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I feel like I need more context on the purported relation between IQ and ability to understand hypotheticals. I'm confident a statement like "For some IQ X all people above IQ X can understand hypotheticals and no people below IQ X can understand hypotheticals" is false for any X. Like, why would it be true? Just based on the way we measure IQ what's the relationship between being able to do reverse digit span and understanding hypotheticals?
I'm happy to believe there's some IQ threshold X below which no people can understand hypotheticals, but I suspect there would also be a substantial population of people with an IQ above X that also cannot understand hypotheticals. Similarly there's probably some IQ threshold Y above which everyone can understand hypotheticals, but also a substantial population of people with IQ below Y that can understand hypotheticals.
Just based on the way we measure IQ the claim that there exists some IQ level that perfectly partitions individuals into can/not understand hypotheticals seems pretty implausible.
This is a greentext from 4chan but it's pretty funny and demonstrates the point if true - it's more about conditional hypotheticals than any hypotheticals: https://i.redd.it/i1ywg8dajac71.png
That "We did research on convicts in San Quentin. They're absolute fucking retards" - well yeah, they ended up in San Quentin. They are also fucking with you because why would a bunch of convicts go out of their way to help some nerdy white middle-class motherfucker with his science project who all too plainly is treating them like lab rats?
The part about empathy may or may not be true, but it's also "You never admit anything, you say you don't know, when the cops are questioning you". If they said "I imagine that guy I beat up felt awful, he was in pain, he was humiliated" then bozo, you have just admitted you beat the guy up, that is another X days on your sentence.
Whatever about the convicts being unable to model theory of mind, our grad student researcher also can't model why convicts in jail are not going to cop to anything an authority figure asks questions about.
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The idea seems to be that «a hypothetical», as a form of syllogism, has some minimum complexity/minimum description length that cannot be represented in a mind that has e.g. working memory corresponding to a given IQ – the minimally sufficient thought, even optimally chunked thanks to experience, just breaks down from noise and signal decay, in the same way complex mathematical expressions or rich verbal statements or puzzles break down for people of somewhat higher level.
That model strikes me as implausible because a basic hypothetical is very simple and people who struggle with understanding that ought to struggle even with speech.
On the other hand, using a hypothetical in practice usually involves thinking through some scenario diverging from known reality, which recruits imagination and a mental scratchpad with some non-negligible context length. So there are at least two levels of understanding – a hypothetical is an asymmetric function of sorts; you can check if it makes sense, but you're not necessarily able to use it as the first step in a reasoning chain that the other party's trying to prompt you into. In that case, it's prudent to concede your failure, drop the entire line of argument and just output the «okay smart guy, not listening» before you're tricked.
Of course intelligence is heterogenous (modestly so, given that g accounts for most variation, but still), and hypotheticals of different nature ought to be unequal in MDL. Additionally, Wason selection task shows that some ecologically valid concepts allow for efficient application of what seems to be the same basic algorithm – we don't have general-purpose theorem provers in our heads, more like a population of heuristics and cached partial solutions for specific cases. So people can be «good» at some hypotheticals but flounder when provided a novel one. Weeding out those specific cases is what good test design is about.
I wouldn’t be so surprised, at least with speech; they‘re different areas of the brain (and cognition, probably), and the way Broca‘s and Wernicke’s areas correspond to speech production seem much more fundamental and binary than whatever thing is to intelligence.
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