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Smart people don't think others are stupid

sivers.org

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Re: Smart people don't think others are stupid

#71

Post by codeonfire »

aoiao wrote: post #36

Nearly 15 percent of people worldwide believe the world will end during their lifetime and 10 percent think the Mayan calendar could signify it will happen in 2012, according to a new poll. http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/01/us-mayancalendar-p... ^at LEAST 15% of the world is stupid. That's just getting started. That's one poll, about one thing.

All evidence suggests that the universe/world will end upon my death in any sense that matters to me. Once my brain has stopped functioning it will be impossible to ever receive stimulus from pysical phenomenon again for all eternity. So, if you can agree with that then you could agree that the world will end sometime during most people's lifetimes assuming I don't outlive them. So from my point of. View they are right, but for the wrong reasons.

Re: Smart people don't think others are stupid

#72

Post by rickmb »

pradocchia wrote: post #68

Sivers has it right, and I'm disappointed by the reaction here. People are smart. This should be your baseline. From there, people may do or say stupid things. It may become pathological. But the person has not lost his capacity to be smart (barring some physiological damage). It may have atrophied, like an unused muscle, but the capacity is still there. But even this is getting ahead of yourself--how would you know…

I completely disagree with the conclusion.

If I go along with the premise that people are merely "acting" stupid, that is all the more reason to casually dismiss them. I can have patience with people that have limited capabilities, but people who choose to act stupid?

Being semantically correct isn't particularly relevant. It's how you deal with consistent stupidity (and I'm not talking about the occasional brainfart or error of judgement).

Whether or not casually dismissing stupidity is the right thing to do depends completely on the context, not on whether you use the correct semantics to do so. I people are being viciously stupid (as in "gay people shouldn't have equal rights"), I will dismiss them as stupid, and I don't give a flying fuck if they are acting or being stupid.

And on the flip side there are also situations in which it is useful to figure out why people do or say stupid things. It's context that determines if my judgement is poor, not semantics.

Re: Smart people don't think others are stupid

#73

Post by jacquesm »

Eliezer wrote: post #60

Sometimes people appear to me unskilled, sometimes they appear unknowledgeable, sometimes they're thinking in twisted ways that they picked up from their environment, sometimes they're falling prey to cognitive biases, sometimes they're making one of a hundred other mistakes I happen to recognize. And sometimes, so far as I can tell, they're stupid. Sorry. Original article's error: The fact that a conclusion sounds n…

As a rule people are a lot smarter than they may appear to be at first contact. And people that think they are very smart are typically smart along some fairly narrow field and then extrapolate their smartness in that one area to all areas.

Thinking is interesting that way, if you're 'smart' it usually means that you know a lot about some subject but that isn't actually being smart. Being smart means that you can use the knowledge you've got in creative ways when presented with unforeseen problems or situations.

And there are plenty of people that would not normally be called smart that excel at that.

Being smart or not has nothing to do with making mistakes or falling prey to cognitive biases. The first is typically evidence of people trying things a little bit outside their envelope of experience, in turn they'll acquire new knowledge because of this. Guilty as charged, I make mistakes all the time. Your environment has nothing to do with you being smart or not either. Otherwise, how would you ever be able to recognize someone from a society with different levels of development as smart.

The fact that someone does not appear smart in a way that you recognize does not mean they are not.

Re: Smart people don't think others are stupid

#74

Post by bad_user »

Eliezer wrote: post #60

Sometimes people appear to me unskilled, sometimes they appear unknowledgeable, sometimes they're thinking in twisted ways that they picked up from their environment, sometimes they're falling prey to cognitive biases, sometimes they're making one of a hundred other mistakes I happen to recognize. And sometimes, so far as I can tell, they're stupid. Sorry. Original article's error: The fact that a conclusion sounds n…

Even people that are in general stupid may surprise you.

The problem with labeling someone as being stupid is that you're applying a stereotype to his behavior and by definition, you have preconceived ideas about stereotypes.

However, stereotypes are human-invented concepts and the world is much more complicated for that, as in fact everybody has a unique combination of knowledge and perspective that's dependent on his environment in which he grew up, his passions, his ideals, his education, his friends, his luck, his misfortunes and so on.

In my country we have a billionaire that started making money by herding and selling sheep. He's also a completely illiterate buffoon, a redneck that still has the same mentality as a sheep herder. Every time he talks, stupid things come out of his mouth. However, he's a billionaire that started from zero, while I have the income of a regular employee, he's also a politician with a seat in the EU parliament and he's also pretty involved in charity work, while I'm not. Judging by his words or actions that end up in the media, he's completely stupid, but judging by his accomplishments only, it's really hard to do that.

So be wary of calling people stupid, because stupidity is relative.

Re: Smart people don't think others are stupid

#75

Post by hsshah »

jseliger wrote: post #43
lotharbot wrote: post #15

Smart people don't think others are stupid merely because of the beliefs they hold . That is, being a [Southerner, Northerner, Republican, Democrat, Indian, American, Christian, Muslim, Atheist, Tauist, Piist, vi user, emacs user, ...] does not mean a person is stupid. There are smart people who really have thought things through and ended up at each of those positions for good reasons. But smart people might conclud…

Even when they hold essentially the same views as I do, it's often for bad reasons I noticed this too, and for a long time it bothered me. But I recently read Jonathan Haidt's book The Righteous Mind , and in it he points out that a lot of people appear to hold believes about a wide array of issues (politics, religion, consumer products, and so forth) that they don't really hold based on logic and evidence, but to si…

To your first point, some scientist believe it is hard wired in our DNA to associate with any form of group (as this played a role in evolution). Here's a related interesting talk on TED that I recently saw: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/jonathan_haidt_on_the_moral...

Re: Smart people don't think others are stupid

#76

Post by asto »

I think others are stupid. Oh noes, I guess I'm the stupid one then.

Jokes apart, there's a consistent pattern in how I judge intellect. The people who I consider smart get logic. Some of them do it intuitively; Some of them are familiar with formal theory. The most common logical error made by those I consider stupid is a non-sequitur [1] Ex: "He doesn't use vim. He must be stupid". The biggest mistake you can make is judge people by knowledge, rather than intelligence. Ex: "A is really good at programming. He's definitely more intelligent than B who's a singer"

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non_sequitur_%28logic%29

Re: Smart people don't think others are stupid

#77

Post by Jach »

Indeed, for only a smart person can come up with a twisted and convoluted rationalization that a person with an IQ of 75 is not stupid and a person with an IQ of 125 is not smart. You'll find some of the most passionate arguments about the problems of IQ testing from people with IQs over 115. If you really think it doesn't matter, well, I'm sure there are some interesting ways to knock down your IQ quite a bit that you might want to try as a personal experiment. As a safer experiment, find someone with an IQ in the 90s or less (do you know anyone with sub-100 IQ?) and try to teach them Haskell.

Of course, we're all intelligent on a species-scale, but that's a separate distinction.

Re: Smart people don't think others are stupid

#78

Post by andyjohnson0 »

pradocchia wrote: post #68

Sivers has it right, and I'm disappointed by the reaction here. People are smart. This should be your baseline. From there, people may do or say stupid things. It may become pathological. But the person has not lost his capacity to be smart (barring some physiological damage). It may have atrophied, like an unused muscle, but the capacity is still there. But even this is getting ahead of yourself--how would you know…

"People are smart. This should be your baseline."

I don't necessarily disagree with you, but can you justify this? You seem to be treating it as axiomatic.

Re: Smart people don't think others are stupid

#79

Post by nyddle »

Love the title of this post. Smartness and stupidity are a matter of motivation and interest in the subject. Most times being stupid is doing what you are not meant to do / reasoning about what doesn't truly interest you.

There are many activities that meant to be done by "smart" people like math or high stakes poker or programming. But most people are just scared of these things because they don't know they are smart enough to succeed.

Re: Smart people don't think others are stupid

#80

Post by ajuc »

notJim wrote: post #39
Tloewald wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fundamental attribution error from social psychology - you tend to attribute errors by others to their intrinsic flaws (stupidity, poor judgment, clumsiness) but your own errors to circumstances (I was tired, they tricked me, it was slippery).

The world would be a much better place, IMO, if everyone ever knew about this cognitive bias and was reminded of it periodically.

I don't think much would change. You can very well use biases to rationalize whatever you want. It's the intention and attitude that matters the most, not how many biases you can recite.

I'm still for teaching common biases in secondary school. Won't hurt, and may sometimes help. But I don't think knowing biases changes people. At least that wasn't my experience.

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