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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   2132 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for August 23, 2023

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How often do you end up reading one of your ideas by a public intellectual? I commented along the lines of athletes seem above average intelligence a few days ago. https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/08/in-which-sector-are-the-top-performers-stupidest.html

I’d say every 4-6 months I see a person I read say the same idea. A few times I assumed they lifted my thought like if Scott said something I wrote in the Reddit.

For athletes I’d say he left out Kobe Bryant who I believe is above most of the ones he mentioned.

Happens occasionally, but often I see them much more fleshed out and better explained than the concept I have in my head when a writer like Scott posts it.

I've noticed this as well. To me it signals that I am imbibing so many of the same ideas as other people, reading the same blogs and watching the same videos and listening to the same podcasts, that the same things are occurring to me at the same time.

If you are demographically and culturally similar to the public intellectuals you read (raised in the same kind of town went to the same kinds of schools at around the same time etc.), if you plug in the same inputs you will get some of the same outputs.

I noticed it when I would read a lot of fashion blogs in undergrad, I would pick something up at the thrift store and two months later I would see it on some trash-tier zine's front page. To a certain extent, this is what we mean when we talk about developing "taste."

Jungian Collective Unconsciousness strikes again.

My conclusion as a person with “taste” is that I’m a solid second rate mind. Not smart enough to be the leader like a Cowen or Alexander but able to get things early. Someone once said a writers readers are one intellectual tier lower. Either that or there is something about work ethic of the high volume thought leaders. Feynman had a quote about having 7 or so ideas he was working on and whenever a new process or paper would come out he would apply that to the things he was working on to see if he got a result. So perhaps there is some combination of being smarter or having better work processes/discipline.

Are you a girl?

No, I distinctly am not. But who knows anymore.

A lot of it is work ethic, or just putting hours in every week to produce content. Nobody remembers the blog posts that kinda suck.

I think Cowen is just overrating the intelligence of his examples, which is a particular weirdness of basketball fans (probably trying to signal their own intelligence despite following a sport with a pretty dumb fanbase). LeBron is notorious for pretending to read. I'll give him Jordan, who clearly has impressive business sense, and trust him on Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, whom I only know from Airplane! In general, top athletes are surrounded by a large staff trying to make them appear as well as possible to the public, including media coaching and PR.

In the sport I follow, football (no, football football), intelligence seems to be all over the place, and somewhat but not entirely correlated with "football IQ." The easiest way to see this is by looking at the jobs they take after their playing career, with most top managers having played a high-football-IQ game rather than a physical one, often in midfield - Guardiola, Ancelotti, Wenger, Arteta, etc. all fit that mould, and Klopp describes his playing career by saying "I had fourth-division feet and a first-division head." Meanwhile, a lot of top players become pundits based off reputation, and quite frankly come across as pretty thick, if good at courting controversy in the mode of modern media. Or, to take an example of current players, Bukayo Saka and Emile Smith Rowe broke into the Arsenal team around the same time, and had very similar promise until ESR's injuries and Saka's break-out, but ESR is known among the team for being humorously dim while Saka scored relatively similar exam results to people I know from top private schools.

The bailey of your point is sound, I think, it's rare for top top athletes to be that stupid (much below 100IQ it would take a lot of crystallized intelligence just to understand top-level tactics). I'm sure most top footballers are above average intelligence, but not that much above average and generally quite uneducated. So there's definitely a floor for required intelligence, but at the highest level it's something which is important but can be traded off against other aspects of one's game, such that the smartest players aren't the best players and the best players aren't necessarily so smart that a guy like Tyler Cowen should be fawning over them and reading the books they "wrote".

(To address the elephants in the room: Ronaldo isn't that smart but makes up for it by sheer force of will. Messi is probably very smart but so cripplingly introverted he doesn't let it show off the pitch.)

Agree. Though I’ll note I posted it back here cuz felt more mental healthy to talk about how ideas pop thru the internet and the feel good feeling when someone widely viewed as smart says an idea you think you were somewhat novel on.

My original post was subtly a hbd type thing where black IQ average is supposedly low 80’s. But I don’t think the average athlete is that low. And many seem to be significantly higher. I think I’m just chilling in the bailey and Cowen is pushing it farther.

Yeah I just couldn't resist talking about football, too excited for the season starting.

The HBD point is kind of interesting, because both of the main 'black' sports have a much greater selection for body type which would presumably crowd out a lot of athletes who are smart but don't have the right body. But, while basketball does demand some serious tactical nous and on-the-spot thinking, american football is much more about getting really big guys and having them follow specific tactics to ram into each other, while giving themselves traumatic brain injuries - and when I think of famous black athletes doing really stupid stuff, it's pretty much all american football players and not NBA players.

Also I think both of us have confused motte and bailey here, I meant to say that the motte of your point is sound but I'm not sure about Cowen's bailey.

Some reason I confuse them a lot and went with your usage.

Basketball I feel like you are constantly running probabilities in your head. Is the three better than the pass for that guys cut for a lay up. Lineman frequently make a decision of two unblocked guys which one would be better to grab.

Although it depends somewhat on how “famous” is defined, NFL rosters are about 3-4x larger than those of the NBA, plus there are two more NFL teams than NBA. So there is a larger pool of NFL players available to provide colorful off-field/off-court behavior.

I generally label all my ideas so banal that any smart person could have come up with them, as it happens often. Nothing is original after 100 billion people lived and died.

There are quite a few national-level journalists in the general rat/motte sphere, it's entirely possible that one of them sees a comment and decides to copy the idea.

Ya Im sure all those types lift things from all over the place.

I this incident is more likely same thought process. This doesn’t feel like a place tc would read.

I remember I once I had a bschool prof who used a phrase that is credited to Scott Sumner frequently and I mentioned it and he said he thought he got it from TC but did not read Sumner. Tracing thoughts especially ones that seem fresh is something I find interesting.

Not sure what it is about basketball but there are a few who seem to be somewhat “philosophers”.

I once had a professor use a Kobe press conference in a psychology course and was like wow that is really smart. So that is where my initial comment came from.

This doesn’t feel like a place tc would read.

I guess, but I wouldn't be surprised if he did.

Here is close to places he would read. But I feel like we are witches to his group. It’s close to my athletes aren’t dumb point I made this week so who knows.

I don’t know any one else who said something like that recently.

On the meta of reoccurring ideas:

Happens to me occasionally. Often with people that run in the same intellectual circles. It is way more common the other way around, where I think of something that I thought was original and then find someone else already had the idea.

On the object level of stupid top-performers:

I think you'd need a weird combination of circumstances to create stupid top-performers. A few things that might cause it (in order of importance):

  1. The benefits to intelligence in the given endeavor are zero or negative. (even a small benefit to intelligence can compound at the top levels of performance).
  2. Depending on how you define the field, maybe the "top level" performers actually have another level that they can graduate to, and only the idiots are unable to do that graduation, and only people that truly love the minor leagues are unwilling to do the graduation.
  3. There is a huge base of people to pull from, such that the effects of low intelligence on other aspects of life won't screw over potential top performers before they become top performers.
  4. Top performers are created young and early, before bad real life decisions from low intelligence can screw them over.

Knowing all this. The best real world example I can think of is Michael Phelps. He isn't stupid by any means. But he also isn't some kind of recognized genius like other top athletes. Despite being a swimmer, I think the sport of swimming fulfills all 3 criteria (running probably fills it too, does anyone know how smart Usain Bolt is?).

For swimming and running being able to empty your mind and just do the thing for hours on end is important. As long as you are smart enough to learn good forms, and follow a diet plan no more intelligence is needed. But if you are too smart, cardio sports can be incredibly dull and boring. Which means there is a potentially negative return on intelligence.

For both swimming and running the people who are the best at it are also good athletes in general. And unless you are literally the world's best at those sports you can earn a lot more money as a professional athlete in other sports. So smart athletes can "graduate" from swimming and running into other better paying sports like soccer, baseball, basketball, cricket, or football.

Finally, they are both basic sports with very few barriers to entry. Swimming and running both require minimal equipment for training. The sport of swimming generally requires a lap pool, but those are plentiful in western nations. Elite athletes can also be created in both by the time an adult male is fully grown.

I think (2) is the area most people would cite. Examples like top nurses not being Doctors.

Someday I would like to be credited or just know I created an original thought.

I think for (2) people can quibble a lot about the definition of the field. Like is "nurse" the category or "medical field".

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