Why Smart People Are Stupid

The research is using SAT score as a proxy for general intelligence... I wonder if this sort of heuristic short-cutting actually correlates with test-taking ability more than it correlates with intellgence.<p>A lot of "test-taking" training basically consists of saving time by training <i>away from</i> full reasoning, in favor of cheap-and-good-enough heuristics. Furthermore, those heuristics are over-fitted to the particular problem types on standardized tests. I wonder how much of this study is actually measuring their ability to trigger test-taking instincts on problem types they're not designed for.

For the types of testing that he's doing, I suspect he's measuring boredom more than anything else, especially since he's testing largely in a university setting. Intelligent people are accustomed to being bored with endless entry-level evaluation exams, and at first glance this looks like it's just one more of them. And because the stakes here are so low (essentially zero), lots of people will just fly through without really reading and analyzing the question.<p>What he's seeing isn't something new, it's something so old that it's part of popular culture: the absent-minded professor syndrome. It's the stereotype of the brilliant physicist forgets what he's supposed to buy at the supermarket because he's thinking about their quantum properties. Analytic people are horrible at things that don't interest them.<p>Pay the students $50 for each correct answer, and there's not a doubt in my mind that the results will be the complete opposite of what he's seeing now.

The bat-ball and lily-pad questions are 2 of the 3 questions on a short test called the 'Cognitive Reflection Test' (or 'CRT') meant to measure whether people make the effort to think beyond the obvious (but wrong) answer.<p>By using those examples, after its headline, this article seems to imply smarter people do worse on these CRT questions. But that is <i>not</i> what I've read elsewhere -- which is that the CRT is positively correlated with other quantitative measures of intelligence (including IQ scores, SATs, and high-school/collegiate grades). 'Smart' people (by those measures) do tend to do better on the CRT.<p>And if you read this article carefully, you see that while it uses these two CRT questions as examples of tricky questions, when it discusses the results about awareness-of-bias not helping alleviate bias, it isn't necessarily saying smart people do worse on those two CRT questions. It's a bit muddled in what it's saying, and reviewing the linked abstract doesn't help much either. The paper is evaluating some very specific things under the umbrella term 'cognitive sophistication', which might not map to what we usually call 'smart' or even 'test-smart'.<p>BTW, I personally think the CRT may be especially useful for evaluating software/systems proficiency. The bat-ball question probes understanding of algebra; the lily-pad question probes understanding of geometric growth (and someone accustomed to powers-of-2 will find it easier); the third question probes understanding of parallelism and projected-rates-of-work.<p>That third question happens to be:<p>"If it takes 5 machines 5 minutes to make 5 widgets, how long would it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets?"<p>(A software person might also think of it as: "If it takes 5 cores to compress 5 GB in 5 minutes, how long would it take 100 cores to compress 100 GB?")

Link to the study linked in the article (PubMed prepublication abstract):<p><a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=west%20stanovich%20meserve" rel="nofollow">http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=west%20stanovich%20m...</a><p>The psychologist Keith R. Stanovich is quite controversial among other psychologists precisely because he writes about what high-IQ people miss in their thinking, but his studies point to very thought-provoking data and deserve to be grappled with by other psychologists. I have enjoyed his full-length book What Intelligence Tests Miss<p><a href="http://yalepress.yale.edu/YupBooks//book.asp?isbn=9780300123852" rel="nofollow">http://yalepress.yale.edu/YupBooks//book.asp?isbn=9780300123...</a><p>which meticulously cites much of the previous literature on human cognitive biases and other gaps in rationality of human thinking.<p>And here is the submitted article's link to a description of the Need for Cognition Scale:<p><a href="http://www.liberalarts.wabash.edu/ncs/" rel="nofollow">http://www.liberalarts.wabash.edu/ncs/</a>

"Although we assume that intelligence is a buffer against bias—that’s why those with higher S.A.T. scores think they are less prone to these universal thinking mistakes..."<p>This fallacy is at the heart of the matter. Intelligence and resistance against bias are only loosely correlated. Such resistance comes not from intelligence but from careful study and mental exercise, e.g. looking at various important ethical and philosophical arguments and analyzing them.<p>This is like saying all large people are strong. There is <i>some</i> dependance but a smaller gym-fly can kick a slacker giant's ass. The sad thing, while it is obvious that you have to exercise your body to be healthy and strong, the fact that the same is quite through fro your brain is often overlooked.

Intelligence is overrated as a metric, from the get-go. Being smart doesn't mean anything - accomplishing something, whether that be writing a book, founding a company, making a new scientific discovery, sculpting a masterpiece, etc., is a much better metric.<p>Unfortunately everyone seems to be hung up on the "idea" of being smart, as if having a high IQ somehow constitutes an accomplishment.

If you'd rather not just accept your current level of cognitive bias, the web site Less Wrong has a bunch of articles by and for people trying to become less wrong about things. Anecdotally, I've noticed that people I know via the Less Wrong community tend to be decidedly less full of crap than average, so it seems to work. For example, here's a series of articles on the subject of avoiding excessive attachment to false beliefs, which I found to be generally entertaining and insightful:<p><a href="http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/How_To_Actually_Change_Your_Mind" rel="nofollow">http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/How_To_Actually_Change_Your_M...</a><p>Any of those articles are a good place to start, so don't be intimidated by the amount of stuff there.

I'm reading the book Priceless by William Poundstone which discusses the work of Kahneman and Tversky (among others) in great detail as it relates to the psychology of pricing (excellent read, btw).<p>This is O.T from what the article is saying but mildly O.T (meaning on-topic) and I'd love to hear HN's opinion on this.<p>One of the problems presented in Priceless is:<p>Would you rather $3,000 as a sure thing, or an 80% chance of $4,000 and a 20% chance of nothing<p>versus:<p>Would you rather a $3,000 loss as a sure thing, or an 80% chance of losing $4,000 and a 20% chance of losing nothing.<p>The erroneous path that most people take, in the eyes of these researchers, is that they set their base reference point at the sure thing, ie. they say "well the $3,000 is a sure thing so I can assume I have it".<p>If you do that, then your answers are different:<p>In the first instance you keep the $3,000 (because it becomes an 80% chance of winning $1,000 versus a 20% chance of losing $3,000).<p>In the second instance you go to court (because it's an 80% chance of losing $1,000 versus a 20% chance of winning $3,000).<p>However if you don't "rebase" your reference point, then you would make the same decision in both cases - that is you would take the 80% of $4,000 bet because it's "worth" $3,200.<p>As much as I realise what they're saying and they say it's statistically incorrect to do this, it really seems to me the most sensible way to make the decisions (which is, I guess, exactly what they're saying right? I'm human, ergo fallible to this kind of illusion).<p>The thing that kills me is this: if this is a one time thing, I'd rather be sure of the $3,000. If I'm buying and selling these bets all day, then sure I should take the $4,000 at 80% because even if I lose this round, the next time I take the bet will make up for it (ie. law of large numbers).<p>But what this problem doesn't address is how <i>often</i> I get this opportunity? Depending on my circumstances, $3,000 could be a life changing opportunity, ie. if I "win" $3,000 or $4,000, my circumstances are essentially the same so I should always go for the sure thing. If I lose $3,000 or $4,000 I'm equally screwed, so I should take the risk and try and win in court.<p>What am I missing?

This explains, when you look in your git repository for who created a bug...<p>When you find it and it's by someone else, it was obviously a stupid, idiotic error that you would never make.<p>When you find it and it's your own, it was obviously an understandable mistake that anybody could have made.<p>Particularly if you consider yourself a great coder.<p>:)

Got the ball and bat one right, and the lily pad one. I must not be as smart as I hoped :-(<p>I think it comes down to having a value system where you'd rather be wrong and corrected (even if you have to do it yourself), as opposed to always projecting yourself as"perfect". Once you accept you aren't perfect, its easier to work towards perfecting what you've got.

Well, at least people are collectively smarter today compared to 100 years ago - the percentage of people who can answer those questions correctly has gone up considerably :-)...<p>Also, I just <i>hate</i> these kind of questions - they've always been used to prove that I'm stupid by those who knew the answers, and they're not solving anything useful - I need the problem to solve something I care about in order for my brain to fully focus on it and "do the math"...

FYI the tallest tree in the world is ~ 116 m or 379 feet.<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperion_(tree)" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperion_(tree)</a>

For all of the high and mightiness of this article, this bugged me:<p>In a lake, there is a patch of lily pads. Every day, the patch doubles in size. If it takes 48 days for the patch to cover the entire lake, how long would it take for the patch to cover half of the lake?<p>If a lilypad is 20 square inches (which is probably conservative), and you started with 1 lilypad, after 48 days of doubling it would cover 1.4MILLION square miles. That is 44 times the surface area of Lake Superior.<p>I get the point of the question, but if you're trying to play "gotcha" on people, at least ask a reasonable question.

My takeaway is that smart people are in fact fairly dumb, in other words even fairly bright specimens of homo sapiens make stupid mistakes and irrational decisions quite often because of this shortcutting.<p>I also think that on the other hand those types of shortcuts are actually probably very useful aspects of our human intelligence.<p>I think that within 50 years or so we will see new species/upgraded humans or AIs that actually don't have those problems, because they will have built-in checks and alternative types of intelligence that rely on those shortcuts less.

I highly recommend reading "Predictably Irrational" by Dan Ariely if you thought this article was interesting. It covers exactly this subject and makes for fascinating reading. I picked up the book about a week ago via some other post linked here on HN and I'm loving it.<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Predictably-Irrational-Revised-Expanded-Edition/dp/0061353248/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&#38;qid=1339561700&#38;sr=8-1" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/Predictably-Irrational-Revised-Expande...</a>

Got the lily pad one. I still cannot believe I said 10 cents on the first one with a completely non-sarcastic chuckle.<p>This article reminds me of pg's reasons to have a co-founder to avoid being delusional. Better be proven wrong on the inside than on the outside.<p>edit: Although on second thought, I think this bias theory probably extends to organizations as well. Probably that's why big companies sometimes can't see the obvious which a startup does.

Full text: <a href="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5317066/2012-west.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5317066/2012-west.pdf</a>

Well I got both those questions right by following the heuristic that the most obvious answer off the top of my head would not be the answer.<p>To my mind on any test that was supposed to be hard the appearance of any obvious an answer triggers me to check for the proverbial trick question.<p>On the other hand, most brain puzzler type questions that get discussed on HN (for example interview questions at Google) I find to be damn hard. I can't imagine that "smart" people would do worse than "stupid" people on truly hard problems. I guess that is the area of bias being pointed to in the OP.

All of this is covered (much better)in Kahneman's 'Thinking, Fast and Slow'.

Here's a good mental test for the author:<p>When you're done with an article for the "Frontal Cortex" section, read it aloud to yourself and smack yourself in the head with a frozen herring for every time you use the word "we", "us" or "our" in your article. If you have a headache when you're done, burn the draft and rethink the whole thing, b/c your article obviously suffers from a "smug we" bias.

I don't see why, when smart people are trained to be lazy, researchers are surprised that smart people are lazy.

Just a couple of weeks ago we had an article about why smart people don't think of others as stupid (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3984894" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3984894</a>), and now they're stupid themselves? I'm puzzled.

<i>This finding wouldn’t surprise Kahneman, who admits in “Thinking, Fast and Slow” that his decades of groundbreaking research have failed to significantly improve his own mental performance. “My intuitive thinking is just as prone to overconfidence, extreme predictions, and the planning fallacy”—a tendency to underestimate how long it will take to complete a task—“as it was before I made a study of these issues,” he writes.</i><p>Doesn't Kahnman distinguish between intuitive and deliberate thinking? So it could be possible to think better by distrusting our intuitions and deliberating more, right?

Well, the ball one I've heard before and the lilypad is obvious if you've been exposed to biology. Is this not more a matter of education not being applied to real-world cases and relying on theoretical teaching?

There is a simple cure for smart people to not be stupid, they can detect those errors and bias easily in other people thinking, but not in their own thinking because introspection doesn't work. So the cure is to play as if you were the actor in a theater, that is pretend that you are not yourself when you are thinking. You should imagine you are thinking as a known stupid person and by miracle you get smart and not so stupid.

This isn't big news for me. It took me about 7 years to understand two courses of high school while finishing my master of science. If you ask me the right question or try to teach me just the right matter in just the right way, a donkey will get it sooner than I do, and I'm talking about possibly years sooner. I might just not see the problem or I might think the wrong way, I don't know. There are things I just don't get.

New Yorker articles (that get posted here, anyway) always have some sort of take on things that attempts to bring down the good. Same for The Atlantic. I'm not saying they're always <i>false</i>, but there is a certain kind of thing that these publications are interested in, and it's a kind of thing that makes me feel dirty---or as if they're trying to make me feel dirty. Anyone else noticed this?

What did you think of first when you read about the bat and the ball problem? Also, what's your background (e.g. CS, Maths etc.)? As someone who has a relatively strong background in maths, I quickly saw the outlines of a simple, algebraic substituion problem. I'm quite interested in how people analyze problems, so I'd love to see how the HN community approached this.

I think this is more an issue of the English language. English is not a good way to speak math or logic. In the bat and ball question I mistakenly (and I'm guessing everyone who got it wrong) ignored the word "more". That word represents an operator and is therefore crucial to the question, but is extremely diminutive in terms of English language.

I answered the question correctly, which I'm sure the majority here probably did too. When someone asks a simple mathematical question, I always seem to give it more thought since I always know it must be a dodgy question. 4 years ago, I'd probably of answered the question incorrectly. But the baseball question is an obvious mindfuck.

So because I'm suffering from a deep case of the derp today, how are the first guess answers to those questions wrong?

Where can I find more of these questions?

I studied "Choice &#38; Behavior" at Penn -- the names Kahneman and Tversky were a common refrain. If you're looking to self-teach, my prof Jon Baron has a great course outline online: <a href="http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~baron/p153.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~baron/p153.html</a>

do we all think about the same thing at the same time or does Jonah Lehrer read HN religiously?<p>i _just_ watched that talk a couple of days ago because it was posted here: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4082308" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4082308</a>

Comments here reinforce the research.

These sort of questions always put me into "hold on, think about it" mode and statements like "Your first response is probably to take a shortcut" are simply not true. I'm actually more vulnerable to over-think a problem rather than provide a quick wrong answer.

If the lily pad patch was a mere 1 square inch, on the 48th doubling, the pond would have to be (check my math)about 70k square miles - or 10 times the size of Lake Erie. Those lilies would be consuming a serious amount of co2 during that last doubling!

Both those questions are trivial and I answered them correctly. This is in line with the article's conclusion: I don't consider myself very smart. I mean I had some moderate successes in my childhood at math competitions, I am a reasonably good programmer, but I am not very smart. I even failed at the on-site Google interview.<p>But here is the problem with the article: The people who I consider smarter than me (in the mathematical/IQ sense) also answer these kind of questions correctly. This includes my friend working at Google, some researcher mathematicians who I know from math forums who won serious math competitions as a child, etc... These questions are really-really trivial. The researcher mathematician guy who I know do not even make mistakes on 10x more tricky or hard questions, it is scary how he do not make mistakes and thinks incredibly fast. Something seems to be wrong with this study.

I remember the SAT as more about checking oneself's first reaction to a problem. They often try to trick you with the obvious answer. The GMAT and GRE were quite similar. I would often have to stop myself from taking shortcuts

A bat and ball cost a dollar and ten cents. The bat costs a dollar more than the ball<p><pre><code> bat + ball = 1.1 bat = ball + 1 2bat + ball = ball +1.1 +1 2bat = 2.1 bat = 1.05 ball =0.05</code></pre>

I think that smart people are also prone to falling for headlines like this. The reality is much more complex.

The last line "The more we attempt to know ourselves, the less we actually understand." is worrying me a bit.

Because they spend all day on HN?

Taking more shortcuts as I get older too - a constant battle to stop and think...

Because they don't ask enough questions.

No, research did't show that "we do this" or "our approach is that" or "humans aren't rational" -- what the research showed is that the <i>typical</i> person does this or that.<p>A similar experiment where people draw the wrong conclusions is the Milgram experiment. Yes, most people are obedient to authority figures and do what they are told. But not <i>everyone</i> acts that way.<p>This research likes to sweep the best human beings under the rug, as if being virtuous is not something to try to emulate, but is something to hide. This explains why the majority of people act the way they do. Perhaps if they were taught that their "we're only human" vices are not the ideal to emulate, perhaps if the best that humanity had to offer were put forth as the ideal instead, then these lesser human beings who make up the majority would become what they might be and ought to be.

Now <i>that's</i> the kind of headline I'd give to my article if I wanted it to reach the top of the HN front page.

I notice this all the time, all over the place. It drives me nuts, to the point that I am now extremely skeptical of what we call "intelligence". Taleb's "The Black Swan" really opened my eyes to this. He talks a lot about how we reason in ways that do not correspond to reality.<p>I don't know what right is, but I know the way we currently think about intelligence is wrong.

I find the abundance of "See? Smart people are actually dumber than I am!" posts amusing.

English is a terrible language for formalism: News at 11.