Ah, that's my problem with the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics.
Intelligent people take longer to solve hard problems: study
121–130 of 184 posts
Re: Intelligent people take longer to solve hard problems: study
#122Extremely 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…
Slow is smooth, smooth is fast. Forgot where that's from but I think it's a Navy or Marine saying.
It is a common aphorism in military training, related to the latency of effective fast-twitch reaction. The jerkiness of trying to point your weapon at a target as quickly as possible and then yanking on the trigger means you usually miss it.
The most important motion is bring your weapon to bear on target in a mechanically efficient way and pulling the trigger as it comes on target in a single motion. That single integrated motion can only be learned by doing it slowly but it is very accurate and smooth. If you practice the motion enough it becomes very fast. It is fine muscle memory. This is virtually always faster in terms of putting a bullet on target than relying on raw muscle speed. Also why military firearm skills are perishable, it has to be constantly practiced to keep the latency down.
Re: Intelligent people take longer to solve hard problems: study
#123Extremely 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…
I'm thinking about too many things like chess. But in chess played with slower time controls, a critical skill is t recognize important positions and take time on them. And for many people, another important skill is to take more time in general.
Like, a lot of lower Elo game at 10-minute time controls end with the losing person having 8 minutes left. That's not good.
Re: Intelligent people take longer to solve hard problems: study
#124Extremely 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…
Alternate title: "Less intelligent people give up on hard tests and begin guessing answers."
Re: Intelligent people take longer to solve hard problems: study
#125Problem: I need to typeset a book.
Normal person: typesets the book
Knuth: takes a decade to solve book typesetting once and for all
I wonder if the intelligent people tend to solve more general problem classes and then apply that to the specific problem at hand.
Re: Intelligent people take longer to solve hard problems: study
#126These 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.
> I would bet that quite a few people just guess when they find this type of question too difficult.
Psych research is such garbage. Of course people are going to start guessing if the problems are boring and they can't solve them. They tried to account for this by comparing timings of only correct answers. But on a multiple choice test, even random guessing will be correct (and fast!) sometimes.
Re: Intelligent people take longer to solve hard problems: study
#127People who don't attempt the answer just guess, which takes less time than solving. News at 11.
Although your response is a bit clever, I think you capture the actual dynamic, which the paper ( https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-38626-y ) tries to obscure by avoiding the comparisons (time taken for each correctly answered question vs incorrect) needed to make it obvious.
On a multiple choice test, does it really matter if they filter to only correct answers? Guessing will still result in fast answers, and be correct 25% of the time.
Re: Intelligent people take longer to solve hard problems: study
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
Source: Principal Software Engineer, 25+ YOE. You are far smarter than you think. Learn to get into flow, and also figure out how to get your state back faster... Once you do, it is a super power. Simple things like leaving your editor/IDE open, create the same situation you left. I personally use music + IEMs to help me block sound and focus. -30-35 DB off the IEMs, and +70DB off my music... yeah, I don't hear anyth…
The reason I love vim and i3/kitty so much as a combination is exactly this. I have 4 monitors in the exact state I left them when I get back, with the last TODO comments I added and what the problem was (that I thought about deeply overnight). For me the best way to get into the flow is by directly getting back to where I left. If I take time to wake up, make breakfast or anything else I usually lost my ideas alread…
If you have a truly great idea. Write it down.
Just writing it down, will help you remember. If not: You have the paper.
Re: Intelligent people take longer to solve hard problems: study
#129There are two measures of intelligence: Correctness and Speed.
Correctness is the primary measure, and if two parties are correct then speed differentiates their level of intelligence. This is the only measure that has been quantified and scientifically correlated with many other attributes of human existence like success and happiness. This measure is is called IQ.
If both people get an answer correct, then literally, by definition, the stupider person will be the person who takes longer to arrive at the correct answer. Remember: IQ tests are timed.
This study is sort of a play on the very definition of what it means to be stupid. Again, IQ tests are timed for a reason.
The real title of this is should be:
Stupid people take less time to arrive at a wrong answer then smart people take to arrive at the correct answer.
This is sort of a useless study, because yeah, I can answer the hardest questions in the entire universe with the wrong answer almost instantaneously. Of course wrong answers will be faster.
The fact that most of you aren't noticing this says something about your intelligence. Maybe you guys are just taking too long to notice this, so in that case according to this study you're all smarter than a dumb dumb like me.
Re: Intelligent people take longer to solve hard problems: study
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> being good at math, especially mental math, correlates with aphantasia as someone who used to do math competitions as a kid, everyone I knew who was "good" at mental math had a good number sense, a big bag of tricks for doing different things with numbers, and practiced with their bag of tricks.
I did math competitions also, but I'm not really talking about the specialized tricks like fast multiplication or square root algorithms. I'm just talking about basic stuff, like computing tips or taking percents. Most people simply cannot add or multiply numbers in their accurately, by any method.