I disagree with the extent to which you take for granted that people's phenomenological experiences are similar, Max, though on very different dimensions than "I.Q.". Now that I think about it, I get the impression that the phenomenological variation is much higher along some other dimensions than it is along IQ, which surprises me somehow.
As someone who is married to a person with adult-diagnosed ADHD & autism, many things clicked into place about both my marriage and my relationships with other people when I fully grokked how different the phenomenological experience of being neurodivergent in these ways is from myself (which I generally understand to be "neurotypical"). The book Unmasking Autism radically expanded my worldview if not just by helping me understand how common it is for other people's minds to work in ways that are completely unintuitive to me. I came to understand how urgent and nuanced concept of "neurodiversity" is.
One of the strangest things about the "what is it like to be low IQ" discourse is that it comes so close to to exposing what I imagine would be, for many people, a pretty valuable & earth-shattering truth. It just focuses on the wrong, and most obviously transgressive, aspect of differences in how our minds work.
The example from that Tweet where the interlocutor asks "Oh, you're going to Paris?" is clearly an autist-to-allist communication failure, where the autist is asking a question in its own right and the allist infers a social context for it which was not implied (much less intended to be) by the autist.
If you seek to cover and understand the current moment and the ascendancy of Silicon Valley and the Tech Right, you MUST read deeply about the subjective experience of autism, because what these guys are expressing and thinking is very clearly emergent, in part, from their predelictions and experiences derived from being autistic—I know this because I recognize these aspects of them in myself. Much of their thought process, decried by "normies" (allists) as "weird," is perfectly legible to me, and though I don't hold their reactionary values (quite the opposite), on some level I actually find them much more relatable than the "cool kids' table" atmosphere and covert social bullying which pervades much of the left. No wonder autistic STEM men are leaning right in droves.
For those reasons (among many others), to cover the Tech Right and its influence on politics without developing an understanding of autism would be a heinous oversight, and would allow a fatal gap in your analyis which will continue to hobble it indefinitely.
An excellent comment. I also see a lot of radical potential in unearthing the kind of reckoning with subjectivity that neurodivergence (as a concept) can bring. As in the ways gender discourse has allowed for new modes of thought about gender and expression among all people, so too can social discourses on neuroatypicallity foster empathy and awareness about different phenomenological experiences among and for even the most putatively “neurotypical.”
Totally agree with this, and it's coming from the standpoint of having actually being diagnosed in my adult stage with ADHD with other neurodivergence traits. Even if also generalistic, it would be a better discussion for that whole online crew how different the world views are based on EQ instead of IQ, but considering empathy is not usually brought in those discussions, it is hard to imagine that foreign concept being understood by the majority of those individuals.
I'm late to the party but after finishing the article just now I wanted to say exactly something along these lines, but I'll just add that it took me a long time to realize just how different other people's minds could be in several other ways as well, and also that recognizing those differences and learning to respect them may be a big part of something like "intersubjective maturity" that IQ fetishists quite precisely lack. A huge difference which was the first one to wake me up to just how wildly different minds can be is the difference in people's "mental sense analogues," like mental vision, hearing, speaking etc.
Not sure if that's the best way to describe it, but as someone who was pretty much aphasic until well into my 20's, when it finally hit me that when some people talked about seeing pictures or movies in their heads it wasn't just a figure of speech, but that they actually did see images in their "mind's eye," I was really floored for a long time. I wonder often what part of that is genetic vs environmental and training based. I read novels in a borderline compulsive way when I was young and I loved reading intricate descriptions of things, but I never stopped to try and form an image of anything being described in what I read. I was always "imagining the concept" of whatever was described, and if you had asked me to give you a description back of what I "saw" in my mind after reading some passage, I would throw a ton of words back at the person that would conjure vivid ideas of images, but as far as what was going on in my head, it was a pitch black space inhabited by the cacophony of reading voices I employed in various situations, and I always implicitly identified the loudest of those voices as "me." I read, a lot, and the reading voice was by far the most developed thing in my brain, so I took it for granted that was what "I" was. Then I heard in an article somewhere that supposedly some people don't have inner voices! I laughed at the absolute absurdity of that idea and gleefully told my brother--who was a very talented musician from the age of like 5 but never much of a reader--that this article made the ridiculous claim that some people didn't have a voice in their head that they considered their voice--and he looked at me really embarrassed.
So yea, that's when I found out that even my own brother's experience of his inner mental life was just utterly and completely different than mine. It took me forever to understand that apparently it is completely possible to think thoughts without talking to yourself in your head. I eventually was able to get some sense of how he did it, and it was my brother I had grown up with so I was certain he definitely did think thoughts, but he didn't speak them to himself in his head. If you asked him what he wanted to eat he just kind of "searched himself" and an answer manifested, without any voice in his head ever going "gee, what do I want? Pizza? No, maybe tacos?" etc. But then I remember also, as one final detail about this, when it came up one time in conversation that Beethoven had composed his final works while deaf, so he heard them in his mind without ever actually hearing them through his ears, my brother's response wasn't the usual "how amazing!" but instead was like "sure, of course. How could anyone ever write any music at all if they didn't hear it that way first?" These were the major things I think that made me realize that people all develop mental analogues of all their senses to different extents, but since no one tends to talk to each other about how to do this or what causes some people to develop certain senses more than others, everyone seems to take some genetically determined amount of "sense simulation potential" and use it to create their own mind in a fairly unconscious way just due to whatever they do with their mind in their formative development years. But once I learned that not everyone's head was a pitch black box where countless voices debated one another with the millions of pages of text from fantasy and sci-fi novels I shoved into my brain between the ages of 6 and 16 roughly, I started actively trying to develop a "mind's eye," and since I wasn't any longer in rapid development it was really incredibly difficult, but after a few months or a year I was able to actually see some basic images in my head.
Ok, apologies for the crazy long comment but this topic of how people's minds can be radically different in terms of actual mental life and not the ridiculous notion that smart people have superior experience is something I think is really important and often secretly at the root of deep misunderstandings between people. Feynman had an example I'll mention briefly since I have typed almost as much as the post itself by now I think, about how he discovered another physicist colleague counted in a completely different way than him. I can't remember the details or even which of his texts, I wanna say it was "structure of physical laws" but maybe I'm wrong, but the gist was that one of them counted with mental images and the other counted with drumbeats or something, and they both put the other into a situation in which they were sure it was "impossible to count," by occupying the other person's senses with the faculty they employed for counting. Like, one thought it was impossible to track an object visually and count at the same time, and the other thought nobody could count while also listening to a symphony, or something along those lines, I'm sure I got the details wrong but the point is the same. Everybody assumes the way their mind does things is the way all minds do things, but even among two world class physicists the most basic mathematical operations can be performed by totally different faculties.
Sorry for the essay I just got enthusiastic about this topic!
This and calling regular folks NPCs is all about rationalizing cruel treatment to others because “they don’t experience things like I would”. It’s a crucial step on the way to extermination camps.
It's all three steps from re-instituting 'literacy' tests at the polls. It's a clear line- 'I' (think) I have a high IQ, thus means my decisions are inherently correct (never mind all those pesky findings about the uncorrelated capacity for cognitive biases, the value of domain-specific knowledge and experience, ordinary human preferences divorced from cognitive ability, etc.), the people who make different decisions are therefore impaired and must be managed separately from our civilization (the poor dears).
I persist in my conviction that the general quality of discourse in the world would be elevated if mentioning IQ outside the clinical confines of a psychometrician's office resulted in a bracing electric shock.
Why the fuck would I want to know where to find the best baguette in Paris if I'm not even planning to go there? What use would that information be to me? High IQ people are weird.
Silicon Valley is full of short sighted logic-gluttons who are short on empathy and real world relational experience. However, it’s not false that the more standard deviations a person gets from the “normal” 100 IQ score, in either direction, the more differentiated their ways of thinking, sensing and moving through the world might be. This is certainly subjective, but well documented. I say this despite my deep disdain of IQ, which is a crude, one dimensional tool that’s overemphasized in the quest to neatly outline and organize intelligence and potential. Whatever it is that IQ attempts to distill (like one of the tweets says), however, does exist and is thought of more and more in relation to neurodivergence. Taboo is the topic of giftedness, particularly among adults, but any support group for struggling folks on the upward range of the IQ spectrum is full of people privately sharing the quiet alienation and loneliness of seeing and experiencing the world in a way others don’t relate to (or have patience for or interest in or understand — however you want to phrase it.) sounds like you feel adequately met/seen/heard/stimulated, a result likely of an alignment between you and enough people around you, but not everyone experiences that. If you imagine people walk around with the same experience of the world as you, is that because you haven’t been told otherwise? It’s like the not uncommon phenomenon of people with something like synesthesia or face blindness expressing surprise that most people around them don’t also taste colors or forget faces until confronted with it after a decade (or three.) Those tweets are condescending and gross for obvious reasons, but I suspect what that some gifted NDs experience as they climb the IQ scale happens inversely as well. Funny to me though that those x users think IQ is correlated with positive life experiences. It is the opposite for many people.
Your point is well-taken but I think my attitude here is ultimately sort of pragmatic: What matters the "truth" of each individual's subjective experience, if thousands of years of cross-continental human collaboration and coordination and intersubjectivity gives us pretty strong evidence that most people are similar enough? Which isn't to say that neurodivergence isn't a real phenomenon—it obviously is, and one thing I appreciate about the framework is it rejects outright, from the start, the kind of hierarchicalism that inevitably follows from rigid I.Q. dogmatism.
"if thousands of years of cross-continental human collaboration and coordination and intersubjectivity gives us pretty strong evidence that most people are similar enough?"
Does it?
Let me give a simple example. Can Africa become a developed continent? Where the standard of living is similar to the modern OECD. And I'm not talking about a few small examples where there is a very high resource to person ratio and they export it to the west, but the whole continent.
I doubt it. They don't have high enough IQs.
I would say the same about the Middle East. Probably the best takedown of the whole War on Terror and Iraq/Afghanistan invasions was simply that the people were too stupid to build a proper developed democracy. Doomed from the start. The only way to win the game of the Middle East is not to play.
The same could be said of immigration from these regions. Obviously, the African slave trade was a disaster for the US. And I've lived in a majority black American cities and it's painful.
In Europe we are seeing the same things with middle eastern immigrants.
So I would say it's precisely cross continental where this IQ gap becomes so huge we really are talking about wildly diverting human experiences with real world implications. It's one thing to posit that Joe the Plumber isn't all that different from Jack the programmer. It's another when you are talking about much of the third world.
The average iq of middle eastern immigrant communities in Europe and the US is probably a full standard deviation higher than that of the native population
Outside of the IQ question it can help a lot to realise someone e.g. organises their memory or has difference visualisation abilities to you cuz suddenly difficulties you had communicating with them can make soooo much sense and be adjusted for.
Imagine being a person who says things like “blooming cacophony of events” and “you are but a leaf on the hands of an impersonal indifferent fate.” YIKES my heart goes out but couldn’t be me.
People who promote IQ as the measure of value are missing a huge segment of our population who are brilliant in non-academic fields, such as farming, manufacturing, repair, and plumbing. Two of the smartest people I ever knew were a deli guy and a carpenter. They lacked college degrees but knew their own sphere of being and a lot about others. Formal education is a fetish in our culture, and way over-rated. People think college degrees (and the status of one's specific university) grants them major privilege, leaving the less-educated people to live without such privilege. I think this one of the reasons our country is so polarized.
I think if anything American education seems to train people to be easily scammed. I’m not sure how it does that (I’d eagerly read someone’s writing about it or watch a video essay) because I’ve never attended American education and on the face of it it doesn’t seem so different but just looking at American culture it seems to be the case.
Although I did have one thought about this that doesn’t blame their education. The predominant culture industry in the “west” at least is American. In all other countries when they engage with this media the cultural differences put a little wedge of unreality and detachment from a very early age that acts to train them to think about media as media and not simply absorb it. Americans are taught to do that much later and with more effort because it isn’t as culturally incongruent, there’s less detachment, and so a more thorough taking for granted the values and symbols it presents.
Regarding the Subjunctive Mood: I came across this blog post from 2008 (https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=481) in the Odd Lots newsletter a few weeks ago, and I really was amazed how directly it maps onto the 2022 greentext that you cite (which I see as a foundational text to this discourse).
I tend to write-off posts about IQ, even the one I linked, for the reasons you've laid out (I'll occaisonally make an exception for Nassim Taleb lol), but comparing posts like this to Yishan Wong's tweets really do reveal how incurious Twitter IQ posters are.
It's interesting seeing this expressed as an appeal to "empathy," - rather than what it is, sneering misanthropy. There's something to be said for this demographic working so hard to construct a concrete model of subjectivity that crumbles under sunlight, toes in contact with a lawn.
Like most psychometric numbers, IQ has this quality where the more average the number the more reliable its interpretation, but the less meaningful the gaps. This is to say, because the metric can only be validated through reference to real humans and their lived lives, extreme numbers are the least reliable - the difference between a claimed IQ of 180 and 200 is meaningless because, if such numbers are even real at all, the examples of them have been so rare in human experience that there is nothing like sufficient data points to establish the usefulness of the scale at that extreme. Similarly, the difference between an IQ of 30 and 40 is essentially meaningless for the same reason. There are people with particularly severe cognitive difficulties who theoretically would be place there on the scale, people with truly disabling cerebral palsy or traumatic brain injuries. But there's no way to validate the difference.
Meanwhile, scores within a standard deviation of the mean (85-115) are very well validated and much more trustworthy, but they are of course of less practical difference precisely because they're average. And a fundamental reason a lot of smart people do think that IQ has some specific validity is precisely because people within an SD of the mean DON'T live wildly different lives. That is to say, we interact with people who float in that 85-115 range all the time - two thirds of us are in that range - and our overwhelming experience is that we're all able to live ordinary human lives and drive cars and use computers and do the shopping etc. If IQ was telling us that we should regularly interact with people who are totally incapacitated, then that would simply be an indicator that IQ doesn't work because this simply is not what we observe walking around in the human world.
None of this means that IQ isn't meaningful or that it isn't a benefit to have a high score; as a predictive tool it's been validated over and over again. But it's mostly useful in the most specific contexts - if you want to predict which high school kids would make the best research physicist, it's pretty good, while if you want to just do a broad “workplace success” prediction, there will be a correlation but it will be modest and thus noisy and not practically useful. Of course I'd rather be higher IQ if I was a programmer because IQ is good at capturing certain kinds of abstract reasoning that happen to be applicable to coding. Really good, actually. But it happens that I'm neither a programmer nor a particularly high IQ person myself, and I've found a way to financially support myself anyway. As do most of us. With apologies to the high school algebra teachers of the world, almost nobody genuinely needs to regularly call on the limits of their abstract reasoning abilities. I have a profession that's more purely cognitive than like 95% of workers, and yet I'm not taxing my abstract reasoning brain pretty much ever.
I think of IQ numbers like the tests they do at the NFL combine, the 40 yard dash, the standing jump, wingspan, etc. Do they measure something real? Yeah, sure. And if you're really good at them or really bad at them, that's practically meaningful - if really good, hello NFL, if really bad, then you're likely suffering from some sort of physical disability that will have life consequences. But that's a tiny portion of the population, in either direction. The vast, vast majority of us are going to have NFL combine numbers that simply aren't relevant to our lives. Because those tests were designed for purposes that have nothing to do with being an ordinary person.
So my brother was measured to have an IQ of 83 at one point (although due to being autistic this involved a very uneven sub spread) and he hasn’t got to my mind problems with abstract reasoning compared to anyone else but he did find it hard to learn practical skills. He was 18 when he learned to read fluently (with very effortful reading of short texts before that). He was bad at making sense of symbols I think but he had good (oral) language. What stood out as “dumb” with him though (again possibly due to autism) was he would be very manipulative but very bad at being manipulative so that it was very obvious to everyone (threatening suicide to get a pizza for supper say or telling outlandish lies to try and turn the tables in a situation to his favour seemingly without picking up that the lies were outside the bounds of people’s expectations of possibility) and also being very bad at regulating his own emotions and having real difficulties even understanding an attempt to talk him through ways he could do that. He also claimed to not have thoughts (visualised or inner monologue) which enraged me as a teenager because I was like obviously you have thoughts you are talking where do you think the stuff you’re saying comes from lol. But paying attention to my own impulsivity has made me aware how much thinking out loud I also do since then so I get that it doesn’t need a preverbalised consciousness anymore :p
Two of the most egregious errors of IQ Fetishism: 1) it posits Intelligence as a static quality rather than a dynamic one--as if "high IQ" performers can always be counted on for peak level performance in their life endeavors. Because, well, high IQ. A superior chip. But wetware ain't hardware. If you don't think so, try taking an IQ test the morning after the apartment next door has been blasting music through your bedroom walls until 5am. 2) it uncritically assumes that the tests measure an all-encompassing substrate of "general intelligence," rather than a narrower and more specialized subset of mental abilities where superior performance confers advantages in learning and mastering tasks related to abstract reasoning and linear pattern recognition. Those abilites are not all there is to human intelligence, or human consciousness. Not even for those humans with the features of non-neurotypicality commonly defined as "high functioning verbal autism."
The term "midwit"--apparently a recent coinage--has achieved notable popularity in the currency of online conversation nowadays. I refrain from using that word to characterize people, because it's an inherently reductive label, and I'm not out to reduce anyone to a label that way. But I do think there's such a thing as Midwit Narrative: superficial theorizing, facile analysis, just-so story mythology, argument ad ignorantiam, granting automatic credence to the correlative fallacy, abstract conjectures supported only by cliched hypothetical comparisons, reductive stereotyping, humorless and unironic embrace of self-flattering essentialism, smug punching down asserted as bedrock truism...and I find that IQ Fetishism has several of those problems. IQ Fetishism is Midwit. Ironically enough.
I think observable intelligence is 90% metacognitive skills (which can be trained) rather than the sort of abstract-logic themed skills that iq tests try and get at. But I think practical intelligence is something different again - just that without good metacognitive skills it’s not really communicable and only shows up when you’re like “woah you just picked up this practical skill seemingly effortlessly” lol.
The sort of abstract mathy iq-ish intelligence seems particularly prone to superiority complexes though because while enabling good academic performance (which is treated as a measure for the most formative decades of life) it’s not something that is improved by social skills (or even traits that make social skills easier) and I actually think social skills and abstract reasoning can be antagonistic in someone bad at “code switching” so people who are bad at social skills can even be better at formal logical reasoning (being undistracted by attempted social inferences) and from that fail entirely to engage in more complex perspective taking their whole lives without ever realising they’re missing a crucial skill for understanding people around them and drawing all kinds of logical inferences that someone who is terrible at math-logic stuff, perceptibly “dumb” even would see the flaws in as pertains to real world interactions if they had even average levels of social ability. And like this poor capacity for perspective taking doesn’t need to be like clinical levels of empathy deficit - it can be as simple as never really taking the time to get to know - as human beings - how people they don’t relate to personally actually think and feel. Sometimes even their own parents remain a sort of black box mystery to these people and their decisions seeming different to the ones they would make are designated as “stupid” - because they don’t have the capacity to get inside their heads or appreciate their motivations and problem solving processes. Which everyone kinda does - I call people stupid for making decisions I wouldn’t make all the time, the contextually socially skilled but poor at code switching think I’m stupid all the time for decisions I make that make no sense to them too - but I also know how to step out of that frame, understand that in reality it’s much more complex and engage with the real complexity of our differences. Some people just stop at their initial disgust at “that’s not what I would do” and seemingly don’t have the ability to step out of their frame or when they do make attempts that seem so detached from actual people like they’re imagining something whole cloth without reference to actual social experience (or with reference only to generalised social experience and not to the individual realities of a specific person which if they spend all their time with people they feel comfortable with and relate to ends up functionally the same).
Speaking of abstract reasoning, I was just thinking that it plays a role in text-based verbal skills, as well as mathematical skills and spatial diagram pattern recognition. Both skills are deductive. The difference is that numbers are denotative, and words are connotative. So math gets progressively more complex, sophisticated, and "difficult"--but what you see is what you get. Typically a set of clues and a mystery component to be completed to solve the mystery--an equation. The rules are clear, the numbers and the clauses and the operations are simply to be acknowledged and included to comprise the solution, which is easily reviewed, checkable.
But while text also requires abstract deduction skills for optimal reading comprehension, the process can be thrown off in the reader, subjectively, if they hit a "trigger word" ("Democrat", say.) Triggering is a language-based deduction that pulls in subjective content to influence the interpretation of the text. That obstacle can interfere with a reader drawing properly focused and germane inferences. It's also a property that allows a writer to manipulate language to serve an agenda--persuasive speech, rhetoric. Which includes propaganda, of course. So a high level of skill at abstract reasoning in math isn't necessarily transferable to the realm of textual verbal comprehension and reasoning, because the extra component of connotation makes for another aspect to be solved by accurately drawing out the proper set of inferences, and winnowing out the irrelevant tangential inferences. Clear close reading (and writing) partakes of the same step-by-step deductive reasoning as solving a math equation. But it's all done with Language, and all of the valences of connotation need to be tested, with critical assessment.
Note that oral verbality is more ambiguous; that's why some verbal expressions, like legal contracts, are absolutely required to be recorded in writing in order maintain their power of enforcement, preferably in no uncertain terms. But oral verbality partakes of the additional component of social skills intelligence, which is largely about the sort of experience-based commonality of human sensitivity, expressiveness, and communicative affect that Justin Ruiz writes about here https://www.the-hinternet.com/p/agi-is-impossible
"Where the defining affect of red-meat M.A.G.A. Twitter is a sleazy jouissance, a delight in cruelty and transgression, the J.D. Vance wing feels only a seething and bilious ressentiment."
Almost like...I daren't say it...jock-douches and nerd-creeps?
Nah the original set are the nerds, clever but low empathy, expressing a deep resentment at feeling locked out of a power they feel they deserve but that has become so entrenched as to manifest as simple aggression toward anything making demands on them or limiting them rather than pursuit of the same power for themselves, the set that rode on their backs to take power (Vance et al) on the other hand are the dorky theatre kids who think 48 laws of power type stuff is a mind blowing revelation and not just “have social skills” in edgy packaging. The first group need to be transgressive they can’t really cope with being in power because it puts them in the position of being the thing they hate, the second group on the other hand *want* to be the normies, they want power to redefine normiedom so that they don’t feel rejected anymore or so they can present themselves as the pinnacle of it.
Jocks aren’t in the game at all, they have social skills.
What’s incredible about this is that the example about a baguette in Paris demonstrates a deficiency in social understanding. It’s actually quite reasonable to assume that if someone is asking where would be best to get a baguette if they were to go to Paris, that someone is planning on, or at least seriously considering, going to Paris. Normally, people don’t go around posing hypotheticals that are prompted by nothing whatsoever. If I replied to that guy “if I were to kill you, would you rather I…” I’d be pretty surprised if they treated it simply as a hypothetical that didn’t imply anything about my thoughts or intentions.
1. IQ is a bunch of nonsense mostly, the tests measuring a few abstract math related skills more than anything more and easily trainable. So yeah.
2. Pretty sure that as similar as we are in many ways humans don’t all experience things the same way subjectively. Lots of variation is hidden under our language - like the people who do and don’t experience an inner monologue, different approaches to autobiographical memory and so on. If you dig in to people’s experiences there’s some really normal everyday experiences that are so varied.
3. The conditional hypothetical thing just sounds like hyper literal people with poor theory of mind not understanding that when they talk to people those people are trying to infer things about stuff not just looking at surface meanings so if anyone is being dumb there… 😬
4. One of the biggest thinking skills that I do think impacts people’s apparent intelligence for me is to what degree they indulge in (because it’s time consuming but also satisfying and doesn’t have immediate as much as longer term extrinsic rewards) higher orders of meta-cognition and perspective taking. Mathy iq doesn’t touch on that skill at all but there’s clearly a lot of variation (and yes it too can be learned but presumably those who don’t take to it automatically enjoy it less so might lack the intrinsic motivation)
Ironically, what if engaging in this stupid discourse on Twitter is actually an exercise in what it's like to be low IQ?
You're cringe so you must be stupid is a sign of low iq
I disagree with the extent to which you take for granted that people's phenomenological experiences are similar, Max, though on very different dimensions than "I.Q.". Now that I think about it, I get the impression that the phenomenological variation is much higher along some other dimensions than it is along IQ, which surprises me somehow.
As someone who is married to a person with adult-diagnosed ADHD & autism, many things clicked into place about both my marriage and my relationships with other people when I fully grokked how different the phenomenological experience of being neurodivergent in these ways is from myself (which I generally understand to be "neurotypical"). The book Unmasking Autism radically expanded my worldview if not just by helping me understand how common it is for other people's minds to work in ways that are completely unintuitive to me. I came to understand how urgent and nuanced concept of "neurodiversity" is.
One of the strangest things about the "what is it like to be low IQ" discourse is that it comes so close to to exposing what I imagine would be, for many people, a pretty valuable & earth-shattering truth. It just focuses on the wrong, and most obviously transgressive, aspect of differences in how our minds work.
Great comment, and you're right that I'm being a bit glib there.
The example from that Tweet where the interlocutor asks "Oh, you're going to Paris?" is clearly an autist-to-allist communication failure, where the autist is asking a question in its own right and the allist infers a social context for it which was not implied (much less intended to be) by the autist.
If you seek to cover and understand the current moment and the ascendancy of Silicon Valley and the Tech Right, you MUST read deeply about the subjective experience of autism, because what these guys are expressing and thinking is very clearly emergent, in part, from their predelictions and experiences derived from being autistic—I know this because I recognize these aspects of them in myself. Much of their thought process, decried by "normies" (allists) as "weird," is perfectly legible to me, and though I don't hold their reactionary values (quite the opposite), on some level I actually find them much more relatable than the "cool kids' table" atmosphere and covert social bullying which pervades much of the left. No wonder autistic STEM men are leaning right in droves.
For those reasons (among many others), to cover the Tech Right and its influence on politics without developing an understanding of autism would be a heinous oversight, and would allow a fatal gap in your analyis which will continue to hobble it indefinitely.
An excellent comment. I also see a lot of radical potential in unearthing the kind of reckoning with subjectivity that neurodivergence (as a concept) can bring. As in the ways gender discourse has allowed for new modes of thought about gender and expression among all people, so too can social discourses on neuroatypicallity foster empathy and awareness about different phenomenological experiences among and for even the most putatively “neurotypical.”
Totally agree with this, and it's coming from the standpoint of having actually being diagnosed in my adult stage with ADHD with other neurodivergence traits. Even if also generalistic, it would be a better discussion for that whole online crew how different the world views are based on EQ instead of IQ, but considering empathy is not usually brought in those discussions, it is hard to imagine that foreign concept being understood by the majority of those individuals.
I'm late to the party but after finishing the article just now I wanted to say exactly something along these lines, but I'll just add that it took me a long time to realize just how different other people's minds could be in several other ways as well, and also that recognizing those differences and learning to respect them may be a big part of something like "intersubjective maturity" that IQ fetishists quite precisely lack. A huge difference which was the first one to wake me up to just how wildly different minds can be is the difference in people's "mental sense analogues," like mental vision, hearing, speaking etc.
Not sure if that's the best way to describe it, but as someone who was pretty much aphasic until well into my 20's, when it finally hit me that when some people talked about seeing pictures or movies in their heads it wasn't just a figure of speech, but that they actually did see images in their "mind's eye," I was really floored for a long time. I wonder often what part of that is genetic vs environmental and training based. I read novels in a borderline compulsive way when I was young and I loved reading intricate descriptions of things, but I never stopped to try and form an image of anything being described in what I read. I was always "imagining the concept" of whatever was described, and if you had asked me to give you a description back of what I "saw" in my mind after reading some passage, I would throw a ton of words back at the person that would conjure vivid ideas of images, but as far as what was going on in my head, it was a pitch black space inhabited by the cacophony of reading voices I employed in various situations, and I always implicitly identified the loudest of those voices as "me." I read, a lot, and the reading voice was by far the most developed thing in my brain, so I took it for granted that was what "I" was. Then I heard in an article somewhere that supposedly some people don't have inner voices! I laughed at the absolute absurdity of that idea and gleefully told my brother--who was a very talented musician from the age of like 5 but never much of a reader--that this article made the ridiculous claim that some people didn't have a voice in their head that they considered their voice--and he looked at me really embarrassed.
So yea, that's when I found out that even my own brother's experience of his inner mental life was just utterly and completely different than mine. It took me forever to understand that apparently it is completely possible to think thoughts without talking to yourself in your head. I eventually was able to get some sense of how he did it, and it was my brother I had grown up with so I was certain he definitely did think thoughts, but he didn't speak them to himself in his head. If you asked him what he wanted to eat he just kind of "searched himself" and an answer manifested, without any voice in his head ever going "gee, what do I want? Pizza? No, maybe tacos?" etc. But then I remember also, as one final detail about this, when it came up one time in conversation that Beethoven had composed his final works while deaf, so he heard them in his mind without ever actually hearing them through his ears, my brother's response wasn't the usual "how amazing!" but instead was like "sure, of course. How could anyone ever write any music at all if they didn't hear it that way first?" These were the major things I think that made me realize that people all develop mental analogues of all their senses to different extents, but since no one tends to talk to each other about how to do this or what causes some people to develop certain senses more than others, everyone seems to take some genetically determined amount of "sense simulation potential" and use it to create their own mind in a fairly unconscious way just due to whatever they do with their mind in their formative development years. But once I learned that not everyone's head was a pitch black box where countless voices debated one another with the millions of pages of text from fantasy and sci-fi novels I shoved into my brain between the ages of 6 and 16 roughly, I started actively trying to develop a "mind's eye," and since I wasn't any longer in rapid development it was really incredibly difficult, but after a few months or a year I was able to actually see some basic images in my head.
Ok, apologies for the crazy long comment but this topic of how people's minds can be radically different in terms of actual mental life and not the ridiculous notion that smart people have superior experience is something I think is really important and often secretly at the root of deep misunderstandings between people. Feynman had an example I'll mention briefly since I have typed almost as much as the post itself by now I think, about how he discovered another physicist colleague counted in a completely different way than him. I can't remember the details or even which of his texts, I wanna say it was "structure of physical laws" but maybe I'm wrong, but the gist was that one of them counted with mental images and the other counted with drumbeats or something, and they both put the other into a situation in which they were sure it was "impossible to count," by occupying the other person's senses with the faculty they employed for counting. Like, one thought it was impossible to track an object visually and count at the same time, and the other thought nobody could count while also listening to a symphony, or something along those lines, I'm sure I got the details wrong but the point is the same. Everybody assumes the way their mind does things is the way all minds do things, but even among two world class physicists the most basic mathematical operations can be performed by totally different faculties.
Sorry for the essay I just got enthusiastic about this topic!
This and calling regular folks NPCs is all about rationalizing cruel treatment to others because “they don’t experience things like I would”. It’s a crucial step on the way to extermination camps.
It's all three steps from re-instituting 'literacy' tests at the polls. It's a clear line- 'I' (think) I have a high IQ, thus means my decisions are inherently correct (never mind all those pesky findings about the uncorrelated capacity for cognitive biases, the value of domain-specific knowledge and experience, ordinary human preferences divorced from cognitive ability, etc.), the people who make different decisions are therefore impaired and must be managed separately from our civilization (the poor dears).
I persist in my conviction that the general quality of discourse in the world would be elevated if mentioning IQ outside the clinical confines of a psychometrician's office resulted in a bracing electric shock.
This comment is making me have to fight with every ounce of my self control not to hornypost on main.
DO IT
Why the fuck would I want to know where to find the best baguette in Paris if I'm not even planning to go there? What use would that information be to me? High IQ people are weird.
See I'd argue what is demonstrated by that exchange is not even a high IQ mode of thinking, it is just autistic literalism.
He is posing a literal question and expecting (demanding actually) a literal interpretation & response to his question.
The person who responds to him interprets the question through a "we are just socializing" context. (Oh you want to share about your trip with me)
It's not that serious and it's a bad example. And no doubt Yishan draws from the culture he's most inundated in as a software engineer background
I am not trying to be glib, I genuinely think you have to be firmly on the spectrum to read the baguette conversation and think that B is stupid.
Maybe a family member who is really into baking bread is going to Paris and the person you are asking is likely to know for some reason.
Who knows
Silicon Valley is full of short sighted logic-gluttons who are short on empathy and real world relational experience. However, it’s not false that the more standard deviations a person gets from the “normal” 100 IQ score, in either direction, the more differentiated their ways of thinking, sensing and moving through the world might be. This is certainly subjective, but well documented. I say this despite my deep disdain of IQ, which is a crude, one dimensional tool that’s overemphasized in the quest to neatly outline and organize intelligence and potential. Whatever it is that IQ attempts to distill (like one of the tweets says), however, does exist and is thought of more and more in relation to neurodivergence. Taboo is the topic of giftedness, particularly among adults, but any support group for struggling folks on the upward range of the IQ spectrum is full of people privately sharing the quiet alienation and loneliness of seeing and experiencing the world in a way others don’t relate to (or have patience for or interest in or understand — however you want to phrase it.) sounds like you feel adequately met/seen/heard/stimulated, a result likely of an alignment between you and enough people around you, but not everyone experiences that. If you imagine people walk around with the same experience of the world as you, is that because you haven’t been told otherwise? It’s like the not uncommon phenomenon of people with something like synesthesia or face blindness expressing surprise that most people around them don’t also taste colors or forget faces until confronted with it after a decade (or three.) Those tweets are condescending and gross for obvious reasons, but I suspect what that some gifted NDs experience as they climb the IQ scale happens inversely as well. Funny to me though that those x users think IQ is correlated with positive life experiences. It is the opposite for many people.
Your point is well-taken but I think my attitude here is ultimately sort of pragmatic: What matters the "truth" of each individual's subjective experience, if thousands of years of cross-continental human collaboration and coordination and intersubjectivity gives us pretty strong evidence that most people are similar enough? Which isn't to say that neurodivergence isn't a real phenomenon—it obviously is, and one thing I appreciate about the framework is it rejects outright, from the start, the kind of hierarchicalism that inevitably follows from rigid I.Q. dogmatism.
"if thousands of years of cross-continental human collaboration and coordination and intersubjectivity gives us pretty strong evidence that most people are similar enough?"
Does it?
Let me give a simple example. Can Africa become a developed continent? Where the standard of living is similar to the modern OECD. And I'm not talking about a few small examples where there is a very high resource to person ratio and they export it to the west, but the whole continent.
I doubt it. They don't have high enough IQs.
I would say the same about the Middle East. Probably the best takedown of the whole War on Terror and Iraq/Afghanistan invasions was simply that the people were too stupid to build a proper developed democracy. Doomed from the start. The only way to win the game of the Middle East is not to play.
The same could be said of immigration from these regions. Obviously, the African slave trade was a disaster for the US. And I've lived in a majority black American cities and it's painful.
In Europe we are seeing the same things with middle eastern immigrants.
So I would say it's precisely cross continental where this IQ gap becomes so huge we really are talking about wildly diverting human experiences with real world implications. It's one thing to posit that Joe the Plumber isn't all that different from Jack the programmer. It's another when you are talking about much of the third world.
How can you type so much with one hand constantly Heiling?
The average iq of middle eastern immigrant communities in Europe and the US is probably a full standard deviation higher than that of the native population
Outside of the IQ question it can help a lot to realise someone e.g. organises their memory or has difference visualisation abilities to you cuz suddenly difficulties you had communicating with them can make soooo much sense and be adjusted for.
Imagine being a person who says things like “blooming cacophony of events” and “you are but a leaf on the hands of an impersonal indifferent fate.” YIKES my heart goes out but couldn’t be me.
Appreciate what I THINK is the irony in this sentence, but as it's the Internet, could be wrong...
People who promote IQ as the measure of value are missing a huge segment of our population who are brilliant in non-academic fields, such as farming, manufacturing, repair, and plumbing. Two of the smartest people I ever knew were a deli guy and a carpenter. They lacked college degrees but knew their own sphere of being and a lot about others. Formal education is a fetish in our culture, and way over-rated. People think college degrees (and the status of one's specific university) grants them major privilege, leaving the less-educated people to live without such privilege. I think this one of the reasons our country is so polarized.
I think if anything American education seems to train people to be easily scammed. I’m not sure how it does that (I’d eagerly read someone’s writing about it or watch a video essay) because I’ve never attended American education and on the face of it it doesn’t seem so different but just looking at American culture it seems to be the case.
Although I did have one thought about this that doesn’t blame their education. The predominant culture industry in the “west” at least is American. In all other countries when they engage with this media the cultural differences put a little wedge of unreality and detachment from a very early age that acts to train them to think about media as media and not simply absorb it. Americans are taught to do that much later and with more effort because it isn’t as culturally incongruent, there’s less detachment, and so a more thorough taking for granted the values and symbols it presents.
Regarding the Subjunctive Mood: I came across this blog post from 2008 (https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=481) in the Odd Lots newsletter a few weeks ago, and I really was amazed how directly it maps onto the 2022 greentext that you cite (which I see as a foundational text to this discourse).
I tend to write-off posts about IQ, even the one I linked, for the reasons you've laid out (I'll occaisonally make an exception for Nassim Taleb lol), but comparing posts like this to Yishan Wong's tweets really do reveal how incurious Twitter IQ posters are.
Great find! This Cosma Shazili post linked in the comments is worth reading too: http://bactra.org/weblog/484.html
It's interesting seeing this expressed as an appeal to "empathy," - rather than what it is, sneering misanthropy. There's something to be said for this demographic working so hard to construct a concrete model of subjectivity that crumbles under sunlight, toes in contact with a lawn.
Like most psychometric numbers, IQ has this quality where the more average the number the more reliable its interpretation, but the less meaningful the gaps. This is to say, because the metric can only be validated through reference to real humans and their lived lives, extreme numbers are the least reliable - the difference between a claimed IQ of 180 and 200 is meaningless because, if such numbers are even real at all, the examples of them have been so rare in human experience that there is nothing like sufficient data points to establish the usefulness of the scale at that extreme. Similarly, the difference between an IQ of 30 and 40 is essentially meaningless for the same reason. There are people with particularly severe cognitive difficulties who theoretically would be place there on the scale, people with truly disabling cerebral palsy or traumatic brain injuries. But there's no way to validate the difference.
Meanwhile, scores within a standard deviation of the mean (85-115) are very well validated and much more trustworthy, but they are of course of less practical difference precisely because they're average. And a fundamental reason a lot of smart people do think that IQ has some specific validity is precisely because people within an SD of the mean DON'T live wildly different lives. That is to say, we interact with people who float in that 85-115 range all the time - two thirds of us are in that range - and our overwhelming experience is that we're all able to live ordinary human lives and drive cars and use computers and do the shopping etc. If IQ was telling us that we should regularly interact with people who are totally incapacitated, then that would simply be an indicator that IQ doesn't work because this simply is not what we observe walking around in the human world.
None of this means that IQ isn't meaningful or that it isn't a benefit to have a high score; as a predictive tool it's been validated over and over again. But it's mostly useful in the most specific contexts - if you want to predict which high school kids would make the best research physicist, it's pretty good, while if you want to just do a broad “workplace success” prediction, there will be a correlation but it will be modest and thus noisy and not practically useful. Of course I'd rather be higher IQ if I was a programmer because IQ is good at capturing certain kinds of abstract reasoning that happen to be applicable to coding. Really good, actually. But it happens that I'm neither a programmer nor a particularly high IQ person myself, and I've found a way to financially support myself anyway. As do most of us. With apologies to the high school algebra teachers of the world, almost nobody genuinely needs to regularly call on the limits of their abstract reasoning abilities. I have a profession that's more purely cognitive than like 95% of workers, and yet I'm not taxing my abstract reasoning brain pretty much ever.
I think of IQ numbers like the tests they do at the NFL combine, the 40 yard dash, the standing jump, wingspan, etc. Do they measure something real? Yeah, sure. And if you're really good at them or really bad at them, that's practically meaningful - if really good, hello NFL, if really bad, then you're likely suffering from some sort of physical disability that will have life consequences. But that's a tiny portion of the population, in either direction. The vast, vast majority of us are going to have NFL combine numbers that simply aren't relevant to our lives. Because those tests were designed for purposes that have nothing to do with being an ordinary person.
So my brother was measured to have an IQ of 83 at one point (although due to being autistic this involved a very uneven sub spread) and he hasn’t got to my mind problems with abstract reasoning compared to anyone else but he did find it hard to learn practical skills. He was 18 when he learned to read fluently (with very effortful reading of short texts before that). He was bad at making sense of symbols I think but he had good (oral) language. What stood out as “dumb” with him though (again possibly due to autism) was he would be very manipulative but very bad at being manipulative so that it was very obvious to everyone (threatening suicide to get a pizza for supper say or telling outlandish lies to try and turn the tables in a situation to his favour seemingly without picking up that the lies were outside the bounds of people’s expectations of possibility) and also being very bad at regulating his own emotions and having real difficulties even understanding an attempt to talk him through ways he could do that. He also claimed to not have thoughts (visualised or inner monologue) which enraged me as a teenager because I was like obviously you have thoughts you are talking where do you think the stuff you’re saying comes from lol. But paying attention to my own impulsivity has made me aware how much thinking out loud I also do since then so I get that it doesn’t need a preverbalised consciousness anymore :p
Two of the most egregious errors of IQ Fetishism: 1) it posits Intelligence as a static quality rather than a dynamic one--as if "high IQ" performers can always be counted on for peak level performance in their life endeavors. Because, well, high IQ. A superior chip. But wetware ain't hardware. If you don't think so, try taking an IQ test the morning after the apartment next door has been blasting music through your bedroom walls until 5am. 2) it uncritically assumes that the tests measure an all-encompassing substrate of "general intelligence," rather than a narrower and more specialized subset of mental abilities where superior performance confers advantages in learning and mastering tasks related to abstract reasoning and linear pattern recognition. Those abilites are not all there is to human intelligence, or human consciousness. Not even for those humans with the features of non-neurotypicality commonly defined as "high functioning verbal autism."
The term "midwit"--apparently a recent coinage--has achieved notable popularity in the currency of online conversation nowadays. I refrain from using that word to characterize people, because it's an inherently reductive label, and I'm not out to reduce anyone to a label that way. But I do think there's such a thing as Midwit Narrative: superficial theorizing, facile analysis, just-so story mythology, argument ad ignorantiam, granting automatic credence to the correlative fallacy, abstract conjectures supported only by cliched hypothetical comparisons, reductive stereotyping, humorless and unironic embrace of self-flattering essentialism, smug punching down asserted as bedrock truism...and I find that IQ Fetishism has several of those problems. IQ Fetishism is Midwit. Ironically enough.
I think observable intelligence is 90% metacognitive skills (which can be trained) rather than the sort of abstract-logic themed skills that iq tests try and get at. But I think practical intelligence is something different again - just that without good metacognitive skills it’s not really communicable and only shows up when you’re like “woah you just picked up this practical skill seemingly effortlessly” lol.
The sort of abstract mathy iq-ish intelligence seems particularly prone to superiority complexes though because while enabling good academic performance (which is treated as a measure for the most formative decades of life) it’s not something that is improved by social skills (or even traits that make social skills easier) and I actually think social skills and abstract reasoning can be antagonistic in someone bad at “code switching” so people who are bad at social skills can even be better at formal logical reasoning (being undistracted by attempted social inferences) and from that fail entirely to engage in more complex perspective taking their whole lives without ever realising they’re missing a crucial skill for understanding people around them and drawing all kinds of logical inferences that someone who is terrible at math-logic stuff, perceptibly “dumb” even would see the flaws in as pertains to real world interactions if they had even average levels of social ability. And like this poor capacity for perspective taking doesn’t need to be like clinical levels of empathy deficit - it can be as simple as never really taking the time to get to know - as human beings - how people they don’t relate to personally actually think and feel. Sometimes even their own parents remain a sort of black box mystery to these people and their decisions seeming different to the ones they would make are designated as “stupid” - because they don’t have the capacity to get inside their heads or appreciate their motivations and problem solving processes. Which everyone kinda does - I call people stupid for making decisions I wouldn’t make all the time, the contextually socially skilled but poor at code switching think I’m stupid all the time for decisions I make that make no sense to them too - but I also know how to step out of that frame, understand that in reality it’s much more complex and engage with the real complexity of our differences. Some people just stop at their initial disgust at “that’s not what I would do” and seemingly don’t have the ability to step out of their frame or when they do make attempts that seem so detached from actual people like they’re imagining something whole cloth without reference to actual social experience (or with reference only to generalised social experience and not to the individual realities of a specific person which if they spend all their time with people they feel comfortable with and relate to ends up functionally the same).
Speaking of abstract reasoning, I was just thinking that it plays a role in text-based verbal skills, as well as mathematical skills and spatial diagram pattern recognition. Both skills are deductive. The difference is that numbers are denotative, and words are connotative. So math gets progressively more complex, sophisticated, and "difficult"--but what you see is what you get. Typically a set of clues and a mystery component to be completed to solve the mystery--an equation. The rules are clear, the numbers and the clauses and the operations are simply to be acknowledged and included to comprise the solution, which is easily reviewed, checkable.
But while text also requires abstract deduction skills for optimal reading comprehension, the process can be thrown off in the reader, subjectively, if they hit a "trigger word" ("Democrat", say.) Triggering is a language-based deduction that pulls in subjective content to influence the interpretation of the text. That obstacle can interfere with a reader drawing properly focused and germane inferences. It's also a property that allows a writer to manipulate language to serve an agenda--persuasive speech, rhetoric. Which includes propaganda, of course. So a high level of skill at abstract reasoning in math isn't necessarily transferable to the realm of textual verbal comprehension and reasoning, because the extra component of connotation makes for another aspect to be solved by accurately drawing out the proper set of inferences, and winnowing out the irrelevant tangential inferences. Clear close reading (and writing) partakes of the same step-by-step deductive reasoning as solving a math equation. But it's all done with Language, and all of the valences of connotation need to be tested, with critical assessment.
Note that oral verbality is more ambiguous; that's why some verbal expressions, like legal contracts, are absolutely required to be recorded in writing in order maintain their power of enforcement, preferably in no uncertain terms. But oral verbality partakes of the additional component of social skills intelligence, which is largely about the sort of experience-based commonality of human sensitivity, expressiveness, and communicative affect that Justin Ruiz writes about here https://www.the-hinternet.com/p/agi-is-impossible
There is a great very entertaining book by Stephen J Gould called “The Mismeasure of Man” about the history of human intelligence testing — recommend!
"Where the defining affect of red-meat M.A.G.A. Twitter is a sleazy jouissance, a delight in cruelty and transgression, the J.D. Vance wing feels only a seething and bilious ressentiment."
Almost like...I daren't say it...jock-douches and nerd-creeps?
Nah the original set are the nerds, clever but low empathy, expressing a deep resentment at feeling locked out of a power they feel they deserve but that has become so entrenched as to manifest as simple aggression toward anything making demands on them or limiting them rather than pursuit of the same power for themselves, the set that rode on their backs to take power (Vance et al) on the other hand are the dorky theatre kids who think 48 laws of power type stuff is a mind blowing revelation and not just “have social skills” in edgy packaging. The first group need to be transgressive they can’t really cope with being in power because it puts them in the position of being the thing they hate, the second group on the other hand *want* to be the normies, they want power to redefine normiedom so that they don’t feel rejected anymore or so they can present themselves as the pinnacle of it.
Jocks aren’t in the game at all, they have social skills.
What’s incredible about this is that the example about a baguette in Paris demonstrates a deficiency in social understanding. It’s actually quite reasonable to assume that if someone is asking where would be best to get a baguette if they were to go to Paris, that someone is planning on, or at least seriously considering, going to Paris. Normally, people don’t go around posing hypotheticals that are prompted by nothing whatsoever. If I replied to that guy “if I were to kill you, would you rather I…” I’d be pretty surprised if they treated it simply as a hypothetical that didn’t imply anything about my thoughts or intentions.
1. IQ is a bunch of nonsense mostly, the tests measuring a few abstract math related skills more than anything more and easily trainable. So yeah.
2. Pretty sure that as similar as we are in many ways humans don’t all experience things the same way subjectively. Lots of variation is hidden under our language - like the people who do and don’t experience an inner monologue, different approaches to autobiographical memory and so on. If you dig in to people’s experiences there’s some really normal everyday experiences that are so varied.
3. The conditional hypothetical thing just sounds like hyper literal people with poor theory of mind not understanding that when they talk to people those people are trying to infer things about stuff not just looking at surface meanings so if anyone is being dumb there… 😬
4. One of the biggest thinking skills that I do think impacts people’s apparent intelligence for me is to what degree they indulge in (because it’s time consuming but also satisfying and doesn’t have immediate as much as longer term extrinsic rewards) higher orders of meta-cognition and perspective taking. Mathy iq doesn’t touch on that skill at all but there’s clearly a lot of variation (and yes it too can be learned but presumably those who don’t take to it automatically enjoy it less so might lack the intrinsic motivation)