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Intelligence and radical economic attitudes

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Re: Intelligence and radical economic attitudes

#61

Post by aeternum »

WalterBright wrote: post #56
aeternum wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

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.

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.

Re: Intelligence and radical economic attitudes

#62

Post by abeppu »

andreilys wrote: post #28
giraffe_lady wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 worl…

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 in…

> 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.

Re: Intelligence and radical economic attitudes

#63

Post by AnimalMuppet »

wutbrodo wrote: post #50
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.

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.

Re: Intelligence and radical economic attitudes

#64

Post by AnimalMuppet »

mistermann wrote: post #54
giraffe_lady wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I see you answered a question other than the one that was asked. Would you mind answering the one that was asked?

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.

Re: Intelligence and radical economic attitudes

#65

Post by selimthegrim »

Jensson wrote: post #60
abeppu wrote: post #49

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, p I.e. what you earn when you'r…

> 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.

Workplace politicking and climbing the career greasy pole does not always correlate with intelligence.

Re: Intelligence and radical economic attitudes

#66

Post by fallingfrog »

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.

Re: Intelligence and radical economic attitudes

#67

Post by jackmott42 »

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.

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.

Re: Intelligence and radical economic attitudes

#68

Post by WalterBright »

aeternum wrote: post #52
somenameforme wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ho…

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 s…

> 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.

Re: Intelligence and radical economic attitudes

#69

Post by antegamisou »

bediger4000 wrote: post #2

If true, this would explain tensions here on HN when discussion of economic issues happens. HN readers are self selected high cognitive ability people.

> 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.

Re: Intelligence and radical economic attitudes

#70

Post by openfuture »

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…

My hot take is that people who believe in IQ have low IQ.
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