Sorry about the long posts, but I’m thinking and trying to model how things look from your perspective. EDIT TO ADD: Epistemic status: Speculation.
Hypothesis: You’re like, 30-40 points higher IQ than me, which would put you around 60 points above average (ballpark figures in each case).
If true, that would explain some things. There’s a certain intelligence level that I round down to “basically not intelligent”, and a certain intelligence level that I round up to “too smart for me to really understand things they find intellectually engaging unless they try really hard to dumb things down, or I spend hours where they spent minutes, so I can’t really have a conversation with them about it”—and in either case, it’s hard for me to see distinctions among people too far from my own intelligence-level in either direction. And the same is true for everyone, from what I’ve read. The barrier to mutual understanding seems to kick in around 30-40 IQ points. I understand that for people at a certain low IQ level, “this person went to community college” = “this person is really smart”, with the same reaction to “this person has a doctorate in physics” or “this person is the President”. And I can talk to and connect with people who are around average, as well as people who are pretty smart, while I find it hard to really put myself in the shoes of someone who’s significantly below average in intelligence, and there are people I tag with “too smart for me to really understand”, although relatively few, and I can still understand the parts of them that, ahem, aren’t particularly intelligent :D.
I picture what the world would look like if I was smarter, and thus concepts that took some prodding or prompting for me to get them (but I did get them) just seem obvious from age 5, the way utilitarianism did for me before I knew other people had thought of it and it had a name. Apparently this is something most people are only introduced to in university? Anyway, picturing what the world would look like if I moved up the intelligence scale, the thoughts that output sound like your posts. Most people are basically cats, if you expect to be treated like an adult you have to be trying to have a counterfactual impact. And my model of you as someone well outside the normal intelligence range predicts that my earlier post saying “counterfactual thinking isn’t something most people get without being taught” would get a response like “yes, exactly, most people are basically cats, and I’ve just downgraded my estimate of your intelligence”. The first part of which is a similar error to “a community college graduate and a top-level physicist are basically the same”.
The more carefully-worded version of “counterfactual thinking isn’t something most people get without being taught”, would be something like “counterfactual thinking isn’t something most people do without being taught, except in rare and fairly stereotypical circumstances, like ‘I was just almost in a car accident’ or ‘what would my life be like today if I had stayed with my first love?’”. I mean, yes, they do basic counterfactuals like “if I eat the cake I will get fat, if I don’t eat the cake I won’t get fat” (which, I note, cats do not), but thinking about the higher-order effects like “if I buy the cake that has this effect on the overall economy, and the world as a whole looks different 6 months from now in these subtle ways” is a thought-pattern most people have to be taught—but can be taught.
If your situation is that you can’t differentiate between average-intelligence people, below-average-intelligence people, and cats, because they all just don’t get things that seem obvious to you, and once they don’t get one obvious thing you worry about what other obvious things they will or won’t get and they just become unpredictable beings you don’t understand very well… then probably my encouragement to treat more people less like cats isn’t going to work for you.
Anyway, picturing what the world would look like if I moved up the intelligence scale, the thoughts that output sound like your posts. Most people are basically cats, if you expect to be treated like an adult you have to be trying to have a counterfactual impact.
This tangentially reminded me of this quote about John von Neumann by Edward Teller, himself a bright chap (father of the hydrogen bomb and all that):
von Neumann would carry on a conversation with my 3-year-old son, and the two of them would talk as equals, and I sometimes wondered if he used the same principle when he talked to the rest of us.
That said in John Wentworth’s case moral agency/ambition/tsuyoku naritai seems more key than intelligence, cf. what he said earlier:
What made it hurt wasn’t that they were stupid; this was a college where the median student got a perfect score on their math SATs, they were plenty smart. They just… hadn’t put in the effort. … The disappointment came from seeing what they could have been, and seeing that they didn’t even try for it. …
I think a core factor here is something like ambition or growth mindset. When I have shortcomings, I view them as shortcomings to be fixed or at least mitigated, not as part of my identity or as a subject for sympathy. On the positive side, I have goals and am constantly growing to better achieve them. Tsuyoku naritai. I see people who lack that attitude, who don’t even really want to grow stronger, and when empathy causes the suspension of disbelief to drop… that’s when I feel disgust or disappointment in my so-called fellow humans. Because if I were in their shoes, I would feel disgust or disappointment in myself.
You could be right, and thanks for the feedback. It’s a low-probability speculation, and that quote is evidence against.
There’s a difference between disappointment and disgust, and “can only have fun with people when he treats them as non-agents” is very different from how I think about people, and it is in my nature to try and figure out people who think very differently from me. So far I haven’t got a mental model that fits John’s outputs well in their entirety. My mind is still working on it in the background.
Sorry about the long posts, but I’m thinking and trying to model how things look from your perspective. EDIT TO ADD: Epistemic status: Speculation.
Hypothesis: You’re like, 30-40 points higher IQ than me, which would put you around 60 points above average (ballpark figures in each case).
If true, that would explain some things. There’s a certain intelligence level that I round down to “basically not intelligent”, and a certain intelligence level that I round up to “too smart for me to really understand things they find intellectually engaging unless they try really hard to dumb things down, or I spend hours where they spent minutes, so I can’t really have a conversation with them about it”—and in either case, it’s hard for me to see distinctions among people too far from my own intelligence-level in either direction. And the same is true for everyone, from what I’ve read. The barrier to mutual understanding seems to kick in around 30-40 IQ points. I understand that for people at a certain low IQ level, “this person went to community college” = “this person is really smart”, with the same reaction to “this person has a doctorate in physics” or “this person is the President”. And I can talk to and connect with people who are around average, as well as people who are pretty smart, while I find it hard to really put myself in the shoes of someone who’s significantly below average in intelligence, and there are people I tag with “too smart for me to really understand”, although relatively few, and I can still understand the parts of them that, ahem, aren’t particularly intelligent :D.
I picture what the world would look like if I was smarter, and thus concepts that took some prodding or prompting for me to get them (but I did get them) just seem obvious from age 5, the way utilitarianism did for me before I knew other people had thought of it and it had a name. Apparently this is something most people are only introduced to in university? Anyway, picturing what the world would look like if I moved up the intelligence scale, the thoughts that output sound like your posts. Most people are basically cats, if you expect to be treated like an adult you have to be trying to have a counterfactual impact. And my model of you as someone well outside the normal intelligence range predicts that my earlier post saying “counterfactual thinking isn’t something most people get without being taught” would get a response like “yes, exactly, most people are basically cats, and I’ve just downgraded my estimate of your intelligence”. The first part of which is a similar error to “a community college graduate and a top-level physicist are basically the same”.
The more carefully-worded version of “counterfactual thinking isn’t something most people get without being taught”, would be something like “counterfactual thinking isn’t something most people do without being taught, except in rare and fairly stereotypical circumstances, like ‘I was just almost in a car accident’ or ‘what would my life be like today if I had stayed with my first love?’”. I mean, yes, they do basic counterfactuals like “if I eat the cake I will get fat, if I don’t eat the cake I won’t get fat” (which, I note, cats do not), but thinking about the higher-order effects like “if I buy the cake that has this effect on the overall economy, and the world as a whole looks different 6 months from now in these subtle ways” is a thought-pattern most people have to be taught—but can be taught.
If your situation is that you can’t differentiate between average-intelligence people, below-average-intelligence people, and cats, because they all just don’t get things that seem obvious to you, and once they don’t get one obvious thing you worry about what other obvious things they will or won’t get and they just become unpredictable beings you don’t understand very well… then probably my encouragement to treat more people less like cats isn’t going to work for you.
This tangentially reminded me of this quote about John von Neumann by Edward Teller, himself a bright chap (father of the hydrogen bomb and all that):
That said in John Wentworth’s case moral agency/ambition/tsuyoku naritai seems more key than intelligence, cf. what he said earlier:
So I think you’re misdiagnosing.
You could be right, and thanks for the feedback. It’s a low-probability speculation, and that quote is evidence against.
There’s a difference between disappointment and disgust, and “can only have fun with people when he treats them as non-agents” is very different from how I think about people, and it is in my nature to try and figure out people who think very differently from me. So far I haven’t got a mental model that fits John’s outputs well in their entirety. My mind is still working on it in the background.