Intelligence and Q

In which I liken intelligence to a high scoring letter in scrabble

During a random conversation this evening, my wife told me about something that someone told her recently. I’m paraphrasing what she paraphrased, but this person told her something to the effect of “the best thing us intelligent people can do is to tell ourselves that we are not intelligent. The more we hold on to our intelligence, the worse our outcomes are”.

I broadly agree with this. The prior can be too strong. The “intelligence” gives you a set of alternate histories that are different from what you would produce for yourself as a “normal person”, and this set of “intelligent alternate histories” necessarily makes your reality seem worse, since it (your reality) will appear lower in the distribution than if it would in the “normal person alternate histories”.

And so dwelling more on your intelligence can leave you worse off, and end up making you make suboptimal decisions, such as taking unnecessary risk (the lower you are in relation to your alternate histories, the more likely you think of yourself as a “failure”, and thus the higher likelihood that you want to “increase volatility” (out of the money options have positive vega) and thus a higher probability that you will take undue risk).

There was another thought that what my wife said triggered - it took my mind back to an especially poor scrabble game I played this evening (with my wife and daughter). Most of the times I win, and occasionally I finish second, like earlier this evening when I ended one point behind my wife. However, this evening’s second game was especially bad.

Here are my first few moves of the game:

Basically I had drawn a q on my initial draw, and that had dominated my mind. On every turn, I had agonized on how I could get maximum value for the q (I always held an i, so there were always opportunities to make a qi), and upon failing to spot something that would fetch me at least a double letter, I would play something else arbitrary for a low score.

And then I realized that intelligence is like drawing the letter q while playing scrabble. When the q is played well, it gives you a chance of making a very high score. However, as long as you hold it, it will play on your mind, and prevent you from playing “normally”.

It is the same with intelligence and career choices - it easily increases the expected value of your earnings, but the more you dwell on it, the less likely that you will make an overall good decision. And so dwelling on your intelligence can reduce the expected value of your earnings.

In other words, intelligence improves your expected value, but thinking about your intelligence reduces it! And in a lot of cases the two cancel out each other, or the meta thought can even overcompensate for the intelligence. Of course there exist people who are blessed enough to not have this “extra talk”, and who can just get plain benefit from the intelligence. But for most others, it is this tradeoff. And hence it might help to not dwell on the fact that you might be intelligent!

It’s like a high scoring letter in scrabble!