Beyond Smart and Stupid

For what that's worth, when I reflect on my past blunders, the worst ones I can think of were due to misunderstandings of the unwritten and unspoken de facto rules according to which various institutions and human interactions work in practice. In these situations, I would either act according to the official rules and the respectable pious principles in situations where you're expected to break them, or I would break them in ways that seemed inconsequential to me but were in fact serious. (Sometimes I'd even feel bad for breaking them when there seemed to be no alternative, when in fact such breaking was tacitly considered business as usual.)

To me it seems evident that the ability to figure out the de facto rules quickly, instinctively, and accurately is mostly independent of general intelligence. It is certainly one of the key abilities that differentiate high achievers (and, conversely, big-time losers) from the rest. Its relation with other aspects of human social behavior and social skills is a complex and fascinating open question. For example, the talent for rule navigation seems to be largely independent of charisma, even though both can be a solid basis for high achievement. (Some historical events provide fascinating examples of clashes between super-charismatic and ingenious rule-navigating types -- think Trotsky vs. Stalin.)

This, incidentally, is a topic where I have found the insight from OB/LW about status and signaling significantly helpful in clearing up some confusions. Still, there are issues where I can't get my head around the de facto rules. For example, when it comes to certain beliefs that are nowadays considered disreputable, I observe people who were severely penalized just for suggesting that they might harbor them, but at the same time other people who have expressed them pretty openly without getting into any problems. Clearly there must be some significant differences involved, but I have nothing except vague hypotheses.

One distinction I always liked might be called "fertile" vs. "focused" intelligence.

Fertile intelligence is the ability to come up with ideas. People with fertile minds come up with lots of startling, original ideas ... and often lots of wrong ones. They're quick to recognize analogies ("Wow, X works just like Y!"). On the other hand they can get hung up on non sequiturs and ideas that seem neat but don't make sense. Maybe the real underlying skill here is very perceptive and quick pattern-matching.

Focused intelligence is the idea to see what's important and ignore the rest. People with focused minds aren't great at coming up with original ideas; they solve problems by saying "What's this problem really about?" and attacking it head-on. They're good at constructing logical arguments because they don't get sidetracked. They tend to be very predictable. They ignore things that "just might work" and stay where most of the probability mass is.

When a "fertile" mind solves a problem, you look at the solution and think "Wow, how did she ever think to do it that way?" When a "focused" mind solves a problem, you look at the solution and think "Wow, that's the only natural way to do it... why didn't everybody do it this way before?"

John Stuart Mill claimed that women tended to have fertile minds while men had focused minds (the words are my own, but I think I'm capturing his descriptions.) I'm not sure if it's true generally of men and women, but I do see people fall into those types.

Just ran across this quote from John Holt and thought it might apply to this discussion:

The true test of intelligence is not how much we know how to do, but how to behave when we don’t know what to do.

Ability to think outside the box

This may be anti-correlated with memory and the ability to follow instructions

I'd say somewhere between your "categorisation" and "thinking outside the box" axes would be taking ideas from one domain and figuring out their applications in others. That would be one example of creativity being aided by powerful memory.

Social intelligence

Is this a useful primitive category?

Not primitive enough. I'd subdivide it at least into something like "people-reading", "mind-theorising", "interest-tracking" and "performance". There are plenty of cases of people being good at one of those but terrible at another.

I also think expressive and language skills could usefully be added to the list. Musical and kinesthetic aptitudes could be added for completeless, although they're probably not within the scope of the "intelligence" you seem to be talking about.

I've often wondered about people who appear to be very smart, and do very stupid things.

I'd phrase it as people who are good at thinking (that could follow instructions, think outside the box, have a good short-term memory, etc.) failing to make good decisions, which can be attributed to several causes:

1) The decision doesn't require thinking as much as "hard-coded" instincts or experience in that domain - this would cover a lot of social domains like seduction, negotiation, reading people's mood, getting out of a fight, reassuring someone who's afraid. In some cases, relying on thinking can make things worse.

2) The decisions requires thinking, but for some reason thinking isn't actually used, or is overridden by an emotions, or is used to shoot oneself in the foot. This would include things like playing the lottery, choosing a career based on a superficial impression and no research, or coming up with clever reasons to keep believing in the pyramid scheme you signed into. Thinking about important and personal things might be especially painful.

I think your comments on medical doctors go some what too far. Doctors who approach medicine with an engineering perspective of "how can I fix this" are stupid - the effects of most interventions are subtle or counter-intuitive and thus can only be reliably determined by quality clinical trials.

Much of being a doctor comes down to pattern recognition - what you have consciously decided to memorise is only part of the story and lays only the foundations for future learning. For instance, even with the textbook in front of you I doubt most could competently perform a clinical examination - it is often difficult to tell the difference between normal variation and a pathological sign.

Performing a procedure is also not a simple as being a gigantic look up table, also you neglect that many medical doctors will be involved with research at some point in their careers as research plays a huge part of this profession.

Medical doctors must also apply their EQ to treat well, which is not not wrote learned. I do agree however that having a large knowledge base is a key part of the profession, more so than for engineers and such.

Regarding thinking outside of the box I do not think it would be anti-correlated with memory at all, in fact the opposite. True thinking out of the box doesn't happen by magic, it involves thinking about a problem and getting to know it totally intimately from there you can start to see new solutions. Additionally I think I have read that memory correlates strongly with problem solving and other forms of intelligence, and it may be that memory and cognition are really applications of the same fundamental thing - I've not completed by studies of cognitive science yet but it seems that information storage and computation aren't truely separate in neural networks.

Related: What Intelligence Tests Miss happens to specifically use the expression "smart but acting stupid" (and seeks to explain it via various biases and mindware problems).

here is an ad-hoc set of axes of intelligence

Upvoted because I think this approach is useful.

There's another axis of intelligence that I've frequently noticed: the ability to imagine consequences.

Rationalists are often bad at noticing success and failure.

Citation needed.

Maybe it's because we're good at following instructions - instructions on how to be rational.

What if the instructions say, loosely speaking, "observe, plan, act, measure, adapt"?

If the instructions say that, and people don't follow the "measure, adapt" part, then they're not good at following instructions.

If the instructions don't say that, then they're lousy instructions.

I'm assuming you know of Gardner?

Google Ment.if.ex, without the dots.

As something of a hobby psychoceramicist I found this to be a fascinating suggestion. Thank you :-)

Rationalists are often bad at noticing success and failure.

I have always thought that noticing success and failure was a key part of being a great rationalist. How can you improve if you can not tell a success from a failure? How can you decided to update or say oops?

Ability to notice success and failure

This. Up voted.