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Intelligent people take longer to solve hard problems: study

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

#71

Post by carabiner »

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.

Have you read Superforecasting? One conclusion they had was that very partisan thinkers, basically dogmatic, were the worst at predicting future events, and it didn't matter what that dogma was. Liberal or conservative or anti big business or whatever. All of the really good forecasters were relentlessly fact based and spent a huge amount of time diving deeply into facts, and microfacts that supported facts. It sounded exhausting and one of the author's takeaways was "the world is enormously complex" and that most of us don't know anything about anything (hello gelman amnesia).

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

#72

Post by MSFT_Edging »

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've always felt like I have awful short term memory. I use tiling WMs so I can see information side-by-side. If I need to type something exactly, I forget the exact details almost immediately.

I need to derive things to understand them, ie music theory. I'm jealous of people who can memorize and take at face value but if I'm looking at a chord, I need to know the components that create that chord, which gets frustrating because music has a lot of rules that seem to be based on vibe and closeness. Two things can be identical but distinct based on their context.

It used to take me 2-3x as long to do homeworks or labs compared to other classmates. Same with work assignments. It often triggers an imposter syndrome type feeling.

Yet I have proof that I'm capable of solving complex problems, I understand certain things almost immediately compared to others, other things I need to study for a long time.

I tend to rarely know an answer on the spot, but I know how to determine many things, by knowing how to find the information needed.

I don't pretend to be a genius, but I have proof via a degree, others opinions of me, and material results that basically say I'm intelligent to a point.

Once I get into a flow I can retain a fairly complex system in my head but before or after that state, it's a terrible blur where I can barely focus my eyes.

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

#73

Post by antisthenes »

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.

No offense, but the experiment is nonsense.

What makes you think there's any relationship between visual recognition and dogmatism?

Even your own results only show a 2.5% difference between the most dogmatic and least dogmatic participants, assuming they even answered the dogmatic portion of the test truthfully and thoughtfully. I can't see how that amounts to anything more than a statistical error.

Just in case, my score was 940/3.0, although again, I don't see anything to show there should be any relation.

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

#74

Post by ajkjk »

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…

Agree with this; also, it feels like you are reading out the same theories I have somewhere in my brain and that's a weird sensation.

A related theory: being good at math, especially mental math, correlates with aphantasia (not being able to see pictures in your head). People who can see images in their head learn to do arithmetic early on with visual algorithms, which are fundamentally not good for understanding as well as rather error-prone (because the brain remembers gestalts, not finicky details like where a decimal is).

Aphantasiacs are forced to learn to do math differently, and use some different part of the brain as 'scratch space'. In my case it's the language brain: calculations which are set aside live in the same part of your brain that can repeat what was said a moment to you without understanding it. Turns out, though, that this verbal part is quite _accurate_ at remembering things, and this makes it easier to juggle multi-step calculations without paper.

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

#75

Post by fxtentacle »

Extremely misleading title, in my opinion.

Let me quote the actual research at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-38626-y :

"subjects with higher PMAT24_A_CR (fluid intelligence) made fewer mistakes, but were slower"

Yes, intelligent people took longer to solve hard problems. But they made fewer mistakes. Getting things right on the 1st try might be much faster than needing a 2nd attempt, even if the 1st try takes 20% longer.

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

#76

Post by galaxyLogic »

fxtentacle wrote: post #75

Extremely misleading title, in my opinion. Let me quote the actual research at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-38626-y : "subjects with higher PMAT24_A_CR (fluid intelligence) made fewer mistakes, but were slower" Yes, intelligent people took longer to solve hard problems. But they made fewer mistakes. Getting things right on the 1st try might be much faster than needing a 2nd attempt, even if the 1st try…

Right they take longer but they actually solve the problem correctly. And if you don't solve it correctly you are not really solving it at all.

The title could have been "Intelligent people take time to make sure their answer is more likely to be correct than not"

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

#77

Post by ChainOfFools »

ajkjk wrote: post #74
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…

Agree with this; also, it feels like you are reading out the same theories I have somewhere in my brain and that's a weird sensation. A related theory: being good at math, especially mental math, correlates with aphantasia (not being able to see pictures in your head). People who can see images in their head learn to do arithmetic early on with visual algorithms, which are fundamentally not good for understanding as…

We are definitely aware of the same phenomenon! Check out a reply I made elsewhere in this thread which addresses compensatory recruiting of ones verbal/ audio immediate recall as an extension of working memory store.

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

#79

Post by MSFT_Edging »

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.

I definitely got more dogmatic, but I also find it interesting because I scan visual stuff really fast, and typically notice things a while before people, ie while driving I'll spot a slick-top cop far ahead. So I have a lot of trust in my visual acuity. I got a score of 900 without trying the easy one.

The latter part of the test was 100% incriminating and I think I am quite dogmatic.

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