Re: Competent Elites

"Probably most ambitious people are starved for the sort of encouragement they'd get from ambitious peers"

This, I think, is one of the roots of smart people getting into weird stuff. Contrarians, contra-cultural types, conspiracy theorists (the inventors, not the believers) and the like are usually very smart, they just don't optimize their smarts in a good direction, so a newly minted smart person will feel attracted to them. The end result are very suboptimal communities of smart individuals going in all kinds of weird directions.

That's my case, mind. Finding the rationalist community has helped me put breaks on some of my weirdest aspects, but by no means on all of them. Which might or not be smart of me, no idea yet at this point.

That's impressive, considering D-K isn't real.

The smartest people tend to be ambitious.

If this is anecdotal, wouldn't it be easily explained by some sort of selection bias? Smart ambitious people are much visible than smart, definitely-not-ambitious people (and by definition of "smart", they have probably better chances at succeeding in their ambitions than equally ambitious less smart people).

Anecdotally, I have met some relatively smart people who are not very ambitious, and I can imagine there could be much smarter people one does not meet except by random chance, because they do not have much ambition. Also anecdotally, I would not be surprised if not-so-ambitious smart people would be content with a "default", probably mildly successful career path and opportunities for a person like them tend to find.

When someone is smarter than you, you cannot tell if they're one level above you or fifty because you literally cannot comprehend their reasoning.

I take issue with this claim, as I believe it to be vastly oversimplified. You can often, if not always, still comprehend their reasoning with additional effort on your behalf. By analogy, a device capable of performing 10 FLOPS can check the calculation of a device that can perform 10 GFLOPS by taking an additional 10^9 factor of time. Even in cases of extreme differences in ability, I think there can be simple methodologies for evaluating at levels above your own, though admitted it can quickly become infeasible for sufficiently large differences. That said, in my experience I think that I've been able to evaluate up to probably 2-3 std deviations of g above my own. That said, I admittedly haven't taken the effort/social cost of asking these individuals their IQ as a proxy to semireliably validate my predictions.

Too much self praise.

It’s interesting to read posts like this and “Fierce Nerds” while myself being much less ambitious/fierce/driven than the objects of said essays. I wonder what other psychological traits are associated with the difference between those who are more vs less ambitious/fierce/driven, other things being equal.

Differences between geniuses are hard for non-geniuses to measure. You can understand everything that's going through the head of someone dumber than you. When someone is smarter than you, you cannot tell if they're one level above you or fifty because you literally cannot comprehend their reasoning.

Whether or not you can understanding everything going through the mind of someone dumber then you depends on whether you have access to the mental models that they use. If a person has professional expertise in a subject for which you have no expertise there's  a good chance that you won't be able to follow all their thoughts even if you are smarter. The same goes for cultural differences. 

Quite practically, I do have an example where someone who professes to have a much lower IQ then me (had it tested 40 years ago in childhood as significantly under 100) is able to say things that take me three months to understand. 

On the flipside plenty of thinking that comes easy to people with a high IQ just takes more effort to follow for people of a lower IQ but isn't impossible. On person in our local rationality group from time to time says that they their intelligence limits them to follow arguments. That mostly based on their ability of have complex arguments in their head. It doesn't make it impossible for them to think through individual parts of the argument in pieces and then come to the same conclusion. It just makes things more difficult.

The smartest people tend to be ambitious.

There are plenty of smart people who are ambitious but if you look at Mensa there are plenty of people in Mensa that aren't ambitious.

It's well settled that qualitative data, defined as "non-numerical data that approximates and characterizes,"

This, unfortunately, is not even close to being a useful definition, as it does not permit us to identify instances of "qualitative data" in the wild. (Unless, of course, your contention is that everything that is not a number is "qualitative data", in which case the merit of your definition is questionable for a rather... different reason.)

As such, I employed qualitative data in the form of quotes from some pretty bright folks

To wit: if "quotes from some pretty bright folks" is sufficient to count as "qualitative data", then I submit that "qualitative data" is a completely useless category, both in and of itself and as a tool for making arguments. (I note that you continue to neglect to respond to the second half of my question, which asked why you believed your use of "qualitative data" strengthened your argument. Your continued lack of response on this point is telling, as are your rather ham-handed attempts to draw attention away from said inability to provide a response—usually by way of playground-level ad hominem attacks.)

But, to play in your lane for just a bit: since "quotes from pretty bright folks" seemingly count as "qualitative data" (which is seemingly meant to be compelling), here is my irrefutable counterargument to your initial claim, which consists of just the same type of "qualitative data" as you yourself employed:

"As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live." —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"Success is most often achieved by those who don't know that failure is inevitable." —Sylvia Plath

I await your response to this crushing rebuttal, which I am sure will consist of an immediate concession to the unyielding validity of the data I have provided.

You have a point, but you are taking it too far.

For an actually smart person with high IQ, there needs to be a moment when after correcting for DK and applying basic humility, the result still says "I am smarter than average". Otherwise, how would they e.g. make the career choices?

If it is known that only smart people can succeed at some school or job, then following this rule only the dumb people should ever apply, because the smart ones would say "eh, everyone says that I am smart, and I even achieved a few awesome things and won a few competitions, but I also know that I am not perfect, there are many things I don't understand, and stupid people are known to be overconfident... so, all things considered, I am probably just an average guy, so I don't have a chance."

I do, in fact, understand the difference between those two things. It's precisely because I understand the difference that I asked you what I did.

Now, let me repeat the question (with some additional emphasis on the important bits): what is the phrase "qualitative data" doing in your comment; in what sense do you believe your initial response to gwern contained "data" at all, qualitative or otherwise; and moreover, why do you believe that your use of this phrase (incidentally combined with other interesting phrases, such as "stats wonk") will cause readers of your comment to believe that it is more likely to be true*, rather than less?

*In fact, I had originally intended to use the word "rigorous" here, but I suspect based on your previous comments that you would not, in fact, agree that "rigor" is a thing to strive for when making arguments; thus I opted for the less specific (but more generally agreed upon) criterion of likelihood. (Whether rigor is in fact an important desideratum is a related discussion to this one, of course, as is--to be somewhat glib--what disregarding said desideratum says about one's own general quality of thought.)

This sounds to me like a claim that lsusr isn't as smart as he thinks he is. If it is, what's your 90% confidence interval for lsusr's IQ? (so how smart do you think he actually is)

One thing I've noticed is that the really smart people actually don't tend to act like they are. They don't spend a lot of time trying to convince those slower than they are about things -- they don't really "argue down" as it were.

qualitative data

What is this phrase supposed to mean, and why is it supposed to make your argument sound more convincing, rather than less?

A curious focus on IQ in your previous post, some narrow definition of intelligence, and labeling binary superiority between people as a result of those things. This strikes me as strange and shallow with strong egotistical motivation.

This feels very much like a piece to simply pat yourself on the back.