Wednesday, November 30, 2022

Communication and the 20 IQ Rule

It is said that you can be too smart to talk. "Much more recently, D.K. Simonton found that persuasiveness is at its maximum when the IQ differential between speaker and audience is about 20 points." I got ganked by this one.
*(Ascended aside.)

From computers, we know this is not actually true. If you define a communication protocol, the situation is asymmetric; either you can adhere to the protocol, or you can't. Any form of smart enough is smart enough. 

Computers can use what's called, I believe, paging. If you have a program that doesn't fit in RAM, you can copy part of the program to the hard drive and then just keep going. Perhaps squishy carbonic mortals have some artificial limit which prevents them from doing this, but that would violate Turing completeness. It should be possible to communicate any idea to anyone who wants to hear it, as long as both can use a Turing-complete communication protocol. 


Basically a smart person is smart enough to figure out how to dumb it down. Yes, it's clear that if I speak "naturally" then very, very few folk can grasp what I'm trying to say, but it's hardly impossible for me to mimic a 125 IQ. I've tried it, and it worked immediately.

 

Anyone smart enough to explicitly define a communication protocol can communicate with anyone else smart enough to respond in kind.


Communication is largely blocked by religion and lack of desire. 

You can't wake up someone pretending to be asleep.

You can't communicate a complex idea to someone who inherently dislikes complex ideas. They will refuse to use the communication protocol. Egalitarianism, envy, etc etc.
You can't communicate an idea that contradicts a merchant-caste member's pre-existing religion. They don't care about ideas, they care about which professions will lead to having the most friends. Due to loss aversion, generally they focus on keeping the friends they already have. If your idea would piss off their friends, then no matter how persuasive you are, they won't buy it. 


Trying to use IQ as an excuse is exactly that, an excuse.
P.S. On the other hand, note that since you can't cooperate with a non-communicator, and by assumption you're smarter than they are, they are ripe for exploitation. Practically begging for it.

4 comments:

JBPGuy said...

Man this is a good post, now after repeated reading I think I have something.

You're kind of right but forget something.
You can make a network communication protocol that's backwards compatible with older protocols, but you can't increase the bandwidth of the ""inferior"" hardware (I am not trying to imply that low IQ = inferior).

People with a lower IQ do not have as big a conceptual space, they can't hold as many concepts simultaneously in their mental space.

Eg, the idea of biblical parable.

It makes sense to me and you that the idea that "God created the world in seven days" is a parable, a representation in human language of a perception of an unformed universe etc etc not a literal event. That there was not a literal garden of evil and a literal talking snake and a literal apple that God literally told Adam and Eve not to eat.

It's a story explaining a concept. It isn't "wrong" or "a lie" though.

But with a lower IQ, you cannot understand this - the understanding chain is just not there.

This is why nihilism is bad. People with a lower IQ will take "the bible is not literally accurate" to mean "the bible is wrong" and therefore "I don't need to take anything in the bible seriously".

Dumb people love appeal to authority arguments, don't they?

This is the point of fundamentalist religions; it's for dumb people. Give people dumb arguments they can use to uphold their simple world view. I don't think it's necessarily morally wrong to do this, but it is definitely exploited more often than used as a force for good.

It's not like the church leaders actually believe what they say, they have just created a communication protocol.


Re: the article, which is a classic.
I think the author primarily refers to how leadership in the world ends up being pathologically run by midwits.


If Alrenous dumbs down his ideas, they just sound nasty and misanthropic, because you naturally have to leave out some details - argument resolution is lost.

I mean you pretty much proved this point with your post on the last psychiatrist.
That reddit post you posted, that person has somewhere around a 115 IQ. Smarter than average for sure..

He cannot understand the implications of TLP's postings because he lacks the intellectual capacity to think about the idea in a broader context, ie, he takes it personally. Because he's not that bright :D






Alrenous said...

>"But with a lower IQ, you cannot understand this - the understanding chain is just not there."

"Hey, uh, this isn't a real model, it's a parable."

"K, cool, I'll keep that in mind."

Done.

The problem is egalitarianism. The Fascist can't admit they're a peasant with limited understanding - you have to lie to them and claim the parable isn't a parable, or they will continuously demand models they can't feasibly use.

Alrenous said...

P.S. Being misanthropic isn't nasty.

Anthropes are nasty and stating this obvious truth makes their nasty brains upset so they start spitting nasty words at you.

JBPGuy said...

>"K, cool, I'll keep that in mind."
How can they keep that concept in mind, that an analogy != the actual problem pace? Their mind can't even hold the analogy let alone conceptualise the problem space.

You almost sound egalitarian in your viewpoint there, that dumb people can somehow magically accept an argument that isn't from an authority figure or characterisation.

"Peasants" are just people that can't see how multiple systems work together in tandem.
People argue that I am being "anti science" when I very reasonably make an argument about the CO2 greenhouse effect and infrared emissions from man made surfaces.

"THOSE TWO THINGS DONT GO TOGETHER", apparently. Very much angry.





>Being misanthropic isn't nasty.

Al, I didn't say it was. I said it sounded nasty AND misanthropic.

Can you take Ravens Matrices for me? I'm feeling a feeling of skepticism. (Kidding, obviously, tone lost on the internet)

>Anthropes are nasty
The only acceptable "anthrope" sentiment is that of a mother towards an infant. Outside of that....

Hmm. I wonder if misanthropes extend that hate to infants? I bet not. Interesting.