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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   4196 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 2, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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I'm posting this in Small-Scale because I don't want to get too weighty on this, but rather commiserate with other smart people about how difficult it is to appreciate how not smart the rest of the world is. Or at least convince you that it's freaking ugly out there.

A little bit of background first.

I consider myself retarded and slow and like I make lots of easy stupid mistakes. My brain feels really noisy and like I would regularly kill people if I worked in an ER or intensive care because I'd mis-dose them or get confused about what step in what procedure we're following. (Though some of these are probably ADHD issues, which a psychiatrist agreed enough with to write me an Rx for, as an Adderall-seeking adult)

I found myself becoming a misanthrope in public school because I considered it extremely, absurdly slow and boring and my school didn't appear to care. I'm sure I didn't make it easy for them because I found everything so trivial that I wouldn't do the work. I also thought most of my teachers were slackers who just wanted an easy job and didn't look up to them in any way (though there were some diamonds in the rough) and perhaps my contempt came across my facial expressions. I started cutting classes to hang out in the computer lab and write OpenGL programs. I can see how few if any teachers wanted to take a risk and advocate for me or would even imagine I was bored to tears intellectually. I also had no friends in HS, not even other supposedly smart kids. I'm not autistic by any means. Everyone just seemed... off. And also my carefully cultivated set of friends on IRC were so much better.

I was so disgusted with school and other people that I never went to college. The thought of taking any step in that direction was a hard no, I was desperate to get out into the work force and got a computer job when I was 18 and didn't think much about intelligence, for awhile.

I've slowly, eventually come to terms with the fact that I have a fairly big cognitive edge over most people. I don't mean this with a sense of pride. I mean this in a sense of horror.

One thing that's confused me a lot is that over the last decade or two, "verbal IQ" has gone up considerably. In the olden days it seemed like people on the internet were either smart or they were obvious morons because the obvious morons couldn't write, being new to keyboards and chatting. But nowadays even the most dimwitted Redditor writes English fluently and they'll even use words from the scientific and intellectual classes to argue, so I would spend a long time arguing with people who were just never going to understand me. Like man-years, I'm sure.

Anyway, it was still really hard to realize I have a cognitive edge? Charles Murray argues in Real Education that many smarter people don't realize just how smart they are, due to sorting. They seek out other smart people and compare themselves and see that they have minor relative strengths and weaknesses and conclude the differences between them, and thereby everyone actually, are cases of nurture and not nature. Meanwhile the people who can't do basic arithmetic in their heads or who could never handle a hypothetical conditional don't enter your universe, or you probably sense you're not very alike and don't get to know their intellectual life.

A few things have broken me out of this. In the Parable of the Talents, Scott writes:

I work with psychiatric patients who tend to have cognitive difficulties. Starting out in the Detroit ghetto doesn’t do them any favors, and then they get conditions like bipolar disorder and schizophrenia that actively lower IQ for poorly understood neurological reasons.

The standard psychiatric evaluation includes an assessment of cognitive ability; the one I use is a quick test with three questions. The questions are – “What is 100 minus 7?”, “What do an apple and an orange have in common?”, and “Remember these three words for one minute, then repeat them back to me: house, blue, and tulip”.

There are a lot of people – and I don’t mean floridly psychotic people who don’t know their own name, I mean ordinary reasonable people just like you and me – who can’t answer these questions. And we know why they can’t answer these questions, and it is pretty darned biological.

Disturbing.

Did you see the conditional hypotheticals thing? Scott again, quoting the anonymous IQ researcher posting to 4chan this time (so grain of salt)

I did IQ research as a grad student, and it involved a lot of this stuff. Did you know that most people (95% with less than 90 IQ) can't understand conditional hypotheticals? For example, "How would you have felt yesterday evening if you hadn't eaten breakfast or lunch?" "What do you mean? I did eat breakfast and lunch." "Yes, but if you had not, how would you have felt?" "Why are you saying that I didn't eat breakfast? I just told you that did." "Imagine that you hadn't eaten it, though. How would you have felt?" "I don't understand the question." It's really fascinating [...]

Other interesting phenomenon around IQ involves recursion. For example: "Write a story with two named characters, each of whom have at least one line of dialogue." Most literate people can manage this, especially once you give them an example. "Write a story with two named characters, each of whom have at least one line of dialogue. In this story, one of the characters must be describing a story with at least two named characters, each of whom have at least one line of dialogue." If you have less than 90 IQ, this second exercise is basically completely impossible. Add a third level ('frame') to the story, and even IQ 100's start to get mixed up with the names and who's talking. Turns out Scheherazade was an IQ test!

Time is practically impossible to understand for sub 80s. They exist only in the present, can barely reflect on the past and can't plan for the future at all. Sub 90s struggle with anachronism too. For example, I remember the 80-85s stumbling on logic problems that involved common sense anachronism stuff. For instance: "Why do you think that military strategists in WWII didn't use laptop computers to help develop their strategies?" "I guess they didn't want to get hacked by Nazis". Admittedly you could argue that this is a history knowledge question, not quite a logic sequencing question, but you get the idea. Sequencing is super hard for them to track, but most 100+ have no problem with it, although I imagine that a movie like Memento strains them a little. Recursion was definitely the killer though. Recursive thinking and recursive knowledge seems genuinely hard for people of even average intelligence.

I tried the "didn't eat breakfast" thing on a few people I know. All of the adults got it (whew). It's very interesting to try it on kids. Kids five and under can't do it flat out, but at about 6+ they can. Imagining that some people are forever 5 years old in that part of their brain is freaking wild.

Swiveling back to Murray in Real Education, he tries to convince you of how not smart the average person is by showing a series of fairly trivial 8th grade exam questions and detailing how wrong most kids get them.

The Anasazi made beautiful pottery, turquoise jewelry, fine sashes of woven hair, and baskets woven tightly enough to hold water. They lived by hunting and by growing corn and squash. Their way of life went on peacefully for several hundred years. Then around 1200 AD something strange happened, for which the reasons are not quite clear.

Here is the item:

Example 7. The Anasazi's life before 1200 AD was portrayed by the author as being

(A) dangerous and warlike (B) busy and exciting (C) difficult and dreary (D) productive and peaceful

The answer is D, productive and peaceful

55% of Illinois 8th graders get this wrong.

I've posted a few of these to Twitter. Some are mathy, and some are word problems. This one about the Asanazi drives some people berserk; people apparently can't separate the author's portrayal from their own portrayal, or do the basic constraint logic needed to rule the rest out.

I saw someone joke in a different part of Twitter that stuff like LSAT questions are designed to maximize toxic Twitter engagement and I have to concur.

Last one. Scott again, writes recently.

According to tests, fewer than 10% of Americans retain PIIAC-defined “basic numeracy skills”, even though in theory you need to know algebra to graduate from most public schools.

I don't really know what this PIIAC thing is, so I asked ChatGPT4o to generate an example question that demonstrate proficiency.

You are planning a trip and need to budget for fuel costs. Your car’s fuel efficiency is 30 miles per gallon, and the distance to your destination is 450 miles. If the price of gasoline is $3 per gallon, how much will you spend on gasoline for the trip?

IMO you should be able to do this in your head in a few seconds. It feels embarrassing to even talk about something this easy and connect any hint of pride to it, like this is an example of any cognitive edge at all. Yet huge portions of the population will struggle with it. I asked an 11th grader taking AP classes this question and they said they would need pen and paper to figure it out(!) He at least knew how to organize it in terms of x.

I could see a grand majority of the population never writing it in terms of x = ... and solving that way.

I'm trying to fill a position at work right now. A sys admin role. I want to ask that gas mileage question during technical interviews but I'm afraid the people who will get it right will be so insulted that they can't believe I'm asking this, while the people who get it wrong will feel very unfairly brutally discriminated against because I could pop such an irrelevant-to-their-job question on them.

So. How do we expect to become a Star Trek, space faring civilization again? There's so much work to do that we need smart people for and so few smart people.

We know how to avoid being overwhelmed by 65 IQ adults. In childhood you can ensure they don't suffer the worst poverty and go hungry and give them a K-6 education. Then they'll have 80-90 IQ. That's still grim, but a huge accomplishment.

Ignoring the Flynn effect, do we have any idea at all about how to shift, say, the middle of the curve from 100 IQ to 130 IQ? Is there any therapy or drug or surgery anywhere on the horizon that could achieve this?

I'm trying to fill a position at work right now. A sys admin role. I want to ask that gas mileage question during technical interviews but I'm afraid the people who will get it right will be so insulted that they can't believe I'm asking this, while the people who get it wrong will feel very unfairly brutally discriminated against because I could pop such an irrelevant-to-their-job question on them.

We use a question like this in our interviewing process. There's much more to it (this is just one component; they then have to design a software system around it), but it requires some basic multiplication.

For the first 2 years, we'd pop it on them live. The results were extremely poor. 90% of people had to pull out a calculator, and many of them would add or remove a 0 if they didn't. I hate to say it, but we had to provide the whole question beforehand to even get through the thing in an hour. I was originally horrified.

Then again, I don't think that solving this sort of complex problem with a timer over your head is empathetic or reasonable. In reality, when I come across a system constraint I have to engineer around, I at least have hours (if not days). My gut feeling was that many people failed because of the pressure and nerve aspect as opposed to the ability to solve the problem in a reasonable timeframe.

In any case, that's a long rant to say: "Feel Empowered to include basic shit like this and use it as a qualifier, but I suggest making it part of a larger question provided to the candidate the day before the interview."

Then again, I don't think that solving this sort of complex problem with a timer over your head is empathetic or reasonable. In reality, when I come across a system constraint I have to engineer around, I at least have hours (if not days). My gut feeling was that many people failed because of the pressure and nerve aspect as opposed to the ability to solve the problem in a reasonable timeframe.

I've been doing hiring off and on for about 20 years so I feel confident offering two quick thoughts.

  1. Have you done mock interviews with the rest of the team to try these questions out? How do your own people do?

  2. Is failing to complete the problem in time that big a deal? In general I find the journey of problem solving more important than reaching the end in the allotted time. You usually know after an hour if someone is too much of a dick to work with, or if they could finish if you gave them another 15 minutes. OTOH, if you and the candidate spend an entire hour struggling with what you thought would take ten minutes, that's probably bad.

  1. The scenario is interesting because it's a real problem we had to solve at the company early on. We haven't had to change it at all for around 5 years because it's such a high-quality signal (and interviewees rate it highly). We did have to modify the approach though - we finished iterating on it after around 1.5 years and probably 30 interviews.
  2. Once the question has been provided a day beforehand, being unable to come up with an adequate solution during the interview is a deal breaker. The good news is twofold: The answer has a correctness gradient, and the whole question is designed to be iterated on as a discusssion. Did you put together a maximally elegant and simple solution? Ok, now make it enterprise-grade. Did you bring your resume-driven development tendencies to the table? Now simplify.

Our entire interview suite uses those approaches, including our small take-home project, so we can easily cross-reference someone's performance with their salary requirements and stated YOE. The tech interview team explicitly defines the tiers of answer performance, and we all collaborate on them.

There have been some calls to introduce a new question to more closely represent the state of the art in modern development. After ~7 total years anything gets long in the tooth, and I'd be lying if I said I'm not a bit concerned about the performance of LLMs in the space. With excellent prompting, they can succeed in our interview if not blow us away. There's no substitute for seeing if someone can verbally describe how they'd solve or problem or change a solution.

Hmm, if it were me, I would be worried that this scenario question would get leaked online. But perhaps your company isn't famous enough that people collect interview questions on forums.

Lol ding ding ding! ~100 people so we are under the radar. Glassdoor doesn't have it on there yet.

But we've interviewed probably 2,000? I think it's still worth developing something, and even if someone knows the answer you can still qualify folks.

I’d personally love to give someone a blank Excel and that mileage problem, if I was interviewing them for a job with Excel use as part of the job description/job ad.

Seriously? My Excel job interview question looks more like this:

  • on worksheet A you have schema and table names and their sizes in the main DB
  • on worksheet B you have schema and table names and their sizes in the backup DB
  • show me all main DB tables that are either missing or have the wrong size
  • bonus question: show me which schemas are completely fine

Seriously. I’m not thinking of a job where Excel will be a primary tool for database work, but admin jobs and other jobs where Excel is an ancillary tool.

  1. Full outer join on table name
  2. Then just null and equality checks until you are there.

Admittedly I can't do this in Excel (because I don't use it), but it's a trival squeal (SQL) or any other tabular tool question

Left join, but ok. The trick is doing this in Excel.

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