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Intelligence and radical economic attitudes

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Re: Intelligence and radical economic attitudes

#121

Post by rizzom5000 »

colinmhayes wrote: post #86
altruios wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

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, i…

Pattern recognition is an interesting way to describe what is being measured. I've always heard that IQ tests are really good at predicting the ability to understand complexity, or perform complex tasks; such as in the way the military has traditionally used intelligence tests to match recruits. I wonder if being really good at advanced math just means 'really good at pattern recognition'.

Anyway, I saw an interesting theory once that suggested IQ simply measures motivation and highly motivated people will tend to do better on standardized tests as well as more generally in life.

Re: Intelligence and radical economic attitudes

#122

Post by zackmorris »

This paper is quite refreshing and tracks with a site I mentioned the other day for a show on FSTV that I feel has the most informative political discussion:

https://www.thomhartmann.com

Like him, I consider myself part of the radical center, which is the opposite of moderate:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_middle

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thom_Hartmann#Political_views

So I have strong liberal and conservative views which form a self-consistent graph of evidence in my mind. Unfortunately it can be kind of lonely sometimes, because nearly all corporate news plays propaganda in opposition to some of my most fundamental values. That can lead to acute feelings of isolation, especially considering the increasingly partisan politics that have played out over the last 20 years, starting around 9/11, but going all the way back to my earliest memories of Carter, George H.W. Bush and Reagan talking past one another about such obviously logically inconsistent topics as trickle-down economics.

What it all comes down to is that I view our present reality as contrived and based on false pretenses. If people knew what was really going on, there'd be no way they could stay moderate. Which is why vast sums of money are spent to keep people in the dark and/or disenfranchised to keep supermajorities in political districts (or whole states like mine) so the parties can maintain the status quo.

But stuff like student loan forgiveness is the first time in my entire life where I've seen signs that the political tides might be turning. It's worth considering why ideas like that are so controversial. Controversy means that a debate is 50/50. If half the country believes something that strongly, then it can't be dismissed out of hand. We could see some real progress on a number of fronts play out rather quickly.

Re: Intelligence and radical economic attitudes

#123

Post by [deleted] »

solveit wrote: post #118
bulatb wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

High IQ with low EQ, whatever they are, is someone who thinks "feed the homeless to the hungry" is an elegant solution to an irritating problem and is baffled why we haven't done it yet. We don't need to rigorously quantify the cause to notice an effect, whatever it turns out to be.

Yes, you need a very high EQ to understand why that wouldn't work./s

[deleted]

Re: Intelligence and radical economic attitudes

#124

Post by iroh2727 »

This kind of purely statistical investigation (quite prevalent in modern academia) is just so bad at investigating holistic causal forces.

E.g. in the intro it mentioned “malicious envy” as a motive accounting for 50% of people’s desires to redistribute wealth. But could not “malicious envy” be caused/increased by outside forces? Is that stable over time and across countries, for example? (I doubt it is.)

These are precisely the kinds of fallacies or at best partial explanations that founders of sociology like Durkheim so clearly cut through. And yet here we are > 100 years later.

I mean, I’d rather have science that sacrificed its significant p-value for a little perspective and philosophy. What good is a correlation with no idea of the causation or overall perspective? For us humans this kind of result is at best a conversation starter (doesn’t really show us anything).

Re: Intelligence and radical economic attitudes

#125

Post by tdeck »

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.

So your definition of a free market is one in which there is no possible resource that isn't owned and commodified?

Re: Intelligence and radical economic attitudes

#126

Post by marketerinland »

hirvi74 wrote: post #120
colinmhayes wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, i…

I am not sure what is defined as "financial success," since it appears to be something one can be born into regardless of IQ. In regards to income, I briefly skimmed the Wikipedia section for IQ and Income, which can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Income "Highly correlated" would not be the choice of words I use to describe correlations between (0.23 - 0.5). We, as people, should c…

Maybe you’re not familiar with how correlation is reported, but 0.23-0.5 is very high.

Re: Intelligence and radical economic attitudes

#127

Post by bulatb »

solveit wrote: post #118
bulatb wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

High IQ with low EQ, whatever they are, is someone who thinks "feed the homeless to the hungry" is an elegant solution to an irritating problem and is baffled why we haven't done it yet. We don't need to rigorously quantify the cause to notice an effect, whatever it turns out to be.

Yes, you need a very high EQ to understand why that wouldn't work./s

That's a purposely absurd example of a mode of thinking I see almost every time I'm here. Whatever EQ is, if anything, maybe some amount of it is needed to avoid that.

Re: Intelligence and radical economic attitudes

#128

Post by sakras »

User23 wrote: post #110
jackmott42 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Smart people do better than dumb people at everything, ceteris paribus. If they didn’t then evolution would never have selected for intelligence.

I guess it depends on your definition of “doing better”, but for example in the Soviet Union the average factory worker made much more than an academic researcher, and I’d bet that academics would score better on an IQ test. So it’s definitely possible to build an economic system where lower-IQ individuals do better.

Re: Intelligence and radical economic attitudes

#129

Post by anigbrowl »

WalterBright wrote: post #115
anigbrowl wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't need you to explain price theory to me, and also don't find your hoarding argument persuasive, for two reasons: one, much of the demand in the aftermath of a disaster is from people who need to consume a commodity and can't get any, and two, the hoarding behavior you describe is more likely to be by price gougers hoping to engage in arbitrage. > But if you artificially suppress prices, there will also be some…

Hoarding toilet paper is only of value if you can resell it. Hence the total amount available remains the same. If hoarding fetches higher prices, that creates tremendous incentive to increase the supply (and/or find alternatives). If hoarding is illegal, and gouging is illegal, the result is shortages. Every time, since there is zero incentive to produce more. Rationing has other problems. It is based on the idea th…

This seems irrational. The need for many commodities like TP or water is fairly homogeneous and predictable, and excess is typically just used later or shared rather than abandoned. It's better in that you can maximize the number of people who have a sufficient supply to get through the emergency.

Again, I'm still wondering why you cite government as the opponents of free market pricing, when the objections often originate with people who are mad about the idea of paying $75 for a bottle of hand sanitizer: https://www.today.com/news/brothers-who-hoarded-17-700-bottl...

Re: Intelligence and radical economic attitudes

#130

Post by oreally »

JamesBarney wrote: post #78
openfuture wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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).

IQ is an indicator of how fast one learns at the job/skill, not how long they stick in it.

This is something social psychologists have authority in and not the opinions of techbros.

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