sibling comment, but repeat after me: You need to memorize things in math , especially if you want full understanding. It is a necessary tool. I realized this when I saw one of the higher math geniuses in university, one who really understood most things better than most of us, learn equations and lemmas from flashcards one day. That memorization may become superfluous after you worked wi…

I agree with this, and the rationalization that I eventually worked out and learned to live with is that as you get into more advanced areas of math, much of what you are learning are building blocks for assembling more complex tools - but those are tools you have no use for yet, and therefore can't hook constituent elements into any existing framework of understanding.

There is no way to pass through these obstacles (without spending the multiple lifetimes it took to forge them from first principles) except to memorize them and gradually extend understanding backwards from that memorization into the broader context of dependencies that converge into its formalization.

But having this predicament explained to me up front, ideally somewhere around the age one learns about something as basic as fractions, would have been enormously helpful.

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

#64

Post by ldehaan » Thu, Jun 22, 2023, 7:31 PM UTC

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

#65

Post by ldehaan » Thu, Jun 22, 2023, 7:33 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…

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

#66

Post by anyfoo » Thu, Jun 22, 2023, 7:36 PM UTC

ChainOfFools wrote: post #63

anyfoo wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I elaborated as a reply to a sibling comment, but repeat after me: You need to memorize things in math , especially if you want full understanding. It is a necessary tool. I realized this when I saw one of the higher math geniuses in university, one who really understood most things better than most of us, learn equations and lemmas from flashcards one day. That memorization may become superfluous after you worked wi…

I agree with this, and the rationalization that I eventually worked out and learned to live with is that as you get into more advanced areas of math, much of what you are learning are building blocks for assembling more complex tools - but those are tools you have no use for yet, and therefore can't hook constituent elements into any existing framework of understanding. There is no way to pass through these obstacles…

> except to memorize them and gradually extend understanding backwards

That is not the only reason, but also a big part of it, yes. Some of the things (but not all) that I memorize I admittedly don't fully understand. I try to avoid that, but it happens. Usually though, the sudden realization comes at a later point, when I understood more of something else.

Literally happened last week to me. I had been memorizing a "stupid" theorem for a while[1], not realizing why it's useful, until something I read was about discontinuities in the n-th derivation of a function, and what that means for the terms of the function's Taylor series, and it all lit up in me, tying it all together.

It's a good feeling!

[1] https://www.dsprelated.com/freebooks/sasp/Spectral_Roll_Off....

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

#67

Post by beepbopboopp » Thu, Jun 22, 2023, 7:37 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…

This is a really interesting idea. I throw some money toward seeing this hypothesis tested or further explored.

Ben Stiller do it meme

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

#68

Post by Solvency » Thu, Jun 22, 2023, 7:41 PM UTC

ChainOfFools wrote: post #47

Solvency wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Just a hunch, but do you find that you perform substantially better if you are an environment where you can talk to yourself out loud as you work through a math or physics problem? If so, this is very much indicative of the phenomenon I'm describing, because what's happening is you're recruiting your audio memory as a compensatory short-term workspace, being able to loop some 2 or 3 additional elements of information…

Actually for me I perform best when I can hear my inner monologue. If I'm in a social setting learning math it's not ideal at all, because I can't "listen" to myself think: I think through things entirely in my head when I can reason through and almost dictate to myself. But not verbally! It's almost like the moment I try to verbalize anything it gets muddied by whatever weird social/colloquial construct I've made to communicate with others.

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

#69

Post by MisterPea » Thu, Jun 22, 2023, 7:48 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

While I agree I think Von Nuemann is the worst example to use in any topic about intelligence. He's not really like the rest of us

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

#70

Post by ChainOfFools » Thu, Jun 22, 2023, 7:51 PM UTC

paulpauper wrote: post #39

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.

There's a confounding factor here, which is that people who score poorly could do so either because they could not solve the problem at all, or because they took too long to solve it (due to having to create mental tooling on the spot that others could buy off the shelf through memorization) and had reached only a partial result.

In timed standardized exams where work is not shown or graded, both results are equally assigned zero points. As AI, even the ersatz AI available currently, becomes more sophisticated and widespread the value of a human who can mimic the capabilities of a machine will diminish rapidly.

Creative and explorative thinkers will, provided they are not merely skilled at the derivative "craft" of performative creativity but are truly creating value without precedent, will accordingly become increasingly sought after.