[HN Gopher] Intelligence and radical economic attitudes
___________________________________________________________________
Intelligence and radical economic attitudes
Author : luu
Score : 53 points
Date : 2022-09-20 17:12 UTC (5 hours ago)
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| abeppu wrote:
| I think the way more interesting thing in this is buried in the
| table of correlations for study 3.
|
| - the positive correlation between intelligence and income at 30
| is 0.11, and highly significant, p<0.001
|
| - the positive correlation between intelligence and income at 42
| is 0.05, highly significant, p<0.001
|
| - the positive correlation between income at 30 and income at 42
| is 0.11, highly significant, p<0.001, and this was the strongest
| correlation of any variable with income at 42.
|
| I.e. what you earn when you're 42 is more tied to what you made
| more than a decade ago than it is to how smart you are. The
| strength of that link between income over time is the same
| strength as the influence of intelligence on income at 30.
| Jensson wrote:
| > the positive correlation between income at 30 and income at
| 42 is 0.11
|
| I'm surprised this correlation is so low, most people have
| already started their main career at 30, do people really
| change career that much between 30 and 42? Only reason I see it
| can be that low is that they have women who quit work or
| something, otherwise I'd expect high earners to continue to be
| high earners at that age and vice versa.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Workplace politicking and climbing the career greasy pole
| does not always correlate with intelligence.
| pedrosorio wrote:
| The comment you replied to does not mention intelligence
| anigbrowl wrote:
| While the degree of economic extremism (perhaps better described
| as investment or fluency) seems to correlate well with
| intelligence, I think it's unlikely that one can decide whether a
| given economic philosophy is the 'smarter' choice. Economic
| preferences may not be the outcome of pure rationality so much as
| differing values which in turn are based on different criteria of
| emotional satisfaction.
|
| There is some evidence* that these value preferences are
| independent of experience and established quite early in life. It
| might be that a lot of theoretical sophistication is an elaborate
| rationalization of the axiomatic preferences rather than
| objective assessments of 'reality'.
|
| It's also worth considering that preferential attachment and
| assortivity could lead to clustering of particular value systems
| at local, regional, or national levels. A policy which is
| 'natural' and 'efficient' in a society where one value system
| prevails might not work elsewhere, because the people there to be
| more competitive, or more cooperative, or more risk averse. Their
| aggregate economic outcomes would then be poorer because the
| policy is at odds with their social norms.
|
| * https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.1600451
|
| The speculated-upon correlation with big 5 personality factors in
| the current paper is intriguing and worthy of further research.
| tqi wrote:
| I wouldn't be surprised if "intelligence" would loosely predict
| extreme attitudes on almost any topic (such as is a hotdog a
| sandwich?).
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| Pretty much. For those who possess average intelligence,
| centrism(compromise) and status quo maintenance is a decent
| decision heuristic.
| lame-robot-hoax wrote:
| The thing is, right vs left doesn't necessarily capture
| extreme positions.
|
| For example, you have r/neoliberal on Reddit. There users are
| overwhelmingly in favor of YIMBY policies (zoning reform,
| banning single family zoning, focusing on high density
| coupled with public transit), getting rid of the Jones act,
| pro free trade, automating ports, pro carbon tax, etc. while
| also being very liberal/progressive (imo) on most social
| issues.
|
| So, while not necessarily extreme left or right, they have
| views that would be relatively extreme compared to the
| average voter, namely views on housing and trade.
| pram wrote:
| I think because extreme 'right' and 'left' are used today
| to characterize basically non-liberal ideologies, and
| liberal positions are described as the 'center'
|
| Historically liberalism can be very extreme and radical,
| considering groups like the Jacobins.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| Certainly. That's the downside of heuristics and in this
| case collapsing a multidimensional non-linear space down to
| a linear value. Any point on that projection doesn't
| necessarily map to a commonly held/centrist belief.
| nh23423fefe wrote:
| I'm not sure political positions have means.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| Any concept projectable down to a single dimension can have a
| mean. Are there valid projections for certain contexts or at
| all is a decent line of inquiry.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I'm sad that free markets are viewed as an "extreme" position.
| aeternum wrote:
| Purely free markets also have some very well-known failure
| cases: tradgedy of the commons, ability of a large
| participant to drop prices to eliminate competition then
| raise prices, inability of market forces to handle extreme
| tail risk like major natural disasters.
| somenameforme wrote:
| There is one issue with your argument here, an increasingly
| relevant one in contemporary times. You are implying that
| since one choice can be shown to be provably bad, it must
| therefore be the case that another is better by default.
|
| But this assumes that there are good choices, and that
| there are bad choices. Reality, unfortunately, is often not
| so kind, and instead leaves us to choose only between bad
| choices and horrible ones. And so emphasizing the flaws of
| one choice, says very little about the desirability of an
| alternative.
|
| In some ways I think game theory is most appropriate for
| chaotic systems. The goal is not to pick the system that
| works the best, under some ideal set of criteria, but the
| one that works the least-worst under the most hostile set
| of criteria.
| aeternum wrote:
| It doesn't need to be a purely free market. I'm very much
| a proponent of free markets but there's also a need for
| some amount of thoughtful regulation.
|
| Allowing market participants to discharge toxins into the
| local water supply is not in society's interests but is
| quite possible in a purely free-market system.
|
| There's now a good amount of evidence that a hybrid
| system: mostly free-market, with some regulation, and
| some kind of social safety net is the least-bad choice.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > Allowing market participants to discharge toxins into
| the local water supply is not in society's interests but
| is quite possible in a purely free-market system.
|
| A pure free market system would not allow people to
| pollute other peoples' property.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > tradgedy of the commons,
|
| Communal ownership is not free market, hence the tragedy of
| the commons is not a failure of the free market.
|
| > ability of a large participant to drop prices to
| eliminate competition then raise prices,
|
| Has never happened successfully.
|
| > inability of market forces to handle extreme tail risk
| like major natural disasters.
|
| The free market does very well at rushing supplies into
| disaster areas. At least until the government put a stop to
| that with anti-gouging laws. So now, disaster victims have
| to wait around until the government gets its act together,
| which takes a lot longer.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| This would be such a beautiful world if only people were
| more selfish!
| twblalock wrote:
| Selfishness is inevitable. You can either try to deny it
| and end up with a broken system where people are still
| selfish anyway, or you can channel it toward beneficial
| goals.
| WalterBright wrote:
| The beauty of the free market is that instead of
| suppressing selfish motives, it enables them in a way
| that benefits society. It's why Americans live the
| highest standard of living in the world.
|
| Socialism fails because it relies on altruistic behavior,
| which is in short supply in humans.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| > in a way that benefits society
|
| So when accusations of price gouging arise (say in the
| aftermath of a disaster), you're saying that it's the
| government interfering while the people in the disaster
| area area are eager to pay top dollar for suddenly-rare
| commodities like water or hand sanitizer? If I see
| regular-seeming people complaining about prices, should I
| assume they're covert government agents?
| twblalock wrote:
| Those things are often suddenly rare because people hoard
| them, which can be prevented by allowing supply and
| demand to properly work. Prices should go up if goods are
| in more demand. In addition, the higher prices will
| motivate sellers to send more products to the impacted
| area. That eventually leads to price stabilization at the
| intersection of the supply and demand curve, i.e. how
| things are supposed to work.
|
| Do the higher prices mean some people won't get any
| water? Yes! But if you artificially suppress prices,
| there will also be some people who don't get water,
| because other people will hoard it.
| aeternum wrote:
| >Communal ownership is not free market, hence the tragedy
| of the commons is not a failure of the free market.
|
| Ah yes so in this free-market utopia shall we purchase
| bottled air from Nestle for our breathing needs?
|
| Shall all aerospace companies pay a toll to the estate of
| Yuri Gagarin whenever they launch a rocket? He was the
| first in space so must have the most logical claim to the
| ownership rights. His estate could then help us avoid
| Kessler syndrome.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Isn't climate change the result of communal ownership of
| the air?
|
| As for space, the orbits are full of dangerous space
| junk. A classic tragedy of the commons.
| aeternum wrote:
| Much of the most heavily polluted land in the US is
| privately owned, so I don't see how that eliminates the
| issue.
|
| I'd be much more concerned with issues like groundwater
| contamination, seeping gasses, and toxic waste dumping.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > groundwater contamination, seeping gasses, and toxic
| waste dumping
|
| Are all not allowed in a free market. A free market does
| not condone damaging other people or their property.
|
| BTW, US military bases are on some of the most polluted
| ground because they polluted it.
| liotier wrote:
| Free markets indeed is an extreme position: efficiency in
| trade requires regulation.
| Test0129 wrote:
| Regulations? You mean the same mechanism ISPs, food
| companies, "sin taxable" companies, etc use to capture
| entire segments of the market and price fix their way to a
| billion dollar profit? Or the regulations that nearly sank
| Tesla in the cradle that existed for no reason other than
| politicians are as corrupt, if not more, than the worst
| CEOs?
|
| 99.9% of the time regulation is unnecessary. Over-
| regulation is a huge problem and one that only an _actual_
| theoretical free market could address. I see people on HN
| complaining about last mile politics often. Yet people seem
| hard pressed to look to the free market for a solution. I
| 'd rather deal with a corrupt CEO whose power will end when
| their life does, rather than a politician whose power will
| continue for centuries until someone with a few more brain
| folds steps in and stops it.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Free markets require a government to enforce contracts,
| property rights, and ensure there's no force or fraud in
| the transactions.
| imtringued wrote:
| When people buy apples it is considered absolutely normal
| that apples go bad and spoil over time. If your unit of
| measurement is a golden apple that never rots, then it is
| only natural that the return on a spoiling apple is negative.
|
| The moment people talk and think about money, they consider
| the mere concept of a negative return as some kind of
| monstrosity going against nature itself, despite the fact
| that money is a claim on labor and labor spoils just like an
| apple. The saver expects a reward for idleness, while the
| laborer without a job is getting punished by his enforced
| idleness. Money without negative return obligates men to
| become golden statues that never age, a world view that is
| obviously in dissonance with nature and reality.
|
| Whenever the economy isn't growing, people will prefer an
| asset that bears a 0% return at no risk over any real
| investment.
|
| In other words, there is no such thing as a free market
| without a monetary reform that allows negative interest rates
| or simply allows money to expire, the same way people age.
|
| Here is another problem, eternal private landownership has
| the same problem. Let's assume you have a perpetuity that
| returns you $1 per year. At a zero interest rate its value is
| infinite and no, that isn't a problem with the concept of
| zero interest, the obvious problem is that a perpetuity
| cannot exist, even the planet itself has a finite lifespan,
| meaning the value of a single plot of land will only amount
| to billions of dollars. What's worth more? Money that works
| according to supply or demand or land that doesn't? Of course
| people are going to pick land. If landownership was eternal,
| then owning all of the land on the planet is equivalent to
| turning everyone else into illegal aliens that merely have
| been granted permission to exist on the planet and whose
| permission can be withdrawn at any time.
|
| In the face of these two forces there cannot be something
| like a free market. It would always be a coercive market in
| one form or another.
| clairity wrote:
| yes, as you move toward more intelligence, you tend to move
| toward the edge of human knowledge, which by definition, are at
| the extremes (not in everything of course, but in areas of more
| intense focus).
| hackerlight wrote:
| Could be because the people who even know what those extremes are
| tend to be high IQ. It could still be true that self selecting
| into these beliefs conditional on knowing they exist predicts
| lower IQ.
|
| E.g, people who knows what ararcho-syndicalism is have a mean IQ
| of 125. People who believe it's a good idea are a subset of this
| group with an IQ of 115. So it appears that the belief predicts
| IQ but it's actually the knowledge that it's even an option.
| openfuture wrote:
| My hot take is that people who believe in IQ have low IQ.
| JamesBarney wrote:
| What does it mean to not believe in IQ?
|
| Does that mean these high IQ people don't think IQ exists. It
| obviously exists. It's a real measure that people use.
|
| It's not like midichlorian count which is a measure from
| Starwars. Which doesn't exist because it only exists in the
| movies and doesn't measure something real (the force).
| altruios wrote:
| I would say (it has been a while), the common complaint
| that I've heard is the tests for IQ are not standardized -
| there are a million snake-oil pitches for free and paid
| online IQ tests - or that the real tests have a bunch of
| cultural bias that might skew the results... Or that IQ is
| inadequate as a measure of general intelligence (if IQ
| measures pattern matching effectively and it misses other
| kinds of reasoning entirely)...
|
| lots of complaints I've heard - can't say one way or the
| other if there is any salt to them.
|
| I haven't heard the complaint before that IQ is imaginary,
| that's a new one... I think through reading the exchange I
| see where the semantics shifted between people's thoughts,
| I doubt that's what the the poster above you meant - likely
| they meant a combination of the many complaints to dismiss
| the general usefulness of IQ tests as a predictor of
| intelligence.
| solveit wrote:
| That sounds like a complaint that online IQ tests are
| bad, which is obviously correct but also not really
| relevant to IQ as studied in psychometrics.
|
| The complaints I hear about IQ are completely opposite!
| People dislike standardized exams, including IQ tests,
| _because_ of their standardization! That is, the need to
| assess everyone the same way precludes assessment
| specific to the individual being assessed. Detractors of
| IQ, insofar as they would like assessment at all, would
| prefer a more holistic procedure where the
| characteristics and capabilities of the assessee are
| analysed with due attention paid to the specific life
| history of said assessee.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| There are certainly a lot of valid complaints about IQ.
| The lack of standardization is obviously a problem, and
| the cultural understanding of it is severely lacking. But
| study after study have shown that IQ is highly correlated
| with financial success, and at this point the confounders
| have been controlled well enough to say it's hard for me
| to deny that pattern recognition, which is what well made
| iq tests measure, is a cause of success.
| kiliantics wrote:
| Yeah but Noam Chomsky thinks anarcho-syndicalism is a good idea
| so it's clearly the superior choice of the true intellectual :p
|
| and if that's not convincing enough, how about Alexander
| Grothendieck
| thwayunion wrote:
| This is a good point.
|
| Additionally, IQ measures a very specific type of cognitive
| ability. I am not so sure that those cognitive abilities are
| perfectly correlated with the sort of social and emotional
| intelligence required to assess the likely effectiveness of a
| political system.
| solveit wrote:
| If only there were half a century of research into exactly
| what IQ does and doesn't correlate with! Anyhow, my lukewarm
| take is that no level of "social and emotional intelligence"
| will allow you to assess the likely effectiveness of a
| political system, because why in the world would the built-in
| intelligence for interacting with a couple of hundred people
| be any good at predicting the aggregate behaviour of billions
| of people.
|
| Instead, we have more general problem-solving skills that
| allowed us to develop things like statistics and economics
| and political theory. I leave it to the reader to determine
| how much social and emotional intelligence is required to
| excel at those. (As opposed to the _merely_ analytical
| intelligence that IQ measures, I suppose. I have yet to see a
| definition of social /emotional intelligence that is coherent
| enough to be measured, and also actually meaningfully exists
| when measured.)
| lliamander wrote:
| I think there's also a (small) correlation between IQ the
| personality trait of "intellect", a sub-trait of openness that
| measures not so much how smart you are, but rather how
| interested you are in intellectual pursuits.
|
| My guess is that people who score higher on "intellect" are
| more likely the kind of people who "take ideas seriously". That
| is, they tend to follow ideas to their logical conclusions.
| legitster wrote:
| I suspect this isn't limited to economic attitude. Intelligence
| is likely associated all over the place to having strong opinions
| about things in every which way.
|
| > Conservative economic attitudes have been theorized as symptoms
| of low cognitive ability.
|
| This has to be the most formalized way of saying "only dumb
| people could be conservatives".
| mountainriver wrote:
| Eh strong opinions are usually morally based, and have little
| to do with intelligence.
| scarmig wrote:
| People like the sense that their views are coherent. Intelligent
| people are more likely to see how their point of view is
| incoherent. So they adopt points of view that are more coherent.
| Our world, both in its material basis and the ideology
| under/overlying it, is a messy hodgepodge, so those points of
| view tend to be radical i.e. a rejection of the existing basis of
| the world.
| wutbrodo wrote:
| Yea, related effects are well-established in politics: "elite"
| voters (esp as measured by education) are more coherent and
| thus more extremist, while the average voter is all over the
| map because they're not as interested in (or capable of?)
| having a coherent model of reality.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Or they are less willing to mutilate reality in order to try
| to make it fit within some
| intellectual/philosophical/political system.
|
| And the more radical the system is, the more it mutilates
| reality in order to try to make it fit within the system.
| jackmott42 wrote:
| Or they just pick the view that benefits them, with no regard
| to how it affects others. Smart people definitely do better in
| a fuck you got mine economy than dumb people.
| openfuture wrote:
| Or they pick the view that benefits everybody but nobody
| wants that because they are busy exploiting something that
| gives them relative advantage and don't see how they would be
| better off if they would have less relative advantage but
| better commons. Smart people have historically often been
| left destitute for their convictions.
| tbrownaw wrote:
| Hubris, the third great virtue.
|
| The more you're confident in your own ability to figure things
| out, the less you need to seek out an established consensus to
| follow.
|
| Sometimes it'll work, sometimes it won't, but hopefully on net it
| works more than it doesn't.
| fallingfrog wrote:
| The way they are interpreting their data here is highly suspect.
| First off, the data points are pretty much in a circular cloud,
| and so the association must be super weak.
|
| What bothers me even more is the way they arbitrarily divided the
| top and bottom halves of their data set into two separate data
| sets. This is highly unusual. Doesn't the way you draw the line
| introduce some kind of bias?
|
| I think you cannot draw any concrete conclusions from this data.
| clairity wrote:
| anything that starts off with "left" and "right" as an underlying
| political model is already hopelessly lost in poor thinking. this
| particular model is especially prone to tautological "evidence"
| of its own potency but it's simply uncovering a bias embedded in
| its own premises. start with a more realistic multidimensional
| model of political space and then maybe we can have productive
| conversations about things like intelligence and economic
| attitudes.
| mistermann wrote:
| > tautological "evidence"
|
| Do you (or anyone else) have any idea if this is a formal term
| in any discipline, or did you come upon it on your own? I
| notice people engaging in this _all the time_ in arguments, and
| having thought about it a fair amount I think it is almost
| impossible to avoid doing unless one is paying _extremely_
| close attention to their word choice, as typically (~only)
| happens during technical discussions.
|
| > start with a more realistic multidimensional model of
| political space
|
| This seems like a good idea... But how might one go about doing
| it?
| clairity wrote:
| "tautological" comes generally from logical reasoning as a
| field (in which i have interest but no formal training). is
| that what you're asking? it's "circular reasoning": a
| (usually hidden) premise comes around to "prove" the causal
| chain, which means it's not really proven at all, but merely
| reasserted. it's a pretty common logical mistake to fall for,
| because it's hard to detect without that close reading (the
| platitude that "falsehoods can travel the world before truth
| has had breakfast" comes to mind here as well).
|
| i think political scientists do research the
| multidimensionality of issues all the time. it's just that
| politicization (as in partisan politics) wants to collapse
| the problem space into memes that can lodge in people's
| brains without further thinking, and simpler (binary) memes
| are more easily remembered and propagated. in any case, the
| standard remedies certainly include voting reform (to lessen
| the incentive towards this binary collapse), parliametary
| systems (accommodating multiparty coalition-building),
| federalism (smaller governments are more responsive to the
| local populace), direct democracy or finer representation,
| etc.
| scarmig wrote:
| Conflict tends toward dualism, and politics is inherently about
| conflict. The space of possible positions is indeed very wide
| and multidimensional, but the process of effective contention
| and coalition building drives everything into two sides. Actors
| who don't want to do this can avoid falling into that binary,
| but they're also then less engaging in politics than
| philosophy.
| thwayunion wrote:
| _> the process of effective contention and coalition building
| drives everything into two sides._
|
| This doesn't seem right.
|
| First, there are a lot of political systems with more than
| one "side", and in which coalitions are at least somewhat
| fluid. This is even true in the United States; if you have
| ever served on a board that proposes a bond issue or tax
| increase, you know that that coalitions are quite local and
| easy to fragment (need to build a new school on the south
| side, but the north side has lots of tax hawks? Include a new
| football stadium on the north side as part of the issue).
|
| Second, think about conflict outside of politics. There is a
| lot of conflict in markets, for example, but most markets do
| not tend toward duopoly.
| groby_b wrote:
| "drives everything into two sides."
|
| Mostly true for political systems that are set up as dual
| parties. Turns out if you have a system that encourages a
| more open political ecosystem, there are more "sides" that
| people can end up on.
| hinkley wrote:
| I was stuck in between 5 groups all arguing over a data
| interchange format. Several groups insisted that the system
| should categorically not be allowed to support some of the
| business cases of the people they either got information from
| or gave it to. I still don't understand how they thought
| having the whole project fail was going to get them whatever
| status they were looking for.
|
| I got real fond of saying, "compromise means everybody is
| equally unhappy with the solution" and giving them solutions
| that worked but often took each of them a couple extra lines
| of code. Helping them figure out what those lines were
| smoothed some feathers, but I don't think any of those people
| were comfortable unless at least a couple feathers were out
| of place. It's weird when people 10 years older than you are
| acting like babies. It's not like 'mature' is the first
| adjective people would use to describe me at that time. When
| you don't want to be the adult in the room, it's all the more
| annoying when you have to be.
| clairity wrote:
| no, that's _post hoc_ rationalization. the world is more
| complex than 2 points on a line, always. sure, our brains
| like 2-dimensions the best, because they 're easier to reason
| about, but there's no law that says that that simple
| reasoning translates into either an accurate read of a given
| situation, or an accurate prediction about the future (which
| is what we want models to do).
|
| that's why starting with the "political spectrum" is bound to
| give you false information. it compresses too much of the
| complexity down into a simple model that doesn't predict the
| world in any meaningful way. it may aid conflict, but that's
| exactly the trouble: couching sociopolitical challenges
| purely in terms of conflict itself perpetuates, rather than
| helps to solve, problems.
|
| and as others have noted, you can just as easily have
| multiple political coalitions coming together to solve
| problems without devolving into dualism. humans prefer but
| don't require binary political stances as you're asserting.
| moreover, even binary issues won't all fall neatly into a
| single left-right spectrum without active coercion (which is
| most of what we see in mediopolitical theater).
| [deleted]
| lliamander wrote:
| > While this reveals motives such as malicious envy accounting
| for around half of support for redistribution (Lin & Bates, 2021;
| Lin & Bates, 2022; Sznycer et al., 2017)
|
| Holy smokes, _half_? I 'll admit this is something that appeals
| to my biases, but that seems like a rather significant finding
| (if true)
| robertk wrote:
| Edge tails of high variance inputs lead to very different values
| of the computational outputs of thought derived from those
| inputs, news at 11.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Intelligence isn't knowledge. Wisdom is the combination of
| intelligence with knowledge.
| lliamander wrote:
| I agree that intelligence and knowledge are not the same, but I
| would say that wisdom is more than just the sum of the other
| two.
|
| The way I see it:
|
| 1. Intelligence is how fast you can go
|
| 2. Knowledge is where you start from
|
| 3. Wisdom (or "perspective" as Alan Kay would say) is the
| direction you are going.
|
| If we think of intellectual activity as searching on the
| terrain of ideas for truth, knowledge and intelligence can both
| help you get to the truth faster, but ultimately what matters
| most is whether you are pointed in the right direction.
| bediger4000 wrote:
| If true, this would explain tensions here on HN when discussion
| of economic issues happens. HN readers are self selected high
| cognitive ability people.
| mjreacher wrote:
| Well that's what we would like to think of ourselves.
| pessimizer wrote:
| That's covered by "self-selected."
| mistermann wrote:
| Self-identified seems more fitting?
| bpodgursky wrote:
| HN is maybe 1.5 standard deviations above mean, which is a very
| dangerous place to be.
| antegamisou wrote:
| > HN readers are self selected high cognitive ability people.
|
| Tech literate maybe, but if we judge from the deplorable
| quality content of the front page the past 1.5 year...
|
| Unless editorialized titles and 2500-word essays on CRUD are
| what high cognitive ability people are into now!
|
| I am aware there are exceptions to this, which is the reason I
| joined the site, but I've become disappointed over time to see
| that they are indeed a minority.
| [deleted]
| nh23423fefe wrote:
| Do people of average intelligence even have views? Can you
| really be said to hold a view that you can't even evangelize.
|
| Lots of people hold a view like, "my body my choice" or "its
| actually just murder" but they couldn't even get the next
| sentence out when prodded.
| paganel wrote:
| > Can you really be said to hold a view that you can't even
| evangelize.
|
| Yeah, most definitely, I realise as I get older (I'm in my
| early 40s now) that life is quite complicated and there's
| almost no "evangelical"-like truth to it. Especially not when
| it comes to economics, that's for sure.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| This view is actually very narrow-minded, much more than
| simply having views you aren't able to deftly articulate or
| defend against a dedicated opponent. It compresses an
| absolutely huge realm of human experience (believing
| things???) into a very small one (arguing about them on the
| internet), and then tries to judo it so the first doesn't
| matter unless you can ably commit to the second. Tragic
| reduction of your world here.
|
| This is such a content-lite view of intelligence it's
| embarrassing to even take it seriously. It really comes
| across that you consider intelligence a virtue and it just
| isn't. You probably have a lot to learn from "people of
| average intelligence" about actual virtues like obligation
| and responsibility, commitment, compassion, understanding,
| and growth. We aren't lesser than you and I'd take a "average
| intelligence" person over this sort of smart ass shit as my
| teammate, business partner, lover, or friend in a second.
| mistermann wrote:
| Is this to say that the proposition has no truth or
| validity to it, that there are not people who hold
| extremely confident opinions on certain matters _but are
| literally not able_ to accurately substantiate their claims
| in detail in a logically consistent manner given sufficient
| time?
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| The idea that beliefs are only valid _if you are able to
| adequately articulate them to the standards set by
| someone else_ is invalid, yes.
| mistermann wrote:
| I see you answered a question other than the one that was
| asked.
|
| Would you mind answering the one that was asked?
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| I'm not taking either side of this argument. I just want
| to say that I found your question to be incomprehensible.
| I can't blame giraffe_lady for not answering it; I
| couldn't, because I can't tell what you're asking.
| andreilys wrote:
| I think they're referring to the NPC programming that
| people receive through media/authority figures, and only
| have those views because "my fellow tribe member on Fox
| News/CNN said so"
|
| You can't really blame them though, the average person
| simply doesn't have the time to be well researched on a
| given topic, and so are going to default to tribal thinking
| that when you poke at, falls apart.
|
| It has nothing to do with inability to articulate their
| position, and everything to do with the fact that there
| simply isn't enough time for most people to become well
| informed on a given topic.
| abeppu wrote:
| > You can't really blame them though, the average person
| simply doesn't have the time to be well researched on a
| given topic
|
| Sure, we can't all be well researched on most topics.
|
| But we can learn to have better BS detectors. We can
| learn to identify bad arguments. We can learn to question
| the incentives of people arguing on cable TV. We can
| learn to be skeptical of claims without evidence, and to
| understand the kinds of caveats that accompany various
| kinds of evidence.
|
| These can separate the critical thinker who, after
| watching a TV news segment isn't sure what's true but has
| some pointed questions, and an uncritical viewer who
| believes new claims made by whichever talking head they
| already agreed with.
| cardanome wrote:
| They have not controlled for the most obvious variable: class.
|
| Obviously higher class individuals would score higher on their
| intelligence test having received better education
|
| It should not surprise anyone that people higher up the class
| hierarchy have more moderate, centrist views while those that are
| struggling and for which radical change is an objective need
| because the current system is not working for them, embrace
| radicalism.
| AlgorithmicTime wrote:
| dllthomas wrote:
| Then you should be _very_ surprised that they seem to have
| found higher test scores implying more demand for change.
| [deleted]
| abeppu wrote:
| They show correlations between household income and their other
| measures in study 2 (significant positive correlation with
| conservatism, insignificant positive correlation with
| extremism), and between income at 2 ages in study 3 (in both
| cases there was significant relationship to conservatism and a
| weaker significant relationship to extremism).
|
| I think it's more interesting that they focus on finding their
| one relationship (between intelligence and extremism) and don't
| really unpack the relative sizes to other correlations in their
| own studies. E.g. the link between intelligence and extremism
| is weaker than the link between intelligence and conservatism
| (though studies 2 and 3 find _opposite signs_ for this
| relationship) and is weaker than the link between intelligence
| and income. So their study is basically consistent with the
| possibility that some intelligent people earn higher incomes
| and richer people are likely to be atypically conservative.
| orthecreedence wrote:
| As I've done better financially in life, I've become _more_
| radical. I 'm one data point, but my experience contradicts
| your conclusion.
|
| I think in my case, it was a realization that I'm not working
| _harder_ than other people or even working things that _matter_
| more than anybody else (in fact, on the contrary) and that at
| least 90% of my success can be attributed to luck. So if my
| success is not due to my deeds but rather a randomized lottery,
| then there 's no point in preserving the status quo.
|
| And that's _only_ analyzing one aspect: me. There are a lot of
| other reasons the world should change beyond what benefits just
| me.
| [deleted]
| sharadov wrote:
| Do you work in tech, WFH and make upwards of 200K/year :-)
| seti0Cha wrote:
| It seems to me you are overgeneralizing from your own case
| and understating the effects of your choices on the outcome
| in characterizing success as random. But even if it is
| random, you should hold out for demonstrably better
| alternative before giving up on preserving the existing one.
| There are worse outcomes than randomly distributed success.
| [deleted]
| AftHurrahWinch wrote:
| > They have not controlled for the most obvious variable:
| class.
|
| What's the distinction you're making between household income
| and class?
|
| > The hypothesis that the positive association between higher
| intelligence and economic extremism would be replicated was
| tested using a linear model with total intelligence score as
| the independent variable, and economic extremism as the
| dependent variable, controlling for age, gender, education
| level, and <<<household income>>>.
| woodruffw wrote:
| So convenient a thing is it to be a reasonable creature, since it
| enables one to find or make a reason for every thing one has a
| mind to do[1].
|
| [1]:
| http://jjcweb.jjay.cuny.edu/awinson/public_html/eng100-act/e...
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