What good is G-factor if you’re dumped in the woods? A field report from a camp counselor.
I had a surprising experience with a 10 year old child “Carl” a few years back. He had all the stereotypical signals of a gifted kid that can be drilled into anyone by a dedicated parent- 1500 chess elo, constantly pestered me about the research I did during the semester, used big words, etc. This was pretty common at the camp. However, he just felt different to talk to- felt sharp. He made a serious but failed effort to acquire my linear algebra knowledge in the week and a half he was there.
Anyways, we were out in the woods, a relatively new environment for him. Within an hour of arriving, he saw other kids fishing, and decided he wanted to fish too. Instead of discussing this desire with anyone or acquiring a rod, he crouched down at the edge of the pond and just watched the fishes. He noticed one with only one eye, approached it from the side with no vision, grabbed it, and proudly presented it to the counselor in charge of fishing.
Until this incident I was basically sceptical that you could dump some Artemis-Fowl-figure into a new environment and watch them big-brain their way into solving arbitrary problems. Now I’m not sure.
His out-of the box problem solving rapidly shifted from winning camper-fish conflicts to winning camper-camper conflicts, and he became uncontrollable. I almost won by breaking down the claim “You have to do what I say” into “You want to stay at camp, here’s the conditions where that happens, map it out- you can see that you’re close to the limit of rules broken where you still get what you want.” This bought two more days of control. Unfortunately, he seems to have interpreted this new system as “win untracably,” and then was traced trying to poison another camper by exploiting their allergy. He’s one of two campers out of several thousand I worked with that we had to send home early for behavior issues.
In the end, he was much less happy than the other campers I’ve had, but I also think he’s one of the few that could survive “Hatchet” or “Call of the Wild” style- despite comparative lack of experience.
Addendum: he harassed and kept catching the poor half-blind fish for the duration of the stay, likely because he got so much positive attention the first time he caught it.
“When Your Child Is a Psychopath” comes to mind… (Remember, 1% adult prevalence.) In addition to the attention, he may just have enjoyed abusing the animal; that’s one of the most striking childhood traits.
Yeah the combo of the fish + poisoning a camper via allergy??? has me pretty sketched out about this kid.
I should emphasize that he did not succeed at hurting another kid in his allergy plot, and was not likely to. 1% of kids with psychopathic tendencies sounds rare when you’re parenting one kid, but it sounds like Tuesday when you have the number of kids seen by an institution like a summer camp- there’s paperwork, procedures, escalations, all hella battle-tested. Typically with a kid in the cluster, we focus on safety but also work hard to integrate them and let all the kids have a good experience. His behavior was different enough from a typical violent, unresponsive to punishment kid that we weren’t able to keep him at camp because the standard fun preserving, behavior improving parts of these policies did not work at all on him (very weird, they always work), but the safety oriented policies like boost staff to camper ratio around him, always have one staff member watching him, document everything and brief staff members who will be supervising him worked fine.
This is really interesting. This makes sense but I hadn’t thought about this before at all. I’d be interested in a post that explores this in more detail.
It’s strikes me as a little … unthinking to single the kid out for “abusing” a fish when he joined a group of other people fishing.
(Also, why does the fish go back? Is the point not to eat the fish you catch? If it were me, and you’re eating the ones the other kids catch, but throwing mine back, I’d keep catching it over and over too, simply out of principle/spite.)
I think this is simultaneously… totally fair, but for better or worse, I think “participating in the socially sanctioned form of cruelty” signals something different than “inventing your own creative forms of cruelty.” (which isn’t necessarily saying it’s better, but, like, I feel like I know what to expect from the other kids and would have to literally watch my back with this one. At least based on the info so far)
A normal kid would catch it once or twice, and then target some other fish, or move on to proper fishing. They would not ‘harass’ the same fish constantly, nor parade it about for attention while alive, before returning it to the pond to torment again. Nor is it necessarily the case that these campers were catching fish in general—like at my Boy Scout camp, it was expected that you wouldn’t catch many fish (if any), and if you managed to catch one worth cooking & eating or worth entering in the camp-wide contest, it would be a topic of conversation. And you definitely wouldn’t release it just to catch it again—you’d either kill it quickly and cleanly, or you’d make a little water pen in the rocks to keep it alive in reasonably non-cruel conditions until you dealt with it. (The lake was stocked, but it didn’t go very far.) The point was more to enjoy the process and unwind in front of the lake for those who didn’t want to rush out & about hiking or merit-badge-maxxing.
Further, you’re ignoring the context. When two people do the same thing, it’s never the same thing. The import of an action is not what it resembles on the surface, but what it reveals about the person. When an angry kitten tries to nom you, it is adorable and amusing and is extremely unlikely to succeed at hurting you; but it reminds you that adult cats can and do send people (like my grandmother) to the emergency room; and it further reminds you of what happened to Siegfried & Roy… (This sort of insistence on the most superficial interpretation possible of an action, and judging every action in isolation without any consideration of patterns of behavior or what it implies about the future, is a classic legalistic trick used to cover one’s tracks.)
This “patterns of behavior,” “what the action reveals about the person” smacks of Richelieu’s “six lines” quote: what you say you’re condemning him for is an excuse, not a reason.
Hastings had a lot of more instances of his behavior to judge him then the isolated incident. The incident is not the reason but the observed behavior in total. This incident is just an example.
Oh definitely. Some fraction of kids are palpably psychopaths, 1% sounds right- this stops being suprising when you’ve supervised enough kids. “Carl” never stopped surprising us.
So the smarter one made rapid progress in novel (to them) environments, then revealed they were unaligned, and then the first round of well established alignment strategies caused them to employ deceptive alignment strategies, you say.
Hmmmm.
My childhood was quite different, in that I was quite kind-hearted, honest, and generally obedient to the letter of the law… but I was constantly getting into trouble in elementary school. I just kept coming up with new interesting things to do that they hadn’t made an explicit rule against yet. Once they caught me doing the new thing, they told me never to do it again and made a new rule. So then I came up with a new interesting thing to try.
How about tying several jump ropes together to make a longer rope, tying a lasso on one end, lassoing an exhaust pipe on the roof of the one-story flat-roofed school, and then climb-walking up the wall onto the roof of the school? Oh? That’s against the rules now? Ok.
How about digging a tunnel under a piece of playground equipment which had an extended portion touching the ground, and then having fun crawling through the ~4ft long tunnel? No tunneling anymore? Ok.
How about taking off my shoes and socks and shinnying up the basketball hoop support pole? No? Ok.
Finding interesting uses for various plant materials collected from the borders of the playground… banned one after another.
An endless stream of such things.
My principal was more amused and exasperated with me than mad.
I added the Parenting tag. I don’t think it is literally fitting as Hastings was not tasked with parenting per se, but I like how he approached his responsibility role to the children at the camps.
I’d like to hear more about your methods, Hastings.
As I read this, I actually put myself into his shoes, as another quirky gifted kid...but MY very first impulse upon reading about the fish was that my younger self would have insisted on putting him into an aquarium, keeping him there all summer (along with whatever other critters we can find: frogs, crayfish, snails, salamanders), releasing them on the final day. Vote on names for him and his friends too. Even back then I had zero interest in any Quien Es Mas Macho status games, but bring an animal into the mix and I am there front and center.
Same planet, different universes...
Oh my, I hope your sanity is holding.
In a sort of morbid way, seems like things are working as intended—the “sharp” fella is winning social battles (invented or not) and keep exploiting the ever widening strategy space. Emboldened, he quickly gets to the “this is the line and no further” boundary of his current strategy. But instead of modifying it and keep his old strategy as a tool in his arsenal, he over-exploit it and disrupts the equilibrium so much he gets kicked out.
Seems like he’s winning the battle but losing the war. He’s not making allies, friends, or experiencing happiness.
Definitely preferable if he wins a longer term, positive sum game.
I fear that happiness may be a sort of consolation prize in the games we’re talking about. If we agree that the factor we’re talking about is mutually exclusive with happiness, then we can describe him as someone who may have considered the full portfolio of benefits of both option and chosen the one that’s not available to most “normal” people.
The LessWrong Review runs every year to select the posts that have most stood the test of time. This post is not yet eligible for review, but will be at the end of 2025. The top fifty or so posts are featured prominently on the site throughout the year. Will this post make the top fifty?
My instinct is also pulling me to think this kid is psychopathic, but drawing this kind of conclusions about some kid we hardly know anything about… it doesn’t seem to help anyone. I would not read too much into the fish-catching thing either. I think we could at least say this kid probably does not score very high in terms of collaboration, right? I wonder if the kid just generally didn’t show a strong inclination to seek help. If you don’t want to get other people involved, sitting there just observing the fish might be a natural thing to do, and if you observe for long enough, realizing you can try catching a half-blind fish might just dawn on you. So I am not sure if this instance is that strongly related to intelligence.
Maybe we can say G-factor matters a lot in the woods if you are not very big on collaboration / playing nice. Humans evolved being social animals and the G-factor probably does not matter much if you are surviving in the woods with a group of other humans. In this case, collaboration and not being a jerk are vital for survival. But, imagine if that’s not the thing for you. First, it means you are probably going to have a lot more alternative activities—like when other people are already having fun hunting together using tools that belongs to the group and you don’t have a goto-person to get you integrated into the activity. You have to do something else. And if you are smart enough, that could still make you quite useful in the group as the eccentric R&D person. Though… if you are smart but too uncollaborative, then intelligence might actually save / extend your life when the group decides to throw you out.
With stories like this, I think it’s important to also resist the stereotypical myths that being extremely intelligent and being not-very-nice are correlated, or somehow intelligence alone is enough (I am not anti-intelligence and I think it’ll be good if everyone can get more of it). Resisting this myth is important because the opposite is dangerous. Someone who is both smart, collaborative, and has a genuinely kind heart will probably do best. And someone who is smart, knows how to act collaboratively, but is slightly “misaligned” in some other ways (e.g., out to maximize their own gains over the long run) will be effective. Then, someone who is smart, but fails to even pretend to be collaborative and cannot act as if they are nice will… get thrown out of the group pretty soon. In an actual forest situation, they might last a bit longer than usual, but probably not long enough to reproduce again. So I’d say G-factor is not necessary or sufficient in even the forest.
Really? I thought it was unsettling.
Maybe the “I love this” refers to an appreciation for the existence of a post like this one on LW, not the content (i.e., the child’s unusual and partially unsettling behavior) of this post; I do think a “reference to the post existing in the LW ecosystem” is a less probable scenario than “reference to the content of the post”. Anyway, I find the content somewhat unsettling, but appreciate that I saw a post like this one today on LW.