Java Grant
2024/07/16

Trying to be smart

Todo, run these all through a prompt then sort the outputs: The following comment was left on a thread titled whats_a_subtle_sign_that_someone_is_very intelligent. Please create 1-2 short bulletpoints of the key ideas from this comment:

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1e3d0sp/whats_a_subtle_sign_that_someone_is_very/

When someone can admit a mistake and they know they don’t know everything

having enough confidence to take responsibility for a mistake and commit to putting it right shows integrity and saying “I don’t know what you mean by ‘x’ can you elaborate” saves a lot of wasted time.

I say variations of “That’s a great question, and I don’t actually know the answer. Let me do some research and get back to you” at basically every presentation I’ve done at work, and it’s a great way to build credibility. They know that if I’m saying something I know it’s correct, and I’m not just guessing or assuming.

A lack of ignorance has a lot to with intelligence. When someone feels the need to constantly remind others about how “smart” they are, they are most likely not very smart at all. Unintelligent people are also very stubborn and can’t admit when they make a mistake because in their head, they think they already know everything. Intelligent people can admit they don’t know everything and will go to great lengths to research things before making claims.

I think self awareness is a large part of this and how it translates for me. The more self awareness a person has, the more their capacity for empathy grows which is itself a form of intelligence. But self awareness is many things. It’s knowing when not to speak, it’s accountability. But self awareness is a treacherous slope and there are many who are willing to distort what that self reflection is trained on. When the world tells these people that they’re ugly, that they’re unlovable, or not worth the effort, that becomes the object of their self awareness, and I think the intelligent, often being in need of acceptance, are deeply vulnerable in this sense.

When they take the time to filter through any possible misunderstandings in an argument by asking questions to help them better understand the idea that’s being presented, instead of immediately assuming their first interpretation of the argument is the correct one. Something that’s always bugged me is when my argument gets misunderstood, and then attacked from angles where supposed “errors” exist, when those errors rose out of the listeners own misinterpretation.

Being misquoted bothers me so much. Even when I’m not being serious, i pick my words deliberately, and when people try to paraphrase and call it a quote, the meaning is usually very different.

I can relate :/ sometimes I just have to ask “what is it you think I said?”. Only to find out the reason they where upset is not because of anything I said. Just what they heard. Though that said I am also not immune to it. It’s something you have to keep in mind when talking to someone. I try to think : ‘if this makes me upset why are they not upset? What reasoning do they use that makes this seem okay to say?’. Thinking of it that way better helps addres the actual confilct being had rarher then the surface level issues that grab the attention

Thinking first. Before doing or saying. Really f’g smart. They look at something new and divine how it works and what it does. They cognitively and intuitively “jump”. Making connections and learning in leaps that are not obvious. Looking at an electrical schematic and understanding it without knowing about electrical systems.

I always assume a misunderstanding is my fault and try to clarify the argument so I know I’m not misunderstanding them. Only then do I fully stand my ground if they are in the wrong. What I hate is when I ask questions and people just answer with “that’s how it it.” That sentence will never be good enough for me. I am not so good at the social stuff so people see it as me trying to prove them wrong when in reality I am always trying to prove them right by trying to understand their side.

They’re very good at problem solving. Even if it’s something they have no experience with they always approach the problem from the right angle

I’ll add on to this by saying they know when they don’t know. And because of that, will take the opportunity to learn so that they do know, rather than continuing to bumblefuck their way through a problem, which sometimes is the right angle to start with by learning what is what first. The know-it-all pretenders will just continue slamming that square peg into a round hole until it fits. Then the next time someone opens a control cabinet it’s a fucking mess of bodges and sometimes even bypassed safeties. Edit: everyone keeps mentioning bumblefuck. I am not the OG on that, credit to AvE on YouTube.

Exactly. One of the most intelligent people I Know taught me that it’s okay not to have the answers to everything. The quest for knowledge makes someone intelligent. We are always learning.

I remember being 12 or 13 and asking my mom how she knew everything. And not in the snotty preteen way,in the genuinely awed way. And she said she had a two part process. 1) she doesnt say things when she doesn’t know and 2) she knew how and where to find the answer to anything she wanted to know; the library.

You don’t need to know the answer to the problem, but you do need to know how to find the solution.

Sometimes you even need to figure out what the actual question is too before you can look for the solution.

My son is 11 and smart. I’ve been preaching this to him since he could talk. In this day and age, finding and understanding information is far more important than rote memorization. Comprehension is far more important than just reading the answer.

I grew up poor. My father’s motto was “Why pay someone to do something you can learn to do yourself?” If he didn’t know it, I watched him learn it from others or books. Plumbing, electrical, mechanical… he didn’t learn it to become a master, he learned just enough to fit his needs at the time. I still carry that mindset to this day, hence my proficiency- I know a little bit about a lot of things. I’ll never be an expert at anything, but I don’t pretend I know everything either. Raised my kids to be able to say three phrases: Thank you, I’m sorry, and I don’t know. If you can be humble enough to not know, you can be smart enough to learn it.

My all time favorite thing to say is “I know enough to know that I don’t know enough.” A coworker said that once that about something and I respected the hell of of him for it.

I’ve spent my career in tech cleaning up the messes of those who came before. I always seek to understand why a thing is being done without presuming to know from the off. And it turns out there’s a name for that: Chesterton’s fence.

“You’re afraid of making mistakes. Don’t be. Mistakes can be profited by. Man, when I was younger I shoved my ignorance in people’s faces. They beat me with sticks. By the time I was forty my blunt instrument had been honed to a fine cutting point for me. If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you’ll never learn.” Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury

I always say, troubleshooting is a lot of figuring out what the problem isn’t which will point you to what it most likely is. I say that because a lot of times I’m troubleshooting systems I’m not 100% sure on how they even work, so I have to piece the puzzle together via the things I DO know about before I make inferences on the things I don’t know

This is me. I find that I’m constantly looking things up and trying to learning new stuff because there’s just so much to learn in general when it can to living life. Just trying to be a functional human being means constantly having to pick up skills along the way, because you’re always faced with situations where you realize that you need to figure things out. For example, I’m in the process of buying my very first home. As I was thinking about being a first time home owner I quickly realized that I do NOT KNOW anything about home maintenance and proper home management. So I decided to start educating myself on the subject. It turned out there is a LOT to learn, and a lot that needs to be done regularly to keep a house in good condition over time. So now I’ve been writing to do lists, gathering relevant information, and making a list of everything I need to do when I move in and when I need to do it. Honestly, it’s a lot. Especially considering that my family taught me ZERO basic life skills. But it’s not unmanageable. It just means that I’m starting the race behind other people who are ahead of me because they already know all this stuff. But as long as I educate myself there’s no reason I can’t do it. It’s just going to take a good amount of self educating. Thankfully self help books exist for most topics. So I already picked out some good books on house structures and how they work, home management, lawn care and gardening, finances, cooking, cleaning, and more.

I’m definitely not a genius but when I started living on my own, I was shocked at how many people lack even basic problem solving skills. Google and YouTube are your friends, use them!

However now it’s becoming a bigger problem as people can’t even figure what to search for or how to apply the knowledge gained (also they have a hard time weeding out any misinformation) In my line of work (IT Security/Coding) I search the Internet all day for answers to things. It real easy when searching for the specific problem gives you the specific answer. It’s a bit harder when searching gives you an answer to another problem that you can maybe apply to fix your issue. That’s where the intelligence comes in.

Its kind of funny, I took at test a few years ago, for some programming course as part of my engineering degree. The test was done on a computer, it was in-person in a lab with people monitoring you to make sure you didn’t cheat, but it was open book you had access to PDFs of all of the lectures. I did not study at all, because I thought it would be easy and I had more important classes to study for. And I was right, for pretty much every question I could just copy a few relevant words, go through all of the different PDFs, and use ctrl+F to find the section on the question. From there I’d read the slide, figure out what the answer was, and put it in. I forget exactly what grade I got, but it was in the mid 90’s. I hardly knew any of the questions from reading them, and even the ones I did I went to double check in the PDFs, because why would I not? The class average was in the 70’s. Apparently the majority of my graduating class did not understand how to use ctrl+F to get information from a PDF. I genuinely don’t understand how you can graduate as an engineer and not have figured that out at some point.

Effectively doing research, interpreting basic statistics, and finding answers really should have its own mandatory class in middle or high school. Most people don’t really know the bar for what constitutes actual research, and just searching something on google usually only gives very surface level results. Knowing how to find good information is essential. That’s why I always roll my eyes when people say they “did their own research”, and it’s always just some post on social media or an article about the topic. I’m like, honey, you wouldn’t know a primary source if it hit you in the face. They don’t know the pain of reading through the crunchiest research papers just so you can use one piece of it as a citation for your paper.

I feel like the search engines themselves are making the issue worse. I was trying to fix an issue with a washing machine at the weekend. Even with strings and modifiers like “[SKU] +troubleshooting +balance -review” still kicked up 90% adverts and review sites. Search engines are no longer about searching, they’re about separating you from your money as swiftly as possible. That makes it really hard to actually extract information from them.

People think I’m an expert on “fixing computers” cause I’m always able to help them when they text me. I’m not an expert, but I am very good at using Google and YouTube.

Yes, sometimes knowing what to ask is the tricky part. I’ve found you get better the more you do it. Especially for a specific thing in an unfamiliar field. There’s always a lexicon.

Even if you do know what to search for; the bigger problem is the right answer isnt always easy to find, as search engines now just show the websites with the most hits and sponsered first. I’ve scrolled through 20+ pages look for something and couldnt get the right answer. Added reddit or Quora to the query and found it right away,

When I was in college, we had a class called Information Gathering. The whole class was writing a research paper. One project, one grade. We called it Info Hell. This was in the mid-00’s, so the Internet landscape was a lot different than what we have now. We also had to use a lot of book and academic paper sources. I credit that class, as much as I hated it, with my ability to know how to search for information. It is one of the best skills I took from college.

i remember i needed to replace a lightbulb in the shifter of my Dodge Neon and i couldn’t find instructions to take it apart since who fixes an economy car that old but i managed to figure it out by watching a center console disassembly for a PT cruiser because they used the same parts. I probably wouldn’t have figured it out if i didn’t know the PT/Neon were very similar

I don’t think it’s the lack of googling/search capabilities, rather it’s a lack of initiative. People who spend mental energy to figure out what possible solutions are and proposing them are rare. It’s the hardest quality to screen interview candidates for, IMHO.

Theoretically you could teach a chimp very sophisticated and complex tasks, but the theory and logic is where intellect comes in handy.

I had a guy who programmed machines for factories tell me something similar. It went something like, “You can program a machine to do nearly anything, except tell when it’s fucking up.”

I pointed out sensors and stuff, and he basically said that while those do help prevent catastrophic damage, they still have to be set up. So if the sensors are botched or set up badly, the machine thinks it’s fine to slam into a plate of steel 50 times a second regardless.

This astonishes me in the professional world. So many people will just not even google a simple issue they’re having. Your email client isnt updating? Have you tried, I dunno, hitting sync? Or googling it? Or restarting the software? Or your internet connection? I don’t even work in IT but I’ve had so many coworkers in fairly high-paying jobs who could not conceptualize even basic problem solving steps for things.

The people at work thought I was a genius after I prepared a Request For Proposal for my dept. I had called another school district and asked them to send me theirs lol. Had the clerk just type it word for word and just changed the parts related to us. 🤷‍♀️. Why start from scratch?

Knowing how to choose relevant search terms and pick through the results to find the best answers for a given context are important skills to have, and many very intelligent people do not have them — but these skills can be taught. The critical thought aspects of this process may be easier for more intelligent people to master.

This is why we have Education. So you can skip rediscovering everything from 2+2, to “how to sew,” etc. Hopefully school would teach 'problem solving’and how to use old info ilon new problems.

Yeah… and even in schools they then teach you how to problem solve. Education isn’t having past information, its being able to build upon it. Which is why problem solving skills is included. You can google the answer, but can you get to that a close answer in a reasonable amount of time? No one wants to hire the person who can google, they want someone who knows what the problem is and how to solve it.

How often they are confident in saying “I don’t know”.

I like to call it being smart enough to know how stupid you are.

Exactly. And being a specialist in one area often makes you acutely aware how limited your knowledge is across other areas.

They are ok with being perceived as “stupid” by asking questions - if we hold back in fear, we’ll never truly learn. Plus it’s a good way to show others it’s ok to question things if you don’t understand - better off if we’re on the same page instead of hoping things work out without being informed.

Understanding/appreciating nuance.

“I can hold two opposing ideas in my head at the same time” Anyone who is willing to do that is intriguing to me. Especially with polarizing issues. They might actually be interesting to talk to.

If you cannot understand and articulate an opposing position, you cannot evaluate its strengths and weaknesses, much less compare them to your own position.

A blog I used to follow actually did a contest called an “Ideological Turing Test”. Do you understand the other side’s position well enough to pass for someone who truly believes it? They’d get 4 people per issue, two per side. One pair remained in their true position, one pair switched, and all four posted position essays. The readers had to figure of which essays were swapped vs true believers. It was pretty fun, and many of them passed (i.e. the readers didn’t outperform chance).

Those people often get criticized for being hypocrites or going back and forth on an issue. To others, it will appear that they preach one thing, then practice another thing.

You can understand both sides of an issue and still think one is wrong

You can also understand both sides are wrong but pick the lesser evil based on the bigger picture

The thing is, if you’re going back and forth on an issue (or are "Both sides have a point"ing something), then you kind of have to be able to say why. A lot of people can’t, and that’s what leads to people calling even the ones who can hypocrites. Having said that, just because someone else calls you a hypocrite doesn’t necessarily mean that you are.

They feel challenged rather than threatened by new things, problems, ideas…

They can adapt their communication style — vocabulary, tone, content, etc — to fit the situation and people they’re talking to, and it seems completely natural.

I consider someone intelligent if they’re able to explain something incredibly complicated in simpler and more readily understood terms.

If I Had More Time, I Would Have Written a Shorter Letter Mark Twain

they ask really good questions and listen more than they talk

Honestly, after reading their work, debates, talks, podcasts, discussions, arguing, etc, I noticed they often use conditions in their sentences that’s not absolute. There’s also this saying “only a fool talks in absolute”. Tgey use: I think, many times, often times, usually, it’s possible, it could be IF … So it appears they talk as if “I can be wrong” or “based on what we know”. If you compare sentences so known unintelligent people they lack these conditions and voices absolutes only

I try my best to do this, Its really a red flag for me when people speak too confidently about things, especially when they are clearly doing so out of pure speculation.

They get excited sharing their knowledge and talk to people instead of at them. This probably isn’t a 100% guarantee that someone is intelligent but it’s something I’ve noticed more often in intelligent people than in people who are just knowledgeable.

My freshman college roommate was a mechanical engineer. One of the first nights we were in the dorms, we had pizza delivered. We didn’t eat it all, but the pizza box didn’t fit inside the dorm fridge. He went all out origami and transformed the box into a smaller, perfectly square box that did fit inside the fridge…in about 12 seconds. I’m pretty good at math, but not necessarily geometry. My mind was blown. I spent 35 years in academia between my student/teacher years and he’s still one of the three smartest people I’ve ever met. His ability to “just do it” is dumbfounding to me. His retirement project is transforming his father’s 1963 Mercedes convertible into a “hybrid” that has a small diesel engine that runs on vegetable oil along with a totaled Tesla Model S battery pack.

They ask good questions.

As a scientist, this is (to me) the most important quality an investigator can have. In modern times, simply knowing stuff off the top of your head isn’t really so important - we have such a vast, instantly accessible resource of information to tap into. What’s more important is probing an issue appropriately, figuring out what are the most pressing and important directions to take inquiries based on the landscape of knowledge and research and the potential implications and future directions of results. Essentially, it’s this weird ability to understand the unknown for what it is and approach it effectively.

Yea, asking good questions is a really underrated skill. I’m not “really intelligent” but I put a lot of work into asking good questions and it almost always pays off. An example is a couple weeks ago I was hanging out with my friends and someone was teaching all of us a new boardgame. I was asking questions when they felt needed and then one of my friends chimed in saying “how the fuck are you teaching me more about this boardgame than person explaining it?”. The thing I love about asking good questions is that the questions themselves can teach you something new that may be the lynchpin to fully understanding a concept. That “aha!” moment when it all clicks together can be so exciting.

Someone who can understand someone’s opposing view without having to agree with it or get angry over it.

I’ve been amazed over the years, that so many people take probing questions (so that I may better understand their position) as attacks, making the whole thing much more difficult than it needs to be. I’ve tried many different approaches, but I’ve failed to find one that works universally. “I’m not seeking a fight, I seek to understand. If I ask more questions, it’s because I’m yet to understand. Communication is a team activity and I need your help.” is about as close as I’ve gotten to a disarmament.

The problem I’ve encountered with probing questions is sea-lioning. It’s almost always Gen-X American males who enjoy being contrarian as their proof of intellect. But it’s just lazy pseudo-intellectualism. It’s bad faith questioning that is just to troll and feel superior. It forces people into conversations that are far from where the conversation should be. Instead of discussion what is happening on the 15th floor of the building, it’s discussing the the building foundation, each lower floor below it, and the neighborhood around it. Once you get frustrated at explaining a basic concept or it’s to something not relevant to the initial point, you’re attacked for being illogical, weak, unreasonable, etc.

I usually say something like “I don’t know anything about subject at hand so I’m trying to understand your point of view. I like to learn as much as I can so I’m able to work out where you’re coming from, even if my experiences are different. I find it fascinating to learn things about your way of thinking” Something like that usually strokes people’s egos enough that they no longer feel attacked (because I have had them react like that as well) and makes them want to explain their thoughts.

So this actually boils down to ancient tribal mentality of “us” vs “them”. If you’re part of “us” you don’t need to ask because you already know. If you’re part of “them” you’re a threat. This logic is the same reason political parties and sports teams have such die-hard followings. It works for religions too. Unfortunately, there is very little you can do to help someone else overcome this, or to bypass their of you being either “us” or “them”. For most people, your best bet is to convince them you’re an “us” as quickly as possible. If successful, you will be much more likely to get them to conversate about the topic, and explain things freely. Instead of feeling like they need to convince you or push you away, they’ll feel like their teaching a trusted member of the tribe.

I’ve found that eliminating physical objects between you and the person you’re trying to open up is a great place to start. If you can, sit next to them and not across from them. Try to mirror the way they’re sitting if you can. Start a dialog and in a couple of minutes shift the way you’re sitting (ex. open crossed arms) if you can make it an opening and not closing motion. If the person follows suit they’re open to talking to you. Now you can ask things like, I’m curious, how do you see/feel about Might not work every time but I’ve found success with it.

Omg thank you for vocalising how I feel. You ask a probing question and people get very defensive, they assume you are attacking them. If anything you’re giving them more opportunity to put forward their ideas. You can disagree with a pov however you can still want to know and understand their perspective. I always take the time to uderstand and peoples why, you never know what will get you think and seeing things in a different way. At school in the uk we have RE (religious education) this was where we learnt about many of the prominent religions in the uk (Christianity, Catholicism, Islam, Jewdaism, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhism ect). We discussed principals of the religions, what they celebrated, how they worked etc etc. we then went onto look at issues such as the Sanctity of life and euthanasia, abortion, terrorism etc etc, we would look at different perspectives, argue different pov even if they were not our own. I am forever grateful for that class and the teacher who facilitated many heated debates.

I had this realization about a year ago. Changed my life. I’m seeking to understand someone and their point of view and they get angry. Which then makes me angry and confused because I didn’t think I was doing anything wrong. In a lot of situations I’m arguing with someone that, based on their knowledge or experience knows more than me about a given thing, so I’m aware that I’m probably missing something and my opinion or understanding is likely incorrect, and I’m trying to figure it out. But instead I come across like a giant dick. They feel like “you asked my opinion, I gave it to you, and now you’re just non-stop arguing with me about why it’s wrong…fuck you!” My go to is just a simple “I’m not arguing with you…I’m seeking to understand…” when I notice they are getting frustrated. It tends to disarm enough, and then I make sure to concede any points openly as they come to demonstrate that I’m truly seeking to understand.

While I agree on the part of understanding opposing views without agreeing with them, getting angry over it may be an entirely legitimate response if the opposing view in question is hostile to the existence or fundamental rights of them or others. In extremis, would you argue that a Jewish interlocutor is less intelligent if they expressed anger over a neo-Nazi expressing the viewpoint that “the Holocaust was faked but the Jews deserved it”?

I find that highly intelligent people have the ability to think in complex hypotheticals while being nuanced. I find that Wise people have enough patience and forethought to consider longer term things and be considerate in ways that are hard to take into account.

Sure I’ll give a hypothetical example lol. Let’s say there are 3 possible causes to a problem, and that they each have a likelihood and severity of cost attached to them. A highly intelligent person would be able to: 1. Withhold acceptance of conclusions while considering the knowns and unknowns. 2. Understand the risk / benefit in scale of the severity of each of the 3 likely causes WHILE understanding that severity is completely different than likelihood that each one is the actual cause. 3. Act to focus on what’s important given the nuanced information presented, likely multiplying likelihood x risk to determine an empirical metric by which to prioritize action.

One thing I’ve noticed is that really intelligent people tend to be empathetic. They’ve quietly analyzed many situations and have thought critically about them.

Cognitive empathy VS affective empathy. Can empathize both by thinking through a situation and understanding human behavior and emotion and understanding why someone would feel a certain way because of that. And you can empathize by actually feeling the emotions someone else feels just interacting with them or hearing their story. Smart people can be really good at the first one. It’s not exclusive you can do both. But smart people can be particularly good at the first. Same with antisocial people and narcissists. It’s why they are good manipulators.

They don’t continually need to tell people how intelligent they are.

They have a nuanced perspective and are able to articulate it well. They understand that things tend not to be black-and-white, but shades of gray, and they listen intently to others during a conversation.

I worked with a lad who was very like this. He could make any conversation really intriguing and thought provoking, often causing people to reconsider their perspective and position. He was a HR manager that could defuse any situation, helping people mend bridges and resolving issues because he could get both parties to compromise and put aside resentment. He had IQ and EQ to go a lot further than the role he was in but he was happy and maybe that is another little tid bit of intelligence.

Being gracious when other people catch up to them. It means they’re very used to being in that situation and have realized that it’s not worth it to point out or make a big deal of being right in the first place.

If someone is actually intelligent, they don’t put down the intelligence of others or make others’ accomplishments seem small. I’ve never met a genuinely intelligent person who feels the need to directly (or even indirectly) hint that someone else is “not so smart.”

VERY quick wit. Not at all interested in proving how smart they are.

I usually find that creativity, humor, and verbal acuity are good signs of intelligence

I generally see lack of empathy, low open-ness, and seeing the world in absolutes as signs of low intelligence

Also, I notice many socially inept people tend to consider themselves intelligent almost just because they’re socially inept and/or not good at sports. It’s as if their ego needs something to value themselves on so they assume they must be smart It’s entirely possible that the “other” guy in your life who makes you insecure is taller, stronger, more charismatic, AND smarter. Such is life

Lastly, people (especially tech people) will often conflate technical/domain knowledge with intelligence which is absolutely not always the case. Yes there is a bare minimum intelligence required to be an engineer etc, but being an awkward senior engineer doesn’t mean you’re just too smart for normies to understand and lack of a specific domain knowledge has fuck all to do with intelligence