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Intelligence and radical economic attitudes

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Re: Intelligence and radical economic attitudes

#131

Post by User23 »

sakras wrote: post #128
User23 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I hate to be the "source please" guy, but I can't manage to craft a search query to corroborate your claim about factory workers vs academics in the USSR. Which particular five year plan are you talking about? What kind of factory work versus what kind of researcher?

Given what I know about political infighting in the modern American academy though, I'd bet that the smart ones went to the politburo where they got to be the "who" and not the "whom" and it was the midwits at best who stuck around in the academy waiting to get shipped to the gulags for publishing something Stalin disliked.

In other words, realizing how the system actually works instead of naively believing how it's claimed to work is just another intelligence test.

Re: Intelligence and radical economic attitudes

#132

Post by SamPatt »

openfuture wrote: post #70
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.

Some people are better problem solvers than others. IQ is an attempt at measuring this. Why is this (admittedly imperfect) method so foolish?

Re: Intelligence and radical economic attitudes

#133

Post by SamPatt »

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.

There's some truth here, and I think it relates to the stereotype of highly intelligent people having poor social skills.

If you've carried out your ideas to their logical conclusion and reached a socially inappropriate truth, well... you're forced to decide to either self-censor, or be perceived as a nut.

Or! Find a community of nuts and fit right in.

Re: Intelligence and radical economic attitudes

#134

Post by deltasevennine »

bpodgursky wrote: post #21
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 is maybe 1.5 standard deviations above mean, which is a very dangerous place to be.

No, everyone on HN likes to think they're at least 1.5 std from the mean (when in reality they're below that). Very different from actually being 1.5 std from the mean. This is an even more dangerous place to be.

Re: Intelligence and radical economic attitudes

#135

Post by political12345 »

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…

> Highly correlated" would not be the choice of words I use to describe correlations between (0.23 - 0.5).

lol, this range is 0.5 to 0.7 variance explained (R squared) which is an insane value. in typical social studies a correlation of > 5% is considered a major improvement. In finance a correlation or > 1% is considered amazing.

You are either a hyper-intelectual drinking Taleb's kool-aid or simply don't know what you are talking about :D

Re: Intelligence and radical economic attitudes

#136

Post by autoexec »

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).

> What does it mean to not believe in IQ?

I believe that IQ exists, but I don't believe it's an effective measure of the things people typically expect from it once you get into average or above average scores.

Leaving aside the problem of the tests themselves and how they're conducted, I suspect that even a "perfect" test wouldn't predict how well a person would manage their life, perform in their job, or contribute positively to society.

At the low end, IQ testing can identify individuals with problems that will certainly cause them difficulties, but a person with a high IQ won't necessarily outperform someone with an average IQ in tasks that aren't IQ tests.

Re: Intelligence and radical economic attitudes

#137

Post by opo »

anigbrowl wrote: post #75
WalterBright wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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?

Before all these price gouging laws, in natural disasters there used to be marginal producers (people with a pickup truck etc.) who would load up on some supplies like ice etc. and bring them to the area that was hit to make a quick profit. When the electricity is out and someone wants $12 a bag for ice it would anger many people who just want to keep your drinks cold - but you would think it is an incredible bargain if that way you can keep your insulin chilled: https://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2007/Mungergouging....

In the long run, high profits during a shortage also mean that suppliers in general will be incentivized to keep a larger stockpile of goods that have a good shelf-life since they know they will be able to make good money the next time there is a shortage (more than the storage costs). (Or the potential for high profits will incentivize spending money to be more flexible in production in case demand increases for a short time.)

If you are going to literally make it illegal to try this, then you better have a government be willing to spend its tax dollars on creating a stockpile - when the pandemic started we saw that all the talk of the national stockpile the federal government supposedly had was greatly exaggerated.

Re: Intelligence and radical economic attitudes

#138

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

solveit wrote: post #84
thwayunion wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

You could take the existence of really large provider variability in therapists as some evidence that social/emotional intelligence exists.

We definitely won't be measuring it with a self report questionnaire though.

Re: Intelligence and radical economic attitudes

#139

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

awesomeMilou wrote: post #119
solveit wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm very curious to what that research looks like. The only IQ-Tests I know of are the ones alike to the Mensa Online Tests, and maybe my IQ is too low ( rimshot ) but I can't fathom it being anything other than an indicator on how well someone can solve these matrix association problems. Since you seem knowledgeable in it, what would be a rigid definition of IQ? As opposed to the vague definition of social intellige…

The colloquial definition is pattern recognition. The rigorous definition is whatever IQ tests measure (I wish I were joking about this).

Re: Intelligence and radical economic attitudes

#140

Post by palmetieri2000 »

WalterBright wrote: post #73
anigbrowl wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would be such a beautiful world if only people were more selfish!

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.

>It's why Americans live the highest standard of living in the world.

Some Americans*, and far fewer than those that have some of the lowest standards of living in the world. And the US has greater wealth disparity than many other countries with living standards many would argue are at least equal.

Altruism isnt necessary, education is. Education teaches people that the best way to prevent the most harmful acts in society is to make sure peoples needs are met, which capitalism and the free market routinely fails at. This is why US has worse crime than other developed nations even accounting for population, you fail to meet your citizens needs within the system so they do it themselves outside of it.

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