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Notes -
Because rationalists love all things IQ, I wanted to ask something here.
Is there reason to think, and is there support for, the idea that people with low intelligence simply lack or rarely develop some of the ways of cognizing, modeling the world, modeling other people, moral cognition, granularity, etc, that highly intelligent people have? Qualitative differences, not just less speed, less depth and breadth of knowledge?
Feel free to point me at research papers or relevant chapters of books if you don't want to write at length. Thanks!
There's no categorical difference between quantitative and qualitative differences. "Sometimes when I talk to other people they talk back to me" is a form of "modeling the world" that dogs and even the dumbest humans can do. Everything beyond that is just more "depth and breadth" of knowledge.
But very dumb people are observably worse at all of the things you describe than very smart people, so that "depth and breadth" is all there is, really.
I guess that's a way to say I don't understand the question, or know if it's well-formed.
But different traits scale disproportionally with respect to each other, so I think you can meaningfully translate quantitative differences into qualitative differences in practice via orders of magnitude difference in ability.
That is, if someone with an IQ of 120 can throw a football 2% more accurately than someone with an IQ of 80, then we'd say that football-throwing skill does not scale meaningfully with IQ even if there is technically a minor improvement. If someone with an IQ of 120 can solve simple arithmetic problems 40% faster or more accurately than someone with an IQ of 80, then this would reasonably be considered a quantitative difference. If someone with an IQ of 120 can solve problems related to hierarchically nested hypothetical scenarios 50 times (5000%) faster or more accurately than someone with an IQ of 80, (which is realistic if the latter can barely handle them at all), then this would reasonably be described as a qualitative difference despite technically being quantitative in the details.
Clearly there isn't a well-defined bright line distinguishing the scenarios. But there are cases which fall unambiguously on one side or the other, such that it's meaningful to discuss.
edit: mixed up the words "quantitative" and "qualitative" in some places
Yes, well said.
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