New IQ Research Shows Why Smarter People Make Better Decisions (phys.org) 64
alternative_right shares a report from Phys.Org: A new study from the University of Bath's School of Management has found that individuals with a higher IQ make more realistic predictions, which supports better decision-making and can lead to improved life outcomes. The research, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, shows that people with a low IQ (the lowest 2.5% of the population) make forecasting errors that are more than twice as inaccurate as those made by people with a high IQ (the top 2.5% of the population).
The research used data from a nationally representative sample of people over 50 in England (English Longitudinal Study of Aging ELSA), assessing their ability to predict their own life expectancy. Individuals were asked to predict their probability of living to certain ages, and these estimates were compared with the probabilities taken from Office for National Statistics life tables (a demographic tool used to analyze death rates and calculate life expectancies at various ages). The study controlled for differences in lifestyle, health, and genetic longevity.
By analyzing participants' scores on a variety of cognitive tests, as well as genetic markers linked to intelligence and educational success, Chris Dawson, Professor of Economics and Behavioral Science at the University of Bath, showed that smarter individuals tend to have more accurate beliefs about uncertain future events - they are more skilled at assessing probability. Individuals with a higher IQ are significantly better at forecasting, making fewer errors (both positive and negative) and showing more consistent judgment compared to those with a lower IQ.
The research used data from a nationally representative sample of people over 50 in England (English Longitudinal Study of Aging ELSA), assessing their ability to predict their own life expectancy. Individuals were asked to predict their probability of living to certain ages, and these estimates were compared with the probabilities taken from Office for National Statistics life tables (a demographic tool used to analyze death rates and calculate life expectancies at various ages). The study controlled for differences in lifestyle, health, and genetic longevity.
By analyzing participants' scores on a variety of cognitive tests, as well as genetic markers linked to intelligence and educational success, Chris Dawson, Professor of Economics and Behavioral Science at the University of Bath, showed that smarter individuals tend to have more accurate beliefs about uncertain future events - they are more skilled at assessing probability. Individuals with a higher IQ are significantly better at forecasting, making fewer errors (both positive and negative) and showing more consistent judgment compared to those with a lower IQ.
in other words (Score:3, Interesting)
Whatever we call "thinking", "consciousness", "mind", "intelligence", "sentience", (and I don't want to descend into supernatural/magical thinking words here like "soul") are just not well defined words from an era bygone, where we didn't even know what we had inside our heads, we were not aware of the existence of neurons etc. Those words are just very rough definitions (aka bad prediction models) for what was going on inside our heads.
Maybe we are just prediction machines at times (system2) and parrots (system1/LLMs) most of the time.
Re:in other words (Score:4, Interesting)
I agree that humans mimic LLMs with respect to probability judgements. Marketers know that if you see a "fact" written in a few different articles or sources, you come to assume it's true, for example. We rely on what our culture feeds us and we internalise it as beliefs.
But the other words you mentioned are actually very difficult and deep questions which smart people throughout the ages have wrestled with and we still don't know the answers today. Sentience/the ability to have an experience is the most obvious and direct reality we each have, yet nobody knows how that works.
Yes our minds can remember things we've heard and repeat them like a photocopier or an LLM, but we don't know what is experiencing the whole show.
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I agree that humans mimic LLMs with respect to probability judgements.
Because... and bear with me here.... humans developed the LLMs.
This is why "AI" will never develop to surpass humans. However, the way humans think, so will it.
This is why SciFi is so on point with its future predictions. Computers attempting to take over is possible, because we thought of it as a possibility and wrote it down.
It doesnt take much to logic this stuff out.
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Yes, I was going to add that, after all, probability is something we conceptualised, as humans, and then we built machines that work on that principle! we worried that the robot will want to kill us and what's the first thing we do when we can build drones? Use them to kill.
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> This is why "AI" will never develop to surpass humans. However, the way humans think, so will it.
this is patently wrong. We mimicked the birds and our planes surpass them.
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If you're actually interested in this topic there is a really great survey of all the different theories of consciousness called A landscape of consciousness: Toward a taxonomy of explanations and implications [sciencedirect.com] by Robert Lawrence Kuhn (creator of PBS series "Closer To Truth").
My interpretation is that there are plenty of answers to these questions. The problem is that consciousness is a subjective experience, so there is no scientific way to distinguish objectively right answers from objectively wrong answe
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Marketers know that if you see a "fact" written in a few different articles or sources, you come to assume it's true
Eh, it makes me go and research it to see if it is true or not, quite often. When I was younger I used to annoy people for not not accepting anything without a whole load of peer-reviewed research, apparently.
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I think it is more the derivative, smarter people are better at modeling or training.
Look at the contributions that have really shaped science. Observations are important but the really high IQ individuals (sometimes the same making the observations sometimes not) are the ones that have given us models that fit those observations and of course prove their correctness and usefulness by correctly predicting future observations.
Think about atomic models, obviously this is a case of refinement vs pure insight b
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I work in a city that has a big university. Students like it a lot and lots of them stay there for life. It means that there are a lot of intellectuals there. I live in a small rural village. It is kind of the opposite.
Smart people make better decisions? No they don't. A lot have the tendency to overthink.
There is a difference between thinking a lot and thinking poorly. I think the hell out of everything, but am considered to have very good judgement.
Easily get lost in the world of how everything should be, slowly floating away from the world of how it is in reality. I am always surprised about how the locals in the village just get through life while while those university grads keep seeing problems everywhere.
Being an intellectual doesn't necessarily equal intelligence, and vice versa. My older sister and I test out around the same. Let's just say we test very high. I've made a pretty successful career utilizing my intelligence - against a current that had me pegged for a low skilled job or manual labor, while my older sister was the chosen one, put through college
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Yeah I have to agree - those "smart" people who get caught up thinking things will work because that is how things should work in an idealized world, when in the real world things are messier - those "smart" people are not smart at all. They are not considering all of the variables, accounting for human nature etc - in short, not thinking over everything.
My own example being the "smart" sysadmin working in a school - installed digital signage in school coridoors, with the power sockets and on switches at s
Re: Is this what passes for *science* research ? (Score:2)
Re: Is this what passes for *science* research ? (Score:1)
Some sort of death clock perhaps...
Re: Is this what passes for *science* research ? (Score:2)
Most IQ research is bogus. IQ researchers routinely confuse the ability to quantify something with the ability to draw meaningful conclusions. Just because you can make a chart out of something does not mean your chart actually conveys useful information.
Duh (Score:4, Insightful)
But remember not every high(er)-IQ person is smart. In fact a majority probably is not. Many chose to use their skills very selectively and are wilfully ignorant on some questions.
On the other hand, some people with lower IQ are smart, because they have a realistic evaluation of their own skills, know what they do not know and hence are able to get good insights, even if sometimes with help.
Bottomline: IQ is overrated.
Re:Duh (Score:4, Funny)
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1. A woman did eat a cat, however, she was not an immigrant.
Source: https://timesofindia.indiatime... [indiatimes.com]
2. Haitians eat cookies made from literal dirt.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
The leap between the two doesn't seem that massive. Maybe you aren't as smart as you think you are?
Re: Duh (Score:2)
Re: Duh (Score:3)
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source: Sleepwalkers [imdb.com]
Surely, we're about to close the loop, somehow..
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There area also a lot of people who say that "nobody is eating cats"
Because most people are capable of extrapolating the rest of that sentence, especially when presented in juxtaposition to the "They are eating the cats, they are eating the dogs [in Springfield]." statement.
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But remember not every high(er)-IQ person is smart. In fact a majority probably is not. Many chose to use their skills very selectively and are wilfully ignorant on some questions.
Many professors didn't care for Einstein due to his inability to stay focused in school. He graduated in 1900 and spent the next several years working only part-time so that he could focus on writing his brilliant theories. Didn't even land a full-time job until 9 years after he graduated.
It appears that patience isn't a virtue when 99% of the world appears infantile in their mental capacity. I had a brilliant yet family member who came across as "mean" to most. Curt in conversation. Mind both wanderin
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Sources? I can find unsourced claims that he was employed full-time at the patent office but finished his work in half the time and so was able to spend the other half doing physics. Certainly the "graduated" of your claim
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Sources? I can find unsourced claims that he was employed full-time at the patent office but finished his work in half the time and so was able to spend the other half doing physics. Certainly the "graduated" of your claim is his first degree; he submitted his doctoral thesis in 1905 and his habilitation in 1907. I see further unsourced claims that having obtained the habilitation he was only able to teach before 08:00 and after 18:00 because of his work at the patent office. 1909 seems to be not when he landed his first full-time job but when he landed his first academic job.
I stand corrected on the clarifications. That said, it did take him two years after graduation to land even a menial job at a patent office. This tends to support the theory that others may have had issues interacting and/or working with him.
And taking years after publishing some of the most brilliant work in human history to be hired in academia? Talk about validating the theory of general jealousy. He would have danced off the stage sporting a Harvard jersey and a $80 million dollar signing bonus had
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But remember not every high(er)-IQ person is smart. In fact a majority probably is not. Many chose to use their skills very selectively and are wilfully ignorant on some questions.
Many professors didn't care for Einstein due to his inability to stay focused in school. He graduated in 1900 and spent the next several years working only part-time so that he could focus on writing his brilliant theories. Didn't even land a full-time job until 9 years after he graduated.
It appears that patience isn't a virtue when 99% of the world appears infantile in their mental capacity. I had a brilliant yet family member who came across as "mean" to most. Curt in conversation. Mind both wandering but also laser focused when probed with a question. Sarcastic as hell. He was also one of the only engineers without a formal degree to work at Sandia Labs for 30+ years. Smart people, understand how to utilize brilliant people.
IQ may be overrated, but getting people to understand how they can utilize incredible intelligence I fear is equally underrated. Forget society. It does humanity no good if the next Einstein is stuck in a dead-end job due to narcissism or jealousy.
You have an interesting point there. I'm not going to go into my IQ, announcing IQ has become something of an issue. Let's just say I've been tested, and am considered pretty smart.
I'm pretty good at pissing people off. Mainly because I tell people things they don't want to hear. Just as three examples, my personal experience in getting women interested in STEM careers, my post 2024 election results analysis, and the worsening divide among the sexes in the western world.
Some people simply won't take t
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So you not being able to learn how to be able to get along with people is "pretty smart"? Seems like a smart person would be able to get their points across at work without pissing people off. Calling "emotional intelligence" bullshit is pretty telling and not at all "smart" given how much easier it makes so many things in life.
But go on, keep telling us how intelligent you are as you do any time anything related to intelligence is brought up on Slashdot. Clearly someone who tells everyone this so often mus
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Smart people, understand how to utilize brilliant people
Some may, some may not. I am not sure you have provided us with much data here other than an anecdote. I know people with high IQs (~180) who are not good with other people so would not "understand how to utilize brilliant people".
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I am in the 93th percental IQ-wise but still ended up with shit because of my rare psychological profile which doeasn't mix well with the regular world.
Am I intelligent? Definitely. Am I smart? Depends. If I had not been constantly busy with work and hobby from a young age and instead had learned about what makes me tick earlier in life, it's very likely my llife would be different now.
I can't predict how long I will live, and in fact brushed with death over a year ago unexpectedly when I've always felt hea
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But remember not every high(er)-IQ person is smart. In fact a majority probably is not. Many chose to use their skills very selectively and are wilfully ignorant on some questions.
On the other hand, some people with lower IQ are smart, because they have a realistic evaluation of their own skills, know what they do not know and hence are able to get good insights, even if sometimes with help.
Bottomline: IQ is overrated.
However, even accounting for statistical outliers, people with higher IQs do tend to make better decisions.
The study in question wasn't trying to dispute that, the question they were trying to answer is why. If anything the small cohort of 50 is far too small for a meaningful answer, however it may be a consideration in funding larger experiments and research.
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"Smart" is a term that doesn't have a single definition. You seem to be using it to mean skills that allow someone to succeed in day-to-day human activities or something like "common sense." But it could also mean academic abilities, high ability in some very specific intellectual skill (like playing the game of chess), deductive reasoning ability, or the ability to read and respond to social situations in an advantageous way.
IQ is simply a score on a test that attempts to measure certain cognitive skills.
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Bottomline: IQ is overrated.
I would argue that it is merely poorly understood and reacted to at face value only. No depth to the perceptions.
Look, my IQ has been tested and it is very high... and yet somehow or another, "normal" people show me to be quite stupid often enough to eliminate much of my ego.
I have met people an order of magnitude smarter than me... and yet somehow or another, I end up reminding them to be humble.
There is SOMETHING to IQ; however, all of us are too stupid to fully detail what exactly that something is. (I s
Principles for decisions (Score:2)
In my complete worklife I've always run into too many people who were exceedingly bad at (1). Their first question was always "what should I do". Instead of asking and answering the real question "what do I want to achieve".
From the No Shit Department. (Score:3)
In all our centuries of (alleged) human advancement, we actually needed to prove through "research" that dumb people are in fact dumb and make dumb decisions?
Was the aptly named Darwin Award we literally invented for the bestest of dummy decisions, not enough proof? Did that need to become a fucking Olympic sport or something?
We humans sure do have a way of validating our humanity. The irony of Skynet, has turned painfully obvious.
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I don't think this research qualifies as "no shit." I think it qualifies as very poorly done and potentially wrong. Or at least the summary makes it seem that way. They asked these individuals a prediction question that existing knowledge significantly helps with. Existing knowledge that many if not most well educated people will have and people with less education probably won't. I know what the average life expectancy is for someone in the US because I have read it. I know that your life expectancy is dif
Predictions = planning ahead (Score:3)
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The more interesting research on this topic that I've read claimed smarter people make better decisions because they are better at deferring decisions. They are comfortable with the uncertainty because of their confidence in their abilities. There is always a tradeoff between making the decision later when you have more information and making it earlier so you have more time to plan your execution. If you need more time to plan execution, you need to make decisions earlier. And your decisions will suffer be
The More Interesting Finding (Score:5, Interesting)
Setting the obviousness aspect of this aside, there are two things of particular note to me in this story.
1. Predicting the probability of living to certain ages seems like an absolutely ridiculous test. There's no reliable way to assess the accuracy of their predictions. Comparing their answers to probabilities from established statistics seems more about the subject's education level than their intelligence or forecasting ability, unless their forecasting completely impossible life expediencies like 1,000 years. But, there were more tests as well, and this may just be a badly written article.
2. I am absolutely astonished that there is only a 2X difference in forecasting accuracy between the bottom 2.5% and the top 2.5%. To me that's a very low amount of difference between the intelligence level of the very brightest and the mouth breathers. I feel that this relatively small difference is orders of magnitude smaller than my own anecdotal observations indicate.
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1)There is a very reliable way to assess the accuracy. You wait for them to die. If the researchers did not do this then the study is flawed.
2)The way you breathe has no effect on your IQ. But I am also surprised especially when you consider that about 2% of people have an IQ less than 70(top 2% have IQ greater than 130)
Incredibly Redundant Study (Score:1)
Having a study about this says so much about the researchers, and they didn't even realize it....
So, they're comparing.. (Score:2)
The Gumpian Conjecture (Score:1)
I don't much care for measuring people's "intelligence".
First of all, what does that even mean? All your definitions end up circular. The intelligent people are the people who scored higher on the test that measures intelligence. The score doesn't predict, in any meaningful way, whether people will behave wisely in everyday life, or make significant artistic contributions. It doesn't even predict if they'll be able to beat you at chess.
Second, the mostly meaningless conclusions that you do draw are alwa
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> Some people act dumb. Maybe humanity would be better served by spending our time and resources teaching them to act smarter.
Is that possible? If we had no limits with the money and we can spot a dumb kid at the very early age and we put the best teacher in the world to educate that dumb kid for years. Will that make that dumb kid a smart kid? Is there an upper limit of how smart the kid can become? How much effort would that require? What would be the sweet spot?
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Let's do a study! No, on second thought, sounds like a lot of work. Instead, let's institute a eugenics program based on astrology and blood type.
Also why the top 1% wealth are not top 1% IQ (Score:2)
100 smartest people (top 1%) look at the high risk/high reward situations and realize their chances of success are low, so none take it.
100 above average people look at the same high risk/high reward situation and say, "WOW, I GOT THIS!". 95% fail, but 5 of them make it.
For this reason, most of the 1% wealthiest people are above average intelligence but not the smartest. I am talking people with an IQ above 115, but below 130.
Lowest 2.5%? (Score:2)
People in the lowest 2.5% would generally be within the threshold of intellectual disability. That's getting into the level where, among other things, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled such persons cannot be subject to the death penalty because they are not capable of understanding their own actions. I would certainly HOPE that those in the top 2.5% could make better forecasts of the future than persons who are intellectually disabled.
People needed a RESEARCH to find that out? (Score:2)
I guess they too were in the lower 2.5%.