I agree that many of these traits are really important, but I guess most (other than altruism) are well correlated with IQ tests. I don’t know much about this, but it’s my sense that most postitive things are well-correlated with IQ and that’s just a pill we have to swallow.
If someone thinks different feel free to say.
If we were doing tests I would hope we’d try and build tests that found the features we wanted best, but I think if we could only do one test, it would be an intelligence test. And I don’t like that, but I think it’s true.
But I don’t think that undermines the point about a potential overemphasis on smarts:
Many of these traits are likely correlated with IQ, but that does not negate the point that one can overemphasize IQ at their expense, and that one can have a high IQ and still completely fail to develop these other traits and virtues.
Moreover, for some of the traits, there doesn’t appear to be much of a positive correlation, such as in the case of conscientiousness:
studies suggest that there is a weak negative relationship between conscientiousness and IQ, possibly because people with a high IQ have less of a need to develop conscientiousness in order to perform well.
or myside bias:
studies have even found that “the magnitude of the myside bias shows very little relation to intelligence”.
These findings suggest that the notion that “most positive things are well-correlated with IQ” is often overstated. (Though it’s also frequently understated, to be sure. :)
Stanovich, West, and Toplak (who are cited in your last link) developed maybe the most ambitious general rationality test to date. As measured by that test, rationality exhibited a strong correlation with IQ-type tests − 0.695. See Stuart Ritchie’s informative review.
It feels a bit silly to post this as a reply to you, because you’re probably either aware of all of this or, otherwise, could convince me that I’m mistaken. But your comment prompted me to think of these points. So I think it’s more useful for other readers who come across this thread.
I kind of tend to be a bit disappointed with correlations in reality, maybe because of this effect (or #2 and #3 below).
You probably have excellent intuitions when it comes to what correlations really mean, but I suspect that that takes a lot of statistical training. When I think that something is correlated, the scatter plot I have in my mind is around r = 0.95. Then I need to remind myself that that’s not how reality usually works, so it’s probably just r = 0.7 or even r = 0.5, at which point it’s starting to get hard to even see the correlation in the scatter plot. Just eyeballing it from an online correlation simulator it looks like you get samples that are below average on one dimension even among just the top 5% of samples along the other dimension. I’m guessing that a lot of people intuitively overestimate how correlated r = 0.7 really is and update too strongly on it.
This seems to be compounded by the halo effect. Sometimes I meet really impressively smart people, and then I’m so shocked when they turn out to be quite irrational about a lot of stuff, at least according to me. ^.^ My level of intuitive shockedness in turn strikes me as a bit irrational too, so I suspect the above overestimation of correlations and some halo effect are at work there.
There’s probably a lot of value in combining multiple virtues just as there is great value in combining multiple skills. I’ve read an amazing article somewhere (maybe by Ozzie or Kat?) that argued that if you master five skills to a normal level of mastery, you may plausibly be the one best-qualified person in the world for jobs that combine these skills.
I wish I knew how to quantify this right, but my intuition is that the 11 qualities in this article would have to be very, very highly correlated or else there’ll be almost no one who excels at all of them. Maybe there’ll be a few more people who are at least decent at all of them. But some of them also function as multiplies of someone’s power, so if they are very powerful because of the qualities they do have but then lack self-reflection, kindness, respect or are addicted to contrarianism or signaling, that can be catastrophic. So the badness of failures of the correlation reasoning can make it worthwhile to not rely on it exclusively. (To use an unnecessarily violent metaphor: A kind, self-reflected, respectful person with an (for our community) normal IQ may be more like a well-aimed shotgun. A high-IQ person who lacks just one virtue may be like a high-powered unaimed sniper rifle with a loose trigger.)
The researchers have probably thought of this and you know all of this stuff better than me anyway, but, not having had the time to investigate it, I idly wonder how many of these correlation experiments really measure some fairly uninteresting common cause. Like, I looove solving Raven’s matrices! They give me the most amazing flow experience, and when I can’t solve them in the allotted time, I can’t help but keep trying for hours afterwards. A friend of mine hated them. Sure enough she got a lower score in the same test, but I don’t think I can really derive anything from that that I didn’t already know. So these studies probably need to correct for countless things like need for cognition and such.
Focusing on one metric because all the others are correlated with it anyway is also quite exploitable. If someone is low on altruism but really high on IQ, they may be particularly drawn to exploiting mechanisms for personal gain that focus too much on IQ. So such mechanisms would then lead to a distribution of outcomes where there is one bump for the desired outcome and one bump for all the people willing and able to exploit the mechanism. That may be fine if the desired people add much more value than the exploitative people can take away, but in communities and among employees it’s usually the opposite.
I’m not surprised that there’s a strong correlation between those measures. However, I think it’s worth keeping in mind that such “general rationality”, in the sense of reasoning correctly in various tests, is still quite different from, and still doesn’t capture, many of the traits and virtues listed above, such as being highly driven (let alone altruistically driven), resisting signaling drives in high-stakes social contexts, and displaying interpersonal kindness.
I wasn’t saying it has anything to do with, e.g. interpersonal kindness. It was a comment on your the relationship between rationality and intelligence, which your last point related to.
I agree that many of these traits are really important, but I guess most (other than altruism) are well correlated with IQ tests. I don’t know much about this, but it’s my sense that most postitive things are well-correlated with IQ and that’s just a pill we have to swallow.
If someone thinks different feel free to say.
If we were doing tests I would hope we’d try and build tests that found the features we wanted best, but I think if we could only do one test, it would be an intelligence test. And I don’t like that, but I think it’s true.
I agree on the correlation point. :)
But I don’t think that undermines the point about a potential overemphasis on smarts:
Moreover, for some of the traits, there doesn’t appear to be much of a positive correlation, such as in the case of conscientiousness:
or myside bias:
These findings suggest that the notion that “most positive things are well-correlated with IQ” is often overstated. (Though it’s also frequently understated, to be sure. :)
Stanovich, West, and Toplak (who are cited in your last link) developed maybe the most ambitious general rationality test to date. As measured by that test, rationality exhibited a strong correlation with IQ-type tests − 0.695. See Stuart Ritchie’s informative review.
It feels a bit silly to post this as a reply to you, because you’re probably either aware of all of this or, otherwise, could convince me that I’m mistaken. But your comment prompted me to think of these points. So I think it’s more useful for other readers who come across this thread.
I kind of tend to be a bit disappointed with correlations in reality, maybe because of this effect (or #2 and #3 below).
You probably have excellent intuitions when it comes to what correlations really mean, but I suspect that that takes a lot of statistical training. When I think that something is correlated, the scatter plot I have in my mind is around r = 0.95. Then I need to remind myself that that’s not how reality usually works, so it’s probably just r = 0.7 or even r = 0.5, at which point it’s starting to get hard to even see the correlation in the scatter plot. Just eyeballing it from an online correlation simulator it looks like you get samples that are below average on one dimension even among just the top 5% of samples along the other dimension. I’m guessing that a lot of people intuitively overestimate how correlated r = 0.7 really is and update too strongly on it.
This seems to be compounded by the halo effect. Sometimes I meet really impressively smart people, and then I’m so shocked when they turn out to be quite irrational about a lot of stuff, at least according to me. ^.^ My level of intuitive shockedness in turn strikes me as a bit irrational too, so I suspect the above overestimation of correlations and some halo effect are at work there.
There’s probably a lot of value in combining multiple virtues just as there is great value in combining multiple skills. I’ve read an amazing article somewhere (maybe by Ozzie or Kat?) that argued that if you master five skills to a normal level of mastery, you may plausibly be the one best-qualified person in the world for jobs that combine these skills.
I wish I knew how to quantify this right, but my intuition is that the 11 qualities in this article would have to be very, very highly correlated or else there’ll be almost no one who excels at all of them. Maybe there’ll be a few more people who are at least decent at all of them. But some of them also function as multiplies of someone’s power, so if they are very powerful because of the qualities they do have but then lack self-reflection, kindness, respect or are addicted to contrarianism or signaling, that can be catastrophic. So the badness of failures of the correlation reasoning can make it worthwhile to not rely on it exclusively. (To use an unnecessarily violent metaphor: A kind, self-reflected, respectful person with an (for our community) normal IQ may be more like a well-aimed shotgun. A high-IQ person who lacks just one virtue may be like a high-powered unaimed sniper rifle with a loose trigger.)
The researchers have probably thought of this and you know all of this stuff better than me anyway, but, not having had the time to investigate it, I idly wonder how many of these correlation experiments really measure some fairly uninteresting common cause. Like, I looove solving Raven’s matrices! They give me the most amazing flow experience, and when I can’t solve them in the allotted time, I can’t help but keep trying for hours afterwards. A friend of mine hated them. Sure enough she got a lower score in the same test, but I don’t think I can really derive anything from that that I didn’t already know. So these studies probably need to correct for countless things like need for cognition and such.
Focusing on one metric because all the others are correlated with it anyway is also quite exploitable. If someone is low on altruism but really high on IQ, they may be particularly drawn to exploiting mechanisms for personal gain that focus too much on IQ. So such mechanisms would then lead to a distribution of outcomes where there is one bump for the desired outcome and one bump for all the people willing and able to exploit the mechanism. That may be fine if the desired people add much more value than the exploitative people can take away, but in communities and among employees it’s usually the opposite.
Thanks for sharing, I wasn’t aware of that. :)
I’m not surprised that there’s a strong correlation between those measures. However, I think it’s worth keeping in mind that such “general rationality”, in the sense of reasoning correctly in various tests, is still quite different from, and still doesn’t capture, many of the traits and virtues listed above, such as being highly driven (let alone altruistically driven), resisting signaling drives in high-stakes social contexts, and displaying interpersonal kindness.
I wasn’t saying it has anything to do with, e.g. interpersonal kindness. It was a comment on your the relationship between rationality and intelligence, which your last point related to.
Yeah, I know; I didn’t mean to imply otherwise. :)
In case anyone else misunderstood, this is a positive correlation of +0.695
Thanks, yeah, that wasn’t intended to be a minus sign but just a standard dash. Sorry about about any potential confusion.
Yeah you’ve changed my mind a bit.