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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 18, 2023

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I think there are two levels to an answer here. The first is to take your framing and dive into the difference between intelligence and perceived intelligence. I think there are two important things here: motivation and legibility.

Plenty of genius-level people just don't spend their time in smart-seeming disciplines. One of the smartest people I knew graduated from college at the age of 18, was an international chess master, and wend to work at a FAANG. Then he left to become a baker. This outlier aside, I suspect that when a man realizes he's good a math/writing/etc, he is disproportionately likely to reorient his life to spend oodles of time on the subject. This brings me to...

Legibility. The guy in class answering all the questions may or may not be the smartest - but he definitely appears the smartest. The guy who aces the test may or may not be the best in industry or in research, but a test score is much more legible than the latter two. Intelligence related to emotions, socialization, and even words are all much less legible than intelligence related to math and coding and engineering. But it is crucial (in life, really) to avoid conflating "harder to measure" with "less important". Also, having the confidence/narcissism to state and defend your beliefs is probably only loosely related to intelligence, but probably strongly related to perceived intelligence.

As an aside intelligence is academically defined as the principle component vector of academic test scores. Do you know what one of the strongest predictors is? Vocabulary size (r=0.83), followed by similarities (r=0.80). Both are much stronger predictors than arithmetic (r=0.68). Yet, a math-smart person is typically considered by people to be obviously smart, while intelligence in other disciplines is less obvious.

The second level is psychological. Why do you care about your partner's intelligence?

Examples:

  • You worry about her ability to make money.
  • You worry about other people's opinions of your intelligence.
  • You worry that your difficulty seeing her as smart indicates a character flaw on your part.

If this were me thinking through this about myself, I would also ask myself why, on some level, I want to believe she is less intelligent. On an internet forum, such a presumptuous question is probably out of place. I will note though, that as someone widely considered a "math wiz" growing up

  1. It is psychologically comforting to believe that being math-smart is super special awesome
  2. If you spend thousands of hours doing math... you're going to end up believing that math is Important. The same is true of anything you spend time doing.

As an aside intelligence is academically defined as the principle component vector of academic test scores. Do you know what one of the strongest predictors is? Vocabulary size (r=0.83), followed by similarities (r=0.80). Both are much stronger predictors than arithmetic (r=0.68).

I think the issue here is ceiling effects. math has a much higher potential ceiling. IQ tests are restricted in the type of questions that can be asked, so you end up with simple math questions and hard vocab ones.