other things

Interesting. So you’re saying that critical thinking is not what I mentioned, but rather it is something different (an “other thing”). What would you say critical thinking is?

People have said “critical thinking”. I agree, but we can be more specific than that:

• Formal logic to think clearly
• Relational frame training to think fluidly
• Human cognitive bias awareness and mitigation strategies to avoid magical thinking or otherwise systematic cognitive errors
• Discourse Analysis to be critical of any message https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LKiaYBVAEUk&pp=
• Mindfulness and acceptance skills to engage with what our thoughts and body tell us, regardless of whether it’s painful or difficult
• Visible Thinking Routines to make thinking and communication with others easier
• Research design (Joseph A. Maxwell) and system design (How to Design Programs) to seek information critically and how to systematically tackle challenges

Same here, but with a different order.

• Turn the heat on.
• Wait.
• Test with water. If it doesn’t sizzle, wait and test again. If it does sizzle…
• Add oil

I agree that there is plenty of nonsense out there. There are many interventions veiled as “scientific”, and most people don’t have the ability to lift the veil and recognize the pseudoscience beneath.

Unfortunately, the answer to your question is, partly, no. Psychology has not inoculated the world from pseudoscience. However, the answer to your question is also, partly, yes. There are people who have learned from the most robust evidence in psychology.

To the extent that organization and management adapt to robust findings in psychology, there are many contributions that psychology has made to organization and management.

• Clear goals. Things like SMART goals, specific goals, vivid goals, implementation intentions, mental contrasting, or otherwise things that help you be clear rather than vague about your goals— all of those tend to have a moderate effect on outcomes.
• CBT, ACT, and mindfulness. You will probably groan at this, because you have probably had watered down, simplified to the point of being unrecognizable versions of these. At their best, these have shown improvements in the way workers approach their work
• Psychological safety. You will probably also groan at this, because ironically psychological safety interventions, when done poorly, can make some people feel unsafe. However, the correlational and longitudinal data is quite clear: psychological safety leads to better results. Unfortunately, the experimental evidence has, to my knowledge, stuck to health-related organizations, where not speaking up costs lives. I wonder if there are good studies elsewhere now.
• Feedback strategies. There have been good experimental studies showing that the way you give feedback can change your organization’s capabilities over time. This is similar to psychological safety but arrived at from a different lineage in the literature.
• Multitasking and task-switching. This one probably goes without saying, because there has been more than extensive research on this. Minimizing distractions, focusing on one thing at a time, having a pull-based workflow…

More broadly, you could look for good resources for Evidence-Based Management.

How does being Christian destroy your sense of self?

I’ve been trying to find this meme but with SpongeBob SquarePants’ fish

How come?

I love this method. It’s how I solve cubes. It’s fast and it minimizes the amount of turns you do. While new methods (methods with optimized algorithms) trump this method, there was a time this method won many tournaments. The method is still fast and gratifying.

It requires thinking, but it requires minimal memorization of algorithms. With this method, you can get away with learning only one or two algorithms. It’ll be much less like memorizing history dates and much more like learning to ride a bike: learn it once and never forget it.

https://lar5.com/cube/

If we ignore Alfred Binet, then sure I can get onboard with you :) Indeed, the pre-IQ head-measuring stage of racism was filled with white supremacist nonsense. In that sense, it is a history filled with pseudoscience and pain.

Out of curiousity, would you classify Alfred Binet as an eugenicist and white supremacist?

You seem to value honesty and accuracy. It sounds as if you’re saying that someone smart wouldn’t say they’re smart. It also sounds as if you’re saying that someone who wouldn’t be considered smart can correctly identify people who claim that they’re smart but in reality aren’t.

How come?

So I don’t know if this answers your question, but there’s my two cents for you.

It does! This is precisely the kind of stuff that I’m interested in! I agree with you, in that it’s possible to think wrong thoughts even with a higher IQ. I see IQ as the speed of thought, and you can very quickly arrive at wrong conclusions. Similarly, if there’s a thought that your skill tree hasn’t unlocked, then you’re left with thoughts that are maybe not ideal for a particular situation, thoughts that could make someone “overcomplicate things unnecessarily” or “make dumb mistakes”, as your dad or anyone on planet Earth would.

I think it’s especially hard to isolate IQ when there are many thoughts or behaviors that we don’t typically associate with high IQ. “Ah yes, the violin is a sensible instrument for a learned man” or whatever people may think. That’s partly why I asked my question. If someone leads a life not typically associated with a high IQ and yet have a high enough IQ that manifested in their life, how did that look like? Of course, I’m not looking for wild stories. I’m looking for genuine stories, and I’m glad that I got an interesting answers like yours!

Thanks for your response.

It’s interesting to see your story in relation to other stories I’ve heard or people I’ve met.

Before I describe them, it’s important to say that you don’t strike me as unkind. I wouldn’t want you to compare yourself to the people I’ll mention and conclude that you’re somehow bad. I’m taking the time to say this because I don’t know if the difficulties you’ve mentioned are a sore spot.

Alright. The people I’ve met. I’ve met people whose identity was tied to their IQ and it became painful for me to wonder what I meant to them. For sure I was not close to their IQ; they needed to take multiple tests because they were off the charts. But I always wondered if they liked me as a person, based on my values and how I did things.

I’ve also met very relaxed and kind people who went on to study at the schools that were supposed to be a goal, people who made me realize it’s possible to be wicked smart and simultaneously kind.

When you mention that it was important that you weren’t told that the test you took was an IQ test, I think about teenage me. Back then, I learned that people could judge me based on my IQ. I made the mistake of reading white supremacist bigotry, and read that they evaluated whether people were worthy of living based on things like IQ. I knew the whole white supremacy discourse was pseudoscience and bigotry, but I was scared of bigots in power evaluating my existence. I became terrified. I became very distrustful of people who I should’ve trusted, wonderful people who would’ve never had such narrow and mistaken views. That has changed, now that I have a clearer sense of self and more perspective. But I can’t help but wonder what would’ve happened if I wouldn’t have mistrusted wonderful people. I guess the discourse around IQ can really change the way you look at the world and what you do.

Is it too nosy to ask a couple of follow up questions? If not, here they are: you mentioned ADHD and the obstacle you could never get yourself past, the inability to keep your focus and control it. Is the diagnosis recent? Could medication help? Could any treatment help with the ADHD? As to difficulties understanding other people, do you know about relational frame theory, the self component of ACT, and the PEAK and AIM programs?

Genuine curiosity: I’ve seen piles of “my superior intellect” and “normies would never understand”, so I wanted to ask if your answer was sarcastic. If it isn’t, are you saying that you identify with Rick? Or something different?

I’m asking this partly because I saw someone else asking the same question but about low IQ.

Hahah! Living up to your aristocratic origins, I see.

If you believe psychology and IQ are nonsense, here’s a comment I copied over from another thread:

IQ means intelligence quotient. A bunch of people take a test and they’re compared to each other. Your result is your intelligence quotient.

Its origins were noble, because it was designed to identify students who needed extra help in school. The creator of the test knew that people could change their results with good instruction.

However, that noble origin story was besmirched by what happened later. Eventually, IQ tests were used as a way to classify people in more brutal and rigid ways. The USA military used it as a cutoff for aspiring cadets. USA colleges use tests that effectively are IQ tests to let people in or not. The worst part is that bigots around the world injected pseudoscience into IQ and used it to decide who they think are worthy of life and who aren’t. It’s as awful as it sounds.

You may notice that helping struggling students sounds wonderful, and you may think that we should go back to that.

However, some people are deeply marked by the dark history of IQ. They have developed beliefs that protect them from the dangers of bigotry and IQ reductionism. They believe that tests aren’t useful at all to tell us something about anything. They believe IQ tests should be banished and never used.

Other people believe IQ tests are a snapshot of how a person answered the questions to a test in a given day. Take the same test days, months, or years after a great education, and the result will be higher. Additionally, these people notice that, in research, IQ scores are robustly associated with other things, such as quality of relationships, happiness, income, and other measures. They contend that learning about the world, about ourselves, and how to think critically and solve problems has massive domino effects in peoples’ lives. Once again, these people believe that a test result one day doesn’t doom you for life and doesn’t define you. A bad test result shows the gap that a good education would fill. These people know that a good education makes the mind curious, nimble, and open.

Intelligence quotient. A bunch of people take a test and they’re compared to each other. Your result is your intelligence quotient.

Its origins were noble, because it was designed to identify students who needed extra help in school. The creator of the test knew that people could change their results with good instruction. However, that noble origin story was besmirched by what happened later. Eventually, IQ tests were used as a way to classify people in more brutal and rigid ways. The USA military used it as a cutoff for aspiring cadets. USA colleges use tests that effectively are IQ tests to let people in or not. The worst part is that bigots around the world injected pseudoscience into IQ and used it to decide who they think are worthy of life and who aren’t. It’s as awful as it sounds.

You may notice that helping struggling students sounds wonderful, and you may think that we should go back to that.

However, some people believe that tests aren’t useful at all to tell us something about anything. They believe IQ tests should be banished and never used.

Others people believe IQ tests are a snapshot of how a person answered the questions to a test in a given day. Additionally, these people notice that, in research, IQ scores are robustly associated with other things, such as quality of relationships, happiness, income, and other measures. These results suggest that learning to solve problems helps humans solve problems!

If the noble origins of the test are a guide, poor performers would receive help. More people would get the benefits of a higher IQ, not because of the fear of being classified in a brutal and rigid way, but because a good education makes the mind curious, nimble, and open.

How to learn better? How to organize teams better? How to write text or make presentations so that it aligns with how the brain best receives information? How to evaluate candidates for a role while minimizing the halo effect and the bandwagon effect? How to nudge people into leaving public spaces cleaner? How to make spaces more attractive for people to spend time in? How to increase adherence to lifestyle changes such as diet and exercise after cancer treatment? How to increase the odds of achieving a task you want to do? How to make computer interfaces easier to use for people, including people with disabilities? You’re saying that psychology has not studied these nor contributed to them?

Yes, there are a lot of problems in the field. But there are also brilliant people cutting through the bullshit and using their findings to improve the world. I’d be more than happy to show you robust findings that the field has gifted the world.

Huh. Interesting. What kind of math were you learning where you noticed the errors?