When rational thinking is correlated with intelligence the correlation is modest

I consider myself smart and rational, so I was surprised that I stumbled on many of the test questions. I got this one wrong, though you would think, having been programming computers for 15 years, I surely should have gotten this one right:

Jack is looking at Anne, but Anne is looking at George. Jack is married, but George is not. Is a married person looking at an unmarried person?

A) Yes

B) No

C) Cannot be determined

Oddly enough, I feel that if this had been presented to me as a bit of Java or Ruby code, then I would have gotten this one correct. It’s the informality of English, and the assumptions I make when reading English, that tripped me up.

Computer code engages the rational side of my brain in a way that English does not.

And to follow up on a point made long ago by Jeff Atwood, I think this (that IQ and rationality are different) also explains the strange inability of some smart people to learn how to program computers.

Jeff Atwood discusses this quote:

“All teachers of programming find that their results display a ‘double hump’. It is as if there are two populations: those who can [program], and those who cannot [program], each with its own independent bell curve. Almost all research into programming teaching and learning have concentrated on teaching: change the language, change the application area, use an IDE and work on motivation. None of it works, and the double hump persists.”

And also this quote:

“Despite the enormous changes which have taken place since electronic computing was invented in the 1950s, some things remain stubbornly the same. In particular, most people can’t learn to program: between 30% and 60% of every university computer science department’s intake fail the first programming course. Experienced teachers are weary but never oblivious of this fact; brighteyed beginners who believe that the old ones must have been doing it wrong learn the truth from bitter experience; and so it has been for almost two generations, ever since the subject began in the 1960s.”