#978 - Spencer Greenberg - How Much Does IQ Matter?

What was this study you did on intelligence?

Yeah, so some people say that IQ is a pseudoscientific swindle, and other people think it fully captures everything about your intelligence and says who you are as a person fundamentally.

And as you probably know, there was a big replication crisis in social science where many studies failed to replicate.

And so we thought, hey, we can do our part by trying to replicate a lot of claims about IQ and intelligence.

So we recruited over 3,000 people.

We implemented 62 distinct intelligence tasks, which includes everything from like memorization, puzzle solving, math problems, spelling, reaction time, sort of everything you could possibly think about that you could do online automatically.

And then we tested about 40 different claims that are made about intelligence and we checked if they held up.

Right.

Yeah, it is.

Intelligence is kind of like the barbell chalk and cheese.

It's the,

how would you say?

It's like the cognitive Rorschach test.

It's like, what do you, how you see it kind of tells me probably quite a lot about your priors coming into it.

You're right.

It's either the fundamental underpinning that explains all of the outcomes that you're going to get in life, or it is a Nazi-ish policy that never had any basis in science and should be totally disbanded.

Yeah, it's pretty wild.

And so the question is, yeah, what's really true about it?

To what extent is academia right about it?

To what extent are the late public right about it?

And so we explored a bunch of those questions.

Why do you think, even before we get into that, why do you think it's so contentious?

Yeah, I think it's a few things.

One, it does have a horrendous history.

It was used, for example, like the idea of IQ or measuring intelligence was used for forced sterilization.

So that's pretty horrible.

I mean, the Nazis got into really some evil stuff around, you know, thinking about how intelligent people are and murdering people on that basis.

So I think that's part of it.

I think another thing is, you know, everyone kind of thinks it's like, yeah, it's good to be organized.

But if someone says you're disorganized, it doesn't feel like it cuts to the bone, like of who you are as a human, or it doesn't make you subhuman.

But I think some people feel this about intelligence.

If you're told you're unintelligent, that it sort of like says you're bad in a feminine way, or you're lesser.

Yeah, exactly.

And I think that's, you know, and I think so.

I think that it feels different.

That's interesting.

Intelligence is very close to our sense of self in a way that the cleanliness of our cupboards

or like our obsessiveness or something isn't quite so much.

Yeah, and it's really interesting because having run many different studies on human psychology, we find there are some things people can report accurately about themselves, and there's some things they can't.

Like, for example, if you ask people how organized they are, they're pretty accurate, actually.

But if you ask people, are you intelligent?

Not so accurate.

Like, they don't, like, it's hard for people to self-assess because sort of everyone has to believe that they're intelligent, right?

Or if you ask people how rational they are, it's not something they can self-assess.

And so, actually, one kind of just funny finding, we asked people to estimate their own IQ, and then our study was able to get an accurate estimate of their IQ.

And guess how related those two things are?

Were people 50%

right?

Yeah,

that's, yeah, it turns out not even, right?

The correlation was about 0.23.

So, yeah, people don't have a very accurate assessment.

It's better than total random guessing, but not a very accurate assessment of their own intelligences, at least as far as IQ is concerned.

Okay, let's get into the different claims about IQ.

Which ones held held up?

Which ones totally fell apart under scrutiny?

Totally.

Well, should we talk about what IQ is maybe?

Just to

explain that.

Like, what is this thing, IQ, right?

Because, you know, if you're really, if you really want to say, well, IQ is intelligence, well, is that really the case, like theoretically?

And so we implemented these 62 distinct intelligence tasks, or each one's totally different.

And then one simple question we can ask is, suppose you do well at one of the tasks, does it make you more likely to do well at the others?

And it turns out it's almost always the case that being better at one makes you more likely at the others, almost throughout all of the different 62 intelligence tasks.

And this is a very strange finding.

Like this was a finding that we replicated that occurred early on in the history of IQ.

And it's not obvious that it would be the case.

Like, for example, you could imagine a world where being good at math says nothing about how good you are at, let's say, vocabulary or spelling, right?

But that's not the world we live in.

There's something funny that's going on about humans where being good at one task makes you more likely to be good at the other tasks.

And then IQ is kind of built on this observation.

The idea of IQ is it's a measurement of this thing they call G, which stands for general intelligence, which is essentially what intelligence tasks have in common.

So it's kind of the common stuff.

So that if you can measure G using IQ, then you have a sense of how well people will people do on intelligence tasks in general.

How much truth is there in saying that G or IQ might be able to predict your ability to complete other tasks that measure the same thing, but it is not predictive of anything as soon as you step outside of the classroom, so to speak?

Yeah, so that's a really good question.

That's part of why we wanted to develop a really wide range of intelligence tasks.

Like, so we didn't take a strong view on, well, what is intelligence?

We said, let's just implement everything we can kind of measure that could be reasonably said to be related to intelligence that we could do quickly on a computer.

And so we find that almost all of them are, to at least some extent, predicted by IQ, right?

However, what about things like

you go study a small-scale culture where they do hunter-gathering activities?

Is tracking an animal or being really good at like planting and picking the best fruit, is that related to IQ?

I think we don't really know, right?

So I think when you get to that kind of stuff, it's far enough away from what we're measuring on a computer that it's hard to say.

Or take a phenomenal dancer that just has an incredible sense of where their body is and they can position it in exactly the way they have in their mind.

Is that really the IQ?

I don't don't know.

It's hard to measure that in a laboratory.

So I don't think we can say that IQ is measured, is connected to every single thing that you might say involves intelligence, but I would say it's connected to almost everything you can measure in a lab, that you can quickly measure in a lab that connects to intelligence.

I would imagine as well, in a increasingly brain-based as opposed to a brawn-based economy,

more of our life outside of the lab is actually going to look like tests inside of the lab.

Yeah.

And I think a lot of it depends on sort of what career trajectory you're on, right?

If you're a white collar worker, like I think that's going to be true.

If, you know, if you work, you know, building infrastructure physically, then, you know, maybe it's not true.

So, you know,

right there, I think is actually a key thing to note that IQ tends to predictability at certain kinds of things.

And those kinds of things are much more relevant for some people's lives than other people's lives.

Yeah.

So IQ is more predictive for certain people than it is for others.

Yeah.

And actually, you find that if you look at, so IQ predicts job performance across a wide range of jobs.

But if you look at what jobs it predicts job performance better, it turns out it's these higher complexity, more analytical type jobs that does a better job of predicting rather than sort of maybe more physical jobs or

jobs that involve less sort of analytical thinking.

Okay.

What were the sort of tests that you did to this wide-ranging

set of assessments?

What did that consist of?

Yeah, so things like memorization, solving puzzles, guessing the next symbol in a sequence, like Raven's matrices, a famous one,

spelling, vocabulary.

We even had one on reaction time where we had a green square, and we said, as soon as it turns red, click.

And literally, IQ is somewhat predictive of how quickly you click, which is kind of nuts.

But funnily enough, people, funnily enough, IQ had a negative predictive ability with how fast people thought they would be at clicking.

So

people actually with higher IQs thought they had lower reaction times, even though they had somewhat better reaction times.

Oh, that's interesting.

Well, yeah, I guess we can get into the implications of people's self-perceived expectation and then what actually happened.

Talk to me about the main claims around IQ.

What were the ones?

I mean, even going in, you must have had an idea where you thought, ah, I feel like this is probably going to get replication crisis, or there was stuff that was more surprising.

Yeah, so we weren't sure sure because, you know, in some areas of social science, there's been really bad replication crisis where maybe like 40% of the papers just don't hold up if you redo the experiment.

That's pretty bad.

Other areas, it's more solid, like in cognitive psychology, where they're like having you look at like lines on a screen and like measuring really low-level brain function, that stuff tends to hold up better.

So, you know, where is IQ on that range?

I would say overall, just like taking a bird's eye view, we did replicate a lot of the academic findings,

but not necessarily every single one of them.

But I think one of the sort of key things that's really important to understand about IQ is that if you look at these 62 intelligence tasks, IQ captured about 40% of the variation in people's ability.

In other words, you could guess about 40% of how people would do, loosely speaking, based on their IQ.

But that leaves 60%, which is really interesting.

And some of that 60% is just random noise, right?

Like, you know, what side of the bed you woke up on that morning, or did you misread the question, right?

There's random noise in there.

But there is a big chunk that IQ is not explaining.

The interesting thing about that big chunk it's not explaining is it's idiosyncratic.

It really depends on which task you're doing.

So, so for example, it's often perceived that people who are good at math are not good at verbal stuff and vice versa.

You know, there's like the journalist versus scientist.

The shape rotat versus the word cell.

Exactly.

And they're kind of at odds with each other.

It turns out being a word cell is actually positively correlated with being a shape rotator.

Right.

But interestingly enough, if you control for IQ, you take people the same IQ, some of them are better at word stuff and some are better at math stuff.

And that's part of what's in that missing 60%.

And so the model, the mental model I like to use for this, I think is really helpful is to think about three things.

There's IQ, which is your ability at the things that intelligence has to have in common.

Then there's your idiosyncratic aptitudes.

Like you might be more of a math person or more of a word person, even compared to people of your own IQ.

And for me, for example, I did my PhD in math.

Like I'm definitely a math person.

You give me a word scramble and I'm like, I have no idea.

I'll start moving letters one by one trying to, you know, it's just ridiculous.

I'm terrible at word scrambles, right?

And then the third thing, and this is really, really important, is skills.

And skills are things we develop by practice.

And skills can also increase our intelligence in a meaningful sense.

So take, for example, someone who has never played chess before.

All they know is the rules and they have 140 IQ.

and pit them against someone with 100 IQ who's played 10,000 hours.

I mean, who's going to win that chess match?

I mean, clearly the person with 100 IQ is with 10,000 hours of experience is going to absolutely wipe the floor with the higher IQ person.

It's not even a question.

And that's because they develop the skill.

And so, if you think about it, if you want to make a mental model of being good at stuff, you've got your IQ, you've got your idiosyncratic abilities, which are, you know, you might be better at certain things than other things, which is probably based on a combination of genetics and also maybe your early childhood environment and things like that.

And then you've got your skills that you can, you know, you can get good at anything you want.

And the really crazy thing in the IQ literature is that we know lots of ways that people get their IQ lowered.

You know, you take too many head blows, that will lower your IQ.

You get lead poisoning as a child, you know, if you live with like lead paint.

You get malnutrition as a child, that will lower your IQ.

Nobody's really figured out a good way to raise your IQ, which is kind of shocking.

Do you think there is any?

Well,

I think that it's theoretically possible.

I don't think we know any good ways to do it, but I think there's something that makes that much less depressing than it sounds.

Because it sounds depressing, right?

Like you started a number and it can only be subtracted from.

Yeah.

But here's the really really fascinating thing.

So what would it mean to raise your IQ?

Well, it would mean, like, let's say on our 62 intelligence tasks, it would mean that if you, let's say, practice one of those tasks, you'd get better at a bunch of the others or all of the others, right?

As opposed to getting better at the specific one, which would be skill-based.

Exactly.

So

here's the reality.

Nobody really knows how to raise your IQ, but you can get good at anything you want.

You can improve your skill.

So in a weird way, it doesn't matter.

If you want to get good at something, go practice it.

Develop a training routine.

You will get better at it.

Okay, maybe it won't generalize everything else.

And, you know, it would be nice if we lived in that world where it generalized everything else, but you can get good at anything.

And so I think that that is sort of what saves it.

It makes it not so depressing.

Okay.

So do you come to think of IQ as foundational or fundamental in some way?

Does it create a window or a bracket within which people's capacities sort of sit?

It certainly seems, and yeah, I think both of us have to be diplomatic when talking about IQ, given its fettered past.

But

the rubber is going to meet the road eventually.

Just how important is IQ?

I guess is my question.

Yeah.

So I think there's a couple ways to answer this.

So one way is say, well, it explains about 40% of the variation in people's ability to tasks.

Okay, 40%.

That's a big chunk, but it's far from everything, right?

Skill and individual aptitudes are going to also play a big role, right?

Okay.

So that's one thing to think about.

Another thing you could ask is, to what extent does it predict outcomes?

And

this is one of our results that most surprised me and I've never seen anywhere else is we actually pitted IQ against personality and said, if you take into account someone's personality traits, their big five personality, which is five traits, openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agree business and neuroticism, you take those five traits, you try to predict outcomes, and you also try to predict outcomes with AQ, which actually wins?

Which is more predictive?

What would you guess?

I would guess IQ.

Yeah, so I actually recently launched a YouTube channel and we made a video about this, IQ versus personality.

The shocking thing to me was actually personality won on almost every one of the predictions or it tied IQ.

I don't think it it lost on a single one.

So whether it's GPA or income or education level, your personality actually mattered more overall, which is pretty fascinating, I think.

Why?

What's the mechanism by which personality is beating IQ?

I think it's hard to say.

I mean, you could think about it in individual cases, right?

Like take something like education.

Well, clearly having a higher IQ is going to make it easier for you to perform well in school.

But you know what else is going to make it you perform well in school?

Conscientiousness.

If you're organized, you're

a little bit perfectionistic, but not too perfectionistic.

You know, you always go to your classes on time, et cetera, versus the really smart person who just loafs around and doesn't try.

So, consciousness matters a lot.

Also, neuroticism can be disabling, right?

If you have really terrible anxiety and really terrible depression, it's going to make it hard to study potentially, be distracting.

So, you know, I think you take these five personality forces together, they actually account for quite a lot.

Does this not just pass the buck to another area that is relatively immalleable

given that people are,

I don't know how much people can change their personalities.

I had David Robson on talking about a book of his, which was How Much You Can Change Your Personality.

And the answer was like a bit, but not exclusively.

So

is this any more hope inspiring or does it simply sort of hedge against IQ being all that matters?

Well, you know, it's interesting.

I think there's a lot of random dice that get rolled when you're born.

And not just in your genetics, but also your early childhood experiences, things like that.

And I think we have to accept that, you know, there's a lot of, a lot of dice that get rolled and they can really affect your life in a lot of ways, right?

I think an interesting analogy is like with basketball, like, could you be like a five foot 10 basketball player?

Like the answer is yes, but it's going to be a lot harder, right?

And, you know, they exist, but if you're, you know, six foot five, that's going to help you a lot.

And I think it's like that.

Like IQ and personality, they don't, they don't fully determine what will happen to you, but they make some things harder and they make some things easier.

But on the topic of changing personality, there's actually, I think there's a lot of room to kind of move things there.

It doesn't necessarily mean you're going to change your sort of fundamental core nature, but you can change a lot of your behaviors that give you a lot of the benefits.

For example, think conscientiousness, right?

So systems like getting things done, that can sometimes take someone who's like just terrible at being organized and give them a system and as long as they follow the system actually they can behave like a person who's much more conscious oh yeah that's interesting uh i suppose you know somebody who's high in neuroticism but chooses to spend a lot of time in sunlight or around friends or contributing to a job that they mean that that's meaningful to them well that's really going to counter a lot of neuroticism somebody who is very low in neuroticism but spends all of their time on their own and not exercising and eating poorly is going to display the sort of traits that somebody who is higher in neuroticism would do.

Absolutely.

That's going to be a huge factor.

And for neuroticism in particular, we actually have a lot of techniques that work pretty well, right?

Like cognitive behavioral therapy has really good evidence for helping people with depression and anxiety.

And so that's a good place to start.

And it doesn't necessarily mean you're going to go from being a highly anxious person your whole life to not an anxious person.

But yeah, it can really, it can actually reduce the symptoms quite a bit.

But I think the behavioral thing is huge.

I mean, there's even some interesting experiments where they get people who are introverted to say, just pretend to be extroverted and just be more social for a couple of weeks.

And often they get a pickup in their mood.

It doesn't apply to all introverts.

Like I think some introverts just fundamentally don't have a desire for social activity.

But I think some introverts, it's more around shyness or feeling socially awkward.

And I think when it's more of that kind of stuff, just acting extroverted, you might get some of the boost as though you were an extrovert.

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Okay.

What about some of the other claims around IQ?

What were some of the ones that got decapitated and some of the ones that held up?

Yeah, so one theory about IQ is Howard Gardner's multiple intelligences theory, which which says there are like eight distinct types of intelligence,

things like

mathematical, linguistic,

interpersonal, et cetera.

And our data did not support that view.

We couldn't test all of his claims or anything like that, but I would say it's not really consistent with that.

We find this sort of almost everything is currently with almost everything else, right?

Whereas his theory is sort of like, there are these distinct brain regions that do these distinct things.

And, you know,

I don't think it's so true.

So that's one.

We also had some, we had some funny ones that uh we replicated.

So, there was an Akipit paper that claimed that uh people with lower IQs tend to have more pathological celebrity attitudes.

So, like they think that if you like meet your favorite celebrity, they're gonna like really enjoy talking to you, or or like you're gonna find that you and your favorite celebrity have all these deep hidden connections.

And yeah, we actually did find that lower IQ people do believe that's like that's such a culturally uh unfortunate, like inconvenient thing to find out.

Oh, the proletariat,

they're working in the mines all day and then going home and dreaming about this person on reality TV that they're going to spend the rest of their life talking to about interesting things.

It's like a, it's, it's very cliche in a totally tragic sort of way.

Cliche, yeah.

Another, another kind of like fascinating one.

So there was a paper that claimed if you make up nonsense, nonsense phrases, like, you know, the destiny of darkness is is everything or whatever that

people with higher IQ will be like, those are bullshit, where people with lower IQ will more likely be like, oh, that's profound.

And we actually replicated that indeed.

People with lower IQ tend to find these nonsense statements more profound.

Oh, that's interesting.

What was some of the, or were there any disadvantages of higher IQ?

Was it predictive in some way of things that were usually undesirable?

You know what's funny about that?

So

I ask a question of the week every week on my social media on Twitter.

And one of my questions of the week was, what do you think like more intelligent people like are worse at or what disadvantages do they have?

And people had like all kinds of theories, like, you know, so many different theories.

And the reality is like almost none of them hold up.

Like it's just a weird, it's a weird thing.

Like I would say the best evidence of what is bad about having a high IQ is you might be more likely to be nearsighted.

And that's probably because of like behavior stuff.

And people, you know, maybe from their face in a book, I don't know.

I don't know exactly what, or you're staring at screens.

The other thing is they may be more prone to loneliness, especially as children.

Like, I do think that there can be some sense of like, you know, if you're much higher IQ than the people around you, it might be a little bit isolating when you're, but I think when people become adults, they like find people that they connect with.

You can broaden your pool of people that you can hang out with and also find other high IQ freaks.

Yeah, exactly.

And you know what actually has made the field very confused for a long time?

Like, there were a bunch of studies looking at Mensa and discovering all these negative things about having high IQ.

But it turns out there seemed to be, at least the evidence seems to suggest there's some kind of negative self-selection.

Like if you identify yourself as a high IQ person, that's probably really not a good sign.

Like

just having high IQ is not a bad thing.

But think making that a major part of your identity, probably not a healthy way to live.

I wonder whether that is negatively predictive of having a high IQ as well.

What did you find out there?

What did you find out about people's ability to self-assess compared with what came up in the data?

Yeah, so people, yeah, so we replicated the general finding that people with hierarchy do believe they have hierarchy, but not very much.

Like there's a very, very, very low correlation.

It's like a, I think it was about 0.23 in our study.

So people were not very good at self-assessing, but they were better than random chance.

But I think, you know, I do want to just emphasize that IQ is very far from destiny, right?

Like you can develop any skills you want.

You can keep getting better and better at them.

IQ might make it harder.

It's like going back to the basketball analogy, right?

It's like hiding in basketball.

Like, it can make it harder based on your starting IQ.

But if you lean into your idiosyncratic aptitudes, the things you tend to be better at, and you develop your skills, you build good training programs, you can get better at pretty much anything.

So, just I really do want people to keep that in mind.

Let's say that there was a way to improve the IQ

of everybody.

would that be the sort of thing that on average is likely to improve life quality for all of the people who got it

well see this is really fascinating what do you think the relationship between iq is and happiness or life satisfaction

positive

you you got it it's got to be positive right but it's not this is it's insane for fuck's sake it's not it's crazy like and it's almost unbelievable because it's like well surely iq should at least give you more optionality, like, you know, open up more possibilities, help you do better in school.

It's crazy.

It's not, it's not correlated with life satisfaction or happiness or momentum and happiness.

And this is our finding.

It's also a finding of others.

And it's honestly, I view it as like this incredible mystery.

I hope someone figures out.

It suggests, to me, it suggests that there's something that...

higher IQ people are doing that like tend to make their life worse.

And I don't know what that thing is, whether it's like they're taking on more stress or whatever.

I'll tell you another like, yeah.

Is it not, it's, it's not correlated or it's negatively correlated?

No correlation, zero correlation.

Right.

Okay.

But if we assume that the objective life outcomes of somebody who's higher IQ is better, right?

Yeah, but they tend to have higher income.

They don't have more.

Socioeconomic, they're less likely to go to jail.

They're more likely to complete college.

They're less likely to be a single parent.

They're more likely to stay in a marriage.

I've just made a ton of fucking predictions, many of which may be incorrect there, but I read it once on the internet.

So

even if it's not predictive at all in terms of life satisfaction, happiness, those things you would assume would be, right?

Income,

poverty is associated with a lot of stresses that probably don't make people particularly happy, et cetera.

100%.

Poverty is definitely associated with lower life satisfaction.

So in order for it to be not correlated at all, you're having to compensate for some of these

better, quote, life outcomes that are predicted by IQ.

So, that actually kind of does suggest that there is some kind of break being applied, not just that you're coasting with it, not just that it's totally impartial, but that it is actually applying some sort of

negative multiplier to the life that you've got.

Is that a fair way?

Am I talking bollocks?

Yeah, no, no, you're completely right.

There's something, and I say this is really a genuine mystery.

Like, I do not think we as a society know the answer to this because everything points to the fact that it should give you higher life satisfaction, higher happiness, but it doesn't.

So there's some factor we're missing that kind of explains this.

And hopefully one day we'll, someone will figure it out.

I'll tell you, like, even more baffling thing we found.

We asked people to what extent they achieved their life, their, their, like, their life goals.

No correlation with IQ.

Like, which, which, and it's especially odd because we know that people with higher IQs are like better at achieving certain kinds of goals, right?

And so it suggests that people's view of like, what is a good life or what are the goals that they have or, you know, must, it must change

based on it must change.

Yeah.

And, you know, and if you go back to thinking, well, what is happiness?

Like on some fundamental level, it does relate to our expectations versus our reality and not just our reality.

There may be something going on there about like the way that people plan their life might change on average when they have higher IQs that screws them over in some way.

It compensates for, yeah.

I had this, I had this idea called the curse of competence, which I think maybe kind of relates to this a little bit.

That basically if things tend to go well for you, that you set your sights very high.

And also that

if you are good at maybe only a small range of things or maybe only one thing, if you only have a skill in one particular area, then your life options are constrained more by your capacity than they are by your ability to choose.

And a sort of rationalist utilitarian approach would say, well, the optionality is in favor of the person who has the competence, not the one that doesn't.

But that's not the way that the human brain works.

Like the paradox of choice suggests that you're actually less satisfied when you have more options as opposed to when you have fewer.

So I kind of totally bro-scienced all of this together and thought, well, okay, that means that somebody who is maybe higher in competence, you could probably, given how predictive G seems to be for lots of things, people, it's robust and varied and allows you to have all of these these different life paths open to you.

I wonder whether this is one of probably tons of different areas that contributes to the lower life satisfaction, lower happiness thing.

You're caught up in the optionality of life.

You're unsure about which direction to go in.

There is a

switching cost and also just an executive functioning cost that you need to pay in order to be able to choose what it is that you want to do.

The loss aversion, the sunk cost fallacy, all of this stuff plays in in a manner where it wouldn't if you had fewer options open to you.

And it's a very like unpopular opinion to hold that somehow having fewer options gives you a better quality of life.

But I think

when you look at the way that the human sort of system works, that does seem, I would guess that that would be predictive of what's going on.

Yeah, it's really interesting.

You can see it cutting both ways, right?

Like if you only have two options and they're both shitty, like that's not, that's not going to make a good But if you have like a thousand options, you have no idea which one to take and you're constantly second guessing it, that's also not a good life.

So there's kind of this intermediate territory where it feels where like you want at least, at least some good options, but you don't want endless options.

And I mean, you know, people say this about online dating, that it can actually

make it more difficult to find a like a really good life partner because of the sort of the feeling of endless options can make you constantly second guess and not give people a fair shake where like instead of going on that date and really being like, let me really take seriously the possibility that this could be my life partner and try that on just for a couple of days and then see, you know, decide that they maybe are just always thinking about, you know, three other people they could go on a date with.

Nexting, as it's known in the world of online dating.

What

just to linger on, because I'm fascinated by this life satisfaction happiness thing.

Have you got any other mechanisms by which you

can say this might be something that would contribute to it?

Yeah, so I mean, I have hypotheses, but they're speculative.

This is a home of bro science.

It's a safe space for you here, Spencer.

Oh, I appreciate that.

Yeah, so one thing I suspect is that when people are higher IQ, they tend to question

what they're told more and they're like question all the like the sort of beliefs of their society and that this might like create a sense of social isolation.

And you see this, for example, that there tends to be a negative correlation between IQ and religiosity.

And that's not to, you know, diss religion, but just to say that I think, I think there might, you know, it's like religion, you know, if you fit well, if you're sort of like the media and their modal religious member, like it might give you a sense of community, a sense of, you know, ease at, you know, life after death, it might give you a sense that someone's, you know, look or some great power is looking out for you.

And then if you're like, you know.

crushing all of that and being like, well, I don't know what to believe.

And like, this seems like bullshit.

Like that may actually make you less happy.

I don't know.

Very speculative, but.

Interesting.

So IQ is a prophylactic against religion, but religion is a prophylactic against misery.

And

yeah, you're fighting against it.

It's an interesting one, man.

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Here's seven that are left.

Hey, this is better immune system,

higher IQ, more externalizing behavior, et cetera, et cetera.

I wonder,

it seems to me inevitable that this technology is going to be used,

especially to avoid what John Tooby talks about with gene decay.

Are you familiar with that?

No, it's not.

It's a really interesting idea that basically

Ancestrally,

the selection pressures that were being applied to humans were so high that any suboptimal genetic mutations were selected out of the gene pool.

But as you get rid of that pressure, as you raise the floor, basically, with modern healthcare, a perfect and totally non-controversial example, which it took me a really long time to try and come up with one, is myopia.

So people that need glasses, we have to assume on the savannah 50,000 years ago, if your eyesight wasn't that good, you had a less high chance of survival and reproduction, right?

Maybe by a little bit, maybe by a lot, it was less high.

We now have glasses, right?

It makes very little difference whether you're a child or whatever.

I imagine it's maybe even not predictive at all of anything in life other than whether or not your kids have got.

But what that means is over time, people with bad eyesight are more likely to have kids who've got bad eyesight, who more likely have kids that have got bad eyesight because the

deleterious mutations are being accumulated and not selected out.

What you you end up with is a, what's called a crumbling genome, which is one that's kind of less robust over time because it's being buttressed and supported more by infrastructure.

I absolutely do not think that people who need glasses should be killed at childbirth or at any point later in life.

I think that would be a terrible idea.

But

I would guess anybody who needs glasses, I'm someone that did need glasses and I got laser eye surgery to fix it.

If you could have told me that my parents would have been able to not have that be an issue for me at birth, and I'm aware that this isn't actually technically the way that it works.

You get into a much more sort of messy ethical territory because it's not about

getting this same embryo and getting rid of the myopia.

It would actually be choosing a different one.

But we, you know, for the purposes of not talking about whether the soul is transferable or not, I think we just need to stick with it here.

My point being,

I think that this is going to be used a lot.

I think it's going to counter, hopefully,

some of the

mental health.

Like we could see that.

I certainly think that you could look at some of the negative outcomes we've got, the

predilections people have toward negative mental health, and say, well, you know,

if selection pressures were higher, somebody that had a lot of depression and anxiety, maybe they would be less likely to survive and reproduce.

I don't think that that should be the case either.

I'm somebody that's suffered with depression and anxiety.

I don't want to be like left out to dry because my tribe doesn't like me or whatever, because I'm not a fun hang all the time in my 20s.

But yeah, I just get the sense that this is going to happen more.

And if we've got that, and IQ is one of the things that's going to be selected for,

I think it's really important that conversations like this that sort of look at IQ apolitically,

that work out what it's good for, what it's not good for, where the limits of it lie, but to basically say that if you've got the choice to make like...

Don't live in a house with lead paint, right?

Like, that's a good idea.

Don't get hit in the head too much.

Don't live in a house with lead paint because your life outcomes are maybe not going to be that good.

That being said,

not actually going to make that much of an impact on your happiness or life satisfaction.

Well, that's the irony.

If the parent wants to be happy, don't select for IQ.

And if you want to help the world, you know,

maybe select for altruism.

Maybe that's, you know, I mean, that's what's more beneficial than the altar.

Obviously,

well, think about that.

Obviously, yeah.

I'm just, that's such a great point.

And one that, like, even for me hasn't fully sunk in, given I I already forgot it, kind of.

Most parents, if you ask parents, what is it that you want for your kids?

So I just want them to be happy.

All right.

Well, you're left with a pretty difficult decision here, right?

Because you know that life outcomes

objectively on average in a modern capitalist

meritocratic society are going to be better with higher IQ.

But maybe they're going to be a little bit more sad.

So actually, what do you want?

And that's.

Yeah, I don't know if they're more sad.

I just think they're not necessarily not necessarily happier if you're trying to do it for the kid no it's an interesting question are you trying to do it for the kid are you trying to do it for your idea of what you want your scale to be and that's a different it's a somewhat different thing what do you think the future of iq research iq discussion looks like

it's a good question um i mean i do think there are a lot of things that are on solid footing like i was it was nice to see that because we we've replicated studies in other areas where we see really big problems right we have a project called transparent replications where when new papers come out in top psychology journals, we'll use a random number generator to pick some of them.

We go take the study, we redo it from scratch, rerun it on a new population, and see if it holds up and analyze it carefully, release a report.

And we find that a bunch of really serious problems.

So at least it's good to see the science is like largely functioning properly.

You know, we got a lot of stuff that did seem to hold up.

I would love to see more research on

can you raise IQ?

Because that would be really, really cool if we could test lots and lots of different methods.

Like, I'd love to see a study that

gets 25 different researchers to come up with ideas of how you might train at something that helps you with everything, right?

It improves your skill at everything.

And like, just test them all, you know, because there's been some efforts in this and they haven't gone well, but it doesn't mean there's not some way to do it that we just haven't figured out yet.

Fascinating stuff.

All right, what have you learned about imposter syndrome?

Yeah, just one more last thing about IQ and intelligence.

If you're interested in this topic, we released a giant report with all of our findings, all the 40 different claims we've tested.

It's on our website, clearerthinking.org.

So you can check that out.

Dude, everyone needs to check out all of the shit that you're doing.

I love the podcast.

I love the blog.

I love your articles as well.

Everything I'll get later.

Thank you so much.

Yeah, I appreciate that.

Yeah, so the podcast is Clear Thinking with Spencer Greenberg.

Every week I invite on someone I think is brilliant to discuss four ideas.

So yeah, I'd love for you to check that out.

Cool.

So yes, imposter syndrome.

So this is something that we deep dived in.

What we did is, this is kind of the style of our work a lot of times.

We took all the different scales to measure imposter syndrome.

We put them together.

We ran a big study testing them all simultaneously.

And then we analyzed it to figure out sort of what are the core components of imposter syndrome and what is it related to.

And so for those who don't know, imposter syndrome is basically when you're someone who's skilled, but you believe that all your success was just lucky and that you're somehow secretly a fraud and that you don't really have the skills that people think.

And so we found, so in analyzing all these different ways of, you know, kind of measuring imposter syndrome, two of the questions that were most predictive of it were:

when I achieve results that are praised, I worry that I might not be able to fulfill that person's expectations in the future.

So, if that's something that you resonate with, you might have imposter syndrome.

And another one was, I'm afraid others will discover to the extent to which I lack knowledge or ability.

So, you feel like you're keeping the secret of your incapability.

So, both of these

of these are

in relation to others.

Yeah, because a lot of it is feeling like people's beliefs about you don't match the reality.

Like, oh, people think I'm really successful, but like, if they only knew, or, you know, people think I'm talented, but if they only do, there's an amazing quote from Tom Hanks.

He said, let me just read this.

It's so good.

No matter what we've done, there comes a point where you think, how did I get here?

When are they going to discover that I am, in fact, a fraud and take everything away from me?

I mean, that's Tom Hanks, right?

Yeah, Woody.

So

it's an interesting question around

the higher someone's praise,

this sense that that is now an obligation to meet it again in future.

And I have to assume that that's because if you

feel like your successes are

by chance

and that you don't have quite as much control or agency over the outcomes at this kind of a level, that

every new success is not a cause for celebration.

It's simply a higher bar to fall from next time.

Yeah, because if you go below that, oh, now you're, you know, you're in decline.

Oh, they're going to find out.

And that plays into your

precisely the concern that you have.

So that's very interesting, this sort of, and I imagine that that's, it's going to be tied in with status.

Did you see, was this at all

like intra-sexual competition, intersexual competition, status anxiety?

Was it related to that at all?

Well, interestingly enough, early on in the research, people believed that it was mostly women that had imposter syndrome, but then they discovered that actually men have a ton of it too.

So now it's thought that actually it's like maybe about equal in genders, maybe slightly more women, but like roughly equal.

And like, it's, it's hard to say who exactly has imposter syndrome for two reasons one because it depends on where you draw the line right like at what you have to pick some point of the line where you say that person has imposter syndrome but the person just below them doesn't so that's arbitrary and the the other thing is there obviously could be people who genuinely just lack skill and people think they're skilled and they're not right

yeah maybe you have imposter syndrome or maybe you're just shit at your job well and the problem is that the people imposter think that they're that person they're like no that's me you're talking about me those other people have imposter syndrome i just suck right

Fuck, that's interesting.

Okay.

So how common is imposter syndrome?

Yeah.

So you get a wide range of estimates.

Typically, the estimates are 20% to 60%.

I know it's an enormous range, but it depends on these factors.

Like, where do we draw the line?

And like, how do we know who really has it?

But it's extremely common.

It's like ridiculously common.

Right.

Even in high-achieving groups, like there have been studies on like medical students, right?

And they're working their ass off and they grind it.

It's so hard to get there.

And like a bunch of them have imposter syndrome, too.

Are high achieving people more likely to suffer with imposter syndrome than low achieving people?

That's a good question.

I don't know the answer to that.

Someone should research that.

Yeah, well, I mean, come on, you're the guy.

Okay.

What did you find out that we didn't already know what was interesting?

Yeah.

So here's some fascinating things.

People with imposter syndrome are more likely to have perfectionism.

And I suspect that what's going on here is that if you hold yourself to an unreasonable standard, it's going to create this gap between your performance and your perceived performance, right?

Like, you know, if your standard is like, you have to do everything perfectly or you suck,

then you do things like, you know, you don't get perfect, but you do really well.

And then you're like, I suck, right?

Yeah.

Outwardly, you've outperformed everybody else because of your inner anxiety.

Inwardly, you're never satisfied with your performance because of your unreasonable expectation.

Exactly, exactly.

And so they find it easy to dismiss their achievements because of the bar that they said is so unreasonably high.

It also tends to be associated with thinking that mistakes are unacceptable, right?

Like, you know, one thing I like to say is that I want to fail at more things than most people try at their entire life.

And, you know, it's like, because I think that's a healthy attitude towards like mistakes and fucking up and

not succeeding.

But it's challenging, right?

Like, it sucks to feel like you made a mistake.

Like, it's painful.

And to fail really, really sucks.

Right.

But the reality is like we're humans.

Everyone's going to make mistakes all the time.

But if you view mistakes as unacceptable, well, you're human, so you're going to make them, but that means you're going to end up thinking that you suck a lot more than you do.

What are the key dimensions of imposter syndrome on your test?

What was it measuring?

Yeah, so we found it's a pretty pure dimension by itself, which is, it's, it's mainly around like this fear that people think more highly of you than they, than you really can justify and you kind of worry about it and you worry you're a fraud and you're worried that they're going to find out, right?

So that's kind of the key, like a purer dimension.

But then it has this perfectionism link.

We also found, interestingly enough, a procrastination link.

People with imposter syndrome tend to like delay the tasks, not do them on time.

Oh, that makes total sense.

Yeah.

I think,

and that also might tie into perfectionism to some extent too.

But it is interesting how sometimes if we don't give ourselves time to do something, then it's easy to just kind of like give ourselves an excuse and feel less bad about it, right?

It's like, oh, well, yeah, I only did, I only put two hours.

I know I should have like started it last week, but then it's like, so I'm not really that bad a person because, like, you know, I didn't do a good job just because I only spent two hours on it, right?

So there's these weird like ego games we play with ourselves to try to protect ourselves.

Yeah, we've got a get out of jail free card because it's the same as somebody that gets into a relationship and they're kind of committed, but kind of not committed all that much.

And if the relationship doesn't work, they think, well, you know,

not that much of a comment.

I mean, it's not like I gave it my all in any case.

Yeah.

I mean, it, you know, it's interesting.

If you are really intent on protecting your ego, it creates a lot of weird effects that can make your life worse.

Like behaviors where you try to protect your ego instead of doing the thing you actually care about, like having a good relationship or like getting this project done, right?

Right.

Yeah.

Okay.

So the reason that you're dating is to find a life partner that makes you feel happy and fulfilled.

But in the process of trying to not feel like somebody rejects you, sees you truly who you are, and doesn't want you, or you're not good enough, or whatever it is, you behave in a manner which defeats the very thing that you were doing the dating to try and achieve because you don't show somebody all of you and you're not fully committed.

Exactly.

And I don't know if we're going to talk about narcissism later in this conversation, but yeah, like is especially a problem for narcissistic people.

But everyone like tries to protect their ego to some extent.

We just differ in how much we try to do it.

What do you make of this lean, slight lean towards females?

Yeah, you know, it's interesting.

I think that

women tend to be less self-confident.

And

men, so we did ran this

funny study where we asked people, out of 100 people of your age and gender, how many of them do you think you perform at different skills, like surviving in a zombie apocalypse and dancing and kissing and, you know, cooking and all these kinds of things.

And, you know, men tend to be a bit more overconfident.

Like they tend to be a bit more.

Yeah, I could, you know, beat 70% of men at, you know, fighting or, you know, kissing or whatever, you know, not kissing that, not kissing that because anyone.

But

yeah, so I think, you know, I think that's probably why people assume that women would have this more because like they tend to have lower self-esteem and less confidence.

But funnily enough, it seems like unapostator, not necessarily.

And, you know, and it's hard to know why that might be, that it's it's more balanced, but it could come, it could be related to men often treat sort of their work as fundamentally their value, right?

So what they do in the marketplace is like, says who they are.

Okay.

So are there any counterintuitive benefits to imposter syndrome?

Well, that's really interesting.

I think a lot of times when we have these like damaging psychological beliefs, they're solving some kind of problem for us.

It's often not worth it, but like they're often not random.

And so, so a good example of this is like negative self-talk.

You know, some people, when they don't do a good job, they're like, you're a piece of shit.

Like, they're saying this to themselves in their mind, like, you're a piece of shit.

You suck.

And you like imagine how damaging that would be if, like, your father said that to you,

you know, or, or your friend said that to you, like, how mean that would be.

But it's like, well, why do people do that?

And I think it's because at some point in their life, they learn that like that squeezed a little bit more performance out of them.

And then they like, they're like stuck to that rule of like,

if I, if I whip myself into submission, then sometimes things go well for me.

Exactly.

I'll get myself to work harder and blah, blah, blah of course there's an incredible cost and the cost is usually not worth it, right?

But it's like they're often, I'm not going to say always, but often I think people are solving a problem with these dysfunctional psychological beliefs.

It's just that they're creating more problems.

And it like, but then if you sort of challenge it and said, well, what if you just didn't treat yourself like shit?

What if you didn't call yourself a dick all the time, you know?

Like they're like, on some level, they're like, but then I wouldn't be high, you know, I wouldn't push myself.

So they're like scared to let go of this dysfunctional measure.

So you're like, you have to kind of give them another tool to be like, well, you could instead of, don't get, don't just throw it away.

Try this other tool for getting good performance out of yourself, right?

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Have you got any idea of potential interventions for imposter syndrome?

Yeah, so we looked into this a bunch and we actually, so we made on clearthing.org, you can find our imposter syndrome assessment.

You can go measure your imposter syndrome, but we also in it have a bunch of techniques you can try.

I'll say that the evidence is not, there's not a huge amount of evidence, but we look at the evidence and we teach you techniques that are at least somewhat evidence-based.

So one of them is self-compassion.

And I have to say, this tends to resonate a lot more with women than men in my experience.

But self-compassion is actually like a pretty cool set of techniques for someone who tends to be pretty harsh on themselves.

And it's basically, I mean, like at a core, it's saying, well, how would you treat like someone you really care about?

when they're going through something difficult and just use that same energy towards yourself, right?

Like treat yourself with understanding, treat yourself with respect, treat yourself with kindness and empathy, and you know, don't berate yourself just like you wouldn't berate a loved one.

Obviously, there's more to it than that, but I think that's like a good starting point.

And I think for people that have a lot of negative self-talk, I think that's a really useful technique.

Anything else?

Yeah, another one is cognitive therapy can be useful here.

So this basic tool from cognitive therapy where when you're feeling emotional, you tend to have distortions in your thinking.

This is actually one of the things that first made me obsessed with psychology.

So I was reading a book on cognitive behavioral therapy and it said, it made this claim, like when you're feeling intense negative emotions, your beliefs tend to get distorted in predictable ways.

And I was like, what?

Really?

Is that true?

So one time when I was feeling like emotional, I wrote down my thoughts and I came back to them when I was in a neutral emotional state.

And I was like, holy shit, that's exactly what happened.

Psychopathic, yeah.

My beliefs were distorted by the intense emotion.

And so cognitive therapy, I think, has this correct observation that that often, it really often is the case.

And so one cool technique is you write down your thoughts when you're feeling negative emotions.

Like, let's say you're telling yourself that you're a fraud and everyone's going to find out.

You write down those thoughts.

You come back to them in a neutral emotional state and you really try to evaluate the evidence.

You say, what's the evidence for?

What's the evidence against?

And then once you've done that, you ask yourself, can I replace this thought with

a thought that's at least as true and more helpful?

So take, let's say you, let's say the thought that you tend to have is like, I'm a fraud and everyone's going to find out, right?

You think, what is a belief that's just as true or more true, but it's more helpful than that?

like it maybe it'll be a belief like you know i'm not good at everything but i am really good at some things right so as an example of like a replacement thought and then what you try to do is you try to practice that replacement thought you try to notice when you're having that first thought and just immediately replace it with the second thought like just say the second thought to yourself in your head or out loud and it can be actually quite a powerful technique is there any relationship between iq and imposter syndrome Oh, that's a good question.

We didn't study it, unfortunately.

Okay.

So the reason that I ask it is I'm seeing at least one

thread between the two topics that we've spoken about so far, which is outwardly, the

outcomes.

Oh, actually,

let me ask you this first.

Do people that have got imposter syndrome have better life outcomes?

Yeah, unfortunately, I don't know that either.

So I don't know much about the link between imposter syndrome and like objective achievement or life outcomes.

I mean, it is linked.

So I will say, imposter syndrome is linked to more depression and anxiety.

So on the emotional front, they have worse outcomes.

But things like whether they do better in school or things like that, I don't know.

Yeah.

So you can probably see where I'm going with this.

Higher IQ, better objective life outcomes.

The only way that we can be measured, which is externally, inwardly, these people seem to be,

it's not correlated, but if life outcomes are better and that would be predictive of better life internally and that

there's a little bit of a sort of a minus multiply going on there.

And the same thing goes for the imposter syndrome.

I would guess that people with imposter syndrome, on average, are higher performers than people who don't have it.

And I think that it's because of this

sort of paranoia that they have about being found out, which will drive them to pay more attention, be more diligent, be more obsessive, compulsive, neurotic,

work harder at these things in a desperate attempt to try and disprove their own unreasonable expectation for their standard that everybody else doesn't even know exists.

So again,

one of the questions I've been the most fascinated by probably since I started this podcast is what is the price that somebody pays in order to be a person that you admire?

So

high performers, high achievers, the ones that everybody seems to look up to.

Okay, well, that's what it's like externally, but what's their experience of like life like internally?

And I'm like a Pokemon card collector for just more little

pieces of evidence that the way that somebody's life is going externally is not necessarily predictive of the things that you care about the most, which is peace of mind, the life satisfaction, happiness, connection with others,

texture of their own existence as their head hits a pillow at night, that sort of stuff.

And it seems like at least between the two things that we've seen so far,

there's a...

a bit of a corollary going on there.

I think that's really astute.

Often to get sort of to the top of something, someone has to dedicate themselves fully to it.

Obviously, there's weird examples where someone gets lucky, but like usually it's people who dedicate themselves fully.

I mean, look at Mr.

Beast.

Like, could someone be more dedicated to getting views on YouTube?

Like,

he's probably the most obsessive person about getting views in the world, and he also has the most views in the world.

Like, it kind of makes sense.

And I think a lot of times that obsessive focus really comes at a tremendous cost to other things.

Yeah.

I mean, Mr.

Beast, I think, if he's even sad, like, I'm not the YouTuber you want to be, right?

And this has been my experience also, like, when I meet billionaires, like, some of them are like, you know, great people and like, you know, seemed like, you know, happy, but a bunch of them seem really like there's something wrong with them.

On average, high performers are more miserable than normal people, as far as I've seen.

And I've spoken to like, you know, nearly a thousand on the show in one form or another.

And when you see somebody that's got a well-balanced sense of self and they don't castigate themselves if they fall short and they relate to the people around them well, and they're connected, and their sleep's okay, and their health's not bad, and they're not too stressed, and all the rest of this stuff.

You're like, holy fuck, like, that's that's really rare.

That's rarer, that's significantly rarer than somebody who is a high performer.

And yet, we look at the high performers as the ones that are

people who have the least desirable internal states have some of the most desirable external lives.

And that paradox will never cease to fascinate me.

I think it's so fucking interesting.

Yeah, I think a really really interesting question is: are you actually willing to make the sacrifices to be at that level?

And like people,

I don't think take seriously that question.

And yeah, of course, like you want to incrementally improve your life and make things better, but do you, do you want to make the sacrifice to be at that level, right?

At the very, very top achieve your level.

Yeah.

And for some people, it's worth it, some it's not.

And I think it comes down to values.

Like, what do you really value in life, right?

You re-examined the Dunning-Kruger effect as well.

They were just going through and decapitating all of the sort of interesting psychological insights of the last few decades.

Yeah, the Dunning-Kruger one is, it's a little hard to explain, but I think it's really fascinating.

So just for those that are not as familiar, the basic Dunning-Kruger effect is the idea that people who have low performance or low skill or low intelligence tend to overestimate their abilities.

And the original explanation is that it's because they know so little that they don't even know how to evaluate, right?

They're so unskilled, they can't even evaluate skill.

So they think they're better than they are, right?

So that's the basic idea.

Sometimes in modern usage, people also mean the opposite, that people who are high skill tend to underestimate their abilities.

So you could also think of that a Dunning-Kruger-like effect, right?

So we've got those two things to explain.

And if you look at the original research, the way that they essentially prove the Dunning-Kruger effect is they'll make these plots of people's actual skill versus their perceived skill.

And they'll show that there's a gap where people who are lower in skill are overshooting their predictions about themselves.

And people who are higher in skill are undershooting.

They believe believe they're not as good as they really are right and they say look there's an effect and so we set about to replicate this but also we ran a bunch of simulations to try to really understand like what produces those plots and we found two really crazy things the first crazy thing is that it turns out you can get those plots that look exactly the same as like the original dunning-krue studies with nothing to do with human psychology.

It turns out if you, if you're, you've got to measure skill using something, right?

You give people a test or something, right?

If you measure measure skill with something that has a decent amount of noise or error, right?

Because

you give people a vocab test.

Well, there's some noise in it, right?

It's not a perfect measure of someone's vocabulary, right?

There's some choice of what questions to ask.

And so it's somewhat noisy, right?

So you have this imperfect measure.

You get a Dunning-Kruger plot.

The noise actually causes that effect,

where people

who you think have lower ability, tend to overestimate their ability.

And the reason, yeah, it's a little bit subtle, but the reason is because,

so you don't know someone's true ability, right?

Like, how would you know?

All you know is someone's measured ability, but measured ability is true ability plus noise.

So, think about someone who was unlucky on the test, like they performed worse than their true ability.

Oh,

so they're gonna overestimate, they're gonna look like they overestimated their ability, right?

But actually, they were just unlucky.

Oh,

wow, that's so interesting.

Holy shit!

Yeah, so both groups

are maybe accurately perceiving

what should have been their expected level of output, but due to noise or luck or chance or a good night's sleep or a bad night's sleep or a crying baby or whatever, they didn't show up as themselves.

And that resulted in...

a disparity between what should have happened that they predicted and what did happen that they didn't predict.

Exactly.

And if anyone wants to deep dive on this, on my YouTube channel, Spencer Spencer Greenberg, we've got a video that breaks this down.

But yeah, exactly.

And so in order to really say there's a Denn-Kruger effect, you actually have to have a test with incredibly little noise.

It's like a really, really accurate measure to protect against this.

And that's really hard to do, right?

It's like hard to build such a good test of almost anything.

So that's the first problem.

It's like, well, we can't, it's hard to even show that's not just a mathematical artifact.

But here's a potentially even bigger problem.

Turns out perfectly rational agents also get a Denning-Kruger effect.

Okay, explain that to me.

Yeah, so it it seems weird, right?

Okay, so suppose you're doing a new skill you've never done before.

You've no idea how good you are, and you're competing against people who've also never done it before.

What would you estimate your percentile to be?

Fuck knows.

I guess it would depend on

analogous other things that I'd done that were kind of similar to it in the past, and I'd try and predict that.

Yeah, so if you had analogous things, exactly.

You try to predict it based on that.

But let's say you had nothing analogous, right?

You're like, well, what percentile?

like i have no idea i have no idea well let's say would you put your like would you put yourself at 99th percentile no it's absolutely right would you put yourself at first no 50th percentile right right so you're gonna like the rational thing if you don't have information is to be like okay i'm probably near the middle right before i get evidence right prior to evidence okay but then think about what happens if you the rational thing is put yourself in the middle without evidence you start getting evidence what do you do you update on the information use bayesian reasoning to update so you get some evidence it push as you get more evidence it pushes you away from the center.

So if you get some evidence that you're not very good, you start pushing down.

If you get evidence you're good, you start pushing up.

Well, guess what that leads to?

It means you end up too close to the center.

Everyone is squished towards the center, which is exactly the Dunning-Kruger effect.

People who are lower skill are overestimated selves because they're squished toward the center.

And people who are higher skill are underestimated themselves because they're squished to the center.

Okay, so is the Dunning-Kruger effect bullshit?

Well,

this is the incredibly unsatisfying thing.

I told you how the Dunning-Kruger effect might just be a mathematical artifact.

It might just be rational actors, but we can't tell the difference.

It's so hard to tell.

So I can't even be positive there's no Dunning-Kruger effect because I'm just saying, like, these results have two other interpretations, and we can't tell which one it is.

Is it irrationality?

Is it a mathematical artifact, or is it rational actors being Bayesian reasoners?

But I will tell you something funny that we observed.

I do think there's some irrationality going on.

And that's because you can see in these plots, so we ran our own study and we got these plots and we looked at a bunch of others from other studies.

What you see is that there tends to be, the line tends to be too high.

On average, people overestimate their abilities.

And I think that is a pretty robust finding.

And so I think this better than average effect, that people tend to overestimate how good they are on average.

I think that is true.

And that is a form of irrationality.

It's not an unknown effect, but it is a form of irrationality.

Of course, it's not true for everyone.

Like depressed people might underestimate their abilities, but on average, right?

So that's one thing.

The other thing that's really peculiar about these curves is they tend to be really flat.

In other words, you might think, well, as you get better and better, you know, you have a slope of one.

Like for every unit of increased skill, you go up by one unit in prediction.

It tends to not be what you see.

Like it's really flat where like the people who are really good think they're only like a little bit better than the people who are not very good.

And the extreme flatness I find very suspicious.

It makes it hard for me to believe people are being rational because it like, How could you really have so little evidence about your skill, right?

Like, you know, it seems like people actually have a lot of evidence of of like how good they are at driving or you know how intelligent they are or you know etc etc and yet there's very flat slopes meaning that the people who are really good think they're not that much better than everyone else and actually the funniest example of this is there's a study asking people to rate how attractive they are on a like a you know zero to 10 scale And they also had third parties rate how attractive they are on a zero to 10 scale.

It's ridiculously flat.

Like almost everyone thinks they're between a six and a seven on average.

The lowest attractiveness people on average think they're like a six and the highest think they're like a seven it's like what is going on here how is that possible but it's super yeah it seems like people are weirdly under updating on evidence with the attractiveness thing i get the sense as opposed to something that's more skill-based

i think there is a there's going to be a huge amount of sort of white coat syndrome or whatever the equivalent is of like oh god like who says it about themselves that they're an eight out of ten i'd better say a seven true but you know not these are anonymous surveys so yeah yeah, I agree.

Like, definitely, definitely if you're being interviewed, yeah, but most people would like they don't want to seem arrogant.

Some social desirability bullshit going on.

Yeah, I don't know.

Well, I mean, maybe that's just, I get the sense that maybe with things like self-rated attractiveness,

it is so enmeshed socially that even if you do, it's anonymous, no one's ever going to see the metadata's been wiped, we don't know your IP address.

There's just this sort of, it feels like someone's watching you over your shoulder when you think about doing that.

Well, you know, what's so strange is that people tend to self-assort by attractiveness.

So they must at some implicit level have a sense of their attractiveness, right?

Like, I mean, like, how often would people date?

Are they dating someone who's like pretty close to their attractiveness?

Like, usually.

It's almost always.

It's almost always.

Even in relationships that are supposedly looks for wealth trades, even when you've got the sugar daddy with the Playboy model, like

most of the time when you actually look at those relationships, they actually end up starting to match in terms of attractiveness.

Mackin Murphy did a great breakdown about this.

He does species podcast.

He's great.

And

yeah, it was, it's fascinating.

It's really, really fascinating that people just seem to.

So I have a really, really spicy theory about this, actually, which is

one of the reasons that there's many, many, many, many reasons about why people aren't coupling up.

One of the spicier ones that I've got is that with increasing levels of obesity with calorie-rich foods and hyper-palatable, hyper-processed stuff going everywhere, everybody is becoming a little bit bigger.

And there has to be a line below which even if you are also a three, a three just isn't that attractive to you.

And I wonder whether there's kind of a lower, a lower bracket to attractiveness that people are just not prepared, or they're less prepared, let's say, to get into a relationship with, even if that's your level.

But then there's also this sort of lagging indicator of where you know that you should be.

Well, that's not who I am underneath.

Like I've gained weight a little bit recently, but they've really gained weight.

And it's like, no, dude, you've gained the same amount of weight that she has or whatever.

But yeah,

I think it's fascinating to see what happens if you, and I guess body weight is probably one of the reliable ways that you could step in and adjust levels of desirability kind of population-wide.

That's not to say that you can't have people that are bigger that aren't beautiful, but you know what I mean in terms of desirability.

It's just what are some of the things that have happened across the board?

Like, I don't know, if the ozone layer above America got disintegrated and everybody had leathery skin or something like that, like what's something that's happening at a relatively sort of global, or at least like population-wide level that's impacting

appearance?

And this is one of the, I guess,

interventions, unfortunate experiments that's kind of being run.

So it's like, it's like decreasing baseline how attractive people are to each other.

That's across the board.

It's interesting.

You know, Ayla, the sex researcher, did a really interesting study where she found she could get people to more accurately indicate their own attractiveness level by having them compare themselves to people of their own gender.

So she actually developed a scale of faces that were like people were, you know, faces where people rated them one on average, two, three, four.

And then she said, where do you rank, like rank yourself against these faces?

And people were actually more accurate than when they had to put it on like an objective scale themselves.

Okay.

What do people consistently get wrong about personality disorders?

You mentioned earlier on about narcissism and BPDs, stuff like that.

Where do we not understand personality disorders very well?

Yeah, great question.

So this is something I've been deep diving a lot on recently.

I actually did a series of interviews for my podcast with a narcissist, a sociopath, someone with borderline.

So just search clear thinking on your podcast app if you want to check that out.

But I think it's actually like a surprisingly important topic because

almost certainly, unless you're like really kind of a hermit, you know people with personality disorders, right?

So if we think about even just three personality disorders, we think narcissistic personality disorder,

antisocial personality disorder, also like known as sociopathy casually, and borderline, like each of them is estimated to be more than 1% of the population.

So, you know, you know 100 people,

there's a good chance you know someone with one or more personality disorder.

And I think they also, while they're absolutely people with personality disorders are good people and not harmful, these they tend to have an elevated risk of causing harm to others.

Like a very substantially elevated risk, especially if you end up in a romantic relationship or a business relationship or they're your best friend or that kind of thing or family member.

So I think it is useful and important to understand these disorders.

I think the first like big misconception is that people confuse like traits with the disorders.

You know, people think, you know, a lot of people will be like, oh, my ex-partner was a narcissist or my boss is a narcissist or my boss is sociopath or whatever and i think it's important to understand that like

these are these are trait-based things right that narcissism is a trait grandiosity is a trait you know manipulativeness is a trait and so everyone kind of is somewhere on the spectrum of these traits and most people who are like somewhat narcissistic or somewhat you know manipulative or not they don't have the disorder and i think that's so i think on the first on the one hand they're like often overdiagnosed like people are like accusing others of having them and they usually don't.

On the other hand, the people that do have them often go overlooked and like people actually don't realize that they have them.

And that sometimes comes at an incredible cost.

So they're both being

overdiagnosed and underdiagnosed at the same time.

Exactly, exactly.

And, you know, I think one thing that contributes a little bit here, if you think about, let's say, someone with narcissistic personality disorder,

if you really get to the core of like their underlying motivations, which is how I like to think about it, I think what they're really driving towards fundamentally is attention and admiration as sort of like their highest value or drive and

thinking of themselves as special and better than other people.

And if you think about it that way, you realize that their behaviors are not necessarily what people would expect of a narcissist.

And so let me give you the example.

Suppose that someone says, hey, Chris, that's a really cool watch.

Like, I really like it.

Where'd you get it?

Right.

You might think of that as sort of like a nice thing to say, right?

An altruistic kind of thing to say.

But what do you think is likely to happen after someone gives you, let's suppose you like actually care about your watch, right?

Like, what do you think is likely to happen after that?

You care about your watch more.

You tell them maybe they go and buy it as well.

Yeah, so that's on your side, but also like you probably feel kind of good about that person, right?

That's like a nice thing.

Oh, of course.

Yeah.

Pro-social.

What a lovely compliment.

Thanks, Spencer.

Yeah, I love this watch.

I'm glad that you noticed.

And how do you think that affects the likelihood that you compliment them later?

Ah, yes.

Yes, yes, yes.

So it's this sort of reciprocal debt that you need to pay.

Exactly, because they love admiration and attention attention and feeling special.

So they're flattering, even though that doesn't seem like the sort of thing that somebody who is a narcissist would do, flattery is a tool that they can use to reciprocally get that back.

Yes.

And I think it's useful to think of, like, obviously people have different skill levels, but it's useful to think of a lot of people with narcissistic personality disorder as experts in getting admiration and attention.

So they're not using, like some of them use really like crude methods.

They're just brag, you know, really boldly and, you know, and obnoxiously, but they're experts in getting admiration and attention.

So they do sly, subtle things.

They give you really nice compliments that make you feel special and make you like them and then make you give them a compliment later, right?

I'll give you another example.

My friend was dating a narcissist, and we were talking about him.

And she's like, you know, it's, I mean, he's just textbook, like everything, you know, it's clearly a narcissist.

But she was saying, you know, the thing is that, like, I felt like he wasn't a narcissist because he would give away all this money anonymously to charity.

And I was like, that's really interesting.

How did you know about that?

So he would literally constantly brag about his anonymous donations.

It's no longer anonymous.

Yeah.

But it worked.

It somehow worked, right?

Where she was like persuaded by this that he must not be narcissistic.

And so I think that like, if you think about them being savvy at this, it really changes your perspective.

And it makes you realize that they're a lot harder to pick up on than a lot of people realize.

And that's why people often misidentify, right?

And in fact, there was a fascinating study where they measured people's narcissism and had them give like a just a two-minute speech about themselves like introduce yourself to the whole room and they asked people to rate how likable people were and what do you think happened the narcissists were more likable the narcissists were more likable in fact not only were they more likable they were even more likable if they cut out the audio so people like they had people watch videos they cut out the audio they were still more likable their facial expressions were more likable their clothing was more likable

like they're they're like experts in being likable they rated themselves Exactly.

But

people's impression of them does tend to fall over time.

Right.

Because, you know, it's a bit of a mask, right?

It's like they're trying to slip eventually.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And so I think, I think, um,

I think it's really important to know when you're dealing with someone with narcissistic personality disorder.

It doesn't mean you should necessarily cut them out of your life.

It doesn't mean they're a bad person necessarily, but I think you should know it is an extremely elevated risk to causing harm.

And then you should take that seriously and say, do I want this person in my life?

And if you do want them in your life, it also is helpful to know because it actually can help you relate to them much more effectively if you understand the way that their minds operate.

What about sociopathy and BPD?

Yeah.

So sociopathy.

So I used to never be able to identify sociopaths until about three years ago.

And something suddenly clicked.

And I meet them like all the time.

It's absolutely wild.

Like I almost can't believe how often I meet them.

I was at a party like three months ago.

I met two sociopaths at the party.

Now, you might say, Spencer, maybe you're full of shit.

How do you know they're sociopaths?

Well,

I'll tell you: do you want to know how I know they're sociopaths?

Yes, yes, yes.

I take them aside and I say, hey, I know this is a weird question, but have you ever considered the possibility that you have antisocial personality disorder?

And do you know what they say to me?

They always say something very similar.

No, what do they say?

They say no emotional reaction.

They say, I have considered that.

And then we have a conversation.

Presumably, you're not saying that to everybody.

No, I'm just saying it to people I think is just that.

So

what's the lead indicator?

What's the indicator that happened before?

Yeah, so here's the funny thing.

You might think it's like, oh, I must be noticing that they're, you know, acting manipulative or callously, right, or whatever.

It's very rarely that, actually.

I think the best way I think of sociopaths is it's like, imagine there were aliens that looked just like humans, right?

Obviously, they're not aliens, they're humans, but their, their minds operate so differently that it's like they're aliens.

So how would you tell someone as an alien, right?

you would notice that they said something that like what no human would say it's just like out of the distribution of human behavior that's actually what i notice and i don't think they're a sociopath immediately it's not like i'm like oh they did something so unusual that they're a sociopath what i'm i like my obsession is human psychology so when i notice someone do something like where i'm like i would predict like essentially zero people would ever do that thing and this person just did that thing i like become really curious and i start asking them questions and then that's when i develop the theory they're society and i ask him about it um so let me give you an example talking to a guy at a conference we were talking about how sometimes you can feel emotions in your body.

And I was like, oh, do you ever feel emotions in your body?

He's like, yes.

One time I was driving down the highway and a refrigerator fell out of the back of the truck, smashed through my windshield, and I felt something in my stomach.

And I was like,

what?

So I didn't think this is sociable.

I was just like, what is going on?

This is not a psychology I'm familiar with.

And then, you know, we talked about it for a while.

And then, you know, then he eventually came out that he keeps a list of everyone who's wronged him and once a month he checks it to see if he can hurt any of those people in ways that take very little effort because he wouldn't want to expend a lot of effort to hurt them but if there's a low effort way he can hurt them then then he might as well because they hurt him

wow

okay yeah i mean that's that's a slightly brighter red flag then well yeah exactly but he probably wouldn't say that in just the normal conversation right so it's usually usually what happens is there's this thread of wow this person like seems like an alien like they don't seem like a human like there's something they said that's so unusual.

And then that's the thread that I pull on.

And then eventually, yeah.

I actually like hanging out with sociopaths way more than narcissists.

Why?

They just tend to be, well, no, the thing, I think the fundamental thing is that narcissist, they tend to make everything about their ego and as much as they can.

So everything's being redirected back to their ego.

And I just find that like very uninteresting.

It's actually very...

It's very exhausting as well, as opposed to someone who's a sociopath who you're not going to trust, but is kind of fascinating at a distance.

Exactly.

Yeah.

And the socio-yeah, the sociopath you know they're

like when i for example when i interviewed um the sociopath she describes it almost like she doesn't even know who her fundamental self is like she is like a shell and she's like learned to blend in so you like think that she's just like you but it's like this practice thing over years like i've asked sociopaths like do you like watching movies because like i don't know without empathy like if you don't like have empathy for the characters like do you is what you interested in exactly and they tell me they love movies because they teach them how to behave.

Like one sociopath was saying that he learned that if your friend's dad dies,

you have to make a sad face and then say, I'm so sorry.

It's like someone's read a handbook on how to be a human.

Yeah.

And I think this is where we can differentiate between low-functioning and high-functioning sociopaths.

That low-functioning ones often have struggle to fit in.

Like they don't learn those skills.

They don't get adept.

And so they constantly have this jarring thing where they're ostracized and people don't like them and whatever and then the high-functioning ones like the ones you meet in a boardroom or the ones you meet you know in a courtroom or the one you know as the lawyer not the the

convicted felon um they tend to be really good at blending in right they've worked their whole life at blending in what's the difference between sociopath and psychopath yeah that's a good question so unfortunately the terms are like all messy and all over the place um technically psychopath is like not in the dsm5 which is a diagnostic and stysical manual no nor is sociopath the technical term is antisocial personality disorder, and it tends to focus more on like the outward signs, like manipulativeness and violating the rights of others.

Whereas I tend to focus more on like what the internal experience is, because I think it gives a deeper sense of like who they are.

Sometimes sociopath is used to refer to less severe forms.

of the disorder, where psychopaths is the more severe forms.

Sometimes sociopaths are thought to be more like hot-headed and emotional, where psychopaths is more cold-blooded.

And then there's also something called the psychopath checklist, which is sometimes used as a scale to measure like really severe levels.

It's used in prisons and stuff like that.

But unfortunately, the terms are really not standardized.

And the sociopaths I've talked to tend to sort of use them interchangeably.

Right.

Okay.

Can you think of

how

narcissism or sociopathy is adaptive?

Is this a spandrel?

Is this a weird byproduct of stuff?

Or is this an adaptive trait that we needed at some point?

Great question.

And it's obviously hard to know for sure.

I'll tell you my speculation.

Narcissist tend to be good at getting admiration and attention.

And I think that that actually sets people up to be leaders and to get everyone to rally around them.

And so I think that they're way overrepresented among politicians.

I think they're way overrepresented among

like people who are in the public spotlight, leaders of all different sorts.

And I think it cuts both ways.

On the one hand, they tend to be drawn to those kind of positions because that's what they want.

They also, though, I think tend to be better at it because they're like practiced their whole life, getting admiration and attention, right?

They also are overrepresented among cult leaders.

And so I think we have like the negative archetype of the narcissist as a cult leader.

Like it's everything is about themselves and they want to be worshipped like a god.

The positive archetype of a narcissist would be like a visionary CEO who's maybe willing to like doesn't care so much about, you know, the well-being of their employees because they have this bigger vision of this grandiose vision, but they might end up playing a very positive role in society because they

bring in something.

Their self-belief and their desire to achieve things in the world will have some negative externalities.

But if either by design or by fluke, they were pointing in a direction which is a net benefit for humanity overall, you end up with them being like kind of anti-social and manipulative en route.

And you end up with a question there of whether or not the ends justify the means to get there.

Yeah.

And you could think of it as someone who's like, they're devoted to that grandiose vision rather than, you know, the people around them or right, things like that.

And sometimes that grandiose vision ushers in something really important, right?

I think they really can rally people and get people moving in the same direction, which is also why they make great co-leaders and harbor a lot of people, right?

What about sociopathy?

Yeah, so let me ask you a question.

Imagine you're living in a tribe of 100 people, you know, 50,000 years ago.

When would you want a sociopath in your tribe and when would you not?

Maybe

when there is some sort of fracturing internally, some sort of

mutiny treacherous kind of gamesmanship type thing, and you need somebody that can shapeshift and do the kind of political gamesman thing back and forth.

Psychopath,

again, the definitions are kind of messy.

Perhaps when there was a war, I guess, as well, you need to be conniving and manipulative with basically any time that there's a rivalrous game going on, either internally or externally, and you need someone that can play that and not have any empathy or

hesitation around fucking other people over.

I think that's astute, right?

Like, imagine, for example, there's you're surrounded by a bunch of tribes.

They hate you, they want to kill you.

They might just come and like kill you all or rape the women or whatever.

Like, but there's a sociopath into your team who doesn't want them to come kill you, and you're like, Yeah, that sociopath might just go and assassinate their leader and not think twice about it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Like, just well, I'll just go over.

I'll just go over and kill them, you know.

And it's like, wow, actually, that's pretty useful to have on your team.

But imagine you're in peacetime, right?

Like, everyone's planting the fields, and things are good.

Like, do you want that sociopath?

You know, it's a little bit like having a wolf with a bunch of sheep, right?

Like, a sociopath is going to, it's like probably not doing their sociopath is being wartime manipulative during peace and that's not really what you need well i mean i guess who's to say that the sociopath would actually they're kind of like you know what a sociopath's kind of like they're kind of like a misaligned ai

they're kind of like a a

relatively powerful

agent that you just don't know what direction they're pointing in because who's to say that during a time of what we've seen it in movies and stuff a lot but there is a a distraction that creates a vacuum of leadership internally.

And someone, as opposed to trying to help the tribe by using their sociopathy against the opposition, they use it internally to try and capture power for themselves because this is

a turbulent moment where they can step in and ascend to the top.

Yeah, I'll tell you something.

A top VC in Silicon Valley told me this.

I don't know why he told me this.

He told me he likes to fund small startups and associopaths as leaders, but then he kicks them out when the company becomes big.

And he said it's because when there's a small company, the sociopaths interests are very aligned with the startup succeeding.

And they're willing to make really brutal cutthroat decisions.

But when it gets big, they actually benefit most by just extracting value from the company itself.

Whereas the small startup doesn't have value to extract.

And so

it's like crazy.

He essentially finds sociopaths and it kicks them out of their company.

Dude, I mean, if you want to use sociopaths as the launch pad booster rocket to get your heavy load

out of orbit, and then you actually switch to a cleaner fuel source once you get up into the atmosphere, I guess,

yeah,

that's an interesting one.

I had this

idea, I guess, I wonder whether we're over-pathologizing difficult people as disordered rather than just unpleasant.

It's like how many people are just fucking unpleasant to be around.

That's absolutely true.

I mean, the vast majority of people are like kind of a dick or unpleasant,

they don't have a personality disorder, right?

They're just, you know, a bit of a narcissist or they're a bit of a dick or they're, or they're just like dealing with their own shit.

And then like they put it out on you because they don't have good emotional regulation skills, right?

So it's, it is a lot of that.

And like, we're really talking here about extreme personality types, like really, really extreme, where you, you know, something I've thought a lot about.

Like, is it even useful having these categories, right?

If these are all traits that are on the spectrum, my suspicion is that what happens is as you get more and more extreme, it starts to dominate more and more of their behavior.

So if someone's a little narcissistic, they may not have that much in common with other little bit narcissistic people, right?

Because they have so many other things going on.

But if like narcissism actually drives like is their fundamental drive in life, they actually might behave really similar to other narcissists because they're kind of like guided by the same North Star.

So I think that's what happens.

That's why I think these categories are useful.

At the real extreme, you start noticing so many similarities

across them.

Because this, this, it's

if someone is 99% made of custard, it's okay to say that you are custard.

But if you're only sort of 65% made of custard, it's like, well, I'm kind of interested in what the other 35% of that is.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, custard analogies.

You weren't thinking I was going to go there today.

Dude, your work's so fucking good.

You're like

the only guy I know.

that's doing this stuff.

And it's just as well that you've got the obsession because I don't think that anybody else would be prepared to put up with the level of like fiddliness that you have to do in order to be able to test this stuff.

So everyone needs to check out all of the shit that you've got going on.

The links will be posted around, but where do you want them to go to?

Oh, thank you so much.

Yeah.

So a new YouTube channel would love for you to check it out.

Subscribe if you find it interesting.

Just search Spencer Greenberg on YouTube.

My podcast, Clearthing with Spencer Greenberg, search it at any podcast app.

And our website, clearthing.org.

We have so much, so much stuff.

We have over 80 tools you can use on there for all kinds of things.

Forming healthy habits, we've got a tool, an actual cognitive assessment tool.

So, if you want to assess your cognitive abilities, strengths, and weaknesses, so lots of stuff on there, dude, you're king.

Until next time, get some more studies done and let's run this back soon.

Thanks so much, Chris.

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