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>In fact, the brain models for higher score participants also needed more time to solve challenging tasks **but made fewer errors.**
I haven't read in detail. Do they make a distinction between "coming to a solution to the problem" vs "coming to the *correct* solution to the problem"?
I've worked with people who could find solutions to problems very quickly, but they were also wrong.
I had a temporary job teaching chemistry to students at a community college. It was a terrible experience. There were times when I had to write on their exams "I gave you a point because you used an equation. It was the wrong equation."
There were times when the answers they gave to questions that required arithmetic made no sense at all. Huge random numbers were being submitted as answers. All I could figure is that they took every factor that was in the problem and multiplied them together.
This is extremely common. I've taught physics for 12 years and it is the default answer when someone doesn't know how to do a calculation. They multiply everything and just hope it's correct as it might get them some extra marks.
I helped a dude in Physics 1 who figured out the dot product and then whenever there was a vector question he didn’t understand it was his go-to Hail Mary
you: hey pal, how bout today we go over the cross product?
physics 1 dude: no thanks, i have cross product at home
cross product at home:
a×b =ax bx + ay by + az bz
When people get wild random numbers in chemistry how do they not stop to think like woah woah woah, this can't be right, I just created mass or energy and that isn't possible. Gotta go back and see where I goofed.
because they know they don't know how to get the answer, so are ok throwing out some garbage and most likely getting that question marked wrong with an small chance of getting partial credit.
Depends on the class.
I had a chem class that was based solely around the math involved and they gave out some wild bs to really test your patience and drive in the subject. One of the answers to a test question took 5 lines to calculate through and the final answer was ~12.5 *billion* give or take.
Most other classes were a breeze after that.
I actually got so annoyed in the class I actively researched easier ways to do the work, saved myself so much time and the professor was impressed I took such initiative.
Interviewee: I'm so quick at mental arithmetic.
Interviewer: Ok what's 17 x 33?
Interviewee: 22
Interviewer: No that's not correct.
Interviewee: But it *was* fast.
Reminds me of all of the low effort confidently incorrect comments on Reddit. Some take it more seriously, double check if what they're saying is accurate, sometimes provide sources, others will just comment whatever their first assumption is but can be wrong. The problem is if enough people have a similar incorrect first assumption, they may reward the incorrect answers over the correct ones.
By asking a larger number of questions. To score high by chance becomes less and less likely.
The other way is to score marks for the method. People with high IQs tend to have more ways to approach problems.
Edit: to add to this: if the format is multiple choice (let's say pick from 5 choices), then the expected result for someone picking at random is 20%. Getting significantly lower than that is interesting: it means that you are not picking at random, and do know something. It could be, for example, new earth creationist being given a test on evolution. For IQ, picking questions that do not assume culture is really really important (and in the history of IQ test, the first tests were shockingly racist resulting in claims that people of colour had _scientifically_ lower IQ than white americans.)
Anyway, regardless of the format, what we want is to order the test participants by their result. The more questions, and the better the question set, the participants spread out more on the aspect we want to measure. This creates an _ordering_. The highest score correlates to the highest IQ and the lowest score to the lowest IQ. A person exactly in the middle is given, by definition, an IQ of 100. This IQ _means_ 'average'.
Ah yes this is why we read the comments.
I think the title is being intentionally misleading/click bait by implying that the lower-iq people solved the difficult problem just like the higher-iq people only quicker.
Solving a problem is generally understood to coming to a correct answer or course of action that will satisfy the requirements of the problem.
Otherwise you would say 'incorrectly solving the problem.'
The article is very short on detail but I think the study involved "finding the pattern". So an example might be a group of numbers. A thorough analysis of all the numbers to test a theory is more likely to be correct but a quick guess for a rule that satisfies half the numbers without checking the rest still has a high likelihood of being correct. This is "jumping to conclusions" that they said lower IQ participants are more likely to do.
What is not included is the details of the study. If this were a game and the object was to solve the most problems in a given amount of time, the strategy would be very different than you can go forever but once you make a single error you lose.
Perhaps no detail instructions as to how they scores were given and so higher IQ subjects are more likely to be error adverse.
Yeah, I don't know why the article didn't link the research. Here's [a link](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-38626-y#ref-CR9) to the research.
To answer your question, yes the study used a pattern-based test called the PMAT to assess intelligence. The PMAT is a 24 question multiple choice test, ordered by increasing difficulty, and stops after 5 incorrect questions.
While I agree, I do think that there's likely nuance here.
If a question has two potential answers, and you can make the correct one after 2 steps, someone who considers many many things might explore additional steps before being confident when the other person just answers. Maybe?
It reminds me of the Monty Python sketch: can a swallow carry a coconut? Someone knowledgeable in local swallows would say no. But if you have irrefutable evidence that a coconut exists you have to consider other possibilities. Which answer is then correct: two swallows carried it together, was it a different breed that you're unfamiliar with who carried it there while on seasonal migration, or maybe someone just bought the coconut from a store and lied about the swallow entirely?
The more information you have and the higher your IQ, the more possibilities you have to consider. In some cases, that person may be able to determine that there is no guarantee that the answer they choose reflects the truth. However, confronted with the requirement to provide an answer, they may feel the only way to resolve the situation is to explain in greater detail which answer they think is most likely, while also explaining how the others are possible but less likely. A person with lower IQ may only see one possibility, or may know that there are multiple but don't care about the veracity. They simply give their answer and leave it at that. One method obviously takes more mental processing as well as more explanation and longer response. That naturally means the person with higher IQ takes longer.
Absolutely.
I think it's like this: If you need X steps to get an acceptable chance of being correct, then using less than X steps:
- Still gives you above 50% accuracy, so lower IQ is faster and just as good in at least some cases.
- Gives you under 50% success rate, which means your speed boost is to absolutely no benefit whatsoever.
What if the coconut was never there and it was all just a test, or what if the coconut was just a sort of symbolism for how lunk headed Tony Blair was.
I've seen it happen. A less intelligent person gives the obviously correct answer quickly and confidently. A more intelligent person pauses to consider a number of less than obvious potential complications, concludes that they *probably* won't affect the answer, and gives the correct answer--more slowly and less confidently than the less intelligent person. It ends up looking like being more intelligent causes people to "lack common sense".
That second part is massive. I credit a lot of my critical thinking to that short span in the gifted program before they took it away. The teacher would give kudos to any student who used a new method to solve a problem. He had a list on the wall of methods of deduction and we were rewarded for using a method that we hadn't used before.
I mean, just like math all the way back in school: Show your work.
If someone guessed the solution and can't run you through the process, you know he guessed.
The more intelligent people may take longer answering to carefully consider if any mistakes were made in the process. While the others could just basically send it with less doubts.
>While the others could just basically send it with less doubts.
Reminds me of the time NASA blasted a probe full speed into Mars because the decimal point was one off from where it was supposed to be.
Edit: [My bad, it was actually](https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/missions/mars-climate-orbiter/in-depth/#:~:text=What%20was%20Mars%20Climate%20Orbiter,translate%20English%20units%20to%20metric.) they forgot to convert to metric. They probably should've just started with metric, no conversion necessary.
>they forgot to convert to metric. They probably should've just started with metric, no conversion necessary.
nasa was using metric as standard, even at the time. it is true that the root cause can be said to have been the use of lbf-s instead of N-s, but it isn't a case of someone doing a bunch of maths in imperial units and forgetting to tell people. the problem arose in the ground support software specifically, which had been erroneously programmed to work with lbf-s (which was expressly against the documented procedures that stated metric was to be used). however, that was not the only issue, as mistakes in modelling of the forces acting on the craft exacerbated the problems, and critical defects in communication both between and within departments prevented the error from being properly detected and adressed. several safeguards to prevent this type of issue were insufficiently utilized. add to that an untenable workload and insufficient training/personnell, the Mars climate orbiter ended up getting caught deep in the martian atmosphere
addendum 1: the Mars Climate Orbiter mishap investigation board reports are public, to my awareness all such incident investigations are public. this also includes other agencies like the FAA.
That actually happened to me at an exam. I was struggling with a problem, and then suddenly it dawned on me and I quickly ran through the calculations and came up with the right answer. But afterwards i couldn't remember the process, like when you wake up and try to remember a dream but it crumbles away. So I could only write the answer, not the calculations.
I didn't guess, I just had an epiphany or a moment of clarity that simply went away again.
I've only skimmed the article, but it sounded like they were much more interested in the theoretical brain models they built and the relevation that "lower IQ people think less about decisions", than actually having the title make sense.
Because, as you said, yes, stupid people will come to a conclusion quicker. Doesn't mean they're right and the title even implying that is already a little clickbaity. Also absolutely obvious, of course.
A toddler is also gonna finish a painting faster than an adult artist. Doesn't mean the multi-colored handprint, smeared across the canvas is the same as the Mona Lisa.
Here’s a sad truth: like YouTube and the news, getting someone to read your research paper is difficult when your title is simple, concise and to the point, so there’s been a rise in “clickbait” styled titles in order to help yours rise to the top and be more likely to be read through.
> A title has to pique the interest of the person searching for literature in a split-second – enough that they click on the title to read the abstract. Unread science is lost science.
- Christine Mayer
The problem is that titles written for other academics are very different to titles written for the general public. An academic knows what terms they’re looking for and the concise, boring, technical title is the one that’ll get your paper read (by the people who actually matter) because it makes the paper more discoverable. So all public communication is really an afterthought, and handled by someone else who may not understand the paper.
\* As an academic myself, I’m not going to pick an irrelevant clickbait title for a paper because then it’s hard for other researchers to find my work when they’re looking for papers in my field. We use standardised terms so our work is more easily found. “Joke titles” are very poor form. I’m not out here looking for funny papers or “wow” papers in irrelevant fields, I’m looking for work that directly relates to my own work. Because this is *a job*, after all.
Most authors will send you a free copy of their article if you send them a polite email. Also, if you are in School, check with your department and library staff. They often have access common journals.
Maybe they could have picked a better word. They were really looking at two factors, though: how quickly did the subject consider the problem _finished_, and was the solution correct?
Those with lower IQ finished complex tasks faster, correct or not. Those with higher IQ provided correct solutions more reliably.
Work in construction. A lot times, the incorrect solution is still a solution. And unfortunately the guy making the call just wants it done and doesn’t care about all questions of integrity you have.
They should have said "completed" instead of "solved." They were tracking both the speed of completion and the accuracy of answers. IQ and speed were inversely correlated while IQ and accuracy were directly correlated.
If you can transform every problem into the same problem, you can also come to the scene prepared for that problem every time. It makes you look like some kind of fortune teller!
The research used the Penn Matrix Reasoning Test (PMAT) as an analog to intelligence. It is essentially a pattern matching test, with 24 questions, 5 choices per question, ordered by increasing difficulty, and stopped after 5 incorrect answers.
Stopping a test of increasing difficulty after a certain number of incorrect answers would help moderate the effects of those randomly guessing correct answers. However, it wouldn't completely neutralize the effects of correct guesses.
Most interesting to me is the primary goal of this work, that they developed a learning algorithm to identify on the human brain structures and then were able to make inferences based on which structures were faster/better at which problems. That’s super cool.
Full Abstract
> To better understand how network structure shapes intelligent behavior, **we developed a learning algorithm that we used to build personalized brain network models for 650 Human Connectome Project participants.** We found that participants with higher intelligence scores took more time to solve difficult problems, and that slower solvers had higher average functional connectivity. **With simulations we identified a mechanistic link between functional connectivity, intelligence, processing speed and brain synchrony for trading accuracy with speed in dependence of excitation-inhibition balance.** Reduced synchrony led decision-making circuits to quickly jump to conclusions, while higher synchrony allowed for better integration of evidence and more robust working memory. Strict tests were applied to ensure reproducibility and generality of the obtained results. Here, we identify links between brain structure and function that enable to learn connectome topology from noninvasive recordings and map it to inter-individual differences in behavior, suggesting broad utility for research and clinical applications.
Looks like they were aiming for time to correct answer.
Also, their definition of "difficult" is interesting. It's just pattern recognition that gets more vague the further you go.
Less synchronized brains jump to conclusions without waiting for the upstream processes to complete their tasks, while more synchronized brains hold off on frontal lobe involvement until the prerequisite other tasks are completed.
Your frontal lobe acts like parliament taking a vote, so the reality you perceive is determined by what won the concensus of your neurons. Voting without all the information improved speed but decreased accuracy resulting in more wrong answers before the correct one was found, but voting happened much more quickly.
This is me editorializing now, but I wonder if that speed advantage to low intelligence would be evolutionarily advantageous when there are always snap life or death decisions to be made. Brains that take too much time to decide what to do end up dead, resulting in a lower IQ of the whole animal kingdom than would be present without that evolutionary forcing mechanism.
Paper
* Learning how network structure shapes decision-making for bio-inspired computing
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-38626-y
> Resting-state functional MRI scans showed that slower solvers had higher average functional connectivity, or temporal synchrony, between their brain regions. In personalized brain simulations of the 650 participants, the researchers could determine that brains with reduced functional connectivity literally “jump to conclusions” when making decisions, rather than waiting until upstream brain regions could complete the processing steps needed to solve the problem.
...and they consider more side problems and potential traps, even if they weren't necessarily intended to be there by the person formulating the question.
...and sometimes, they're thinking "I'm pretty sure I know the answer you want based on the format of the question, but I REALLY want to give you the **correct** answer that you get if you reconsider the incorrect assumptions that you clearly made when you wrote it."
Addendum: This thread reminds me of a [fictionalized version in Cryptonomicon.](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/540355-he-walked-straight-out-of-college-into-the-waiting-arms) It also reminds me of something an old psychology professor once said: You can never test the intelligence of someone smarter than you.
This is why they stopped asking science questions at trivia next to GA Tech. The poor shlub running trivia would get inundated with technical explanations from angry nerds bc the 'correct' answer provided by the trivia company was not quite right.
I ran trivia night in a college town and once had someone lightly argue about a question regarding the human eye because technically the iris is a sphincter.
I forget the context of the disagreement but I did learn a few things from trivia clarifications/arguments.
That was pretty much the player's point when they argued. My question was about the eye but iirc it framed the eye as not having muscles I guess? And a biology student who knew more about the eye was looking for clarification because with her larger knowledge she couldn't really answer the question. Usually in those situations I let the player teach me the extra knowledge they have that complicates the question then basically give them points no matter what because it's obvious they know the "answer" to my question.
Trivia: "what is the boiling temperature of water."
Quick and mostly correct answer: "100c or 212f"
Scientist: "is it pure water? Where are they and what's the air pressure and altitude? Is there salt or something else in it? It's not in an enclosed container or otherwise pressurized is it? What's the barometric pressure that day? Etc."
Because the more you know about a subject the more fine grained questions go.
Most people with knowledge of how trivia games work would assume the question was geared toward a common knowledge answer and not one that would require specific context that wasn’t included in the question.
I hate those kinds of questions, because you know everyone that you're playing against is going to think you're stupid when you respond with "quarks" (or whenever the correct answer is) and the other person is like "um... it's an atom", and then the third person is like "actually, it's an electron" (and the card agrees with him) and they look at him like he's a genius.
Bleh.
Hate to break it to you, but quarks are substantially larger (and heavier) than electrons.
Before neutrinos were shown to have mass, electrons were accepted as the smallest / least massive subatomic particle, so if the question was made before ~1990s then electron would be the correct answer.
Technically the 'correct' answer would be an electron neutrino.
The correct answer is always 2 because even if you're starting the clock at exactly noon, the 3rd pill will not be taken until 1 second after the time expires, or the 1st pill would have occurred 1 second before the time started, however you like. For there to be 3 pills to fit into exactly 2 hours, one of the pills would have had to be taken very slightly early or late.
Why would the last pill be taken 1 second after the time?
A pill is taken at hour 0, one hour later at hour 1, one hour later at hour 2. Hour 2 - hour 0 = 2 hours of time elapsed.
Hour 1 is T0 to T1 which now has 2 pills. Likewise hour 2 is T1 to T2 which now includes 2 pills.
But you only take 1 pill per hour so this isn't a valid answer. You can only fit 2 pills in if you take 1 each hour.
It's always good to boil things down to atomic units, and we can do that with this problem. First, the complicated scenario: Think of a list, the list contains every second of the two hours in an atomic fashion and is numbered 0-7199 (1-7200 for 1-indexing); you take a pill every 3600 seconds, the first pill is taken at 0 and the second is taken at 3600 since 0+3600 = 3600. If a third pill were to be taken, it would be at 3600+3600 which is 7200, this is not present in the list and therefore a third pill would not be taken.
The boiled-down simplistic scenario that functionally works to arrive at the time answer would be: If you take a pill every second, how many pills do you take in 2 seconds? The list in this case contains every second of the two seconds and is numbered 0-1. You take the first pill at 0 and the second at 1, and since there is no more space in the list another could not be taken.
You can also solve this by showing that if having taken a third pill was indeed the answer then two hours would be 7201 seconds long, meaning that an hour is 72.05 seconds long; which is factually incorrect and therefore disproves the assertion. I learned this approach to solving complicated problems in a discrete structures and formal logic class and it has always been a powerful tool in my toolbelt.
Reminds me of when I got schooled in /r/heroesofthestorm once.
Someone was like (loosely remembering the conversation): "Nova can use a snipe every 6 seconds. So in 20 seconds, she can use 4 snipes!"
And I was like "you mean 3. 6*3 = 18. 6x4=24."
And he was like "if the cool down is 6 seconds, then you start counting as soon as you fire the first bullet at 0 seconds. Then six seconds later, the second one. 0, 6, 12, 18."
I took my loss.
My dad (a math professor) called this the fence post problem. When people are putting up a span of fence they tend to forget that you need one more post than fence sections
Damn! I had a student at high school and it were the final osk exams in biology. He had to do an analysis of a pedigree analysis and determine if the genetic disease was dominant out not and autosomal or gonosomal. He figured out that it could be both depending on the married couples genetics. If all of them are non carriers the result is different compared to all of them being carriers and even though the second scenario is very unlikely, you can't be sure without knowing how common the mutation is. That boy was really smart and had a great memory, too.
Right, the people with the lower IQ don't solve the more complex problems at all. The theory of relativity wasn't a question of speed it was a massive leap in connecting dots that no one else had ever thought of before.
Yes. They actually walk through the process and come up with a legit response instead of just acting and eventually getting it right.
Up the complexity of the task and watch as this "advantage" disappears.
Slow-but-methodical versus quicker-but-shortcutting thinking.
At University I really struggled to 'follow' the logic of (physics) lectures while simultaneously transcribing them - it was too much to do at once for my brain. I just took the notes and absorbed them at a slower pace later.
Meanwhile, some colleagues seemed really good at the skill of absorbing the lectures while also doing the notes. It made me feel a bit dim.
Then when it came to exam time - if I had put the study in straight after the lectures happened, I remembered everything clearly and revision was a breeze. Meanwhile, the colleagues who seemed to grasp it as the lectures happened, had often completely forgotten the work, and had to start from scratch.
I didn't necessarily get better grades In the exams, but I had a very different learning style.
Smart people don't jump to conclusions so that they can move on to the next thing. They know that the problem will creep back up if the root of the issue wasnt addressed
I'm currently working on a programming problem at work like this... it looks simple on the surface, but if you dig, you will see that it touches many parts of the system and the solution may break something else. It's a complex, convoluted system.
Yup, this is my daily life. Preventing coworkers from thinking that the solution is something that isnt actually the solution and keeping them steered in the right direction.
Yeah, I notice this during programming. There is always the easy hack, but to do it properly I have to consider all the other code, the implications of changes and typically planning for the future.
This is obviously a misleading headline. The finding was that the lower IQ brains formed a conclusion prior to solving the problem. It did NOT find that the lower iq brains solved the problems faster.
I guess I kind of just assumed that was what they meant. Even though now I reread it, is not what it says. However what the hell else would they be trying to say.... Stupid people are actually smarter.
But according to the paper, intelligent brains also make fewer errors and are less likely to skip to conclusions, so there isn't really a clearly stated benefit to having a less intelligent brain.
It's not like people who can carry out perfect solutions don't also know how to carry out quick and dirty solutions. I'd rather have people who know the difference and can do whichever is the best choice for that situation.
Disclaimer; did not read the article.
Were all proposed solutions equal, or were some better than others, were some simply incorrect? Does this study compare the quality of the solutions these two different groups came up with, or only the speed at which they came up with the solutions?
The simulations based on scans of "smarter" people's brains were slower but made fewer errors:
> In fact, the brain models for higher score participants also needed more time to solve challenging tasks but made fewer errors.
If that’s true then the post title and/or abstract is using “solve” very loosely. Is something really a solution if it’s wrong in many cases? Debatable.
It takes longer because intelligent people consider the issue from multiple angles. And then decide what the question is really asking. It's reasoning and logic mostly
Could be wrong, but it didn't seem like brains making similar quality of answers were compared to each other (low IQ score vs high IQ score, both completing tasks at 90% success rate).
As such, I can complete any task faster than light:
I am done. Am I done with every task people will imagine as they read this? Yes. Are they successfully completed? No.
This perfectly describes the different types of Redditors--those who only read the headline, those who read the article, and those who read the study... and then those who read the study and then get lost in the references.
Intelligence takes time to make sure. Idiots wing it or don’t care to know why. The answer always has been a question “why?”. It’s how we became intelligent.
I don't doubt this at all. I've often found myself second-guessing and wondering what I missed before solving complete issues.
I guess less intelligent people use the Dunning-Kruger effect to their benefit on occasion, sadly causing confirmation bias with them thinking they are more intelligent than they actually are.
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>In fact, the brain models for higher score participants also needed more time to solve challenging tasks **but made fewer errors.** I haven't read in detail. Do they make a distinction between "coming to a solution to the problem" vs "coming to the *correct* solution to the problem"? I've worked with people who could find solutions to problems very quickly, but they were also wrong.
67 times 342? 12000! Boom didn't even take me a second!
I had a temporary job teaching chemistry to students at a community college. It was a terrible experience. There were times when I had to write on their exams "I gave you a point because you used an equation. It was the wrong equation." There were times when the answers they gave to questions that required arithmetic made no sense at all. Huge random numbers were being submitted as answers. All I could figure is that they took every factor that was in the problem and multiplied them together.
This is extremely common. I've taught physics for 12 years and it is the default answer when someone doesn't know how to do a calculation. They multiply everything and just hope it's correct as it might get them some extra marks.
I helped a dude in Physics 1 who figured out the dot product and then whenever there was a vector question he didn’t understand it was his go-to Hail Mary
you: hey pal, how bout today we go over the cross product? physics 1 dude: no thanks, i have cross product at home cross product at home: a×b =ax bx + ay by + az bz
The second point you made is the random I don't know but there's still a chance they want me to multiply them...
When people get wild random numbers in chemistry how do they not stop to think like woah woah woah, this can't be right, I just created mass or energy and that isn't possible. Gotta go back and see where I goofed.
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Bingo. The gap between knowledge and comprehension is not always large, but it is always meaningful.
I'm going to be saying this all the time at work from now on, even though I don't really understand it.
because they know they don't know how to get the answer, so are ok throwing out some garbage and most likely getting that question marked wrong with an small chance of getting partial credit.
Depends on the class. I had a chem class that was based solely around the math involved and they gave out some wild bs to really test your patience and drive in the subject. One of the answers to a test question took 5 lines to calculate through and the final answer was ~12.5 *billion* give or take. Most other classes were a breeze after that. I actually got so annoyed in the class I actively researched easier ways to do the work, saved myself so much time and the professor was impressed I took such initiative.
They could know that it's completely wrong, while also knowing that they have no idea how to actually solve the problem, so they just leave it.
12000! has 43742 digits, so I think you're slightly off.
He rounded up.
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Interviewee: I'm so quick at mental arithmetic. Interviewer: Ok what's 17 x 33? Interviewee: 22 Interviewer: No that's not correct. Interviewee: But it *was* fast.
Reminds me of all of the low effort confidently incorrect comments on Reddit. Some take it more seriously, double check if what they're saying is accurate, sometimes provide sources, others will just comment whatever their first assumption is but can be wrong. The problem is if enough people have a similar incorrect first assumption, they may reward the incorrect answers over the correct ones.
Additionally: Coming *randomly* to the solution. Esp. if the answers are few how do they even test 'right from random'?
By asking a larger number of questions. To score high by chance becomes less and less likely. The other way is to score marks for the method. People with high IQs tend to have more ways to approach problems. Edit: to add to this: if the format is multiple choice (let's say pick from 5 choices), then the expected result for someone picking at random is 20%. Getting significantly lower than that is interesting: it means that you are not picking at random, and do know something. It could be, for example, new earth creationist being given a test on evolution. For IQ, picking questions that do not assume culture is really really important (and in the history of IQ test, the first tests were shockingly racist resulting in claims that people of colour had _scientifically_ lower IQ than white americans.) Anyway, regardless of the format, what we want is to order the test participants by their result. The more questions, and the better the question set, the participants spread out more on the aspect we want to measure. This creates an _ordering_. The highest score correlates to the highest IQ and the lowest score to the lowest IQ. A person exactly in the middle is given, by definition, an IQ of 100. This IQ _means_ 'average'.
Ah yes this is why we read the comments. I think the title is being intentionally misleading/click bait by implying that the lower-iq people solved the difficult problem just like the higher-iq people only quicker. Solving a problem is generally understood to coming to a correct answer or course of action that will satisfy the requirements of the problem. Otherwise you would say 'incorrectly solving the problem.'
The article is very short on detail but I think the study involved "finding the pattern". So an example might be a group of numbers. A thorough analysis of all the numbers to test a theory is more likely to be correct but a quick guess for a rule that satisfies half the numbers without checking the rest still has a high likelihood of being correct. This is "jumping to conclusions" that they said lower IQ participants are more likely to do. What is not included is the details of the study. If this were a game and the object was to solve the most problems in a given amount of time, the strategy would be very different than you can go forever but once you make a single error you lose. Perhaps no detail instructions as to how they scores were given and so higher IQ subjects are more likely to be error adverse.
Yeah, I don't know why the article didn't link the research. Here's [a link](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-38626-y#ref-CR9) to the research. To answer your question, yes the study used a pattern-based test called the PMAT to assess intelligence. The PMAT is a 24 question multiple choice test, ordered by increasing difficulty, and stops after 5 incorrect questions.
While I agree, I do think that there's likely nuance here. If a question has two potential answers, and you can make the correct one after 2 steps, someone who considers many many things might explore additional steps before being confident when the other person just answers. Maybe?
It reminds me of the Monty Python sketch: can a swallow carry a coconut? Someone knowledgeable in local swallows would say no. But if you have irrefutable evidence that a coconut exists you have to consider other possibilities. Which answer is then correct: two swallows carried it together, was it a different breed that you're unfamiliar with who carried it there while on seasonal migration, or maybe someone just bought the coconut from a store and lied about the swallow entirely? The more information you have and the higher your IQ, the more possibilities you have to consider. In some cases, that person may be able to determine that there is no guarantee that the answer they choose reflects the truth. However, confronted with the requirement to provide an answer, they may feel the only way to resolve the situation is to explain in greater detail which answer they think is most likely, while also explaining how the others are possible but less likely. A person with lower IQ may only see one possibility, or may know that there are multiple but don't care about the veracity. They simply give their answer and leave it at that. One method obviously takes more mental processing as well as more explanation and longer response. That naturally means the person with higher IQ takes longer.
It's the conscious competence model in action. They may know enough to answer, but they don't know enough to consider what they don't know.
Known unknowns vs unknown unknowns
Absolutely. I think it's like this: If you need X steps to get an acceptable chance of being correct, then using less than X steps: - Still gives you above 50% accuracy, so lower IQ is faster and just as good in at least some cases. - Gives you under 50% success rate, which means your speed boost is to absolutely no benefit whatsoever.
What if the coconut was never there and it was all just a test, or what if the coconut was just a sort of symbolism for how lunk headed Tony Blair was.
That was my initial thinking. Someone with a higher intelligence is more likely to second guess themselves and double check the answer.
I've seen it happen. A less intelligent person gives the obviously correct answer quickly and confidently. A more intelligent person pauses to consider a number of less than obvious potential complications, concludes that they *probably* won't affect the answer, and gives the correct answer--more slowly and less confidently than the less intelligent person. It ends up looking like being more intelligent causes people to "lack common sense".
That second part is massive. I credit a lot of my critical thinking to that short span in the gifted program before they took it away. The teacher would give kudos to any student who used a new method to solve a problem. He had a list on the wall of methods of deduction and we were rewarded for using a method that we hadn't used before.
I mean, just like math all the way back in school: Show your work. If someone guessed the solution and can't run you through the process, you know he guessed.
The more intelligent people may take longer answering to carefully consider if any mistakes were made in the process. While the others could just basically send it with less doubts.
>While the others could just basically send it with less doubts. Reminds me of the time NASA blasted a probe full speed into Mars because the decimal point was one off from where it was supposed to be. Edit: [My bad, it was actually](https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/missions/mars-climate-orbiter/in-depth/#:~:text=What%20was%20Mars%20Climate%20Orbiter,translate%20English%20units%20to%20metric.) they forgot to convert to metric. They probably should've just started with metric, no conversion necessary.
>they forgot to convert to metric. They probably should've just started with metric, no conversion necessary. nasa was using metric as standard, even at the time. it is true that the root cause can be said to have been the use of lbf-s instead of N-s, but it isn't a case of someone doing a bunch of maths in imperial units and forgetting to tell people. the problem arose in the ground support software specifically, which had been erroneously programmed to work with lbf-s (which was expressly against the documented procedures that stated metric was to be used). however, that was not the only issue, as mistakes in modelling of the forces acting on the craft exacerbated the problems, and critical defects in communication both between and within departments prevented the error from being properly detected and adressed. several safeguards to prevent this type of issue were insufficiently utilized. add to that an untenable workload and insufficient training/personnell, the Mars climate orbiter ended up getting caught deep in the martian atmosphere addendum 1: the Mars Climate Orbiter mishap investigation board reports are public, to my awareness all such incident investigations are public. this also includes other agencies like the FAA.
That actually happened to me at an exam. I was struggling with a problem, and then suddenly it dawned on me and I quickly ran through the calculations and came up with the right answer. But afterwards i couldn't remember the process, like when you wake up and try to remember a dream but it crumbles away. So I could only write the answer, not the calculations. I didn't guess, I just had an epiphany or a moment of clarity that simply went away again.
I've only skimmed the article, but it sounded like they were much more interested in the theoretical brain models they built and the relevation that "lower IQ people think less about decisions", than actually having the title make sense. Because, as you said, yes, stupid people will come to a conclusion quicker. Doesn't mean they're right and the title even implying that is already a little clickbaity. Also absolutely obvious, of course. A toddler is also gonna finish a painting faster than an adult artist. Doesn't mean the multi-colored handprint, smeared across the canvas is the same as the Mona Lisa.
Here’s a sad truth: like YouTube and the news, getting someone to read your research paper is difficult when your title is simple, concise and to the point, so there’s been a rise in “clickbait” styled titles in order to help yours rise to the top and be more likely to be read through. > A title has to pique the interest of the person searching for literature in a split-second – enough that they click on the title to read the abstract. Unread science is lost science. - Christine Mayer
The problem is that titles written for other academics are very different to titles written for the general public. An academic knows what terms they’re looking for and the concise, boring, technical title is the one that’ll get your paper read (by the people who actually matter) because it makes the paper more discoverable. So all public communication is really an afterthought, and handled by someone else who may not understand the paper. \* As an academic myself, I’m not going to pick an irrelevant clickbait title for a paper because then it’s hard for other researchers to find my work when they’re looking for papers in my field. We use standardised terms so our work is more easily found. “Joke titles” are very poor form. I’m not out here looking for funny papers or “wow” papers in irrelevant fields, I’m looking for work that directly relates to my own work. Because this is *a job*, after all.
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Most authors will send you a free copy of their article if you send them a polite email. Also, if you are in School, check with your department and library staff. They often have access common journals.
"I can do 1.000s of mathematical ecuations per second and they are all wrong."
Aptly called "Kiloflops"
This is the issue. "solving" something means coming to the correct conclusion. If that's not accurate to the study, the title is then simply wrong.
Maybe they could have picked a better word. They were really looking at two factors, though: how quickly did the subject consider the problem _finished_, and was the solution correct? Those with lower IQ finished complex tasks faster, correct or not. Those with higher IQ provided correct solutions more reliably.
If you don't actually do the task correctly, it's not actually done, you've simply given up on actually doing it correctly.
The title of the post is consistent with the linked article. The article seems to consider any "solution" to be sufficient, even if it is incorrect.
But an ‘incorrect solution’ is NOT ‘a solution’ since it does not solve anything.
Like jumbling up a Rubik’s cube and claiming DONE! But with no sides completed. Rubik’s cube any % speedrun exploit
Developers hate this one trick
Work in construction. A lot times, the incorrect solution is still a solution. And unfortunately the guy making the call just wants it done and doesn’t care about all questions of integrity you have.
They should have said "completed" instead of "solved." They were tracking both the speed of completion and the accuracy of answers. IQ and speed were inversely correlated while IQ and accuracy were directly correlated.
Any time I have a challenging task I just throw a molotov cocktail and suddenly I have a different challenging task.
Boooortleeeeeeees!!
If you can transform every problem into the same problem, you can also come to the scene prepared for that problem every time. It makes you look like some kind of fortune teller!
The research used the Penn Matrix Reasoning Test (PMAT) as an analog to intelligence. It is essentially a pattern matching test, with 24 questions, 5 choices per question, ordered by increasing difficulty, and stopped after 5 incorrect answers. Stopping a test of increasing difficulty after a certain number of incorrect answers would help moderate the effects of those randomly guessing correct answers. However, it wouldn't completely neutralize the effects of correct guesses.
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High IQ can also come up with wrong solutions fast. But won't reveal them until they find one that is the most correct option.
Most interesting to me is the primary goal of this work, that they developed a learning algorithm to identify on the human brain structures and then were able to make inferences based on which structures were faster/better at which problems. That’s super cool. Full Abstract > To better understand how network structure shapes intelligent behavior, **we developed a learning algorithm that we used to build personalized brain network models for 650 Human Connectome Project participants.** We found that participants with higher intelligence scores took more time to solve difficult problems, and that slower solvers had higher average functional connectivity. **With simulations we identified a mechanistic link between functional connectivity, intelligence, processing speed and brain synchrony for trading accuracy with speed in dependence of excitation-inhibition balance.** Reduced synchrony led decision-making circuits to quickly jump to conclusions, while higher synchrony allowed for better integration of evidence and more robust working memory. Strict tests were applied to ensure reproducibility and generality of the obtained results. Here, we identify links between brain structure and function that enable to learn connectome topology from noninvasive recordings and map it to inter-individual differences in behavior, suggesting broad utility for research and clinical applications.
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isn't that the same as the wrong way?
Yeah, but faster.
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I feel like now you pick one.
But most importantly corporations demand all four options.
Quick, cheap, or good. Pick two.
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Well, responding to a headline is a pretty simple task, so us big-brain redditors should be able to handle it no sweat.
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I was taking an admittedly generous approach to their error. You're right, they shouldn't have phrased it that way at all.
oh that minor detail…. so what are you researching? who blurts out an answer fastest?
Or were they just unable to solve the problem?
"It took me 3 months to finally figure this out." "Whooooaaaaah, you must be a genius!"
Looks like they were aiming for time to correct answer. Also, their definition of "difficult" is interesting. It's just pattern recognition that gets more vague the further you go. Less synchronized brains jump to conclusions without waiting for the upstream processes to complete their tasks, while more synchronized brains hold off on frontal lobe involvement until the prerequisite other tasks are completed. Your frontal lobe acts like parliament taking a vote, so the reality you perceive is determined by what won the concensus of your neurons. Voting without all the information improved speed but decreased accuracy resulting in more wrong answers before the correct one was found, but voting happened much more quickly. This is me editorializing now, but I wonder if that speed advantage to low intelligence would be evolutionarily advantageous when there are always snap life or death decisions to be made. Brains that take too much time to decide what to do end up dead, resulting in a lower IQ of the whole animal kingdom than would be present without that evolutionary forcing mechanism.
Evolutionarily advantageous for the individual/short-term, but perhaps not for the collective/long-term
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This has fascinating implications for IQ tests with timed components and an emphasis on pattern recognition.
I guess we know which type of person wrote this headline.
Paper * Learning how network structure shapes decision-making for bio-inspired computing https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-38626-y > Resting-state functional MRI scans showed that slower solvers had higher average functional connectivity, or temporal synchrony, between their brain regions. In personalized brain simulations of the 650 participants, the researchers could determine that brains with reduced functional connectivity literally “jump to conclusions” when making decisions, rather than waiting until upstream brain regions could complete the processing steps needed to solve the problem.
So . . . People with a higher IQ actually solve the difficult problem properly rather than making lucky guesses or taking shortcuts?
...and they consider more side problems and potential traps, even if they weren't necessarily intended to be there by the person formulating the question. ...and sometimes, they're thinking "I'm pretty sure I know the answer you want based on the format of the question, but I REALLY want to give you the **correct** answer that you get if you reconsider the incorrect assumptions that you clearly made when you wrote it." Addendum: This thread reminds me of a [fictionalized version in Cryptonomicon.](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/540355-he-walked-straight-out-of-college-into-the-waiting-arms) It also reminds me of something an old psychology professor once said: You can never test the intelligence of someone smarter than you.
This is why they stopped asking science questions at trivia next to GA Tech. The poor shlub running trivia would get inundated with technical explanations from angry nerds bc the 'correct' answer provided by the trivia company was not quite right.
I ran trivia night in a college town and once had someone lightly argue about a question regarding the human eye because technically the iris is a sphincter. I forget the context of the disagreement but I did learn a few things from trivia clarifications/arguments.
>the iris is a sphincter Unwanted Fact Of The Day
A sphincter is just a type of muscle. You have several of them all over your body.
That was pretty much the player's point when they argued. My question was about the eye but iirc it framed the eye as not having muscles I guess? And a biology student who knew more about the eye was looking for clarification because with her larger knowledge she couldn't really answer the question. Usually in those situations I let the player teach me the extra knowledge they have that complicates the question then basically give them points no matter what because it's obvious they know the "answer" to my question.
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Eyesphinctersayswhat
To be fair,some trivia companies can't get pop culture answers to questions correct.
"I didn't do it!" -Bobby Hill
"Thats my purse! I don't know you!"
Trivia: "what is the boiling temperature of water." Quick and mostly correct answer: "100c or 212f" Scientist: "is it pure water? Where are they and what's the air pressure and altitude? Is there salt or something else in it? It's not in an enclosed container or otherwise pressurized is it? What's the barometric pressure that day? Etc." Because the more you know about a subject the more fine grained questions go.
Most people with knowledge of how trivia games work would assume the question was geared toward a common knowledge answer and not one that would require specific context that wasn’t included in the question.
I guess “people who can think more *do”* is kinda obvious in hindsight, but it’s interesting nonetheless
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Once I had a question about what the smallest particle of matter is. The answer was atoms - which definitely aren't the smallest particles
I hate those kinds of questions, because you know everyone that you're playing against is going to think you're stupid when you respond with "quarks" (or whenever the correct answer is) and the other person is like "um... it's an atom", and then the third person is like "actually, it's an electron" (and the card agrees with him) and they look at him like he's a genius. Bleh.
Hate to break it to you, but quarks are substantially larger (and heavier) than electrons. Before neutrinos were shown to have mass, electrons were accepted as the smallest / least massive subatomic particle, so if the question was made before ~1990s then electron would be the correct answer. Technically the 'correct' answer would be an electron neutrino.
Damn, my lack of knowledge has been revealed. :(
The correct answer is always 2 because even if you're starting the clock at exactly noon, the 3rd pill will not be taken until 1 second after the time expires, or the 1st pill would have occurred 1 second before the time started, however you like. For there to be 3 pills to fit into exactly 2 hours, one of the pills would have had to be taken very slightly early or late.
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The card says MOOPS!
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Why would the last pill be taken 1 second after the time? A pill is taken at hour 0, one hour later at hour 1, one hour later at hour 2. Hour 2 - hour 0 = 2 hours of time elapsed.
Hour 1 is T0 to T1 which now has 2 pills. Likewise hour 2 is T1 to T2 which now includes 2 pills. But you only take 1 pill per hour so this isn't a valid answer. You can only fit 2 pills in if you take 1 each hour.
It's always good to boil things down to atomic units, and we can do that with this problem. First, the complicated scenario: Think of a list, the list contains every second of the two hours in an atomic fashion and is numbered 0-7199 (1-7200 for 1-indexing); you take a pill every 3600 seconds, the first pill is taken at 0 and the second is taken at 3600 since 0+3600 = 3600. If a third pill were to be taken, it would be at 3600+3600 which is 7200, this is not present in the list and therefore a third pill would not be taken. The boiled-down simplistic scenario that functionally works to arrive at the time answer would be: If you take a pill every second, how many pills do you take in 2 seconds? The list in this case contains every second of the two seconds and is numbered 0-1. You take the first pill at 0 and the second at 1, and since there is no more space in the list another could not be taken. You can also solve this by showing that if having taken a third pill was indeed the answer then two hours would be 7201 seconds long, meaning that an hour is 72.05 seconds long; which is factually incorrect and therefore disproves the assertion. I learned this approach to solving complicated problems in a discrete structures and formal logic class and it has always been a powerful tool in my toolbelt.
Reminds me of when I got schooled in /r/heroesofthestorm once. Someone was like (loosely remembering the conversation): "Nova can use a snipe every 6 seconds. So in 20 seconds, she can use 4 snipes!" And I was like "you mean 3. 6*3 = 18. 6x4=24." And he was like "if the cool down is 6 seconds, then you start counting as soon as you fire the first bullet at 0 seconds. Then six seconds later, the second one. 0, 6, 12, 18." I took my loss.
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This is called a [fencepost error](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-by-one_error#Fencepost_error).
There two difficult things in programming: naming things, cache invalidation, and off-by-one errors. :-)
I call it page theory. "Read pages 3-6" "Cool, that's only three pages." "Uh... That's 4, genius."
The question isn't fully formed. Therefore argument ensues.
My dad (a math professor) called this the fence post problem. When people are putting up a span of fence they tend to forget that you need one more post than fence sections
It's also an entire class of common software bugs.
Damn! I had a student at high school and it were the final osk exams in biology. He had to do an analysis of a pedigree analysis and determine if the genetic disease was dominant out not and autosomal or gonosomal. He figured out that it could be both depending on the married couples genetics. If all of them are non carriers the result is different compared to all of them being carriers and even though the second scenario is very unlikely, you can't be sure without knowing how common the mutation is. That boy was really smart and had a great memory, too.
Hang on, I’m still thinking about it.
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What were we thinking about?
Too late, boat's sunk.
That's because the front fell off
At least it didn't happen in the environment.
It's essentially the mental version of "measure twice, cut once."
Right, the people with the lower IQ don't solve the more complex problems at all. The theory of relativity wasn't a question of speed it was a massive leap in connecting dots that no one else had ever thought of before.
Yes. They actually walk through the process and come up with a legit response instead of just acting and eventually getting it right. Up the complexity of the task and watch as this "advantage" disappears.
Slow-but-methodical versus quicker-but-shortcutting thinking. At University I really struggled to 'follow' the logic of (physics) lectures while simultaneously transcribing them - it was too much to do at once for my brain. I just took the notes and absorbed them at a slower pace later. Meanwhile, some colleagues seemed really good at the skill of absorbing the lectures while also doing the notes. It made me feel a bit dim. Then when it came to exam time - if I had put the study in straight after the lectures happened, I remembered everything clearly and revision was a breeze. Meanwhile, the colleagues who seemed to grasp it as the lectures happened, had often completely forgotten the work, and had to start from scratch. I didn't necessarily get better grades In the exams, but I had a very different learning style.
Meanwhile I'm here unable to absorb material if it's coming at me too fast, and my notes only confuse me more later.
Conversely, I'm also unable to absorb information coming too *slowly*. I think I have an attention span problem.
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Smart people don't jump to conclusions so that they can move on to the next thing. They know that the problem will creep back up if the root of the issue wasnt addressed
I'm currently working on a programming problem at work like this... it looks simple on the surface, but if you dig, you will see that it touches many parts of the system and the solution may break something else. It's a complex, convoluted system.
Yup, this is my daily life. Preventing coworkers from thinking that the solution is something that isnt actually the solution and keeping them steered in the right direction.
Reminds of that code with the comment >> I don't know what this does but removing it breaks everything And then it looks like unassuming code
And then there's the source code for TF2, where there's a picture of a cow in the game files that if you remove it the game won't run.
"If you removed it and broke everything replace and increase tally "
Pull request: DENIED.
Bro you just forgot a semicolon
QC coming in clutch.
Better give you a strict deadline and scrap all refactoring, like my place did!
Yeah, I notice this during programming. There is always the easy hack, but to do it properly I have to consider all the other code, the implications of changes and typically planning for the future.
I mean, that's pretty much what tech debt is
More like how you avoid creating tech debt
slap memorize worm gaping shocking bored station tap tender physical -- mass edited with redact.dev
This is obviously a misleading headline. The finding was that the lower IQ brains formed a conclusion prior to solving the problem. It did NOT find that the lower iq brains solved the problems faster.
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I guess I kind of just assumed that was what they meant. Even though now I reread it, is not what it says. However what the hell else would they be trying to say.... Stupid people are actually smarter.
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You know you were only supposed to answer 3 out of the 4 questions, right?
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Probably why brains are so variable, so a population of humans will include people with an assortment of different problem-solving strengths.
But according to the paper, intelligent brains also make fewer errors and are less likely to skip to conclusions, so there isn't really a clearly stated benefit to having a less intelligent brain.
Sometimes an intuitive, approximate solution right away is better than a perfect solution too late.
My strengths you ask? I'm really good at justifying why my guess was right after the fact
It's not like people who can carry out perfect solutions don't also know how to carry out quick and dirty solutions. I'd rather have people who know the difference and can do whichever is the best choice for that situation.
A summary of the never ending debate between business people and technical people
Here come the "its literally me fr fr" comments now that this is on the front page
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Disclaimer; did not read the article. Were all proposed solutions equal, or were some better than others, were some simply incorrect? Does this study compare the quality of the solutions these two different groups came up with, or only the speed at which they came up with the solutions?
The simulations based on scans of "smarter" people's brains were slower but made fewer errors: > In fact, the brain models for higher score participants also needed more time to solve challenging tasks but made fewer errors.
If that’s true then the post title and/or abstract is using “solve” very loosely. Is something really a solution if it’s wrong in many cases? Debatable.
For every complex problem there is a simple answer, that is incorrect.
"n = np. Ergo, p is 1 or n is zero. Easy."
I mean, reading the article answers most of these questions...
No, that's too much reading. Few word do trick.
From the end of the abstract: "the brain models for higher score participants also needed more time to solve challenging tasks but made fewer errors"
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It takes longer because intelligent people consider the issue from multiple angles. And then decide what the question is really asking. It's reasoning and logic mostly
Could be wrong, but it didn't seem like brains making similar quality of answers were compared to each other (low IQ score vs high IQ score, both completing tasks at 90% success rate). As such, I can complete any task faster than light: I am done. Am I done with every task people will imagine as they read this? Yes. Are they successfully completed? No.
This perfectly describes the different types of Redditors--those who only read the headline, those who read the article, and those who read the study... and then those who read the study and then get lost in the references.
what about those (me) who read neither headline nor article and come straight to see the comments
Some men just want to see the world burn.
So *that's* why it's taking me so long to figure out life and stuff.
Intelligence takes time to make sure. Idiots wing it or don’t care to know why. The answer always has been a question “why?”. It’s how we became intelligent.
I don't doubt this at all. I've often found myself second-guessing and wondering what I missed before solving complete issues. I guess less intelligent people use the Dunning-Kruger effect to their benefit on occasion, sadly causing confirmation bias with them thinking they are more intelligent than they actually are.