New IQ research shows why smarter people make better decisions

IQ is a rough measure of how big the engine is, like horsepower in a car. It says nothing about the quality of the driver or anything else about the car. A car with a huge engine in the hands of a bad driver can ram itself into a tree with great force.

In my experience I've met a ton of extremely high IQ people who believe insane things: the Moon landings didn't happen, bizarro political theories that fall apart if you look at them funny, occult mumbo jumbo, Scientology, vaccines cause autism and similar (RFJ Jr. probably has a high IQ), etc.

I wonder if having a high IQ means you can delude yourself better. Whether God can build a mountain he can't climb over may be a paradox, but humans with high IQ can absolutely create traps for their own mind they can't think their way out of.

I've also found that high IQ correlates -- at least in my sample -- with authoritarian political beliefs, with a roughly equal split between authoritarian leftism (Communism / tankie Marxism, technocratic socialism) and authoritarian rightism (race nationalism, fascism, neoreaction, authoritarian traditionalism / theocracy). I think this stems from an intuition on the part of the person that because they seem smarter than average and have trouble running their own life, there's no way an average person can be part of self-governing. I think they're both underestimating other people and overestimating the inherent efficacy of "smart" people.

If this is true, then I suppose that smarter people are also richer.

Happiness > Wealth Accumulation.

Depends on what you're optimising your life for. Money is very easy to measure, work/life balance, family and other factors are all incredibly difficult to measure and are arguably more important. Plenty of relatively poor people have extremely happy lives.

It's a factor, but to a lesser degree than greed and selfishness.

> I've also found that high IQ correlates -- at least in my sample -- with authoritarian political beliefs

I think that’s just a side effect of being told “you’re very smart” a lot as a kid. You think that you can understand facts about the universe that others cannot, which steers you away from (boring, unthinking) normie positions.