I've found that your perception of how smart other people are goes up with the quality of the education you receive.
Good schools have a filter to keep out the worst of the riff-raff; and once you are out of school, most of us spend most of our time after school with our peers. Many of my peers went to very good schools, and nearly all of those people have a much higher opinion of humanity in general than i do, simply because they have never been exposed to a group of average people. See, I went to one of the worst high schools in the state, then I skipped college to get a .com job, so my last interaction with the proletariat was unfiltered.
The upside of a top tier education is in realizing that you can always improve your work in some manner. The pitfall is when that sentiment morphs into your work being inadequate.
A year later and I'm still wrestling with accepting the things I produce.
you realize this the first time you work somewhere that has standards high enough that you are the least effective person on the team.
But yeah, everyone /needs/ that experience of being in a place where they are the least competent person on the team. I have met people who have not had that experience, and they are nearly impossible to work with. Just saying, though, school isn't the only place to get that experience.
Watching people who can barely afford to eat play the lottery because they think they might actually win.
Watching people who shouldn't be buying anything on credit judging the qualify of a loan by the monthly payment.
Watching people base their entire lives around a book written by a bunch of ignorant (by modern standards) pre-industrial men, and praying to the sky weekly to make their lives better.
Smarter is the wrong word, more knowledgeable would be more appropriate. Pre-industrial was just a way of calling them ignorant by our standards. I wasn't actually referring to industry so much as their lack of modern science. I really should have said bronze age or iron age men.
> And why judge people by "modern standards?" Doesn't that just beg the question?
Because they're modern people. They have access to vastly more information about the world than someone 2000 years ago did and to ignore all that is stupid. To base your life around the writing of bronze age hippies who probably didn't realize they were tripping on ergot and not actually talking to God is sad.
Again, having loads of information doesn't necessarily imply it is relevant. We know loads more about chess now, does that make people smarter about life in general?
I expect the average person to be less intelligent than many of my better-educated peers expect. Heh. I know one guy who is much better educated, and somewhat more intelligent than I am who thought I was average. At the time, we had the same job description (he was a bit more senior to me, and quite a bit more competent, but we did basically the same work.) - the point was, in his world, someone in the 98th percentile seemed, to him, average.
I was amazed to learn that ~15% of adults in America are functionally illiterate. They can put letters together and sound out words - but couldn't, for example, answer simple questions about a short text they just read.
Over 20% of American adults are 'quantitatively illiterate'. They are unable to add two small numbers together - or parse a simple chart or table that has numbers.
Only 13% of the adult population is proficient in reading, writing, math - where proficient means being able to do simple things like compare viewpoints in two editorials or compare the cost per ounce of food items.
That means ~9 out of 10 American adults are seriously lacking in their ability to read, write, or interpret numbers.
I was a volunteer tutor for a 5th grader for few months. He had the reading ability supposedly of about a 3rd grader I was told. He could pretty much read any word, but we'd crack a book, he'd point at the word, say it, then continue to the next word. Punctuation meant nothing. He could have probably done it for days. Part of my job was to stop him and ask him questions about what was going on. Blank stares. I moved and couldn't tutor him any longer, but I don't think I helped, which was frustrating. The thing is, he had been in the program for years. And was undoubtedly going to passed to 6th grade, and probably won't break out of illiteracy without an intensive program.
Point being, I don't think his situation is all that unique.
It's not a trend so much as it is a redefinition of intelligence. When you get older, you realize that somebody can be bright/wise/funny despite being fairly stupid in so-called "quantitative" terms. Somebody who can't read and isn't very logical can still accumulate common sense, mature with age, and become a better person in a lot of ways. So while people are stupider under the strict sense of "Lots of people can't do very simplistic things", they're brighter than the rote negativism would let on.
Put another way, I've got a friend who's a poet and who's training to be a nurse who insists Sarah Palin was a brilliant politician maligned by the liberal media. Online it's fun to suggest that a single stupid thought invalidates a person's entire existence, but - both fortunately and unfortunately - it's possible to think stupid things and still be a smart person, and vice versa.
I think people are as smart as they need to be. You don't need to be able to summarize tabular data if you work at a fast food shop (e.g. as a waiter).
And it definitely has to do with the circles you hang around in. As a programmer you're more likely to be in a rather smart circle.
dono. I've met more than a few smart people working in the service industry. (I've hired a few, too, with good results.)
Personally, when I hire someone, I rate hobby experience as more desirable than paid experience. I can give you paid experience. At least for SysAdmins, I can train you in all the gotchas of production. But I can't make you like it.
I think Robin Hanson and you are both right: I tend to overestimate the intelligence of random samples in the population (the receptionist), but, in trying to correct for that, I end up underestimating the knowledge/capabilities of at least some of my peers.
I think that estimating about non-peers is most dangerous. How smart/dumb is the guy who fixes your car? Or the lady who owns a flower shop?
I think it's quite a stretch to assume too much about intelligence simply on the basis of vocation, etc. And the tests that Hanson cites are highly based on reading comprehension (a skill not needed in many vocations)... the seeming logic problems are all simple enough to be understood by a chimp, so if humans miss them it's probably due to some other factor.
One can't necessarily conclude from what people did answer correctly on a test what they could answer correctly. Were they trying their best? Why would they? It's boring and they weren't presented with any powerful reason to really care a lot about doing their best.
There is a further issue of how long it would take people to learn these skills, if they genuinely wanted to, and got helpful explanations. If someone doesn't know a skill, but could learn it in 30min if he ever wanted to, then that's no reason to call him dumb. I think to judge people you have to look at how well they learn rather than what they currently know.
You have to keep your personal bar set high, though not letting that demoralize you, and not self-congratulate yourself too much when comparing yourself to the "average" person. Just being in the top 2% or 0.2% of IQ, does not guarantee success (sometimes quite the opposite!).
I think it might be fairer to say that most people don't realize how many stupid people there are. This drags the average down, of course, but most of them aren't relevant to me. Hanging out with intelligent people leads me to believe that people are intelligent, which is a) wrong and b) totally fine. Because it holds true for those people with whom I interact, my mistaken assumption is perfectly safe, and on the whole can lead me to make more accurate judgments in most cases.
All of these questions could be categorized as testing "critical thinking". Should we really find it all that surprising that a majority of people lack such skills when a large number of jobs (dare I say most) only require skills along the lines of rote memorization of a finite amount of information. I find it scary how few people lack the capacity for independent thought. They just wait for others to tell them what to do and then follow unquestioningly.
Understanding a bar chart or a pie chart is something you learned at some point. It takes a while to learn to inteprete these things.
Most people are not dumb. They are rather smart, but they focus their thoughts on the things they have interest in. In other things, they do not pay attention.
There are functionally illiterate people who make millions of dollars per year. And there are people with sky-high IQs that collect subway cards and remain jobless.
When you start throwing around words like "stupid" or "smart", you have to provide some kind of context. For instance, I have a high ability to learn languages. Yet I only know English and a smattering of French. To somebody who speaks seven languages, I'm dumb. But to me, I just never developed that talent. Whereas to me, the guy who knows seven languages and can't create a web page is stupid (perhaps), etc.
Lots of people don't know or can't do things that I can do. Likewise, I don't know and can't do a lot of things other people can. If I were to dwell on this disparity, it would say a lot more about my ego than the human population.
Sorry, I'm hung up on your high ability to learn languages. If you only know a "smattering" of another language, how can you say you have a high ability to learn languages?
Having ability to learn and having learned are quite obviously different. For example, I was good at languages in school, and could easily have gone on to a language degree at a good university, but decided to do law instead. 3 years later and my French is very out of practice. It is (unfortunately) easy to have a talent for something and fail to cultivate it.
"Again, how do you know you have a talent for something unless you actually do it?"
You do a little of it, then compare yourself against statistical norms.
For instance, I have a talent at playing the piano. I took lessons for around 10 years. At the end, I was able to compete against other people who took the same amount of lessons and win a scholarship. Now -- I did not continue developing that talent, so compared to say, a concert pianist, I'm a complete musical idiot. I know enough to be dangerous. But of course, looking at some guy on the street playing the kazoo, he's the idiot compared to me, etc.
Same goes with languages. Usually there are standard ways of teaching language concepts. You apply the teaching for a small amount of time (say an hour or a few days) and then compare with statistical averages.
It's not foolproof, but it's more right than wrong. That's how statistics work.
This work-vs-talent equation works at all levels. I knew a guy who became a supervisor for around 30 employees. Smart guy, knew his stuff, but he couldn't spell. He, quite frankly, looked stupid compared to most of the people who worked for him. So he took the time and boned up on his spelling. He was no more stupid than I am -- smarter in a lot of ways -- but he just didn't see the point in emphasizing spelling until later in life.
You're always stupid compared to something else. The word "stupid" doesn't exist in a vacuum. There's always some subtext involved when you use it.
Good schools have a filter to keep out the worst of the riff-raff; and once you are out of school, most of us spend most of our time after school with our peers. Many of my peers went to very good schools, and nearly all of those people have a much higher opinion of humanity in general than i do, simply because they have never been exposed to a group of average people. See, I went to one of the worst high schools in the state, then I skipped college to get a .com job, so my last interaction with the proletariat was unfiltered.