Most people on average are reasonably well-calibrated about how smart they are.
(I think you probably agree with most of what I say below and didn’t intend to claim otherwise, reading your claim just made me notice and write out the following.)
Hmm, I would guess that people on average (with some notable pretty extreme outliers in both directions, e.g. in imposter syndrome on one hand and the grandiose variety of narcissistic personality disorder on the other hand, not to mention more drastic things like psychosis) are pretty calibrated about how their cognitive abilities compare to their peers but tend to be really bad at assessing how they compare to the general population because most high-income countries are quite stratified by intelligence.
(E.g., if you have or are pursuing a college degree, ask yourself what fraction of people that you know well do not and will never have a college degree. Of course, having a college degree is not the same as being intelligent, and in fact as pointed out in other comments if you’re reading this Forum you probably know, or have read content by, at least a couple of people who arguably are extremely intelligent but don’t have a degree. But the correlation is sufficiently strong that the answer to that question tells you something about stratification by intelligence.)
That is, a lot of people simply don’t know that many people with wildly different levels of general mental ability. Interactions between them happen, but tend to be in narrow and regimented contexts such as one person handing another person cash and receiving a purchased item in return, and at most include things like small talk that are significantly less diagnostic of cognitive abilities than more cognitively demanding tasks such as writing an essay on a complex question or solving maths puzzles.
For people with significantly above-average cognitive abilities, this means they will often lack a rich sense of how, say, the bottom third of the population in terms of general mental ability performs on cognitively demanding tasks, and consequently they will tend to significantly underestimate their general intelligence relative to the general population because they inadvertently substitute the question “how smart am I compared to the general population?” – which would need to involve system-2 reasoning and consideration of not immediately available information such as the average IQ of their peer group based on e.g. occupation or educational attainment – with the easier question “how smart am I compared to my peers?” on which I expect system 1 to do reasonably well (while, as always, of course being somewhat biased in one direction or the other).
As an example, the OP says “I’m just average” but also mentions they have a college degree – which according to this website is true of 37.9% of Americans of age 25 or older. This is some, albeit relatively weak, evidence against the “average” claim depending on what the latter means (e.g. if it just means “between the first and third quartile of the general population” then evidence against this is extremely weak, while it’s somewhat stronger evidence against being very close to the population median).
This effect gets even more dramatic when the question is not just about “shallow” indicators like one’s percentile relative to the general population but about predicting performance differences in a richer way, e.g. literally predicting the essays that two different people with different ability levels would write on the same question. This is especially concerning because in most situations these richer predictions are actually all that matters. (Compare with height: it is much more useful and relevant to know, e.g., how much different levels of height will affect your health or your dating prospects or your ability to work in certain occupations or do well at certain sports, than just your height percentile relative to some population.)
I also think the point that people are really bad at comparing them to the general population because society is so stratified in various ways applies to many other traits, not just to specific cognitive abilities or general intelligence. Like, I think that question is in some ways closer to the question “at what percentile of trait X are you in the population of all people that have ever lived”, where it’s more obvious that one’s immediate intuitions are a poor guide to the answer.
(Again, all of this is about gradual effects and averages. There will of course be lots of exceptions, some of them systematic, e.g. depending on their location of work teachers will see a much broader sample and/or one selected by quite different filters than their peer group.
I also don’t mean to make any normative judgment about the societal stratification at the root of this phenomenon. If anything I think that a clear-eyed appreciation of how little many people understand of the lived experience of most others they share a polity with would be important to spread if you think that kind of stratification is problematic in various ways.)
I think you’re entirely right here. I basically take back what I said in that line.
I think the thing I originally wanted to convey there is something like “people systematically overestimate effects like Dunning-Kruger and imposter syndrome,” but I basically agree that most of the intuition I have is in pretty strongly range-restricted settings. I do basically think people are pretty poorly calibrated about where they are compared to the world.
(I also think it’s notably more likely that Olivia is above average than below average.)
Relatedly, I think social group stratification might explain some of the other comments to this post that I found surprising/tone-deaf. (e.g. the jump from “did a degree in sociology” to “you can be a sociologist in EA” felt surprising to me, as someone from a non-elite American college who casually tracks which jobs my non-STEM peers end up in).
(I think you probably agree with most of what I say below and didn’t intend to claim otherwise, reading your claim just made me notice and write out the following.)
Hmm, I would guess that people on average (with some notable pretty extreme outliers in both directions, e.g. in imposter syndrome on one hand and the grandiose variety of narcissistic personality disorder on the other hand, not to mention more drastic things like psychosis) are pretty calibrated about how their cognitive abilities compare to their peers but tend to be really bad at assessing how they compare to the general population because most high-income countries are quite stratified by intelligence.
(E.g., if you have or are pursuing a college degree, ask yourself what fraction of people that you know well do not and will never have a college degree. Of course, having a college degree is not the same as being intelligent, and in fact as pointed out in other comments if you’re reading this Forum you probably know, or have read content by, at least a couple of people who arguably are extremely intelligent but don’t have a degree. But the correlation is sufficiently strong that the answer to that question tells you something about stratification by intelligence.)
That is, a lot of people simply don’t know that many people with wildly different levels of general mental ability. Interactions between them happen, but tend to be in narrow and regimented contexts such as one person handing another person cash and receiving a purchased item in return, and at most include things like small talk that are significantly less diagnostic of cognitive abilities than more cognitively demanding tasks such as writing an essay on a complex question or solving maths puzzles.
For people with significantly above-average cognitive abilities, this means they will often lack a rich sense of how, say, the bottom third of the population in terms of general mental ability performs on cognitively demanding tasks, and consequently they will tend to significantly underestimate their general intelligence relative to the general population because they inadvertently substitute the question “how smart am I compared to the general population?” – which would need to involve system-2 reasoning and consideration of not immediately available information such as the average IQ of their peer group based on e.g. occupation or educational attainment – with the easier question “how smart am I compared to my peers?” on which I expect system 1 to do reasonably well (while, as always, of course being somewhat biased in one direction or the other).
As an example, the OP says “I’m just average” but also mentions they have a college degree – which according to this website is true of 37.9% of Americans of age 25 or older. This is some, albeit relatively weak, evidence against the “average” claim depending on what the latter means (e.g. if it just means “between the first and third quartile of the general population” then evidence against this is extremely weak, while it’s somewhat stronger evidence against being very close to the population median).
This effect gets even more dramatic when the question is not just about “shallow” indicators like one’s percentile relative to the general population but about predicting performance differences in a richer way, e.g. literally predicting the essays that two different people with different ability levels would write on the same question. This is especially concerning because in most situations these richer predictions are actually all that matters. (Compare with height: it is much more useful and relevant to know, e.g., how much different levels of height will affect your health or your dating prospects or your ability to work in certain occupations or do well at certain sports, than just your height percentile relative to some population.)
I also think the point that people are really bad at comparing them to the general population because society is so stratified in various ways applies to many other traits, not just to specific cognitive abilities or general intelligence. Like, I think that question is in some ways closer to the question “at what percentile of trait X are you in the population of all people that have ever lived”, where it’s more obvious that one’s immediate intuitions are a poor guide to the answer.
(Again, all of this is about gradual effects and averages. There will of course be lots of exceptions, some of them systematic, e.g. depending on their location of work teachers will see a much broader sample and/or one selected by quite different filters than their peer group.
I also don’t mean to make any normative judgment about the societal stratification at the root of this phenomenon. If anything I think that a clear-eyed appreciation of how little many people understand of the lived experience of most others they share a polity with would be important to spread if you think that kind of stratification is problematic in various ways.)
I think you’re entirely right here. I basically take back what I said in that line.
I think the thing I originally wanted to convey there is something like “people systematically overestimate effects like Dunning-Kruger and imposter syndrome,” but I basically agree that most of the intuition I have is in pretty strongly range-restricted settings. I do basically think people are pretty poorly calibrated about where they are compared to the world.
(I also think it’s notably more likely that Olivia is above average than below average.)
Relatedly, I think social group stratification might explain some of the other comments to this post that I found surprising/tone-deaf. (e.g. the jump from “did a degree in sociology” to “you can be a sociologist in EA” felt surprising to me, as someone from a non-elite American college who casually tracks which jobs my non-STEM peers end up in).
Yes, that’s my guess as well.