Live data from Hacker News

Intelligent people take longer to solve hard problems: study

bigthink.com

11–20 of 184 posts

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

#12
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…

>There clearly is a relationship between higher intelligence and a faster brain, to some degree. However faster thinking enables more sophisticated searching of complex problem spaces.

I don't think that's clear at all. The confusion is around different definitions of speed and different definitions of the task.

You have the speed to process data points or variables, and the speed to come to a result. You also have the number of variables used to calculate a result and the number of variables needed to come to a result.

It is reasonable to believe that some brains can process the same data faster than others. It is also reasonable to believe that some brains consider more variables than others.

However, more variables is not always better. You can process faster, and include more variables, but still perform worse overall if you are using too many unecessary variables.

In terms of computing, an example would be multiplying 2x2. A slower computer can give you a result faster if it is representing 2 as a 2-bit number than a faster computer representing it as a 64-bit number

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

#13
Intelligence is related to increased perception throughput abilities, i.e. neural volume and density, so more intelligent people are processing more information which takes slightly longer (probably logarithmic). It all ties back to the same sort of results in neural networks. Not sure why I got downvoted...seems studies support my conclusion.

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

#14
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

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

#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.

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

#18

The "less likely to jump to conclusions" is the important part. This doesn't necessarily mean they are slower at processing information.

Yup.

I also wonder if they could see another part of the brain to see if intelligent people are more concerned of judgement from other intelligent people, or perhaps even from everyone in general for some intelligent people that intelligence is their identity.

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

#19
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 will come back to try this later, but I skimmed it and just wanted to say that the third button gave me a good laugh.

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

#20
post #10

People 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.
Post reply on HN