IQ Is Misunderstood - Spencer Greenberg

Go see Chris live in America - https://chriswilliamson.live Spencer Greenberg is a mathematician, founder, CEO & creator of ClearerThinking.org How much does IQ really matter? Most of us have met people on both ends of the spectrum and wondered where we stand and what that means for our future. But is IQ truly fixed, or can it be shaped in some very surprising ways? Expect to learn how much IQ matters in all areas of your life, what the pubic misunderstands about IQ, if we should be treating intelligence more like a skill than an inherent trait, why the obsession with IQ might just be a form of intellectual status-signaling, why imposter syndrome is shockingly common and some counterintuitive benefits to imposter syndrome, if traits like narcissism or sociopathy can ever be adaptive or useful, the most common misinterpretations of the Dunning-Kruger effect, and much more… - 0:00 The Intelligence Test 3:25 What is IQ? 7:19 The Main Claims Around IQ 12:35 How Important is IQ? 17:50 More Claims Around IQ 19:52 Can a High IQ Be a Disadvantage? 22:25 Are IQ and Happiness Correlated? 35:20 What Does the Future of IQ Research Look Like? 36:31 Deep Dive into Imposter Syndrome 55:07 Re-examining the Dunning-Kruger Effect 01:02:22 Deciding Your Own Attractiveness Level 01:06:14 Misunderstandings About Personality Disorders 01:16:56 The Differences Between Sociopaths and Psychopaths 01:17:56 Are Narcissism and Sociopathy Adaptive Traits? 01:23:27 Are We Over-Pathologizing Unpleasant People? 01:25:02 Find Out More About Spencer - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic here - https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  What was this study you did on intelligence?

• 0:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, so some people say that IQ is a pseudoscientific swindle and other people think it fully captures everything about your intelligence and says who you are as a person fundamentally. And as you probably know, there was a big replication crisis in social science where many studies failed to replicate. And so we thought, hey, we can do our part by trying to replicate a lot of claims about IQ and intelligence. So we recruited over 3,000 people. We implemented 62 distinct intelligence tasks, which includes everything from like memorization, puzzle solving, math problems, spelling, reaction time, sort of everything you could possibly think about, that you could do online automatically. And then we tested about 40 different claims that are made about intelligence and we checked if they held up.

• 0:49Chris Williamson?

  Right, yeah, it is. Intelligence is kind of like the barbell chalk and cheese. It's the, how do you say? It's like the cognitive Rorschach test. It's like, what do you, how you see it kind of tells me probably quite a lot about your priors coming into it. You're right, it's either the fundamental underpinning that explains all of the outcomes that you're going to get in life, or it is a Nazi-ish policy that never had any basis in science and should be totally disbanded.

• 1:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's pretty wild. And so the question is, yeah, what's really true about it? To what extent is academia right about it? To what extent are the lay public right about it? And so we explored a bunch of those questions.

• 1:31Chris Williamson?

  Why do you think, even before we get into that, why do you think it's so contentious?

• 1:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's a few things. One, it does have a horrendous history. It was used, for example, like the idea of IQ or measuring intelligence was used for forced sterilization. So that's pretty horrible. I mean, the Nazis got into really some evil stuff around, you know, thinking about how intelligent people are and murdering people on that basis. So I think that's part of it. I think another thing is, you know, everyone kind of thinks it's like, yeah, it's good to be organized. But if someone says you're disorganized, it doesn't feel like it cuts to the bone, like of who you are as a human, or it doesn't make you subhuman. But I think some people feel this about intelligence. If you're told you're unintelligent, that it's sort of like says you're bad and have a fundamental way, or you're lesser.

• 2:14Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:15Speaker 01

  Exactly. And I think that's, you know, and I think, so I think that it feels different.

• 2:20Chris Williamson?

  That's interesting. Intelligence is very close to our sense of self in a way that the cleanliness of our cupboards or like our obsessiveness or something isn't quite so much.

• 2:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it's really interesting because having run many different studies on human psychology, we find there are some things people can report accurately about themselves and there's some things they can't. Like, for example, if you ask people how organized they are, they're pretty accurate, actually. But if you ask people, are you intelligent? Not so accurate. Like, it's hard for people to self-assess because sort of everyone has to believe that they're intelligent, right? Or if you ask people how rational they are, it's not something they can self-assess. And so actually, one kind of just funny finding, we asked people to estimate their own IQ and then our study was able to get an accurate estimate of their IQ. And guess how related those two things are?

• 3:09Chris Williamson?

  Were people 50%, right?

• 3:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's, yeah, it turns out not even, right? The correlation is about 0.23. So, yeah, people don't have a very accurate assessment. It's better than total random guessing, but not a very accurate assessment of their own intelligences, at least as far as IQ is concerned.

• 3:25Chris Williamson?

  Okay, let's get into the different claims about IQ. Which ones held up? Which ones totally fell apart under scrutiny?

• 3:33Speaker 01

  Totally. Well, should we talk about what IQ is, maybe?

• 3:35Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, what is this thing, IQ, right? Because, you know, if you really, if you really want to say, well, IQ is intelligence, well, is that really the case, like theoretically? And so we implemented these 62 distinct intelligence tasks, or each one's totally different. And then one simple question we can ask is, suppose you do well at one of the tasks? Does it make you more likely to do well at the others? And it turns out, it's almost always the case that being better at one makes you more likely at the others, almost throughout all of the different 62 intelligence tasks. And this is a, this is a very strange finding. Like, this was a finding that we replicated that was, occurred early on in the history of IQ. And it's not obvious that it would be the case. Like, for example, you can imagine a world where being good at math

• 4:19Speaker 01

  says nothing about how good you are at, let's say, vocabulary or spelling, right? But that's not the world we live in. There's something funny that's going on about humans where being good at one task makes you more likely to be good at the other tasks. And then IQ is kind of built on this observation. The idea of IQ is it's a measurement of this thing they call G, which is stands for general intelligence, which is essentially what intelligence tasks have in common. So it's kind of the common stuff. So that if you can measure G using IQ, then you have a sense of how well will people do on an intelligence task in general.

• 4:54Chris Williamson?

  How much truth is there in saying that G or IQ might be able to predict your ability to complete other tasks that measure the same thing, but it is not predictive of anything as soon as you step outside of the classroom, so to speak?

• 5:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, so that's a really good question. It's part of why we wanted to develop a really wide range of intelligence tasks. Like, so we didn't take a strong view on, well, what is intelligence? We said, let's just implement everything we can kind of measure that could be reasonably said to be related to intelligence, that we could do quickly on a computer. And so we find that almost all of them are to at least some extent predicted by IQ, right? However, what about things like you go, you go study a small scale culture where they do hunter, hunter gathering activities? You know, is, is tracking an animal or being really good at like planting and picking, you know, the best fruit? Is that related to IQ? I think we don't really know. Right? So I think when you get to that kind of stuff, it's far enough away from what we're measuring on a computer that it's hard to say. Or take a phenomenal dancer that just has an incredible sense of where their body is

• 5:55Speaker 01

  and they can position it exactly the way they have in their mind. Is that related to IQ? I don't know. It's hard to measure that in a laboratory. So I don't think we can say that, that IQ is measured, is connected to every single thing that you might say involves intelligence, but I would say it's connected to almost everything you can measure in a lab, that you can quickly measure in a lab that, that connects to intelligence.

• 6:14Chris Williamson?

  I would imagine as well, in a increasingly brain-based as opposed to a brawn-based economy, more of our life outside of the lab is actually going to look like tests inside of the lab.

• 6:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I think a lot of it depends on sort of what career trajectory you're on, right? If you're a white collar worker, like I think that's going to be true. If you know, if you work, you know, building infrastructure physically, then you know, maybe it's not true. So, you know, right there, I think is actually a key thing to note that IQ tends to predict ability at certain kinds of things. And those kinds of things are much more relevant for some people's lives than other people's lives.

• 6:52Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, so IQ is more predictive for certain people than it is for others.

• 6:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, and actually you find that if you look at, so IQ predicts job performance across a wide range of jobs. But if you look at what jobs it predicts job performance better, it turns out it's these higher complexity, more analytical type jobs that does a better job of predicting rather than sort of maybe more physical jobs or or jobs that involve less sort of analytical thinking.

• 7:19Chris Williamson?

  Okay, what were the sort of tests that you did? Do you do this wide ranging set of assessments? What did that consist of?

• 7:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, so things like memorization, solving puzzles, guessing the next symbol in a sequence like Raven's matrices is a famous one. Spelling vocabulary, we even had one on reaction time where we had a green square and we said, as soon as it turns red, click. And literally IQ is somewhat predictive of how quickly you click, which is kind of nuts. But funnily enough, people, but funnily enough, IQ had a negative predictive ability with how fast people thought they would be at clicking. So people, people actually with higher IQs thought they had lower reaction times, even though they had somewhat better reaction times.

• 8:05Chris Williamson?

  Oh, that's interesting. Well, yeah, we can, I guess we can get into the implications of people's self perceived expectation and then what actually happened. Talk to me about the the main claims around IQ. What were the ones, I mean, even going in, you must have had an idea where you thought, ah, I feel like this is probably going to get replication crisis. Or there was stuff that was most surprising.

• 8:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we weren't sure because you know, in some areas of social science, there's been a really bad replication crisis where maybe like 40% of the papers just don't hold up. If you redo the experiment, that's pretty bad. Other areas, it's more solid, like in cognitive psychology where they're like having you look at like lines on a screen and like measuring really low level brain function, that stuff tends to hold up better. So you know, where is IQ on that range? I would say overall, just like taking a bird's eye view, we did replicate a lot of the academic findings, but uh, but not necessarily every single one of them. But I think one of the sort of key things that that's really important to understand about IQ is that if you look at these 62 intelligence tests, IQ captured about 40% of the variation in people's ability. In other words, you could, you could guess about 40% of how people would do, loosely

• 9:13Speaker 01

  speaking, based on their IQ, but that leaves 60%, which is really interesting. And some of that 60% is just random noise, right? Like, you know, what side of the bed you woke up on that morning, or did you misread the question, right? There's random noise in there, but there is a big chunk that IQ is not explaining. The interesting thing about that big chunk is not explaining is it's idiosyncratic. It really depends on which task you're doing. So, so for example, it's often perceived that people who are good at math are not good at verbal stuff and vice versa. You know, there's like the journalist versus scientist.

• 9:42Chris Williamson?

  The shape rotator versus the word cell.

• 9:44Speaker 01

  Exactly, and they're kind of at odds with each other. It turns out being a word cell is actually positively correlated with the shape.

• 9:52Speaker 01

  Right? But interestingly enough, if you control for IQ, you take people the same IQ, some of them are better at word stuff and some are better at math stuff. And that's part of what's in that missing 60%. And so the model, the mental model I like to use for this, I think is really helpful, is to think about three things. There's IQ, which is your ability at the things that intelligence tasks have in common. Then there's your, your idiosyncratic aptitudes, like you might be more of a math person or more of a word person, even compared to people of your own IQ. And for me, for example, I did my PhD in math, like I'm definitely a math person. You give me a word scramble and I'm like, I have no idea. I'll start moving letters one by one, trying to, you know, it's ridiculous. I'm terrible at word scrambles, right?

• 10:35Speaker 01

  And then the third thing, and this is really, really important, is skills. And skills are things we develop by practice. And skills can also increase our intelligence in a meaningful sense. So take for example, someone who has never played chess before, all they know is the rules and they have 140 IQ and pit them against someone with 100 IQ who's played 10,000 hours. And who's going to win that chess match? I mean, clearly, the person with 100 IQs with 10,000 hours of experience is going to absolutely wipe the floor with a higher IQ person. It's not even a question. And that's because they developed the skill. And so if you think about, if you want to make a mental model of being good at stuff, you've got your IQ, you've got your idiosyncratic abilities, which are, you know, you might be better at certain things than other things, which was probably based on a combination of genetics and also maybe your early childhood environment and things like

• 11:19Speaker 01

  that. And then you've got your skills that you can, you know, you can get good at anything you want. And the really crazy thing in the IQ literature is that we know lots of ways that people get their IQ lowered. You know, you take too many head blows that will lower your IQ. You get lead poisoning as a child, you know, if you live with like lead paint. You get malnutrition as a child, that will lower your IQ. Nobody's really figured out a good way to raise your IQ, which is kind of shocking.

• 11:43Chris Williamson?

  Do you think there is any?

• 11:45Speaker 01

  Well, here, I think that theoretically possible. I don't think we know any good ways to do it. But I think there's something that makes that much less depressing than it sounds. Because it sounds depressing, right? Like

• 11:55Chris Williamson?

  You started a number and it can only be subtracted from.

• 11:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. But here's the, here's the really fascinating thing. So what would it mean to raise your IQ? Well, it would mean like, let's say on our 62 intelligence task, it would mean that if you, let's say, practice one of those tasks, you'd get better at a bunch of the others, or all of the others, right?

• 12:10Chris Williamson?

  As opposed to getting better at the specific one, which would be skill based.

• 12:14Speaker 01

  Exactly. So the here's the, here's the reality. Nobody really knows how to raise your IQ, but you can get good at anything you want. You can improve your skill. So in a weird way, it doesn't matter. If you want to get good at something, go practice it, develop a training routine, you will get better at it. Okay, maybe it won't generalize everything else. You know, it would be nice if we lived in that world where it generalized everything else. But you can get good at anything. And so I think that that is sort of what saves it. It makes it not so depressing.

• 12:35Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so do you come to think of IQ as foundational or fundamental in some way? Does it create a window or a bracket within which people's capacities sort of sit? It certainly seems, and yeah, I think both of us have to be diplomatic when talking about IQ, given its fetid past. But

• 12:56Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 12:56Chris Williamson?

  The rubber's going to meet the road eventually. Just how important is IQ, is, I guess, is my question.

• 13:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I think there's a couple ways to answer this. So one way is say, well, it explains about 40% of the variation to people's ability to task. Okay, 40%, that's a big chunk, but it's far from everything, right? Skill and individual aptitudes are going to also play a big role, right? Okay, so that's one thing to think about. Another thing you could ask is to what extent does it predict outcomes? And this is one of our, this is one of our results that most surprised me and that I've never seen anywhere else, is we actually pitted IQ against personality and said, if you take into account someone's personality traits, their big five personality, uh, which is five traits, openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. You take those five traits, you try to predict outcomes, and you also try to predict outcomes with IQ, which actually wins, which is more predictive? What would you guess?

• 13:45Chris Williamson?

  I would guess IQ.

• 13:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I actually recently launched a YouTube channel and we made a video about this, IQ versus personality. The shocking thing to me was actually personality won on almost every one of the predictions, or it tied IQ. I don't think it lost on a single one. So whether it's GPA, or income, or education level, your personality actually mattered more overall, which is pretty fascinating, I think.

• 14:07Chris Williamson?

  Why? What's the mechanism by which personality is beating IQ?

• 14:12Speaker 01

  I think it's hard to say. I mean, you could think about it in individual cases, right? Like, take something like education. Well, clearly, having a higher IQ is going to make it easier for you to perform well in school. But you know what else is going to make it you perform well in school? Conscientiousness. If you're organized, you're, you know, a little bit perfectionist, like, but not too perfectionist, like, you know, you always go to your classes on time, etc., versus the really, you know, smart person who just looks around and doesn't try, right? So conscientiousness matters a lot. Also, neuroticism can be disabling, right? If you have, if you have really terrible anxiety, really terrible depression, it's going to make it hard to study potentially, be distracting. So, you know, I think you take these five personality forces together, they actually account for quite a lot.

• 14:56Chris Williamson?

  Does this not just pass the buck to another area that is relatively amenable? Given that people are, I don't know how much people can change their personalities. I had David Robson on talking about a book of his, which was how much you can change your personality. And the answer was like, a bit, but not exclusively.

• 15:21Chris Williamson?

  So is this any more hope inspiring? Or does it simply sort of hedge against IQ being all that matters?

• 15:31Speaker 01

  Well, you know, it's interesting. I think there's a lot of random dice that get rolled when you're born and not just in your genetics, but also your early childhood experiences, things like that. And I think we have to accept that, you know, there's a lot of, a lot of dice that get rolled and they can really affect your life in a lot of ways. Right? I think an interesting analogy is like with basketball. Like, could you be like a five foot 10 basketball player? Like, the answer is yes, but it's going to be a lot harder. Right? And, you know, they exist, but if you're, you know, six foot five, that's going to help you a lot. And I think it's like that, like IQ and personality, they don't, they don't fully determine what will happen to you, but they make some things harder and they make some things easier. But on the topic of changing personality, there's actually, I think there's a lot of room to, to kind of move things there.

• 16:14Speaker 01

  Doesn't necessarily mean you're going to change your sort of fundamental core nature, but you can change a lot of your behaviors that give you a lot of benefits. For example, think conscientiousness, right? So systems like getting things done, that can sometimes take someone who's like just terrible at being organized and give them a system. And as long as they follow the system, actually, they can behave like a person who's much more conscientious.

• 16:34Chris Williamson?

  Oh, yeah, that's interesting. I suppose, you know, somebody who's high in neuroticism, but chooses to spend a lot of time in sunlight or around friends or contributing to a job that they mean that's meaningful to them. Well, that's really going to counter a lot of neuroticism. Somebody who is very low in neuroticism, but spends all of their time on their own and not exercising and eating poorly is going to display the sort of traits that somebody who is higher in neuroticism would do.

• 17:03Speaker 01

  Absolutely. That's going to be a huge factor. And for neurotism in particular, we actually have a lot of techniques that work pretty well. Right? Like cognitive behavioral therapy has really good evidence for helping people with depression and anxiety. And so that's a good place to start. And it doesn't necessarily mean you're going to go from being a highly anxious person your whole life to not anxious person. But yeah, it can really, it can actually reduce the symptoms quite a bit. But I think the behavioral thing is huge. I mean, there's even some interesting experiments where they get people who are introverted to say, just pretend to be extroverted and just be more social for a couple of weeks. And often they get a pickup in their mood. It doesn't apply to all introverts. Like, I think some introverts just fundamentally don't have a desire for social activity. But I think some introverts, it's more around shyness or feeling socially awkward. And I think when it's more of that kind of stuff,

• 17:47Speaker 01

  just acting extroverted, you might get some of the boost as though you were an extrovert.

• 17:51Chris Williamson?

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• 18:34Chris Williamson?

  below and signing up for a $1 per month trial period, or by heading to Shopify.com/ModernWisdom, all lowercase. That's Shopify.com/ModernWisdom to upgrade your selling today. Okay, what about some of the other claims around IQ? What were some of the ones that got decapitated and some of the ones that held up?

• 18:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, so one theory about IQ is Howard Gardner's multiple intelligence theory, which says there are like eight distinct types of intelligence, you know, things like mathematical, linguistic, you know, interpersonal, et cetera. And our data did not support that view. We couldn't test all of his claims or anything like that, but I would say it's it's not really consistent with that. We find this sort of almost everything is currently with almost everything else, right? Whereas his theory is sort of like, there are these distinct brain regions that do these distinct things. And, you know, I don't think it's, I don't think it's so true. So that's one. We also had some, we had some funny ones that we replicated. So there was an academic paper that claimed that people with lower IQs tend to have more pathological celebrity attitudes.

• 19:38Speaker 01

  So like, they think that if you like, meet your favorite celebrity, they're gonna like, really enjoy talking to you, or, or like, you're gonna find that you and your favorite celebrity have all these deep hidden connections. And yeah, we actually did find that lower IQ people do believe that.

• 19:50Chris Williamson?

  That's like, that's such a culturally unfortunate, like inconvenient thing to find out. Oh, the proletariat, no, they're working in the mines all day and then going home and dreaming about this person on reality TV that they're gonna spend the rest of their life talking to about interesting things. It's like, uh, it's very cliche in a totally tragic sort of way.

• 20:18Speaker 01

  Cliche, yeah. Another, another kind of like fascinating one. So there was a paper that claimed if you make up nonsense, nonsense phrases, like, you know, the destiny of darkness is everything, or whatever, that people with higher IQ will be like, those are bullshit, where people with lower IQ would be more likely to be like, oh, that's profound. And we actually replicated that. Indeed, people with lower IQ tend to find these nonsense statements more profound.

• 20:42Chris Williamson?

  Oh, that's interesting. What?

• 20:47Chris Williamson?

  What was some of the, or were there any disadvantages of higher IQ? Was it predictive in some way of things that were usually undesirable?

• 20:58Speaker 01

  You know what's funny about that? So I, I, I ask a question of the week, every week on my social media, on Twitter. And one of my questions of the week was, what do you think like more intelligent people like are worse at? Or what disadvantages do they have? And people had like all kinds of theories, like, you know, so many different theories. And the reality is like, oh, most, none of them hold up. Like, it's just a weird, it's a weird thing. Like, I would say the best evidence of what is bad about having a high IQ is you might be more likely to be nearsighted. And that's probably because of like behavior stuff. And people, you know, maybe from their face in a book, I don't know. I don't know exactly what, or just staring at screens. The other thing is that they may be more prone to loneliness, especially as children.

• 21:39Speaker 01

  Like, I do think that there can be some sense of like, you know, if you're much higher IQ than the people around you, it might be a little bit isolating when you're. But I think when people become adults, they like find people that they connect with.

• 21:49Chris Williamson?

  You can broaden your pool of people that you can hang out with and also find other high IQ freaks.

• 21:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And you know what's actually has made the, the field very confused for a long time? Like, there were a bunch of studies looking at Mensa and discovering all these negative things about having high IQ. But it turns out there seemed to be, at least the evidence seems to suggest there's some kind of negative self-selection. Like, if you identify yourself as a high IQ person, that's probably really not a good sign. Like, just having a high IQ is not a bad thing, but thinking, making that a major part of your identity, probably not, not a healthy way to live.

• 22:24Chris Williamson?

  I wonder whether that is negatively predictive of having a high IQ as well. What, what did, what, what did you find out there? What did you find out about people's ability to self-assess compared with what came up in the data?

• 22:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, so people, yeah, so we, we replicated the general finding that people with hierarchy do believe they have hierarchy, but not very much. Like, there's a very, very, very low correlation. It's like a, I think it was about point two, three in our study. So people didn't, we're not very good at self-assessing, but they were better than random chance. But I think, you know, I do wanna just emphasize that IQ is very far from destiny, right? Like, you can develop any skills you want, you can keep getting better and better at them. IQ might make it harder. It's like the going back to basketball analogy, right? It's like height in basketball. Like, it can make it harder based on your starting IQ. But if you lean into your, you know, idiosyncratic aptitudes, the things you tend to be better at, and you develop your skills, you build good training programs, you can get better at pretty much anything. So just, I really do want people to keep that in mind.

• 23:20Chris Williamson?

  Let's say that there was a way to improve the IQ of everybody.

• 23:31Chris Williamson?

  Would that be the sort of thing that, on average, is likely to improve life quality for all of the people who got it?

• 23:39Speaker 01

  Well, see, this is really fascinating. What do you think the relationship between IQ is and happiness or life satisfaction?

• 23:47Chris Williamson?

  Positive?

• 23:49Speaker 01

  You got it. It's gotta be positive, right? But it's not. This is, it's insane.

• 23:53Chris Williamson?

  For fuck's sake.

• 23:54Speaker 01

  It's not. It's crazy. Like, and it's almost unbelievable, because it's like, well, surely IQ should at least give you more optionality, like, you know, open up more possibilities, help you do better in school. It's crazy. It's not, it's not correlated with life satisfaction or happiness, or moment-to-moment happiness. And this is our finding, it's also a finding of others. And it's, honestly, I feel it as like this incredible mystery. I hope someone figures out. It's suggest, to me, it suggests that there's something that higher IQ people are doing that like tend to make their life worse. And I don't know what that thing is, whether it's like they're taking on more stress or whatever. I'll tell you another, like, yeah.

• 24:26Chris Williamson?

  Is it not, it's not correlated, or it's negatively correlated?

• 24:29Speaker 01

  No correlation, no correlation, zero correlation.

• 24:33Chris Williamson?

  Right, okay. But if we assume that the objective life outcomes of somebody who's higher IQ is better, right?

• 24:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, they tend to have higher income, they don't have more.

• 24:43Chris Williamson?

  Socioeconomic, they're less likely to go to jail, they're more likely to complete college, they're less likely to be a single parent, they're more likely to stay in a marriage. I've just made a ton of fucking predictions, many of which may be incorrect there, but I read it once on the internet.

• 24:58Chris Williamson?

  So even if it's not predictive at all in terms of life satisfaction, happiness, those things you would assume would be, right? Income, poverty is associated with a lot of stresses that probably don't make people particularly happy, etc.

• 25:15Speaker 01

  A hundred percent. Poverty is definitely associated with lower life satisfaction.

• 25:18Chris Williamson?

  So in order for it to be not correlated at all, you're having to compensate for some of these better, quote, "life outcomes" that are predicted by IQ. So that actually kind of does suggest that there is some kind of brake being applied, not just that you're coasting with it, not that it's totally impartial, but that it is actually applying some sort of negative multiplier to the life that you've got. Is that a fair way? Am I talking bollocks?

• 25:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. No, no, you're completely right. There's something, and I say this is really a genuine mystery. Like, I do not think we as a society know the answer to this because everything points to the fact that it should give you higher life satisfaction, higher happiness, but it doesn't. So there's some factor we're missing that kind of explains this. And hopefully one day someone will figure it out. I'll tell you like even more baffling thing we found. We asked people to what extent they achieve their life goals. No correlation with IQ. Like, which, and it's especially odd because we know that people with higher IQs are like better achieving certain kinds of goals, right? And so it suggests that people's view of like, what is a good life or what are the goals that they have or, you know, must, it must change.

• 26:35Chris Williamson?

  Expectation.

• 26:36Speaker 01

  It must change, yeah. And, you know, and if you go back to thinking, well, what is happiness? Like, on some fundamental level, it does relate to our expectations versus our reality and not just our reality. There may be something going on there about like the way that people plan their life might change on average when they have higher IQs that screws them over in some way. It compensates for.

• 26:55Chris Williamson?

  I had this, I had this idea called the curse of competence, which I think maybe kind of relates to this a little bit, that basically if things tend to go well for you, that you set your sights very high. And also that.

• 27:10Chris Williamson?

  If you are good at maybe only a small range of things, or maybe only one thing, if you only have a skill in one particular area, then your life options are constrained more by your capacity than they are by your ability to choose. And a sort of rationalist utilitarian approach would say, well, the optionality is in favor of the person who has the competence, not the one that doesn't. But that's not the way that the human brain works. Like, the paradox of choice suggests that you're actually less satisfied when you have more options as opposed to when you have fewer. So I kind of totally bro-science all of this together and thought, well, okay, that means that somebody who is maybe higher in competence, you could probably, given how predictive G

• 27:53Chris Williamson?

  seems to be for lots of things, people, this, it's robust and varied and allows you to have all of these different life paths open to you. I wonder whether this is one of probably tons of different areas that contributes to the lower life satisfaction, lower happiness thing. You're caught up in the optionality of life, you're unsure about which direction to go in, there is a switching cost and also just an executive functioning cost that you need to pay in order to be able to choose what it is that you want to do. The loss aversion, the sunk cost fallacy, all of this stuff plays in in a manner where it wouldn't if you had fewer options open to you.

• 28:35Chris Williamson?

  And it's a very unpopular opinion to hold that somehow having fewer options gives you a better quality of life. But I think when you look at the way that the human sort of system works, that that does seem, I would guess that that would be predictive of what's going on.

• 28:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's really interesting. You can see it cutting both ways, right? Like, if you only have two options and they're both shitty, like, that's not, that's not gonna make a good life. But if you have like a thousand options, you have no idea which one to take and you're constantly second guessing it. That's also not a good life. So there's kind of this intermediate territory where it feels where like you want at least at least some good options.

• 29:12Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 29:12Speaker 01

  But you don't want endless options. And and I mean, you know, people say this about online dating, that it can actually make it more difficult to find a like a really good life partner because of the sort of the feeling of endless options can make you constantly second guess and not give people a fair shake. We're like, instead of going on that date and really being like, let me really take seriously the possibility that this could be my life partner and try that on just for a couple of days and then see, you know, decide that they maybe are just always thinking about, you know, three other people they could go on a date with.

• 29:39Chris Williamson?

  Nexting, as it's known in in the world of online dating.

• 29:44Speaker 01

  Ah.

• 29:45Chris Williamson?

  What? Just to linger on, because I'm fascinated by this life satisfaction, happiness thing. Have you got any other mechanisms by which you can say this might be something that would contribute to it?

• 29:59Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I mean, I've had policies, but they're speculative. So.

• 30:03Chris Williamson?

  This is the this is a home of bro science. It's a safe space for you here, Spencer.

• 30:08Speaker 01

  Oh, I appreciate that. Yeah. So one thing I suspect is that when people are higher IQ, they they tend to question what they're told more and they're like, question all the like the sort of beliefs of their society and that this might like create a sense of social isolation. And you see this, for example, that there tends to be a negative correlation between IQ and religiosity. And that's not to, you know, diss religion, but just to say that I think I think there might, you know, it's like religion, you know, if you fit well, if you're sort of like the median or modal religious member, like it might give you a sense of community, a sense of, you know, ease that, you know, life after death, it might give you a sense that someone's, you know, look, or some great powers looking out

• 30:51Speaker 01

  for you. And then if you're like, you know, questioning all of that and being like, well, I don't know what to believe. And like, this seems like bullshit. Like, that may actually make you less happy. I don't know. Very speculative, but.

• 31:01Chris Williamson?

  Interesting. So IQ is a prophylactic against religion, but religion is a prophylactic against misery. And.

• 31:08Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you're fighting against it. It's an interesting one, man. I am. This episode is brought to you by Incogni. If you've ever typed your name into Google and found your info on some weird website that you've never heard of, that's not a fluke. Data brokers and people's search sites collect your personal information like your name, address, phone number, buying habits, your income, your medical history, and they sell it without your consent. And there are hundreds of them, which is why I partnered with Incogni. It finds these bad actors and gets your info removed from their databases automatically. You don't have to email anyone, fill out forms or jump through hoops. They handle the entire process for you and keep going as new brokers pop up. Best of all, you can cancel at any time and they offer a 30 day money back guarantee. So you can buy it completely risk free, use it for 29 days. If you don't like it for any reason, they'll just give you your money back.

• 31:51Chris Williamson?

  Right now, you can get a 60% discount on an annual plan by going to the link in the description below. I'm heading to incogni.com/modernd wisdom and using the code modern wisdom at checkout. That's I N C O G N I dot com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. So the reason that I asked about if there was a way that we could raise everybody's IQ. I've just become an advisor in a company that does embryo selection, gene, polygenic risk score embryo selection. And one of the things that they can get a little bit into is looking at raising IQ. Hey, here's a dashboard of 10 embryos that we've harvested. These three, you don't want those three. Here's seven that are left.

• 32:32Chris Williamson?

  Hey, this is better immune system, higher IQ, more externalizing behavior, et cetera, et cetera. I wonder, it seems to me inevitable that this technology is going to be used, especially to avoid what John Tooby talks about with gene decay. Are you familiar with that? No, it's not. It's a really interesting idea that basically ancestrally, the selection pressures that were being applied to humans were so high that any suboptimal genetic mutations were selected out of the gene pool. But as you get rid of that pressure, as you raise the floor, basically with modern healthcare, a perfect and totally non controversial example, which it took me a really long time to try and come up with one,

• 33:17Chris Williamson?

  is myopia, so people that need glasses. We have to assume. On the savannah 50,000 years ago, if your eyesight wasn't that good, you had a less high chance of survival and reproduction, right? Maybe by a little bit, maybe by a lot, it was less high. We now have glasses, right? It makes very little difference whether you're a child or whatever. I imagine it's maybe even not predictive at all of anything in life, other than whether or not your kids have got. But what that means is, over time, people with bad eyesight are more likely to have kids who've got bad eyesight, who more likely have kids that have got bad eyesight. Because the deleterious mutations are being accumulated and not selected out, what you end up with is what's called a crumbling genome,

• 34:02Chris Williamson?

  which is one that's kind of less robust over time because it's being buttressed and supported more by infrastructure. I absolutely do not think that people who need glasses should be killed at childbirth or at any point later in life. I think that would be a terrible idea. But I would guess anybody who needs glasses, I'm someone that did need glasses and I got laser eye surgery to fix it. If you could have told me that my parents would have been able to not have that be an issue for me at birth, and I'm aware that this isn't actually technically the way that it works, you get into a much more sort of messy ethical territory because it's not about getting this same embryo and getting rid of the myopia. It would actually be choosing a different one.

• 34:45Chris Williamson?

  But, you know, for the purposes of not talking about whether the soul is transferable or not, I think we just need to stick with it here. My point being, I think that this is going to be used a lot. I think it's going to counter, hopefully, some of the mental health. Like, we could see that. I certainly think that you could look at some of the negative outcomes we've got, the predilections people have toward negative mental health and say, well, you know.

• 35:14Chris Williamson?

  If selection pressures were higher, somebody that had a lot of depression and anxiety, maybe they would be less likely to survive and reproduce. I don't think that that should be the case either. I'm somebody that suffered with depression and anxiety. I don't want to be like left out to dry because my tribe doesn't like me or whatever. Cause I'm not a fun hang all the time in my twenties. But yeah, I just get the sense that this is going to happen more. And if we've got that and IQ is one of the things that's going to be selected for. I think it's really important that conversations like this, that sort of look at IQ apolitically, that work out what it's good for, what it's not good for, where the limits of it lie. But to basically say that if you've got the choice to like, don't live in a house with lead paint. Right? Like, that's a good idea. Don't get hit in the head too much.

• 35:59Chris Williamson?

  Don't live in a house with lead paint because your life outcomes are maybe not going to be that good. That being said, not actually going to make that much of an impact on your happiness or your life satisfaction.

• 36:07Speaker 01

  Well, that's the, that's the irony. If the parent wants it to be happy, don't select for IQ.

• 36:14Speaker 01

  And if you want to help the world, you know, uh, maybe select for altruism. Maybe that's, you know, that's, that's more beneficial.

• 36:21Chris Williamson?

  That's a fascinating point. Well, think about what.

• 36:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:24Chris Williamson?

  I'm just, that's such a great point. And I, one that like even for me, hasn't fully sunk in, given I already forgot it kind of.

• 36:33Chris Williamson?

  Most parents, if you ask parents, what is it that you want for your kids? So I just want them to be happy.

• 36:39Chris Williamson?

  All right. Well, you're left with a pretty difficult decision here, right? Because you know that life outcomes are objectively on average in a modern capitalist meritocratic, meritocratic society are going to be better with higher IQ. But maybe they're going to be a little bit more sad. So actually, what do you want? And that's.

• 36:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't know if they're more sad. I just think they're not necessarily, not necessarily happier. If you're trying to do it for the kid, you know, it's an interesting question. Are you trying to do it for the kid? Are you trying to do it for your idea of what you want your child to be? And that's a different, somewhat different thing.

• 37:10Chris Williamson?

  What do you think the future of IQ research, IQ discussion looks like?

• 37:17Speaker 01

  It's a good question. I mean, I do think there are a lot of things that are on solid footing. Like I was, it was nice to see that because we, we have replicated studies in other areas where we see really big problems. Right. We have a project called Transparent Replications, where when new papers come out in top psychology journals, we'll use a random number generator to pick some of them. We go take the study, we redo it from scratch, we run it on a new population and see if it holds up and analyze it carefully and release a report. And we find that a bunch of really serious problems. So at least it's good to see the science is like largely functioning properly. You know, we got a lot of stuff did, did seem to hold up. I would love to see more research on, can you raise IQ? Cause that would be really, really cool if we could test lots and lots of different methods.

• 38:02Speaker 01

  Like I'd love to see a study that like, you know, gets 25 different researchers to come up with ideas of how you might train at something that helps you at everything, right? It improves your skill at everything and, and like just test them all, you know? Cause there's been some efforts in this and they haven't gone well, but it doesn't mean there's not some way to do it that we just haven't figured out yet.

• 38:20Chris Williamson?

  Fascinating stuff. All right. What have you learned about imposter syndrome?

• 38:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. Just one more last thing about IQ and intelligence. If you're interested in this topic, we released a giant report with all of our findings, all the 40 different claims we tested. It's on our website, clearerthinking.org. So you can check that out.

• 38:36Chris Williamson?

  Dude, everyone, everyone needs to check out all of the shit that you're doing. I, I love, I love the podcast. I love the blog. I love your articles as well. Everything will get lit.

• 38:46Speaker 01

  Thank you so much. Yeah. I appreciate that. Yeah. So the podcast is Clear Thinking with Spencer Greenberg. Every week I invite on someone I think is brilliant to discuss four ideas. So yeah, I'd love for you to check that out. Cool. So yes, imposter syndrome. So this is something that we deep dived in. We, what we did is this is kind of the style of our work a lot of times. We took all the different scales to measure imposter syndrome. We put them together. We ran a big study, testing them all simultaneously. And then we analyzed it to figure out sort of what are the core components of imposter syndrome and what is it related to? And so for those who don't know, imposter syndrome is basically when you're someone who's skilled, but you believe that all your success is was just lucky and that you're somehow secretly a fraud

• 39:26Speaker 01

  and that you don't really have the skills that people think. And, and so we found, so in analyzing all these different ways of, you know, kind of measuring imposter syndrome, two of the, the questions that were most predictive of it were, When I achieve results that are praised, I worry that I might not be able to fulfill that person's expectations in the future. So if that's something that you resonate with, you might have imposter syndrome. And another one was, I'm afraid others will discover to the extent to which I lack knowledge or ability. So you feel like you're keeping the secret of your incapability.

• 39:57Chris Williamson?

  So both of these, both of these are in relation to others?

• 40:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, because a lot of it is feeling like people's beliefs about you don't match the reality. Like, oh, people think I'm really successful, but like, if they only knew, or, you know, people think I'm talented, but if they only do. There's an amazing quote from Tom Hanks. He said, let me just read this, it's so good. No matter what we've done, there comes a point where you think, how did I get here? When are they going to discover that I am in fact a fraud and take everything away from me? That's Tom Hanks, right?

• 40:34Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, Woody.

• 40:36Chris Williamson?

  So it's an interesting question around the higher someone's praise than the, this sense that that is now an obligation to meet it again in future. And I have to assume that that's because if you feel like your successes are by chance, and that you don't have quite as much control or agency over the outcomes at this kind of a level, that every new success is not a cause for celebration, it's simply a higher bar to fall from next time.

• 41:15Speaker 01

  Because if you go below that, oh, now you're, you know, you're declining.

• 41:18Chris Williamson?

  Oh, they're going to find out, and that plays into your, precisely the concern that you have.

• 41:25Chris Williamson?

  So that's very interesting, this sort of, and I imagine that that's, it's going to be tied in with status. Did you see, was this at all?

• 41:33Chris Williamson?

  Like, intrasexual competition, intersexual competition, status anxiety, was it related to that at all?

• 41:40Speaker 01

  Well, interestingly enough, early on in the research, people believed that it was mostly women that had imposter syndrome, but then they discovered that actually, men have a ton of it too. So now it's the thought that actually it's maybe about equal in genders, maybe slightly more women, but like roughly equal. And like, it's, it's hard to say who exactly has imposter syndrome for two reasons. One, because it depends on where you draw the line, right? Like, what, you have to pick some point of the line where you say that person has imposter syndrome, but the person just below them doesn't. So that's arbitrary. And the, the other thing is, there obviously can be people who genuinely just lack skill, and people think they're skilled and they're not, right?

• 42:17Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, maybe you have imposter syndrome, or maybe you're just shit at your job.

• 42:21Speaker 01

  Well, and the problem is that the people with imposter syndrome think that they're that person. They're like, no, that's me. You're talking about me. Those other people have imposter syndrome. I just suck, right?

• 42:31Chris Williamson?

  Fuck, that's interesting. Okay, so how common is imposter syndrome?

• 42:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, so you get a wide range of estimates. Typically, the estimates are 20% to 60%. I know it's an enormous range, but it depends on these factors, like where do we draw the line? And like, how do we know who really, who really has it? But yeah, it's extremely common, like ridiculously common.

• 42:49Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 42:50Speaker 01

  Even, even in high achieving groups, like, there have been studies on like, medical students, right? And they're working their ass off, and they, they grind it so hard to get there. And like, a bunch of them have imposter syndrome too.

• 43:00Chris Williamson?

  Are high achieving people more likely to suffer with imposter syndrome than low achieving people?

• 43:05Speaker 01

  That's a good question. I don't know the answer to that. Someone should research that.

• 43:09Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, well, I mean, come on, you're the guy. Okay, what did you find out that we didn't already know? What was interesting?

• 43:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, so here's some, here's some fascinating things. People with imposter syndrome are more likely to perfectionism. And I suspect that what's going on here is that if you hold yourself to an unreasonable standard, it's going to create this gap between your performance and your perceived performance, right? Like, you know, if your standard is like, you have to do everything perfectly, or you suck, then you do things like, you know, you don't get perfect, but you do really well. And then you're like, I suck, right?

• 43:42Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Outwardly, you've outperformed everybody else because of your inner anxiety. Inwardly, you're never satisfied with your performance because of your unreasonable expectation.

• 43:53Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. And so they find it easy to dismiss their achievements because of the bar that they set is so unreasonably high. It also tends to be associated with thinking that mistakes are unacceptable, right? Like, you know, one thing I like to say is that I I want to fail at more things than most people try at their entire life. And, you know, it's like, I because I think that's a healthy attitude towards like mistakes and fucking up and, you know, and not succeeding. But it's challenging, right? Like, it sucks to feel like you made a mistake. Like, it's painful and and to fail really, really sucks, right? But the reality is like, we're humans, or everyone's going to make mistakes all the time. But if you view mistakes as unacceptable, well, you're humans, you're going to make them. But that means you're going to end up thinking that you suck a lot more than you do.

• 44:34Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. What are the what are the key dimensions of imposter syndrome on your test? What was it measuring?

• 44:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we found it's a pretty pure dimension by itself, which is it's mainly around like, this fear that people think more highly of you than they than you really can justify. And you kind of worry about it. And you worry you're a fraud. You're worried that they're going to find out, right? So that's kind of the key, like, like a pure dimension. But then it has this perfectionism link. We also found, interestingly enough, a procrastination link. People with imposter syndrome tend to like delay the tasks, not do them on time.

• 45:08Chris Williamson?

  Oh, that makes total sense.

• 45:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, and that also might tie into perfectionism to some extent, too. But it is interesting how sometimes if we don't give ourselves time to do something, that it's easy to just kind of like give ourselves an excuse and feel less bad about it, right? It's like, oh, well, yeah, I only did I only put two hours. I know I should have like, started it last week. But then it's like, so I'm not really that bad a person because like, you know, I didn't do a good job just because I only spent two hours on it, right? So there's these weird like ego games we play with ourselves to try to protect ourselves.

• 45:41Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, we've got a get out of jail free card, because it's the same as somebody that gets into a relationship, and they're kind of committed, but kind of not committed all that much. And if the relationship doesn't work, they think, well, you know, not that much of a comment. I mean, it's like I gave it my all in any case.

• 45:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it, you know, it's interesting. If you are really intent on protecting your ego, it creates a lot of weird effects that can make your life worse. Like behaviors where you try to protect your ego instead of doing the thing you actually care about, like having a good relationship or like getting this project done, right?

• 46:17Chris Williamson?

  Right, yeah, okay. So the reason that you're dating is to find a life partner that makes you feel happy and fulfilled. But in the process of trying to not feel like somebody rejects you, sees you truly who you are and doesn't want you, or you're not good enough, or whatever it is, you behave in a manner which defeats the very thing that you were doing the dating to try and achieve, because you don't show somebody all of you and you're not fully committed.

• 46:46Speaker 01

  Exactly. And I don't know if we're going to talk about narcissism later in this conversation, but yeah, like is especially a problem for narcissistic people. But, but everyone like tries to protect their ego to some extent. We just differ in how much we try to do it.

• 46:59Chris Williamson?

  What do you make of this lean, slight lean towards females?

• 47:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, it's interesting. I think that, that women tend to be less self-confident. And men, so we did, we ran this funny study where we asked people, out of a hundred people of your age and gender, how many of them do you think you'd outperform at different skills? Like surviving in a zombie apocalypse and dancing and kissing and, you know, cooking and all these kinds of things. And, you know, men tend to be a bit more overconfident. Like they tend to be a bit more, yeah, I could, you know, beat 70% of men at, you know, fighting or, you know, kissing or whatever, you know. Not kissing that, because of women. But, um, uh, yeah. So I think, you know, and I think that's probably why people assume that women would have this more.

• 47:50Speaker 01

  Because like they tend to have lower self-esteem and less confidence. But funnily enough, it seems like unopposed to them, not necessarily. And, you know, and it's hard to know why that might be that it's more balanced. But it could come, it could be related to, men often treat their, sort of their work as sort of fundamentally their value. Right? Like, so what they do in the marketplace is like, says who they are.

• 48:15Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so are there any counterintuitive benefits to imposter syndrome?

• 48:21Speaker 01

  Well, that's really interesting. I think a lot of times when we have these like damaging psychological beliefs, they're solving some kind of problem for us. It's often not worth it, but like they're often not random. And so a good example of this is like negative self-talk. You know, some people, when they don't do a good job, they're like, you're a piece of shit. Like they're saying this to themselves in their mind, like you're a piece of shit. You suck. And you like imagine how damaged that would be if like your father said that to you, you know, or, or your friend said that to you, like how mean that would be. But it's like, well, why do people do that? And I think it's because at some point in their life, they learn that like that squeezed a little bit more performance out of them. And then they like, they're like stuck to that rule of like,

• 49:00Chris Williamson?

  Oh, if I, if I whip myself into submission, then sometimes things go well for me.

• 49:04Speaker 01

  Exactly. I'll get myself to work harder and blah, blah. Of course, there's an incredible cost and the cost is usually not worth it, right? But it's like they're, they're often, I'm not gonna say always, but often I think people are solving a problem with these dysfunctional psychological beliefs. It's just that they're creating more problems and it like, but, but then if you sort of challenge it and said, well, what if you just didn't treat yourself like shit? What if you didn't call yourself a dick all the time, you know? Like they're like, on some level, they're like, but then I wouldn't be high, you know, I wouldn't push myself. So they're like scared to let go of this dysfunctional measure. So you're like, you have to kind of give them another tool and be like, well, you could instead of don't get, don't just throw it away. Try this other tool for getting good performance out of yourself, right?

• 49:44Chris Williamson?

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• 50:29Chris Williamson?

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• 50:42Chris Williamson?

  Have you got any idea of potential interventions for imposter syndrome?

• 50:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we look into this a bunch. And we actually, so we made unclearthing.org, you can find our imposter syndrome assessment. You can go measure your imposter syndrome. But we also in it have a bunch of techniques you can try. I'll say that the evidence is not, there's not a huge amount of evidence, but we look at the evidence and we teach you techniques that are at least somewhat evidence-based. So one of them is self-compassion. And I have to say, this tends to resonate a lot more with women than men, in my experience. But self-compassion is actually like a pretty cool set of techniques for someone who tends to be pretty harsh on themselves. And it's basically, I mean, like, at a core, it's saying, well, how would you treat like someone you really care about? When they're going through something difficult and just use that same energy towards yourself, right? Like, treat yourself with understanding, treat yourself with respect, treat yourself with kindness and empathy.

• 51:33Speaker 01

  And, you know, don't berate yourself, just like you wouldn't berate a loved one. Obviously, there's more to it than that, but I think that's like a good starting point. And I think for people that have a lot of negative self-talk, I think that's a really useful technique.

• 51:43Chris Williamson?

  Uh huh. Anything else?

• 51:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, another one is cognitive therapy can be useful here. So this basic tool from cognitive therapy where when you, when you're feeling emotional, you tend to have distortions in your thinking. This is actually one of the things that first made me obsessed with psychology. So I was reading a book on cognitive therapy and it said, it made this claim, like, when you're, you're feeling intense negative emotions, your beliefs tend to get distorted in predictable ways. And I was like, what? Really? Is that true? So one time when I was feeling like emotional, I wrote down my thoughts and then I came back to them when I was in a neutral emotional state. And I was like, holy shit, that's exactly what happened.

• 52:18Chris Williamson?

  Psychopathic, yeah.

• 52:20Speaker 01

  My beliefs were distorted by the intense emotion. And so cognitive therapy, I think, has this correct observation that that often, really often is the case. And so you, one cool technique is you write down your thoughts when you're feeling negative emotions. Like, let's say you're telling yourself that you're a fraud and everyone's going to find out. You write down those thoughts. You come back to them in a neutral emotional state and you really try to evaluate the evidence. You say, what's the evidence for? What's the evidence against? And then, once you've done that, you ask yourself, can I replace this thought with a thought that's at least as true and more helpful? So let's say the thought that you tend to have is like, I'm a fraud and everyone's gonna find out, right? You think, what is a belief that's just as true or more true, but it's more helpful than that? Like, maybe it'll be a belief like, you know, I'm not good at everything, but I am really good at some things.

• 53:04Speaker 01

  Right? So that's an example of like a replacement thought. And then what you try to do is you try to practice that replacement thought. You try to notice when you're having that first thought and just immediately replace it with the second thought. Like, just say the second thought to yourself in your head or out loud. And it can be actually quite a powerful technique.

• 53:19Chris Williamson?

  Is there any relationship between IQ and imposter syndrome?

• 53:23Speaker 01

  Oh, that's a great question. We didn't study it, unfortunately.

• 53:26Chris Williamson?

  Ah, okay. Well, so the reason I ask it is I'm seeing at least one thread between the two topics that we've spoken about so far, which is outwardly the outcomes. Oh, actually, that's, let me ask you this first. Do people that have got imposter syndrome have better life outcomes?

• 53:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, unfortunately, I don't know that either. So I don't know much about the link between imposter syndrome and like objective achievement or life outcomes. I mean, it is linked, so I will say, imposter syndrome is linked to more depression and anxiety. So on an emotional front, they have worse outcomes. But things like whether they do better in school or things like that, I don't know.

• 54:05Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, so you can probably see where I'm going with this. Higher IQ, better objective life outcomes, the only way that we can be measured, which is externally. Inwardly, these people seem to be, it's not correlated, but if life outcomes are better, and that would be predictive of better life internally, and it's not. There's a little bit of a sort of a minus multiplier going on there. And the same thing goes for the imposter syndrome. I would guess that people with imposter syndrome, on average, are higher performers than people who don't have it. And I think that it's because of this sort of paranoia that they have about being found out, which will drive them to pay more attention, be more diligent, be more obsessive compulsive, neurotic,

• 54:49Chris Williamson?

  work harder at these things in a desperate attempt to try and disprove their own unreasonable expectation for their standard that everybody else doesn't even know exists.

• 54:58Chris Williamson?

  So again, One of the questions I've been the most fascinated by, probably since I started this podcast, is what is the price that somebody pays in order to be a person that you admire? So, high performers, high achievers, the ones that everybody seems to look up to. Okay, well, that's what it's like externally, but what's their experience of like life like internally? And I, I'm like a Pokemon card collector for just more little

• 55:29Chris Williamson?

  pieces of evidence that the way that somebody's life is going externally is not necessarily predictive of the things that you care about the most, which is peace of mind, the life satisfaction, happiness, connection with others, you know, texture of their own existence as their head hits a pillow at night, that sort of stuff. And it seems like at least between the two things that we've, we've seen so far, it's, there's a bit of a corally going on there.

• 55:56Speaker 01

  I think that's really a student, often to get sort of a tap of something, someone has to dedicate themselves fully to it. Obviously, there's, there's weird examples of someone gets lucky, but like usually it's people who dedicate themselves fully. If you look at Mr. Beast, like, could someone be more dedicated to getting views on YouTube? Like, he's the, he's probably the most obsessive person about getting views in the world, and he also has the most views in the world. Like, it gotta make sense. And I think a lot of times, that obsessive focus really comes at a tremendous cost to other things.

• 56:24Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 56:25Speaker 01

  I mean, Mr. Beast, I think if he's even sad, like, I'm not the YouTuber you wanna, you wanna be, right? And this has been my experience also, like, when I meet billionaires. Like, some of them are like, you know, great people and like, you know, seem like, you know, happy, but a bunch of them seem really like there's something wrong with them.

• 56:42Chris Williamson?

  On average, high performers are more miserable than normal people, as far as I've seen. And I've spoken to like, you know, nearly a thousand on the show in, in one form or another. And when you see somebody that's got a well-balanced sense of self, and they don't castigate themselves if they fall short, and they relate to the people around them well, and they're connected, and their sleep's okay, and their health's not bad, and they're not too stressed, and all the rest of this stuff. Like, holy fuck, like, that's, that's really rare. That's rarer, that's significantly rarer than somebody who is a high performer. And yet, we look at the high performers as the ones that are, people who have the least desirable internal states have some of the most desirable external lives.

• 57:22Chris Williamson?

  And that, that paradox will never cease to fascinate me. I think, I think it's so fucking interesting.

• 57:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think a really interesting question is, are you actually willing to make the sacrifices to be at that level? And like, people, I don't think, take seriously that question. And yeah, of course, like, you want to incrementally improve your life and make things better. But do you, do you want to make the sacrifice to be at that level, right? At the very, very top achiever level?

• 57:49Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 57:49Speaker 01

  And for some people, it's worth it, and some it's not. And I think it comes down to values. Like, what do you really value in life, right?

• 57:54Chris Williamson?

  Mm hmm. You reexamine the Dunning Kruger effect as well. They were just going through and decapitating all of the sort of interesting psychological insights of the last few decades.

• 58:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, the Dunning Kruger one is, it's a little hard to explain, but I think it's really fascinating. So just for those who are not as familiar, the basic Dunning Kruger effect is the idea that people who have low performance, or low skill, or low intelligence, tend to overestimate their abilities. And the original explanation is that it's because they, they know so little that they don't even know how to evaluate, right? They're so, they're so unskilled, they can't even evaluate skill, so they think they're better than they are, right? So that's the basic idea. Sometimes, in modern usage, people also mean the opposite, that people who are high skill tend to underestimate their abilities. So you could also think of that as a Dunning Kruger-like effect, right? So we've got those two things to explain. And if you look at the original research, the way that they essentially prove, prove the Dunning Kruger effect is they'll make these plots of people's actual skill versus

• 58:50Speaker 01

  their perceived skill. And they'll show that there's a gap, where people who are lower in skill are overshooting their, their predictions about themselves, and people who are higher in skill are undershooting them, believe they're not as good as they really are, right? And they say, look, there's an effect. And so, we set about to replicate this, but also, we ran a bunch of simulations to try to really understand, like, what produces those plots? And we found two really crazy things. The first crazy thing is that it turns out, you can get those plots that look exactly the same as like, the original Dunning Kruger studies, with nothing to do with human psychology. It turns out, if you, if you're, you've got a measure skill using something, right? You give people a test or something, right? If you measure skill with something that has a decent amount of noise or error, right?

• 59:34Speaker 01

  Because you, you know, you give people a vocab test, well, you know, there's some noise in it, right? It's not a perfect measure of someone's vocabulary, right? You, there's some choice of what questions to ask. And so, it's somewhat noisy, right? So you have this imperfect measure, you get a Dunning Kruger plot. The, the noise actually causes that effect, where people who have low, who you, you think have lower ability, tend to overestimate their ability. And the reason, yeah, it's a little bit subtle, but the reason is because so you don't know someone's true ability, right? Like, how would you know? All you know is someone's measured ability, but measured ability is true ability plus noise. So think about someone who was unlucky on the test, like they performed worse than their true ability.

• 1:00:14Chris Williamson?

  Oh.

• 1:00:17Speaker 01

  So they're gonna overestimate, they're gonna look like they overestimated their ability.

• 1:00:21Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 1:00:21Speaker 01

  But actually, they were just unlucky.

• 1:00:23Chris Williamson?

  Oh, wow, that's so interesting. Holy shit. Yeah, so both groups are maybe accurately perceiving their, what should have been their expected level of output. But due to noise or luck or chance or a good night's sleep or a bad night's sleep or a crying baby or whatever. They didn't show up as themselves. And that resulted in a disparity between what should have happened that they predicted and what did happen that they didn't predict.

• 1:00:57Speaker 01

  Exactly. And if anyone wants to deep dive on this on my YouTube channel, Spencer Greenberg, we've got a video that like breaks this down. But yeah, exactly. And so in order to really say there's a done in career effect, you actually have to have a test with incredibly little noise. It's like a really, really accurate measure to protect against this. And that's really hard to do, right? It's like hard to build such a good test of almost anything. So, so that's the first problem. It's like, well, we can't, it's hard to even show that it's not just a mathematical artifact. But here's a potentially even bigger problem. Turns out perfectly rational agents also get a done in career effect.

• 1:01:27Chris Williamson?

  Okay, explain that to me.

• 1:01:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it seems weird, right? Okay, so suppose you're doing a new skill you've never done before. You've like, you've no idea how good you are and you're competing against people who've also never done it before. What would you estimate your percentile to be?

• 1:01:43Chris Williamson?

  Ah, fuck knows. I guess it would depend on analogous other things that I'd done that were kind of similar to it in the past. And I'd try and predict that.

• 1:01:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, so if you had analogous, exactly, you try to predict it based on that. But let's say you had nothing analogous, right? You're like, well, what percentile?

• 1:01:59Chris Williamson?

  I have no idea, no idea.

• 1:02:03Speaker 01

  Well, let's say, would you put yourself at 99 percentile?

• 1:02:06Chris Williamson?

  No, absolutely not.

• 1:02:07Speaker 01

  Right. Would you put yourself at first?

• 1:02:09Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 1:02:10Speaker 01

  50th. Right, right. So you're gonna like, the rational thing, if you don't have information is to be like, okay, I'm probably near the middle, right? Before I get evidence, right? Prior to evidence. Okay. But then think about what happens. The rational thing is put yourself in the middle without evidence. You start getting evidence. What do you do? You update the information, use Bayesian reasoning to update. So you get some evidence, it pushes, as you get more evidence, it pushes you away from the center. So if you get some evidence that you're not very good, you start pushing down. If you get evidence you're good, you start pushing up. Well, guess what that leads to? It means you end up too close to the center. Everyone is squished towards the center, which is exactly the Dunning Kruger effect. People who are lower skill are overestimating themselves because they're squished to the center. And people who are higher skill are underestimating themselves because they're squished to the center.

• 1:02:55Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so is the Dunning Kruger effect bullshit?

• 1:02:57Speaker 01

  Well, that's the, this is the incredibly unsatisfying thing. I told you how the Dunning Kruger effect might just be a mathematical artifact. It might just be rational actors, but we can't tell the difference. It's so hard to tell. So I can't even be positive there's no Dunning Kruger effect because I'm just saying, like, these results have two other interpretations. And we can't tell which one it is. Is it irrationality? Is it a mathematical artifact? Or is it rational actors being Bayesian reasoners? But I will tell you something funny that we observed. I do think there's some irrationality going on. And that's because you could see in these plots, so we ran our own study, we got these plots and we looked at a bunch of others from other studies. What you see is that there tends to be, the line tends to be too high. On average, people overestimate their abilities. And I think that is a pretty robust finding.

• 1:03:42Speaker 01

  And so I think this better than average effect, that people tend to overestimate how good they are on average. I think that is true, and that is a form of irrationality. It's not the Dunning Kruger effect, but it is a form of irrationality. Of course, it's not true for everyone, like depressed people might underestimate their abilities, but on average, right? So that's one thing. The other thing that's really peculiar about these curves is they tend to be really flat. In other words, You might think, well, as you get out, get better and better, you know, you have a slope of one, like for every unit of increased skill, you go up by one unit in prediction. It tends to not be what you see, like it's really flat where like the people are really good, think they're only like a little bit better than the people who are not very good. And the extreme flatness, I find very suspicious. It makes it hard for me to believe people are being rational because it like, how could you really have so little evidence about your skill, right?

• 1:04:27Speaker 01

  Like, you know, it seems like people actually have a lot of evidence that like how good they are at driving or, you know, how intelligent they are, or, you know, et cetera, et cetera. And yet there's very flat slopes, meaning that the people who are really good think they're not that much better than everyone else. And actually, the funniest example of this is there's a study asking people to rate how attractive they are on a like a, you know, zero to 10 scale. And they also had third parties rate how attractive they are on a zero to 10 scale. It's ridiculously flat, like almost everyone thinks they're between a six and a seven on average. The lowest attractive people on average think they're like a six and the highest think they're like a seven. It's like, what is going on here? How is that possible? But it's super, yeah. It seems like people are weirdly under updating on evidence.

• 1:05:10Chris Williamson?

  With the attractiveness thing, I get the sense, as opposed to something that's more skill-based, I think there is a, there's going to be a huge amount of sort of white coat syndrome or whatever the equivalent is of like, oh God, like who says it about themselves that they're an eight out of 10? I'd better say a seven.

• 1:05:27Speaker 01

  True, but these are anonymous surveys. So yeah, I agree, like definitely, definitely if you're being interviewed, yeah, but most people would like, they don't want to seem arrogant.

• 1:05:34Chris Williamson?

  Some social desirability bullshit going on. Yeah, I don't know. Well, I mean, maybe that's just, I, I get the sense that maybe with things like self-rated attractiveness, um, it is so enmeshed socially that even if you do, it's anonymous, no one's ever going to see, the metadata has been wiped, we don't know your IP address.

• 1:05:57Chris Williamson?

  It, there's just this sort of, it feels like someone's watching you over your shoulder when you think about doing that.

• 1:06:04Speaker 01

  Well, you know what's so strange is that people tend to self assort by attractiveness. So they must have someone plus a level.

• 1:06:10Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:06:10Speaker 01

  Have a sense of their attractiveness, right? Like, I mean, like, how often would people date? Are they dating someone who's like pretty close in their track? Like, as usual.

• 1:06:17Chris Williamson?

  It's almost always. It's almost always, even in, even in relationships that are supposedly lux for wealth trades. Even when you've got the sugar daddy with the Playboy model. Like, most of the time, when you actually look at those relationships, they actually end up starting to match in terms of attractiveness. Mac and Murphy did a great breakdown about this. He does Species Podcast, he's great. And, um, yeah, it was, it's fascinating. It's really, really fascinating that people just seem to. So I have a, I have a really, really spicy theory about this, actually, which is,

• 1:06:52Chris Williamson?

  one of the reasons that, there's many, many, many, many reasons about why people aren't coupling up. One of the spicier ones that I've got is that with increasing levels of obesity, with calorie-rich foods and hyper-palatable, hyper-processed stuff going everywhere, everybody is becoming a little bit bigger. And there has to be a line below which, even if you are also a three, a three just isn't that attractive to you. And I wonder whether there's kind of a lower, a lower bracket to attractiveness that people are just not prepared, they're less prepared, let's say, to, to get into a relationship with, even if that's your level. Like, but then there's also this sort of lagging indicator of where you know that you should be. Well, that's not who I am underneath.

• 1:07:36Chris Williamson?

  Like, I've gained weight a little bit recently, but they've really gained weight. And it's like, no, dude, you've gained the same amount of weight that she has, or whatever. But yeah, I, I, I think it's fascinating to see what happens if you, and I guess, body weight is probably one of the reliable ways that you could step in and adjust levels of desirability kind of population-wide. It's not to say that you can't have people that are bigger that aren't beautiful, but you know what I mean in terms of desirability. It's just, what are some of the things that have happened across the board? Like, I don't know. If the ozone layer above America got disintegrated and everybody had leathery skin or something like that, like, what's something that's happening in a relatively sort of global, at least like population-wide level, that's impacting appearance? And this is one of the, I guess.

• 1:08:22Chris Williamson?

  Interventions, unfortunate experiments that's kind of being run.

• 1:08:26Speaker 01

  It's like decreasing baseline, how attractive people are to each other.

• 1:08:30Chris Williamson?

  That's interesting.

• 1:08:32Speaker 01

  You know, Ella, the sex researcher did a really interesting study where she found she could get people to more accurately indicate their own attractiveness level by having them compare themselves to people of their own gender. So she actually developed a scale of faces that were like people were, you know, faces where people rated them a one on average, two or three or four. And then she said, where do you rank, like rank yourself against these faces? And the people were actually more accurate than when they had to put it on like an objective scale themselves.

• 1:09:00Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. Okay. What do people consistently get wrong about personality disorders? You mentioned earlier on about narcissism and BPDs, stuff like that. Where, where do we not understand personality disorders very well?

• 1:09:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, great question. So this is something I've been deep diving a lot on recently. I actually did a series of interviews for our podcast with a narcissist, a sociopath, someone with borderline. So just search clear thinking on your podcast app if you want to check that out. But I think it's actually like a surprisingly important topic because almost certainly, unless you're like really kind of a hermit, you know, people with personality disorders, right? So if we think about even just three personality disorders, we think narcissistic personality disorder,

• 1:09:43Speaker 01

  antisocial personality disorder, also known as sociopathy casually, and borderline. Like each of them is estimated to be more than 1% of the population. So, you know, you know, a hundred people, there's a good chance you know someone with one or more personality disorder. And I think they also, while they're absolutely people with personality disorders are good people and not harmful. These, they tend to have an elevated risk of causing harm to others. Like a very substantially elevated risk, especially if you end up in a romantic relationship or a business relationship, or they're your best friend or that kind of thing, or a family member. So I think it is useful and important to understand these disorders. I think the first like big misconception is that people confuse like traits with the disorders.

• 1:10:26Speaker 01

  You know, people think, you know, a lot of people will be like, oh, my ex-partner was a narcissist or my boss is a narcissist or my boss is a sociopath or whatever. And I think it's important to understand that like. These are, these are trait based things, right? That narcissism is a trait. Grandiosity is a trait. You know, manipulativeness is a trait. And so everyone kind of is somewhere on the spectrum of these traits. And most people who are like somewhat narcissistic or somewhat, you know, manipulative or not, they don't have the disorder. And I think that's, so I think on the first, on the one hand, they're like often over diagnosed. Like people are like accusing others of having them and they usually don't. On the other hand, the people that do have them often go overlooked and like people actually don't realize that they have them. And that could sometimes comes at incredible cost.

• 1:11:04Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. So they're both being, uh, over diagnosed and under diagnosed at the same time.

• 1:11:10Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. And, you know, I think one thing that contributes a little bit here, if you think about, let's say somewhat narcissistic personality disorder. If you really get to the core of like their underlying motivations, which is how I like to think about it, I think what they're really driving towards fundamentally is attention and admiration is sort of like their highest value or drive. And, uh, and thinking of themselves as special and better than other people. And if you think about it that way, you realize that their behaviors are not necessarily what people would expect of a narcissist. And so let me give you an example. Suppose that someone says, hey, Chris, that's a really cool watch. Like, I really like it. Where'd you get it? Right? You might, you might think of that as sort of like a nice thing to say, right? An altruistic kind of thing to say.

• 1:11:56Speaker 01

  But what do you think is likely to happen after someone gives you, let's suppose you like actually care about your watch, right? What do you think is likely to happen after that?

• 1:12:02Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. You care about your watch more, you tell them, maybe they go and buy it as well.

• 1:12:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, so that's on your side, but also like you probably feel kind of good about that person, right? That's like a nice thing.

• 1:12:13Chris Williamson?

  Oh, of course. Yeah. Pro-social, what a lovely compliment. Thanks, Spencer. Yeah, I love this watch. I'm glad that you noticed.

• 1:12:19Speaker 01

  And how do you think that affects the likelihood that you compliment them later?

• 1:12:23Chris Williamson?

  Uh, yes, yes, yes, yes. So it's this sort of reciprocal debt that you need to pay.

• 1:12:28Speaker 01

  Exactly. Because they love admiration and attention and feeling special. So.

• 1:12:31Chris Williamson?

  They're flattering, even, even though that doesn't seem like the sort of thing that somebody who is a narcissist would do. Flattery is a tool that they can use to reciprocally get that back.

• 1:12:41Speaker 01

  Yes, and I think it's useful to think of like, obviously, people have different skill levels, but it's useful to think of a lot of people with narcissistic personality disorder as experts in getting admiration and attention. So they're not using, like, some of them use really, like, crude methods. They're just brag, you know, really boldly and, you know, obnoxiously. But they're experts in getting admiration and attention. So they do sly, subtle things. They give you really nice compliments that make you feel special, make you like them, and then make you give them a compliment later, right? I'll give you, I'll give you another example. My friend was dating a narcissist, and we were talking about him, and she's like, you know, it's, I mean, he's just textbook, like, everything, you know, he's clearly a narcissist. But she was saying, you know, the thing is that, like, I felt like he wasn't a narcissist because he would give away all this money anonymously to charity. And I was like, that's really interesting.

• 1:13:26Speaker 01

  How did you know about that? He would literally constantly brag about his anonymous donations, so.

• 1:13:37Chris Williamson?

  It's no longer anonymous.

• 1:13:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, but it worked. Like, like, it somehow worked, right? Where she was, like, persuaded by this, that he must not be narcissistic. And so I think that, like, if you think about them being savvy at this, it really changes your perspective, and it, it makes you realize that they're a lot harder to pick up on than a lot of people realize, and that's why people often misidentify, right? And in fact, there was a fascinating study where they measured people's narcissism and had them give, like, a, just a two-minute speech about themselves, like, introduce yourself to the whole room. And they asked people to rate how likable people were. And what do you think happened?

• 1:14:11Chris Williamson?

  The narcissists were more likable?

• 1:14:13Speaker 01

  The narcissists were more likable. In fact, not only were they more likable, they were even more likable if they cut out the audio. So people, like, they had people watch videos, they cut out the audio, they were still more likable. Their facial expressions were more likable, their clothing was more likable. Like, they're, they're like experts in being likable.

• 1:14:28Chris Williamson?

  They curated themselves.

• 1:14:29Speaker 01

  Exactly. But they, people's impression of them does tend to fall over time, right? Because, you know, it's a bit of a mask, right? It's like, they're trying to get you.

• 1:14:39Chris Williamson?

  It's gonna slip eventually.

• 1:14:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And so I think, I think, um, I think it's really important to know when you're dealing with someone with narcissistic personality disorder. It doesn't mean you should necessarily cut them out of your life. It doesn't mean they're a bad person necessarily, but I think you should know it is, it's an extremely elevated risk to causing harm. And then you should take that seriously and say, do I want this person in my life? And if you do want them in your life, it also is helpful to know because it actually can help you relate to them much more effectively, if you understand the way that their minds operate.

• 1:15:07Chris Williamson?

  What about sociopathy and BBD?

• 1:15:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, so sociopathy. So I used to never be able to identify sociopaths until about three years ago, and something suddenly clicked. And I I meet them like all the time. It's absolutely wild. Like, I almost can't believe how often I meet them. I was at a party like three months ago. I met two sociopaths at the party. Now, you might say, Spencer, maybe you're full of shit. How do you know they're sociopaths?

• 1:15:33Speaker 01

  I'll tell you. Do you want to know how I know they're sociopaths?

• 1:15:35Chris Williamson?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 1:15:36Speaker 01

  I take him aside, and I say, Hey, I know this is a weird question, but have you ever considered the possibility that you have antisocial personality disorder? And do you know what they say to me? They always say something very similar.

• 1:15:47Chris Williamson?

  No, what do they say?

• 1:15:49Speaker 01

  They say, no emotional reaction. They say, I have considered that.

• 1:15:56Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, but that's not Presumably, you're not saying that to everybody.

• 1:16:00Speaker 01

  No, I'm just saying it to people I think are sociopaths.

• 1:16:03Chris Williamson?

  So what's the what's the lead indicator? What's the indicator that happened before?

• 1:16:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. So here's the funny thing. You might think it's like, oh, I must be noticing that they're, you know, acting manipulative or callously, right? Or whatever. It's very rarely that, actually. It's I think the best way to think of sociopaths is it's like, imagine there were aliens that look just like humans, right? Obviously, they're not aliens, they're humans, but their their minds operate so differently that it's like they're aliens. So how would you tell someone is an alien, right? You would notice that they said something that like, would no human would say. It's just like, out of the distribution of human behavior. That's actually what I noticed. And I don't think they're sociopaths immediately. It's not like I'm like, oh, they did something so unusual that they're sociopath. What do you I'm I like, my obsession is human psychology. So when I notice someone do something like, where I'm like, I would predict like, essentially, zero people would ever do that thing. And this person just did that thing. I like, become really curious.

• 1:16:51Speaker 01

  I start asking them questions. And then that's when I developed the theory. Then I ask them about it. So let me give you an example. Talked to a guy at a conference. We were talking about how sometimes you can feel emotions in your body. And I was like, Oh, do you ever feel emotions in your body? He's like, Yes. One time, I was driving down the highway, and a refrigerator fell out of the back of the truck, smashed through my windshield, and I felt something in my stomach.

• 1:17:13Speaker 01

  And I was like, uh, what?

• 1:17:18Speaker 01

  So I didn't think this is a sociopath. I was just like, what is going on? This is not a psychology I'm familiar with. And then, you know, we talked about it for a while and then, you know, then he eventually came out that he keeps a list of everyone who's wronged him. And once a month, he checks it to see if he can hurt any of those people in ways that it take very little effort because he wouldn't want to expend a lot of effort to hurt them. But if there's a low effort way he could hurt them, then then he might as well because they hurt him.

• 1:17:42Chris Williamson?

  Wow. Okay, yeah, I mean, that's that's a slightly brighter red flag than.

• 1:17:47Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, exactly. But he probably wouldn't say that in just the normal conversation, right? So it's usually usually what happens is there's this thread of wow, this person like seems like an alien. Like they don't seem like a human, like something they said is so unusual. And then that's the thread that I pull on and then eventually, yeah.

• 1:18:05Speaker 01

  I actually like hanging out with sociopaths way more than narcissists.

• 1:18:08Chris Williamson?

  Why?

• 1:18:08Speaker 01

  They just tend to be, well, no, the thing, I think the fundamental thing is that narcissists, they tend to make everything about their ego as much as they can. So everything's being redirected back to their ego. And I just find that like very uninteresting. It's actually very boring.

• 1:18:22Chris Williamson?

  Exhausting as well, as opposed to someone who's a sociopath, who you're not going to trust, but is kind of fascinating at a distance.

• 1:18:28Speaker 01

  Exactly, yeah. And the sociopath, you know, they're like, when I, for example, I interviewed the sociopath. She describes it almost like she doesn't even know who her fundamental self is. Like she is like a shell and she's like learned to blend in. So you like think that she's just like you, but it's like this practice thing over years. Like I've asked sociopaths, like, do you like watching movies? Cause like, I don't know, without empathy, like if you don't like have empathy for the characters, like do you?

• 1:18:56Chris Williamson?

  What are you interested in?

• 1:18:57Speaker 01

  Exactly. And they tell me they love movies because they teach them how to behave. Like one sociopath was saying that he learned that if your friend's dad dies, you have to, you have to make a sad face and then say, I'm so sorry.

• 1:19:11Chris Williamson?

  It's like someone's read a handbook on how to be a human.

• 1:19:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I think this is where we can differentiate between low functioning and high functioning sociopaths. That low functioning ones often have struggled to fit in, like they don't learn those skills. They don't get adept. And so they constantly have this jarring thing where they're ostracized and people don't like them or whatever. And then the high functioning ones, like the ones you meet in a boardroom, the ones you meet, you know, in a courtroom or the one, you know, as the lawyer, not the convicted felon. They tend to be really good at blending in, right? They've worked their whole life at blending in.

• 1:19:44Chris Williamson?

  What's the difference between sociopath and psychopath?

• 1:19:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a great question. So unfortunately, the terms are like all messy and all over the place. Technically, psychopath is like not in the DSM five, which is the Diagnostic and Psycical Manual, nor a sociopath. The technical term is antisocial personality disorder. And it tends to focus more on like the outward signs, like manipulativeness and violating the rights of others. Whereas I tend to focus more on like what the internal experiences, because I think it gives a deeper sense of like who they are.

• 1:20:14Speaker 01

  Sometimes sociopath is used to refer to less severe forms of the disorder, where psychopath is the more severe forms. Sometimes sociopaths are thought to be more like hot-headed and emotional, where psychopath is more cold-blooded. And then there's also something called the psychopath checklist, which is sometimes used as a scale to measure like really severe levels. It's used in prisons and stuff like that. But unfortunately, the terms are really not standardized. And the sociopaths I've talked to tend to sort of use them interchangeably.

• 1:20:41Chris Williamson?

  Right, okay. Can you think of how narcissism or sociopathy is adaptive? Is this a spandrel? Is this a weird byproduct of stuff? Or is this an adaptive trait that we needed at some point?

• 1:20:59Speaker 01

  Great question. It's obviously hard to know for sure. I'll tell you my speculation.

• 1:21:05Speaker 01

  Narcissists tend to be good at getting admiration and attention. And I think that that actually sets people up to be leaders and to get everyone to rally around them. And so I think that they're way overrepresented among politicians. I think they're way overrepresented among, like, people in the public spotlight, leaders of all different sorts. And I think it cuts both ways. On the one hand, they tend to be drawn to those kind of positions because that's what they want. They also, though, I think, tend to be better at it because they're like, practice their whole life of getting admiration and attention. Right? They also are overrepresented among cult leaders. And so I think we have like, the negative archetype of the narcissist as a cult leader. Like, it's everything is about themselves and they want to be worshiped like a god.

• 1:21:45Speaker 01

  The positive archetype of narcissist would be like, a visionary CEO who's maybe willing to like, doesn't care so much about, you know, the well-being of their employees because they have this bigger vision, this grandiose vision. But they might end up playing a very positive role in society because they

• 1:22:02Chris Williamson?

  Right, yeah, their self-belief and their desire to achieve things in the world will have some negative externalities. But if either by design or by fluke, they were pointing in a direction which is a net benefit for humanity overall, you end up with them being like, kind of antisocial and manipulative en route. And you end up with a question there of whether or not the ends justify the means to get there.

• 1:22:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, and you could think of it as someone who's like, they're devoted to that grandiose vision rather than, you know, the people around them, or, right, things like that. And sometimes that grandiose vision ushers in something really important. Right, I think they really can rally people and get people moving in the same direction, which is also why they make great cult leaders and harbor a lot of people, right?

• 1:22:46Chris Williamson?

  What about sociopathy?

• 1:22:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, so let me ask you a question. Imagine you're living in a tribe of 100 people, you know, 50,000 years ago. When would you want a sociopathic tribe and when would you not?

• 1:22:58Chris Williamson?

  Um, maybe when there is some sort of fracturing internally, some sort of mutiny, treacherous kind of gamesmanship type thing. And you need somebody that can shapeshift and do the kind of political gamesman thing back and forth. Psychopath, again, the definitions are kind of messy. Perhaps when there was a war, I guess, as well. You need to be conniving and manipulative with basically any time that there's a rivalrous game going on, either internally or externally, and you need someone that can play that and not have any empathy

• 1:23:40Chris Williamson?

  or hesitation around fucking other people over.

• 1:23:45Speaker 01

  I think, I think that's astute, right? Like, imagine, for example, there's, you're surrounded by a bunch of tribes. They hate you, they want to kill you. They might just come and like, kill you all, or rape the women or whatever. Like, but there's a sociopath on your team who doesn't want them to come kill you. And you're like, yeah, that sociopath might just go and assassinate their leader and not think twice about it.

• 1:24:08Chris Williamson?

  Not even think about it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:24:09Speaker 01

  Like, just, well, I'll just go over, I'll just go over and kill them, you know? And it's like, well, actually, that's pretty useful to have on your team. But imagine you're in peacetime, right? Like, everyone's planting the fields and things are good. Like, do you want that sociopath? You know, it's a little bit like having a wolf with a bunch of sheep, right? Like, the sociopath is gonna, is like, probably not doing their part.

• 1:24:26Chris Williamson?

  The sociopath is, is being wartime manipulative during peace. And that's not really what you need. Well, I mean, I guess, who's to say that the sociopath would actually, they're kind of like, you know what a sociopath's kind of like? They're kind of like a misaligned AI. They're kind of like a relatively powerful agent that you just don't know what direction they're pointing in. Because who's to say that during a time of what we've seen in movies and stuff a lot, but there is a distraction that creates a vacuum of leadership internally. And someone, as opposed to trying to help the tribe by using their sociopathy against the opposition, they use it internally to try and capture power for themselves.

• 1:25:11Chris Williamson?

  Because this is a turbulent moment where they can step in and ascend to the top.

• 1:25:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'll tell you something, a top VC in Silicon Valley told me this. I don't know why he told me this. He told me he likes to fund small startups and sociopaths as leaders, but then he kicks them out when the company becomes big. And he said it's because when it's a smaller company, the sociopaths like interests are very aligned with like the startup succeeding.

• 1:25:37Speaker 01

  And they're willing to make like really brutal, cutthroat decisions. But when it gets big, they actually benefit most by just extracting value from the company itself. Whereas a small startup doesn't have value to extract. And so I like, it's like crazy. He like, he essentially finds sociopaths and then kicks them out of their company.

• 1:25:54Chris Williamson?

  Dude, I mean, if you want to use sociopaths as the launchpad booster rocket to get your heavy load off the, out of orbit. And then you actually switch to a cleaner fuel source. Once you get up into the atmosphere, I guess.

• 1:26:12Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's, that's an interesting one. I had this idea, I guess. I wonder whether we're over pathologizing difficult people as disordered rather than just unpleasant. It's like, how many people are just fucking unpleasant to be around?

• 1:26:27Speaker 01

  That's absolutely true. I mean, the vast majority of people are like, kind of a dick or unpleasant. They don't have a, they don't have a personality disorder, right? They're just, you know, a bit of a narcissist, or they're a bit of a dick, or they're, or they're just like dealing with their own shit. And they're like, they put it out on you because they don't have good emotional regulation skills, right? So it's, it is a lot of that. And like, we're really talking here about extreme personality types, so really, really extreme. Where you, you know, something I thought a lot about, like, is it even useful having these categories, right? If these are all traits that are on a spectrum. My suspicion is that what happens is as you get more and more extreme, it starts to dominate more and more of their behavior. So if someone's a little narcissistic, they may not have that much in common with other little bit narcissistic people, right?

• 1:27:10Speaker 01

  Cause they have so many other things going on. But if like narcissism actually drives like, is there fundamental drive in life? They actually might behave really similarly to other narcissists because they're kind of like guided by the same North Star. So I think that's what happens. That's why I think these categories are useful. At the real extreme, you start noticing so many similarities across.

• 1:27:28Chris Williamson?

  Because this i- i- it's if someone is ninety nine percent made of custard, it's okay to say that you are custard. But if you're only sort of sixty five percent made of custard, it's like, well, I'm kind of interested in what the other thirty five percent of that is.

• 1:27:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:27:44Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, custard analogies. You weren't thinking I was gonna go there today.

• 1:27:49Chris Williamson?

  Dude, your work's so fucking good. You're like

• 1:27:52Speaker 01

  Oh, thank you.

• 1:27:52Chris Williamson?

  the only guy I know that's doing this stuff. And it's just as well that you've got the obsession, because I don't think that anybody else would be prepared to put up with the level of like fiddliness that you have to do in order to be able to test this stuff. So everyone needs to check out all of the shit that you've got going on. The links will be posted around, but where do you want them to go to?

• 1:28:14Speaker 01

  Oh, thank you so much. Yeah, so a new YouTube channel. Would love for you to check it out. Subscribe if you find it interesting. Just search Spencer Greenberg on YouTube, my podcast, Clear Thing with Spencer Greenberg, search it on any podcast app, and our website, clearthing.org. We have so much, so much stuff. We have over eighty tools you can use on there for all kinds of things, forming healthy habits. We've got a tool, an actual cognitive assessment tool. So if you want to assess your cognitive abilities, strengths and weaknesses, so lots of stuff on there.

• 1:28:38Chris Williamson?

  Dude, you're king. Until next time, get some more studies done, and let's run this back soon.

• 1:28:42Speaker 01

  Thanks so much, Chris.