Ask HN: How to figure out if someone is smart during a casual conversation? Hi, I'd love to be able to figure out if someone is smart during an informal, casual conversation. Do you have any ideas? |
Ask HN: How to figure out if someone is smart during a casual conversation? Hi, I'd love to be able to figure out if someone is smart during an informal, casual conversation. Do you have any ideas? |
Quickness? Adaptability or rote responses? Knowledge? Trivia or domain knowledge? Ability to learn new ideas? Ability to analyze? Ability to memorize? Ability to improvise? Etc
You could probably ascertain surface level measures for those kind of questions in the course of a single conversation, but you’d only be seeing a sliver of their self in one conversation and it would be best to just ask the person “how smart do you think you are?” in some innocent way at an opportune moment in the conversation.
Here's my anecdata with a very narrow but pragmatic definition of "smart". When I did academic research, there was no correlation between any aspect of the casual conversation I held with students and their abilities in maths and CS theory. N=O(10).
It's stretching the Big Oh notation but it isn't terrible.
I wonder about instead using notation like
N = ~10
Edit: Just realised Alan Kay said this more succinctly. A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points.
http://www.actforlibraries.org/intelligence-and-personality-...
If you check the literature, I'd be extremely surprised if they are not highly correlated. Note also that IQ, which has issues of its own, is not the same as intelligence.
Also, I think I accidentally trick smart people into thinking I'm smart sometimes by just saying random things that turn out to have some unexpectedly humorous connection inside the smart person's brain. Sometimes I figure out the joke later, but often I don't. I think once this has happened people give me the benefit of the doubt when my random shit doesn't sync up to their preconceptions and just assume that they didn't get the joke this time.
Secondly, intelligent people modulate their communication to be what the people they are talking to expect. They won't use big words at the bar, but will totally change in an academic or professional setting.
One way that "smarter" than oneself is revealed is when a person predicts or anticipates something. That could be experience, or just indicates that they had already processed the situation to the same level.
I'd disagree. You can look at HN, for example. When we upvote something, it usually means that we've learned something from the conversation and left a little smarter.
Few people are generally smarter about everything, unless you're talking to say, Bill Gates. Most people are smarter in certain topics.
Here's my working formula at the moment:
`P = A * SUM([B * C * TopicA] + [B * C * TopicB] + [B * C * TopicC] [...])`
Where:
P = Perceived intellect
A = Coefficient that measures the ability to connect different concepts
B = Depth of knowledge of a topic
C = Ability to break down topic into concepts
The people I perceive to be smart come up with logically-sound answers to questions they don't know the answer to, based on past knowledge.
If I ask `what is X?`, they say `I don't know what X is, but based on Y and Z, it might be ...`
So if you're trying to identify if this person can come off as smart, perhaps a tactic could be asking them a question about a domain they are not an expert in.
"We are frightenly bad at making an accurate assessment of other people's competence, and the same is true for the closely related factor of intelligence⁰. In one experiment, only 20 percent of people tested were able to assess the intelligence of others with higher accuracy than a random number generator.
[…]
To assess intelligence, which is colesely related to competence, there are, however, some generally valid factors. The following items are charcteristics of an actual high intelligence¹:
• speaking quickly • using easily understandable speech and standard English • making eye contact while talking • displaying self-confident behavior • reacting quickly and with little hesitation
[…] Unlike many of the previously discussed points, however, these five items are also indicators of actual high intelligence. All of these points can rather easily be evaluated by mere observation. Interestingly, it is easier for us to make an accurate evaluation if we only hear people and do not see them - visual factors often are misleading."
[0] Reynolds, D.J. & Gifford, R. (2001). The sounds and sights of intelligence: A lens model channel analysis. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 27, 187-200.
[1] Murphy, N. (2007). Appearing smart: The impression management of intelligence, person perception accuracy, and behavior in social interaction. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 33, 325-39
and
[2]
CAUTION: if you do this, you will unmask far more poseurs than genuinely interesting people. Be prepared for the social fallout.
I've found myself as a mathematician that conversations just flow with other people who have a math background in ways that they don't with other people. It's probably due to a conversational deficit on my part.
As others have mentioned, something really important is mental flexibility, the ability to look at new evidence and adjust your opinion. You can find out if people have this ability in a casual conversation, but it would have to be a long casual conversation.
And it is orthogonal to all those things in me.
Also, listening duration is a measure of attention not intelligence.
Next, run this test on yourself. Be more human.
You can also open up fixed topics that everyone has an opinion about. Politics, religion/life, economics, and investing are nice. Everyone intelligent has some kind of investment strategy. A lot of people at least try to figure out religion at some point. A lot of intelligence is understanding that you could be wrong, and dealing with that. If someone straight up says, "Communism bad, end of story," without trying to understand why communism is bad, they're likely not very smart.
"Did you hear the one about the cannibal who passed his friend in the street?"
1. generating new and unusual humor
2. spotlessly logical grammar, aside from interruptions like changing an argument mid-sentence
3. understands a huge vocabulary (note: doesn't necessarily use it)
None of those is going to get you very far. It's also very verbal-oriented.
I'd say it is terrible. O(10) is O(1), and it doesn't make a lot of sense in this context (measure of growth to represent a scalar).
Plenty of literature referenced there.
At best, not even a modest correlation (r=.42, at best, r=.06 at worst) for openness.
The link you provided itself suggests that old frumpy (not open by some definition) people are correlated, and young open (by some definition) people are correlated. So at least one view of openness per se is allegedly thought by some papers to be only correlated when combined with another factor (age). However the link you provided only appears to be a library community-related website vaguely summarizing a very small selection of third party papers, which is basically equally as good as our random HN comments for citeability.