[HN Gopher] Cognitive reflection, intelligence, and cognitive ab...
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Cognitive reflection, intelligence, and cognitive abilities: A
meta-analysis
Author : Bluestein
Score : 69 points
Date : 2024-05-20 13:50 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.sciencedirect.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.sciencedirect.com)
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| The study found that your ability to reflect on "your first
| impulsive response" in order to refine it or discard it, is
| closely related to your general intelligence ability and
| numerical abilities. It refutes the idea that cognitive
| reflection is a separate skill independent of general
| intelligence.
| Bluestein wrote:
| I guess, by some measure it should be a separate skill. It
| appears to be a measurable skill, apart from AGI, so there's
| that.-
|
| PS. It would appear to be a great, reflexive, quality for an AI
| to have: the ability to monitor its outputs, and improve on
| responses, in a "metacognitive" way.-
| prometheus76 wrote:
| Just because something is distinct does not mean it is
| independent.
| alphazard wrote:
| This is usually what happens when you try to tease out another
| skill or separate "intelligence" from the general factor, it
| ends up being correlated in the end.
| Teever wrote:
| Well yeah, defects are clustered so if someone is likely to
| be damaged in one way they're likely to be damaged in
| another.
| bbor wrote:
| Super interesting maxim, thanks for sharing! Of course
| that's part of it, but given the spatially distributed
| nature of the relevant networks (ie we could _maybe_
| constrain some of these Piagetian abilities to one
| hemisphere or lobe of the cortex, at best) I think there's
| more at play than adjacency.
|
| I'm personally confident that the four faculties of the
| brain are each involved in reinforcing the others, and I
| think that provides a compelling causal mechanism
| correlating the development of one with increased
| performance among the others. For example, consider the
| Metaconscious gradually tweaking a baby's Unconscious
| visual networks to improve their sight, and the increase in
| information input eventually bubbles up to develop the
| Metaconscious in turn.
| discreteevent wrote:
| > ability to reflect on "your first impulsive response"
|
| This is why it's harder to be brave if you're smart.
| sandspar wrote:
| Citation needed.
| nabusman wrote:
| Isn't the other way around? Take a fireman, he's running into
| a burning building, whereas I'd think the first impulse would
| be to run away, hence he's reflecting on his first impulse to
| be brave.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| We all three of us understood this differently.
|
| I heard the old "Thinking fast and slow" dichotomy all
| over: You have snap impulses, and you have the ability to
| override them if you recognize them. Also "elephant and
| rider" from Haidt's books.
|
| A fireman spends time training his "elephant" (impulses) to
| be helpful in fire situations, first by overcoming his
| impulse for fear in the face of fire.
|
| This takes time.
|
| A person who is predisposed to contemplation might appear
| smarter on tests or be smarter in actuality (see TFA), but
| that doesn't have much to do with someone who has faced and
| conquered their fearful impulses enough that they are
| dampened.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| I think that's training, which is the opposite of
| reflection - you train behaviors exactly so you don't dwell
| on them at the moment.
| bena wrote:
| It's kind of both ways. Your impulse is controlled by your
| amygdala. Fight or flight, where "fight" in this instance
| represents running into a building to save others.
|
| However, being able to reflect on your first impulse means
| you will sit back and assess the situation: "Can I get
| in?", "What are my chances?", "Am I protected enough?",
| "Will the structure collapse soon?", etc.
|
| So your first instinct _may_ be to run in, but you hesitate
| because you want to do that critical thinking first.
| nicklecompte wrote:
| It seems to me like it is yet another study which refutes the
| idea that we're able to scientifically measure "general
| intelligence" (or "cognitive intelligence," using the author's
| term). Instead of anything which can be called intelligence,
| these tests keep measuring the same wrong thing. This thing is
| clearly amenable to short-term improvement with practice, and
| possibly assistance from a trained psychologist. And I don't
| think it has much to do with the actual problems human brains
| have to solve. The fact that human brains _can_ be trained to
| solve IQ test problems or math problems is interesting. But
| surely it 's a tiny slice of what human brains can do.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| No, it's another datapoint _for_ IQ. General intelligence was
| discovered empirically, not hypothesized and then searched-
| for.
|
| The basic observation was that people who score highly on one
| intelligence-related test will generally score highly on
| every other intelligence-related test. The "dimensions" of
| intelligence, while hypothetically separable and distinct,
| don't actually appear to be so in practice. Smart people are
| smart at most things (in general), dumb people are dumb at
| most things (in general).
|
| This only gets shaky when one uses it to make moral arguments
| about people's value or worth, so I'll just explicitly say
| it: being smart is not a moral victory or very likely even
| something you _earned_ at all. Smart and dumb people have
| equal claim to a dignified life here on earth.
| bena wrote:
| Yes, intelligence is more a multiplier of effects, rather
| than something useful in and of itself.
|
| You still need knowledge, skill, training, etc.
| Intelligence will allow you to acquire all of that more
| quickly and make better use of it, but intelligence without
| knowledge is useless.
|
| And just like taller people aren't better than shorter
| people, more intelligent people aren't better than less
| intelligent people. Nothing can make you a good person
| except your choices to do good things.
| hirvi74 wrote:
| > _more intelligent people aren 't better than less
| intelligent people._
|
| I completely agree with this, and I wish it was something
| that was a bit more emphasized.
|
| However, I do think there lies the dangers of
| intelligence research. In seems that so much of the world
| is catered towards the idea that more intelligence =
| better person. I suppose the notion is that more
| intelligence people can produce greater value, thus they
| are more important/beneficial to society?
|
| In society, we have "gifted" programs, "elite"
| universities, "knowledge" workers, etc.. I'm probably
| rambling and wording this all poorly, but I guess what I
| am trying to allude to is that society definitely ranks
| people's value by intelligence in overt and subtle ways.
|
| Don't you think most parents would rather have a child
| with average empathy with gifted intelligence than a
| child that with gifted empathy and average intelligence?
|
| (Tangent below)
|
| I was required to take a legitimate IQ test (WAIS-IV) for
| the purposes of diagnosing/confirming a disability when I
| was in college. I'm not kidding when I say this, but I
| wish I was able to remain ignorant of the composite and
| subtest scores. Sure, it told me somethings about myself,
| but at the same time, I felt like it was some kind of
| report describing what domains my aspirations and
| limitations in life should be confined to.
|
| To me, it seems like intelligence is not important to
| those that have a lot of it, and it's significant to
| those that lack it (whether they realize it or not).
| hirvi74 wrote:
| If you have the time, I am curious what you think about
| this post, "Three-Toed Sloth."
|
| http://bactra.org/weblog/523.html
|
| It is obviously just one person's blog post, but I did find
| it interesting and compelling. However, I must admit that
| some of the areas of discussion surpass my level of
| knowledge of statistics and psychometrics.
|
| I am just curious what your opinions are since you seem
| much more versed in this topic than I am.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| To be clear I'm nowhere close to an expert. But my
| reaction to that blog post is that I'm not quite sure
| what it's rebutting? It seems to argue (successfully, I
| guess) that _g_ isn't some singular source of intellect
| that's powering all other dimensions of intellect. I am
| not sure if other people believe this to be the case, but
| I certainly don't, as that seems contrary to the
| structure of the brain itself. There is no "smartness"
| lobe that's supporting the "smartness" of all the other
| things the brain is doing and smart people have a bigger
| /better smartness lobe than dumb people. That's just not
| what the brain looks like.
|
| What this blog post does say, which I believe to be true,
| is that intelligence on one dimension is highly
| correlated with intelligence on other dimensions. Not
| because they're necessarily all driven by the "same
| source," which seems like an implementation detail with,
| AFAICT, pretty much zero bearing on anything of practical
| concern?
| nicklecompte wrote:
| This is just a distortion, and shows you haven't actually
| engaged with the scientific criticism of IQ tests:
|
| > General intelligence was discovered empirically, not
| hypothesized and then searched-for.
|
| General intelligence has been hypothesized - and assumed to
| exist - by almost all peoples since prehistory. The _g
| factor_ is what you are referring to, and that was
| discovered "empirically." What was not at all empirical
| was the decision to call the g factor a measure of general
| intelligence. That is a hypothesis which seems flatly
| wrong, and I have yet to see an argument for its validity
| that isn't circular or specious. My point is that written
| cognitive tests don't measure intelligence, they measure
| something much more shallow. The fact that written
| cognitive tests have a correlating g factor does not mean
| that the g factor itself is any less shallow.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| From the first line of the Wiki article: "The g factor
| (also known as _general intelligence_ ,...)"
|
| I was referring to _g_ , not to the concept of general
| intelligence, which very obviously has pretty much always
| existed. Apologies for the ambiguity.
|
| In any case, I don't think it really matters how
| precisely or reliably we can actually _measure_ g
| directly, which is really what your sticking point is.
| Every important decision we need to make around the idea
| of general intelligence has to do with 1) whether it
| exists, 2) how well it correlates to positive outcomes in
| life under specific social and economic regimes, and 3)
| how heritable it is. All of these seem pretty darn
| obvious from various experiments _not_ relying on
| measuring _g_ directly.
|
| Why do you think it matters whether we can measure _g_?
| What decisions are there to be made with that
| information?
| RandomWorker wrote:
| > Cognitive Reflection (CR) refers to the individual ability or
| disposition to stop the first impulsive response that our mind
| offers and to activate the reflective mechanisms that allow us to
| find an answer, make a decision, or carry out a specific behavior
| in a more thoughtful way.
|
| Basically the idea that you think before you act. Makes sense
| that this would enhance all other skills. Is this junk science?
| I'd rather see actual test plus data with control variables. Meta
| analysis seems to have the conclusion already in the
| introduction. We think this matters here's a bunch of evidence we
| found, therefore it matters.
| OnlyMortal wrote:
| It's impulsive if it's blindly obvious.
|
| Someone of intelligence would find that so and have no need to
| reflect or even think about it.
| nine_k wrote:
| Our knowledge of a situation is almost always imperfect, and
| can most of the time benefit from longer, deeper, less blond
| analysis.
|
| Where impulses and reflexes rule is time-sensitive
| activities, like most sports, playing musical instruments, or
| driving. Whoever can deploy a better repertoire of
| thoughtless, instant reactions wins. It's basically
| precomputed and cached thought.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| oh the word games in this thread.
|
| This is an old concept:
|
| System 1 and System 2 (The linked article but also everyone?)
|
| book: Thinking fast and slow (Daniel Kahneman)
|
| analogy: Elephant and Rider (Haidt)
|
| analogy: Charioteer and Horse (stoics)
|
| An impulse is not blindly obvious (e.g., unconscious bias or
| unquestioned assumptions), and an intelligent person may or
| may not have correct biases / impulses _in all situations_.
| However, a person who can sit with their impulses, override
| them, and try to see through them through reflection may in
| fact have something that is synonymous with intelligence to a
| degree (thesis of TFA).
|
| I _believe_ the implication is that "much of intelligence is
| reflection" and that "continuous reflection yields better
| intuition on the reflected domain". Not "a person born with
| high IQ has better instincts".
| Bluestein wrote:
| Just to be sure, "TFA" is Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking, Fast
| and Slow", I assume ...
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Ah no, it was the article we were all discussing here.
| The one the HN thread is about.
| Bluestein wrote:
| Understood. :)
| gwd wrote:
| Man, I'm shocked at how often this has to be reiterated
| here...
|
| "TFA" means The F[ine]* Article (or insert another 'F'
| word if you wish), which I first heard on Slashdot, which
| was perhaps the OG "news aggregator" site back in the
| 90's and early 2000s, to refer back to the original
| article which we were all discussing.
|
| This was a back-formation from RTFA, which would have
| meant, "Read The F[ine] Article", an admonition /
| accusation not uncommon on Slashdot which is explicitly
| discouraged here.
|
| RTFA, in turn, was a modification of RTFM, familiar to
| many of the IT crowd, as an admonition / recommendation
| often proffered in response to user questions: Read the
| F[ine] Manual.
|
| Although RTFM was obviously fairly toxic, and RTFA was of
| the same spirit, TFA by itself simply filled a useful
| role: a way to refer back specifically to the article we
| were all (supposedly) discussing.
|
| * There are other F-words sometimes used here, of course
| bbor wrote:
| IDK if you just wrote that all on the spot but well done,
| you need a blog! I knew most of those facts individually
| but never tied it all together into a narrative, or made
| the connection with Read the Freakin Manual.
|
| To only slightly elongate this tangent: I'm giving the
| Reddit crowd cultural victory on this one with "OP" (for
| Original _Post_ ) rather than "TFA"/"TLA". I'm curious
| what is typically used on platforms like Instagram and
| TikTok, but I'm guessing no one here knows lol
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Everyone learned it somewhere!
| Bluestein wrote:
| Ah. Slashdot. Those were the days.-
|
| Had not made the connection between "TFA" here and that.
| Much less "RTFM" ...
|
| ... which is a classic by now.-
| neuronexmachina wrote:
| The OP article cites Kahneman & Frederick quite a bit in
| the intro.
| rhelz wrote:
| It is junk science--when a skill is truly mastered, it is done
| entirely without thinking bout it. Flow. Conscious, reflective
| thought is very slow and is typically only invoked when all
| else fails.
|
| When you are programming--really sucked into it, the state of
| flow---you are not thinking about _how_ you are programming.
| You are not aware that you have feet, inside of socks, or even
| that you are sitting down. You are not even aware you are
| thinking about it at all-- _you_ actually disappear altogether,
| all that really exists is this mind-meld of you, the problem
| you are trying to solve, and the program you are solving it
| with.
|
| If, in the middle of this state, you stop and start questioning
| "am I programing this the right way? Am I sure this is the best
| way to do it? Should I be making this more general, or generic?
| All you get is analysis paralysis.
|
| Its a trap even, because bike shedding feels like you are
| getting things done, or being smart, foresighted, etc etc. You
| are not; if you know how to solve the problem within spec and
| budget, doing anything else is just procrastinating.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| I disagree with this. Outstanding programming (outstanding
| performance at almost anything) involves a flow state where
| you are doing-the-thing almost unconsciously, but that frees
| your mind up for meta-cognition reflecting on the bigger
| picture and concurrently refining the performance of the
| task. To be an outstanding athlete, you also need to be your
| own best coach.
| Emma_Goldman wrote:
| I don't think this is right at all, a lot of intellectual
| forms of 'flow' necessarily involve incessant reflection,
| often through writing and re-writing, but also through
| conversation with self and others. Keep in mind that Mihaly
| Csikszentmihalyi, who pioneered the concept of flow, thought
| of the manipulation of symbols - including in science,
| philosophy, conversation - as one of its principal domains.
| Jensson wrote:
| > Basically the idea that you think before you act
|
| They talk about thinking before you judge, not thinking before
| you act. ADHD people often have a hard time thinking before
| they act but many of them are still really smart and think a
| lot before judging.
|
| Judging without thinking is a much bigger problem than doing
| without thinking, but most people still do it.
| mateo1 wrote:
| Doing a meta-analysis on something easily quantifiable is
| sketchy enough, doing a meta-analysis on something as vague and
| hard to measure as "cognitive intelligence" is.. well, it's
| sociology's territory. Not to say it isn't of value, many
| discoveries were made on a lot less methodologically strict
| grounds and this kind of "conversation" does create the
| stimulus for further, more specific research, but you ought to
| read this more like a an investigative journalistic piece with
| a lot of opinion rather than hard science.
| jeydi42 wrote:
| So video games and quick stimuli make you smarter? :)
| waihtis wrote:
| I feel its the complete opposite. Playing video games for hours
| makes me generally incapable of deep thinking. Btw the same
| happens after hours-long coding sessions.
| saulrh wrote:
| You're exercising your cognition. It's no surprise that the
| acute effects include exhaustion. The long term effects are
| you have stronger cognition.
| closetnerd wrote:
| Hierarchical model for the win. Consistent with Jeff Hawkins
| research as well.
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