Intelligence and radical economic attitudes • Hacker News Board

Re: Intelligence and radical economic attitudes

#41

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Sep 20, 2022, 7:15 PM UTC

orthecreedence wrote: post #40

cardanome wrote: post #25

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, em…

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…

[deleted]

Re: Intelligence and radical economic attitudes

#42

Post by clairity » Tue, Sep 20, 2022, 7:15 PM UTC

scarmig wrote: post #19

clairity wrote: post #6

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 i…

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.

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).

Re: Intelligence and radical economic attitudes

#43

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Sep 20, 2022, 7:21 PM UTC

orthecreedence wrote: post #40

cardanome wrote: post #25

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, em…

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…

[deleted]

Re: Intelligence and radical economic attitudes

#44

Post by pram » Tue, Sep 20, 2022, 7:21 PM UTC

lame-robot-hoax wrote: post #12

kelseyfrog wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much. For those who possess average intelligence, centrism(compromise) and status quo maintenance is a decent decision heuristic.

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…

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.

Re: Intelligence and radical economic attitudes

#45

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Sep 20, 2022, 7:27 PM UTC

cardanome wrote: post #25

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, em…

[deleted]

Re: Intelligence and radical economic attitudes

#46

Post by abeppu » Tue, Sep 20, 2022, 7:27 PM UTC

cardanome wrote: post #25

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, em…

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.

Re: Intelligence and radical economic attitudes

#47

Post by thwayunion » Tue, Sep 20, 2022, 7:32 PM UTC

hackerlight wrote: post #30

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…

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.

Re: Intelligence and radical economic attitudes

#48

Post by clairity » Tue, Sep 20, 2022, 7:34 PM UTC

mistermann wrote: post #31

clairity wrote: post #6

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 i…

> 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…

"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.

Re: Intelligence and radical economic attitudes

#49

Post by abeppu » Tue, Sep 20, 2022, 7:38 PM UTC

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- the positive correlation between intelligence and income at 42 is 0.05, highly significant, p- the positive correlation between income at 30 and income at 42 is 0.11, highly significant, pI.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.

Re: Intelligence and radical economic attitudes

#50

Post by wutbrodo » Tue, Sep 20, 2022, 7:39 PM UTC

scarmig wrote: post #16

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.

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.