Intelligent people are better judges of the intelligence of others

Difficulty of Judging Higher Intelligence

• Several commenters report that it’s easy to see when someone is smarter than you, but hard to rank people who are all above your level.
• Analogies include faster cars on a highway and tabletop RPG players: smart people can portray dumb characters, but not vice versa.
• Some note that very smart people often simplify their communication, which makes fine-grained comparison even harder.

Multidimensional Nature of Intelligence

• Many stress that “intelligence” is not one-dimensional: domain knowledge, abstraction, social modeling, and practical skills can diverge.
• Examples include athletes or footballers with high “game intelligence” versus scientists, and people strong in theory of mind but weak in abstract reasoning.

Emotional Intelligence and Empathy

• One camp calls “emotional intelligence” pseudoscience or just another skill subset of general intelligence.
• Others argue social/emotional cognition is distinct enough to merit its own label, pointing to people strong in abstract reasoning but poor at reading emotions.
• Distinctions are drawn between:
  • Empathy (feeling others’ emotions).
  • Theory of mind / social reasoning (accurately modeling others’ mental states).
• Some note that high empathy can coexist with poor accuracy (“feeling” wrong things about others).

Study Design and Limitations

• Link to the underlying paper is shared; some see the sample (~198) as sufficient, others dismiss studies under 1,000 as weak.
• Concerns raised about:
  • Homogeneous, WEIRD university samples.
  • Lack of replication.
  • Use of standardized IQ tests as a narrow or flawed proxy for “intelligence.”

Practical Heuristics for Judging Intelligence

• Suggested cues include:
  • Ability to steelman opposing views.
  • Comfort with hypotheticals and abstraction.
  • Recognizing PR/propaganda language.
  • Clear, precise speech and vocabulary.
• Others argue results and long-term predictive accuracy (what people say they’ll do vs. what happens) are more reliable than conversational impressions.

Social and Ethical Observations

• Some note that smarter people often cluster together, reinforcing their ability to recognize each other.
• A volunteer working with ex-prisoners observes frequent low abstract reasoning and short-term thinking, raising concerns about inequality rooted in cognitive differences.
• There is also a reminder that high intelligence doesn’t guarantee good judgment about one’s own beliefs or morality.

Meta / Thread Skepticism

• One commenter claims the linked article is low-quality “AI slop” mainly for traffic.
• Another flags the submitter’s history of systematic self-promotion on Hacker News.