This is a limited and subjective answer but there are just some subtle conversational and lifestyle markers of potential (I’ve talked to a fair few “intelligent” people about this and they agree that you can just tell if someone is of their type).
This is racist? The poster doesn’t mention race once. And his point is supported by research. Perceived intelligence tracks measured intelligence well even when the observer sees just a photo.
the problem is that such assessments are meaningfully noncausal in ways that have serious issues, in particular that attributes that do not cause low intelligence are correlated with perceived low intelligence due to incorrect training data—this doesn’t invalidate that it’s correlated by any means. quanticle points out that one of the concerning correlations is race. as I said in my comment—naming it racism is a bit odd to someone who tags racism as an agentic action on the part of a person (eg, you object that the post didn’t mention race), but quanticle raises an issue I agree with, and which I would continue to assert is an issue with both studies you link: these perceptual correlations also correlate with variables we’d like to causally normalize away, so that we can consistently detect intelligence across contexts. I do think that the use of the word “racism” is misleading in this context, and that the entire world should probably taboo the word and instead criticize things as being non-causal and correlated with attributes that are downstream of prejudice.
before reading the papers in depth: I’d bet that a significant portion of the findings turn out to be due to health causing intelligence to be higher, and so variables that let you predict health will predict intelligence as well. I also expect some detectable genetic correlate.
(but the long-term solution is that we should give everyone friendly-superintelligence healthcare that allows them to reach maximum human health and customize their own intelligence level ;)
I agree that with current cultural training data, training data collected from a lifetime of human experiences in a world where phrasing and behaviors enact racialization based on things like people’s bodily form, this method of verbal capability judgement is going to tend to have a correlation with people’s racialized attributes, because the cultural aesthetic you’re trying to match on by detecting verbal intelligence will present differently in people from different dialects and backgrounds.
different groups have different word bindings for the word racism based on whether it is an agentic action (“I’m not racist, dude, come on!”) or being synchronized with the correlated patterns of behavior that result in people being excluded (ie, the “I’m not racist, come on!” is probably being racist by this standard). IMO, because racism is such a high magnitude word for some people, there are going to be those who have the inclination to downvote because of your use of it.
but I agree that there’s a correlation that is worth highlighting: people’s verbal and aesthetic presentation does not represent intelligence the same way across different cultural aesthetic backgrounds, and so attempting to guess whether someone is competent from their presentation will tend to have a correlation with racialized groups—ie, people who others treat as being of a category because of their simple physical characteristics rather than their complex and agentic ones.
There’s, of course, some issue as well with actual intelligence probably being at least partially causally downstream from having a poor household in early childhood, and poor households being correlated with racialization—people tend to have less aggregate capability, including iq, when their nutritional, social, and chemical environment was bad growing up (eg poorer households are more likely to have undetected mold and chemical hazards hidden in the floor and walls). But I don’t think that was the key thing you were getting at.
That is both racist and, worse, ineffective.
It’s a strategy that gives you a lot of false negatives. If you are hiring in a competitive market having false negatives is a problem.
If you are hiring 14 or 15 year olds you are not in a competitive market, so you can live with more false negatives.
This is racist? The poster doesn’t mention race once. And his point is supported by research. Perceived intelligence tracks measured intelligence well even when the observer sees just a photo.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1467-6494.7103008
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3961208/
the problem is that such assessments are meaningfully noncausal in ways that have serious issues, in particular that attributes that do not cause low intelligence are correlated with perceived low intelligence due to incorrect training data—this doesn’t invalidate that it’s correlated by any means. quanticle points out that one of the concerning correlations is race. as I said in my comment—naming it racism is a bit odd to someone who tags racism as an agentic action on the part of a person (eg, you object that the post didn’t mention race), but quanticle raises an issue I agree with, and which I would continue to assert is an issue with both studies you link: these perceptual correlations also correlate with variables we’d like to causally normalize away, so that we can consistently detect intelligence across contexts. I do think that the use of the word “racism” is misleading in this context, and that the entire world should probably taboo the word and instead criticize things as being non-causal and correlated with attributes that are downstream of prejudice.
before reading the papers in depth: I’d bet that a significant portion of the findings turn out to be due to health causing intelligence to be higher, and so variables that let you predict health will predict intelligence as well. I also expect some detectable genetic correlate.
(but the long-term solution is that we should give everyone friendly-superintelligence healthcare that allows them to reach maximum human health and customize their own intelligence level ;)
I agree that with current cultural training data, training data collected from a lifetime of human experiences in a world where phrasing and behaviors enact racialization based on things like people’s bodily form, this method of verbal capability judgement is going to tend to have a correlation with people’s racialized attributes, because the cultural aesthetic you’re trying to match on by detecting verbal intelligence will present differently in people from different dialects and backgrounds.
different groups have different word bindings for the word racism based on whether it is an agentic action (“I’m not racist, dude, come on!”) or being synchronized with the correlated patterns of behavior that result in people being excluded (ie, the “I’m not racist, come on!” is probably being racist by this standard). IMO, because racism is such a high magnitude word for some people, there are going to be those who have the inclination to downvote because of your use of it.
but I agree that there’s a correlation that is worth highlighting: people’s verbal and aesthetic presentation does not represent intelligence the same way across different cultural aesthetic backgrounds, and so attempting to guess whether someone is competent from their presentation will tend to have a correlation with racialized groups—ie, people who others treat as being of a category because of their simple physical characteristics rather than their complex and agentic ones.
There’s, of course, some issue as well with actual intelligence probably being at least partially causally downstream from having a poor household in early childhood, and poor households being correlated with racialization—people tend to have less aggregate capability, including iq, when their nutritional, social, and chemical environment was bad growing up (eg poorer households are more likely to have undetected mold and chemical hazards hidden in the floor and walls). But I don’t think that was the key thing you were getting at.