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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   4186 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?

How is your sysadmin recruiting going?

Having been in this space for nearly 30 years, the quality of the candidates seems lower now than in the 90's.

I recall working with people enthusiastic and curious about the technology we were administering. They'd have hobbies or intrests in adjacent but relevant areas.

Many now need more supervision than they receive. I also suspect the poor performers drag down the pay scales.

I work in tech accidentally. I'm a "little sister." My older brother was very into computers, and I fell into it because working overnights as tech support while I was in law school gave me a lot more time to study than working overnights at a gas station. I knew enough by virtue of being around my brother to be competent (and back then, knowing the difference between SLIP and PPP was enough to get hired). And there was a certain level of trouble shooting and just needing to understand computers that you had to know to use them. So I could swap out cards in my computer as I managed upgrades, I'm not afraid of an IRQ jumper. I've run cables. But I am not a computer person. These are just things I learned by virtue of being around people who lived and breathed this stuff, or because I had to know it in order to use the tools for my specific purposes. And ultimately, because I ended up liking working in tech more than working in law. I'm good at what I do. People who learn I didn't intend to go into tech or that I don't consider myself particularly a computer person are often surprised.

My daughter (college aged) is basically a power user, even growing up with two parents in tech. She hasn't had to do the trouble shooting or the general tech support we had to do, because computers are functional tools now. When something doesn't work, after she turns it off and back on, she's kind of stymied, because things usually "just work" for her. It's the same way a lot of folks are with cars. I grew up with beaters, so there's a level of mechanical trouble shooting I knew that people who grew up with cars that just worked didn't know. Now, because she grew up with parents in tech, she can do basic trouble shooting, she can build simple electronic devices, she knows percussive maintenance can just work. But she has peers (in STEM even) who couldn't figure out how to plug an ethernet cable in (they've never plugged in a phone jack, either...).

I don't think that folks are necessarily less capable, they just don't have the same skill set. It's not required in the way it used to be. In the 80's, if I couldn't build my own PC, I didn't have a PC. Nowadays, building your PC is a niche thing only people who are deeply into (some aspects of) computers do. My daughter and her peers are going to come across as less able, in a lot of ways, than those of us who were in tech in the 90s (or earlier). They aren't. They've just grown up with tools that work. They aren't shadetree mechanics because that hasn't been something in their environment. They know other things. And they obviously have the potential (it's not like we're smarter than them). Nowadays, they have no reason to be able to chant orange white, orange, green white, blue, blue white, green, brown white, brown. So when I'm interviewing (for a junior position), I look for the curiosity, the trouble shooting ability, the engagement. This is particularly challenging because interviewing has become very scripted, at least where I work currently. It's also challenging because there's something about computers that makes a lot of people in it want to be the smartest guy in the room, and they can get really demeaning, really quickly, about someone who doesn't act like they know it all right out of the gate. As if proving themselves superior is more important than finding someone who can do the job. It's not rocket science, even when it is.

I think we often hire the wrong people, both because the candidates show up with less of the knowledge we're looking for, so it's hard to pick out the best ones, and also because the hiring process has become so weird that the ways in which we might have dug for the passion, the enthusiasm, even the basic underlying abilities (do they give up when they don't know something, or do they poke at it again?) aren't allowed. But we focus on, how did this candidate not know the TCP 3 way handshake cold? (Sure, maybe he should have, but it ends up being more important because we aren't allowed to get into how he figured out how to manage pedal feedback, because we'll never learn that he plays guitar in a band for a hobby, and maybe him explaining THAT problem is what demonstrates the trouble shooting and tracing skills that we're looking for, even if he spaced on the 3 way handshake in a moment of stress.)

They've just grown up with tools that work. They aren't shadetree mechanics because that hasn't been something in their environment. They know other things.

In your opinion what are these other things?

For my kid and her peers, their people skills are lightning years above the people skills of the computer people I know (and mine). There seems to be a higher baseline for presentations than there used to be. They have broad computer skills - they may "just" be power users, but they also don't just know excel, they know all the tools. They have better virtual meeting etiquette. I think they have broader skills in general. My kid and her STEM peers have high level accomplishments in athletics, arts, humanities, in a way that I didn't see among my computer peers in the 80s and 90s. Unless you count D&D, quoting Monty Python, and taking the Church of the SubGenius a little too seriously broad high level accomplishments.

I'm not meaning to talk down myself or my peers. But I would like those of us who are shocked at what the kids don't know to consider why they don't know it. If I can't show someone how to plug in an ethernet cable that's on me. It's unreasonable to expect everyone to know everything. I've been employed in tech since 1995, and got "my" (it was a family computer) first computer in 1979 (Atari gang represent!). There are loads of things I don't know. Even things I obviously should know that I just don't.

Definitely video editing.

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