The Limits of Intelligence and Me: Domain Expertise

A rather out-of-context takeout of:

I recently read of a certain theist that he had defeated Christopher Hitchens in a debate (severely so; this was said by atheists). And so I wrote at once to the Bloggingheads folks and asked if they could arrange a debate. This seemed like someone I wanted to test myself against. Also, it was said by them that Christopher Hitchens should have watched the theist's earlier debates and been prepared, so I decided not to do that, because I think I should be able to handle damn near anything on the fly, and I desire to learn whether this thought is correct; and I am willing to risk public humiliation to find out. Note that this is not self-handicapping in the classic sense—if the debate is indeed arranged (I haven't yet heard back), and I do not prepare, and I fail, then I do lose those stakes of myself that I have put up; I gain information about my limits; I have not given myself anything I consider an excuse for losing.

I don't expect I can handle 'anything' domain-unspecifically on the fly. I thought I should be able to handle arguments William Lane Craig made, or tactics he used, on the fly. The entire article is about "Don't guess your strength when you can just test yourself", especially if the test is cheap, and the world doesn't end if I lose a debate to Craig. In any case, Craig declined to debate me, which makes me wonder if he's actually just careful in his choice of debating opponents.

I think this is sufficiently out-of-context that I object to the redacted quote and to its interpretation. The original quote is about finding out your ability level by using cheap/noncatastrophic tests.

Good post.

When I notice someone outperforming me in figuring out some part of the world, I like to ask why they're able to do that.

Sometimes the most obvious explanation is sheer IQ. There's just no way I'm going to master model theory as quickly as Paul Christiano or Eliezer Yudkowsky.

In other cases, the most obvious explanation is superior rationalist practice, though this happens less often because applied rationality isn't yet a well-developed field with a high ceiling of human performance, and I'm fortunate enough to be pretty involved with one tentpole of the field.

And with other people, the standout explanation is that they just know way more shit than I do. As it turns out, many of these people are Carl Shulman.

My current strategy for catching up with Carl, or at least for falling behind him less quickly, is to listen to nonfiction audiobooks at 2x speed whenever I'm traveling, and whenever my eyes have given up for the day but my brain still wants more. Then I flip open the Audible app on my phone, put on my eye mask, and start learning about Cold War nuclear security.

Of course, I can't remember the exact details of most of the content, but I remember enough to know where to look up those exact details, and I copy down particularly interesting passages from the ebook versions. I also suspect I'm slowly training my neural network to have better intuitions about which kinds of things do and don't happen in the world, though there are lots of ways that can go wrong, so I can't be sure.

Anyway, if you'd like to try this yourself, I maintain an updated and annotated list of audiobooks I've listened to.

I think I can somewhat identify with this.

Growing up I was always told I was really smart; I had teachers telling me I was the smartest in class, right in front of the other students. I got into the gifted children program and I got into the national-level math competition.

What did that all do? Did it make me grow into the next Einstein or Witten? Nope. All that praise just got to my head. At 15 my head was larger than the Hindenburg, and just as doomed to catastrophic failure.

By high school I didn't even study. I didn't put effort into anything. And soon enough my grades started dropping. Pretty soon I was not only not the top student at the school, I was barely the top student in my own circle of friends. Everyone was wondering what was wrong with me. Psychiatrists, counsellors, all that jazz.

Looking back I'm not sure what was wrong with me. I think I was just disillusioned at everything. Maybe I was even a bit depressed. Being the 'smart' kid resulted in my not having many friends and generally being alienated from the rest of the world.

It was only much later that I 'snapped' out of it, but I think that if I actually had a good motivator, a good teacher, someone with experience and wisdom, things might have turned out differently. But it's so easy to blame everyone but oneself, I guess. I suppose I'm the one who has to take most of the blame.

Anyway, I tried to catch up with everyone else but it had now become hard, because everyone had spent so much time solving math problems and physics problems. I remember being confused by some integral and one of my friends solving it just like that. I was amazed and incredibly jealous. I resolved to find out his secret. I kept an eye on him and it turned out he was spending ten hours a day at the library solving math problems. I couldn't imagine anyone putting that much effort into anything, cause I definitely hadn't ever put that much effort into anything. To my teenage self, ten hours a day seemed like herculean effort.

I had somewhat of your problem, but fortunately my comparison group consisted of famous scientists and mathematicians, and also competitive chess players -- so instead of thinking how smart I am compared to other people, I was more amazed at the stupidity I saw around me. Specific things that help put me in my place were being clobbered at chess by a kid half my height (much younger than me), getting clobbered at chess by a guy playing against 20 other people simultaneously (this happened on a regular basis with different such people), and realizing that even with the advantage of hindsight, I couldn't understand quantum and general relativity. So I've long known that I'm not memorably smart.

On the subject of embarrassing teachers: I had a college professor who thought endorphins were cells and another who thought only humans ever made tools. A claim he repeated even after I showed him videos of crows making tools.

I did not feel especially good about knowing better regarding these things (and I have many other stories on this topic). I never felt like I had all that much knowledge or special talents and, as I know actual geniuses, I was pretty sure I was not one.

I guess surrounding yourself with people smarter than you are could serve as a sort of humility preserver but apparently that doesn't always work.

As someone who thinks a lot about AI, the fact that domain expertise almost always trumps "raw" IQ seems to me to have very significant implications about the relationship between human learning, intelligence, and the structure of real world problems.

You left out discussion of domain specific intelligence, and I'd like to know why that is. Maybe it was intentional, maybe not. Because of this reason, I suggest your early misconceptions could have just as easily stemmed from misunderstanding what intelligence is (it's not like even the experts understand it well).

For example, it's easy to think you're the best at everything if you really are prodigiously talented just at math and merely very talented in other things like language. On top of this, consider the fact you're more likely to seriously compete in the domain you're best at. Getting perfect grades in other subjects doesn't count, because that's relatively easy.

acquiring domain expertise requires a certain minimum level of intelligence, which varies from field to field. It's only once you get beyond that minimum that more intelligence doesn't help as much as expertise.

I think you could have phrased this better. Whatever relevant intelligence you have, specific or G, helps you learn from experience faster. It always helps to be smarter than your competitors, no matter what the minimum entry level of the field is. I suggest the people who won the math competition were both the smartest and the hardest working.

I think it's possible in most cases there is no minimum entry level intelligence in other sense than time becoming the limit really fast.

This is a good picture of the value of experience.

If the system you're looking at is simple enough for you to entirely analyse and understand it when encountered, experience won't add anything. However even for smart humans this restricts you to pretty simple systems!

Experience allows you to observe and make models of the emergent patterns of high-level behaviour of a system, without understanding the details of how they follow from the lower-level details. In many complex systems this high-level behaviour can be very simple. For example the sun rises once every day. You could understand this in terms of the physics of the situation, but you can simply learn the pattern from experience.

Just as an aside, and not to criticize your frustration at your grade school math teacher, it may be worth spending some time thinking about whether negative numbers in fact exist and what exactly do you mean when you confidently assert that they do.

This post reminded me of this interview with Jeremy Howard, multiple-times winner of Kaggle data prediction contest. The article is titled "Specialist Knowledge Is Useless and Unhelpful" and includes this:

Q. How have experts reacted?

A. The messages are uncomfortable for a lot of people. It's controversial because we're telling them: "Your decades of specialist knowledge are not only useless, they're actually unhelpful; your sophisticated techniques are worse than generic methods."

It's only anecdotal evidence, but still; I think that becoming a domain expert always comes at the cost of certain inertia in thinking. "If all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like nail". An abacus expert may have spent years honing his techniques, but that would not help him much in a contest against someone equipped with a computer. The expert would be better off if had switched to the computer himself, which was psychologically hard, because he had so much more (subjectively) to lose, compared with unskilled novices.

Experience was mentioned in the comments, but one thing that is missing is emphasizing the value of the subconscious brain(System 1 in Kahneman terminology). A lot of things experts "know" they cant verbalize. Consider a chess master, through thousands of games he has internalized a lot of patterns and "intuitively" knows what moves to consider. He doesnt have to be particularly rational in his thinking or practicing of chess, just sheer repetition is what gave him the skills.

The real power is in the brain(System 1) automatically picking up the patterns without we being aware of it.