25 ms·

Intelligence and radical economic attitudes

82 points by luu 4y ago

bediger4000 4y ago
If true, this would explain tensions here on HN when discussion of economic issues happens. HN readers are self selected high cognitive ability people.
- mjreacher 4y ago
  Well that's what we would like to think of ourselves.
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    That's covered by "self-selected."
    - mistermann 4y ago
      Self-identified seems more fitting?
- nh23423fefe 4y ago
  - giraffe_lady 4y ago
    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 world here. This is such a content-lite view of intelligence it's embarrassing to even take it seriously. It really comes across that you consider intelligence a virtue and it just isn't. You probably have a lot to learn from "people of average intelligence" about actual virtues like obligation and responsibility, commitment, compassion, understanding, and growth. We aren't lesser than you and I'd take a "average intelligence" person over this sort of smart ass shit as my teammate, business partner, lover, or friend in a second.
    - andreilys 4y ago
      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 inability to articulate their position, and everything to do with the fact that there simply isn't enough time for most people to become well informed on a given topic.
      - abeppu 4y ago
        > 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.
      - redeeman 4y ago
        > 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. true, but I also cannot expect the average person to be a doctor, but if someone feints in the cinema, and I yell "anyone here a doctor??" I do expect them to not claim to be one if they are not. If you do not know something about a subject, you should not inject yourself in where it matters. And when you want to learn about a subject, you should not be a total sheep that blindly listens to the talking heads on TV, regardless of which channel it is on.
    - mistermann 4y ago
      Is this to say that the proposition has no truth or validity to it, that there are not people who hold extremely confident opinions on certain matters but are literally not able to accurately substantiate their claims in detail in a logically consistent manner given sufficient time?
  - paganel 4y ago
    > Can you really be said to hold a view that you can't even evangelize. Yeah, most definitely, I realise as I get older (I'm in my early 40s now) that life is quite complicated and there's almost no "evangelical"-like truth to it. Especially not when it comes to economics, that's for sure.
    - nh23423fefe 4y ago
      Ok, cool view you have there about life that you can't express beyond "its quite complicated".
      - paganel 4y ago
        Yes, pure 100% libertarianism results in people dying in the streets because of no medical services, pure 100% communism results in people dying in internment camps. This is if we want to talk about economics, but we can extend that view to lots and lots of other fields. The onus is on the other side, to show that an evangelical "there is only one truth" thing really works.
        nh23423fefe 4y ago
        thanks for providing evidence for my claim that most people's "views" are actually just barren husks without content.
        paganel 4y ago
        Communism ended up putting people in internment camps, and I say that as a person that has leaned left more and more these past few years, libertarian-like policies have most likely gotten people killed or, at least, threw them in an unmanageable debt-spiral (like we currently now have in the US), and I say that as a former libertarian (yes, one could say that there's no true "libertarian" health market in the US, and that would be correct, but even the concept of a "health market" is libertarian per se). I honestly don't know what you want me to say that would have more "content" than this.
- bpodgursky 4y ago
  HN is maybe 1.5 standard deviations above mean, which is a very dangerous place to be.
  - deltasevennine 4y ago
    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.
    - bpodgursky 4y ago
      1.5 std is only 120-125 IQ
      - deltasevennine 4y ago
        Makes sense. Someone on HN is typically average. Everyone likes to think of themselves as slightly more intelligent, but the reality is... most people are average... including the modern programmer. I would say that in the past... the average IQ for programmers was higher.
- antegamisou 4y ago
  > 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.
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tqi 4y ago
I wouldn't be surprised if "intelligence" would loosely predict extreme attitudes on almost any topic (such as is a hotdog a sandwich?).
- nh23423fefe 4y ago
  I'm not sure political positions have means.
  - kelseyfrog 4y ago
    Any concept projectable down to a single dimension can have a mean. Are there valid projections for certain contexts or at all is a decent line of inquiry.
- clairity 4y ago
  yes, as you move toward more intelligence, you tend to move toward the edge of human knowledge, which by definition, are at the extremes (not in everything of course, but in areas of more intense focus).
- kelseyfrog 4y ago
  Pretty much. For those who possess average intelligence, centrism(compromise) and status quo maintenance is a decent decision heuristic.
  - lame-robot-hoax 4y ago
    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 social issues. So, while not necessarily extreme left or right, they have views that would be relatively extreme compared to the average voter, namely views on housing and trade.
clairity 4y ago
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 intelligence and economic attitudes.
- scarmig 4y ago
  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.
  - hinkley 4y ago
    I was stuck in between 5 groups all arguing over a data interchange format. Several groups insisted that the system should categorically not be allowed to support some of the business cases of the people they either got information from or gave it to. I still don't understand how they thought having the whole project fail was going to get them whatever status they were looking for. I got real fond of saying, "compromise means everybody is equally unhappy with the solution" and giving them solutions that worked but often took each of them a couple extra lines of code. Helping them figure out what those lines were smoothed some feathers, but I don't think any of those people were comfortable unless at least a couple feathers were out of place. It's weird when people 10 years older than you are acting like babies. It's not like 'mature' is the first adjective people would use to describe me at that time. When you don't want to be the adult in the room, it's all the more annoying when you have to be.
  - thwayunion 4y ago
    > the process of effective contention and coalition building drives everything into two sides. This doesn't seem right. First, there are a lot of political systems with more than one "side", and in which coalitions are at least somewhat fluid. This is even true in the United States; if you have ever served on a board that proposes a bond issue or tax increase, you know that that coalitions are quite local and easy to fragment (need to build a new school on the south side, but the north side has lots of tax hawks? Include a new football stadium on the north side as part of the issue). Second, think about conflict outside of politics. There is a lot of conflict in markets, for example, but most markets do not tend toward duopoly.
robertk 4y ago
Edge tails of high variance inputs lead to very different values of the computational outputs of thought derived from those inputs, news at 11.
WalterBright 4y ago
Intelligence isn't knowledge. Wisdom is the combination of intelligence with knowledge.
- lliamander 4y ago
  I agree that intelligence and knowledge are not the same, but I would say that wisdom is more than just the sum of the other two. The way I see it: 1. Intelligence is how fast you can go 2. Knowledge is where you start from 3. Wisdom (or "perspective" as Alan Kay would say) is the direction you are going. If we think of intellectual activity as searching on the terrain of ideas for truth, knowledge and intelligence can both help you get to the truth faster, but ultimately what matters most is whether you are pointed in the right direction.
scarmig 4y ago
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.
- wutbrodo 4y ago
  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.
  - AnimalMuppet 4y ago
    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.
    - wutbrodo 4y ago
      I don't understand. Holding directly-contradictory beliefs sounds a lot more like "mutilating reality" to me.
    - redeeman 4y ago
      > Or they are less willing to mutilate reality in order to try to make it fit within some intellectual/philosophical/political system. what we are seeing a certain political leaning do these days would seem to very very strongly disprove this :)
      - eternalban 4y ago
        One is an intellectual response and the other emotional. To wit, the mascot of this entire affair ..
tbrownaw 4y ago
Hubris, the third great virtue. The more you're confident in your own ability to figure things out, the less you need to seek out an established consensus to follow. Sometimes it'll work, sometimes it won't, but hopefully on net it works more than it doesn't.
cardanome 4y ago
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, embrace radicalism.
- dllthomas 4y ago
  Then you should be very surprised that they seem to have found higher test scores implying more demand for change.
- AlgorithmicTime 4y ago
- orthecreedence 4y ago
  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 a randomized lottery, then there's no point in preserving the status quo. And that's only analyzing one aspect: me. There are a lot of other reasons the world should change beyond what benefits just me.
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  - sharadov 4y ago
    Do you work in tech, WFH and make upwards of 200K/year :-)
  - 4y ago
woodruffw 4y ago
So convenient a thing is it to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for every thing one has a mind to do[1]. [1]: http://jjcweb.jjay.cuny.edu/awinson/public_html/eng100-act/eng100-articles/Benjamin%20Franklin.htm http://jjcweb.jjay.cuny.edu/awinson/public_html/eng100-act/e...
hackerlight 4y ago
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 knowledge that it's even an option.
- thwayunion 4y ago
  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.
  - solveit 4y ago
    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 of people. Instead, we have more general problem-solving skills that allowed us to develop things like statistics and economics and political theory. I leave it to the reader to determine how much social and emotional intelligence is required to excel at those. (As opposed to the merely analytical intelligence that IQ measures, I suppose. I have yet to see a definition of social/emotional intelligence that is coherent enough to be measured, and also actually meaningfully exists when measured.)
    - thwayunion 4y ago
      > If only there were half a century of research into exactly what IQ does and doesn't correlate with! Nice quip, but what's your point? ;-) > 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 of people. I at least have a high degree of belief in the contrapositive -- if one doesn't have a high degree of social and emotional intelligence then they won't be able to assess the likely effectiveness of a political system.
abeppu 4y ago
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<0.001 - the positive correlation between intelligence and income at 42 is 0.05, highly significant, p<0.001 - the positive correlation between income at 30 and income at 42 is 0.11, highly significant, p<0.001, and this was the strongest correlation of any variable with income at 42. I.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.
- Jensson 4y ago
  > 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.
  - selimthegrim 4y ago
    Workplace politicking and climbing the career greasy pole does not always correlate with intelligence.
    - pedrosorio 4y ago
      The comment you replied to does not mention intelligence
  - thwayunion 4y ago
    I'd guess voluntary career phase transition. Women is a really good guess. 30 is sort of a terrible age to choose for this sort of thing... Another possibility: lots of high earners are "done but not retired" by 40. They have a big enough nest egg to step off the corporate ladder, but not enough of a nest egg to stop working entirely. So they have part-time income from teaching university courses or consulting, but it's nowhere near their highest-earning years (which wouldn't been in their 30s).
deleted 4y ago
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anigbrowl 4y ago
While the degree of economic extremism (perhaps better described as investment or fluency) seems to correlate well with intelligence, I think it's unlikely that one can decide whether a given economic philosophy is the 'smarter' choice. Economic preferences may not be the outcome of pure rationality so much as differing values which in turn are based on different criteria of emotional satisfaction. There is some evidence* that these value preferences are independent of experience and established quite early in life. It might be that a lot of theoretical sophistication is an elaborate rationalization of the axiomatic preferences rather than objective assessments of 'reality'. It's also worth considering that preferential attachment and assortivity could lead to clustering of particular value systems at local, regional, or national levels. A policy which is 'natural' and 'efficient' in a society where one value system prevails might not work elsewhere, because the people there to be more competitive, or more cooperative, or more risk averse. Their aggregate economic outcomes would then be poorer because the policy is at odds with their social norms. * https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.1600451 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.1600451 The speculated-upon correlation with big 5 personality factors in the current paper is intriguing and worthy of further research.
- thwayunion 4y ago
  > Economic preferences may not be the outcome of pure rationality so much as differing values which in turn are based on different criteria of emotional satisfaction. The dyadic games paper is interesting, but I think you're perhaps a bit quick to dismiss banal self-interest as a very likely missing causal variable. To what extent are extreme economic ideologies simply post-hoc intellectual justifications camouflaging basically self-interested preferences? There is a correlation between family socioeconomic status and IQ. What if it's merely that advantaged groups: 1. have the resources to provide the early life advantages that give an IQ boost, 2. have the resources to develop and defend coherent ideological systems that justify their allotment (eg, by funding think tanks and so on), and 3. tend to pass those social interests down to the next generation either directly (family-owned businesses/assets) or indirectly via cultural knowledge and connection (eg, doctor/professor/etc. kids are more like to become doctors/professors/etc.). In particular, - what economic beliefs do "non-extreme" people have? Are their beliefs non-extreme, or do they simply have a consistent bucket of (perhaps quite extreme) economic beliefs which don't have a clear name? What if all we're measuring here is that the children of professors have Brookings and an army of intellectuals to give names to things, while the children of business owners have AEI and an army of other intellectuals who also give names to things? - what happens to this result if we control for SES? I ask the first question because most people in my orbit from lower SES describe themselves as centrists on economic issues but actually have a haphazard bucket of deeply held cultural beliefs which are not located at the center of anything in particular.
fallingfrog 4y ago
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.
legitster 4y ago
I suspect this isn't limited to economic attitude. Intelligence is likely associated all over the place to having strong opinions about things in every which way. > Conservative economic attitudes have been theorized as symptoms of low cognitive ability. This has to be the most formalized way of saying "only dumb people could be conservatives".
- mountainriver 4y ago
  Eh strong opinions are usually morally based, and have little to do with intelligence.
lliamander 4y ago
> While this reveals motives such as malicious envy accounting for around half of support for redistribution (Lin & Bates, 2021; Lin & Bates, 2022; Sznycer et al., 2017) Holy smokes, half? I'll admit this is something that appeals to my biases, but that seems like a rather significant finding (if true)
ScipioAfricanuz 4y ago
Is this taking into consideration that only an educated subset of the population may know about radical stances and therefore you’re already sampling an above average group of people i.e someone with a low iq may not even know the radical options
aaron695 4y ago
tsol 4y ago
>Conservative economic attitudes have been theorized as symptoms of low cognitive ability. Studies suggest the opposite, linking more conservative views weakly to higher, not lower, cognitive ability, but with very large between-study variability. Here, we propose and replicate a new model linking cognitive ability not to liberal or conservative economics, but to economic extremism: Maybe none of these are indicative of intelligence. It would be neat if our collective political opinions becoming more extreme was because we are really are just so much smarter, but I don't actually see a reason why there should be any relation between the two. Whether it's more intelligent to take a conservative stance or a liberal stance, whether it's more intelligent to take an extreme stance or a moderate stance-- I think really depends on the situation. If anything it would seem to me that the more unintelligent view might be to too heavily identify with any single point of view.
zackmorris 4y ago
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 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/Radical_middle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thom_Hartmann#Political_views 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.
iroh2727 4y ago
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).

82 points by luu 4y ago

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

mjreacher 4y ago
Well that's what we would like to think of ourselves.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  That's covered by "self-selected."
  - mistermann 4y ago
    Self-identified seems more fitting?
nh23423fefe 4y ago
- giraffe_lady 4y ago
  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 world here. This is such a content-lite view of intelligence it's embarrassing to even take it seriously. It really comes across that you consider intelligence a virtue and it just isn't. You probably have a lot to learn from "people of average intelligence" about actual virtues like obligation and responsibility, commitment, compassion, understanding, and growth. We aren't lesser than you and I'd take a "average intelligence" person over this sort of smart ass shit as my teammate, business partner, lover, or friend in a second.
  - andreilys 4y ago
    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 inability to articulate their position, and everything to do with the fact that there simply isn't enough time for most people to become well informed on a given topic.
    - abeppu 4y ago
      > 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.
    - redeeman 4y ago
      > 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. true, but I also cannot expect the average person to be a doctor, but if someone feints in the cinema, and I yell "anyone here a doctor??" I do expect them to not claim to be one if they are not. If you do not know something about a subject, you should not inject yourself in where it matters. And when you want to learn about a subject, you should not be a total sheep that blindly listens to the talking heads on TV, regardless of which channel it is on.
  - mistermann 4y ago
    Is this to say that the proposition has no truth or validity to it, that there are not people who hold extremely confident opinions on certain matters but are literally not able to accurately substantiate their claims in detail in a logically consistent manner given sufficient time?
- paganel 4y ago
  > Can you really be said to hold a view that you can't even evangelize. Yeah, most definitely, I realise as I get older (I'm in my early 40s now) that life is quite complicated and there's almost no "evangelical"-like truth to it. Especially not when it comes to economics, that's for sure.
  - nh23423fefe 4y ago
    Ok, cool view you have there about life that you can't express beyond "its quite complicated".
    - paganel 4y ago
      Yes, pure 100% libertarianism results in people dying in the streets because of no medical services, pure 100% communism results in people dying in internment camps. This is if we want to talk about economics, but we can extend that view to lots and lots of other fields. The onus is on the other side, to show that an evangelical "there is only one truth" thing really works.
      - nh23423fefe 4y ago
        thanks for providing evidence for my claim that most people's "views" are actually just barren husks without content.
        paganel 4y ago
        Communism ended up putting people in internment camps, and I say that as a person that has leaned left more and more these past few years, libertarian-like policies have most likely gotten people killed or, at least, threw them in an unmanageable debt-spiral (like we currently now have in the US), and I say that as a former libertarian (yes, one could say that there's no true "libertarian" health market in the US, and that would be correct, but even the concept of a "health market" is libertarian per se). I honestly don't know what you want me to say that would have more "content" than this.
bpodgursky 4y ago
HN is maybe 1.5 standard deviations above mean, which is a very dangerous place to be.
- deltasevennine 4y ago
  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.
  - bpodgursky 4y ago
    1.5 std is only 120-125 IQ
    - deltasevennine 4y ago
      Makes sense. Someone on HN is typically average. Everyone likes to think of themselves as slightly more intelligent, but the reality is... most people are average... including the modern programmer. I would say that in the past... the average IQ for programmers was higher.
antegamisou 4y ago
> 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.
- deleted 4y ago
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tqi 4y ago

I wouldn't be surprised if "intelligence" would loosely predict extreme attitudes on almost any topic (such as is a hotdog a sandwich?).

nh23423fefe 4y ago
I'm not sure political positions have means.
- kelseyfrog 4y ago
  Any concept projectable down to a single dimension can have a mean. Are there valid projections for certain contexts or at all is a decent line of inquiry.
clairity 4y ago
yes, as you move toward more intelligence, you tend to move toward the edge of human knowledge, which by definition, are at the extremes (not in everything of course, but in areas of more intense focus).
kelseyfrog 4y ago
Pretty much. For those who possess average intelligence, centrism(compromise) and status quo maintenance is a decent decision heuristic.
- lame-robot-hoax 4y ago
  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 social issues. So, while not necessarily extreme left or right, they have views that would be relatively extreme compared to the average voter, namely views on housing and trade.

clairity 4y ago

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 intelligence and economic attitudes.

scarmig 4y ago
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.
- hinkley 4y ago
  I was stuck in between 5 groups all arguing over a data interchange format. Several groups insisted that the system should categorically not be allowed to support some of the business cases of the people they either got information from or gave it to. I still don't understand how they thought having the whole project fail was going to get them whatever status they were looking for. I got real fond of saying, "compromise means everybody is equally unhappy with the solution" and giving them solutions that worked but often took each of them a couple extra lines of code. Helping them figure out what those lines were smoothed some feathers, but I don't think any of those people were comfortable unless at least a couple feathers were out of place. It's weird when people 10 years older than you are acting like babies. It's not like 'mature' is the first adjective people would use to describe me at that time. When you don't want to be the adult in the room, it's all the more annoying when you have to be.
- thwayunion 4y ago
  > the process of effective contention and coalition building drives everything into two sides. This doesn't seem right. First, there are a lot of political systems with more than one "side", and in which coalitions are at least somewhat fluid. This is even true in the United States; if you have ever served on a board that proposes a bond issue or tax increase, you know that that coalitions are quite local and easy to fragment (need to build a new school on the south side, but the north side has lots of tax hawks? Include a new football stadium on the north side as part of the issue). Second, think about conflict outside of politics. There is a lot of conflict in markets, for example, but most markets do not tend toward duopoly.

robertk 4y ago

Edge tails of high variance inputs lead to very different values of the computational outputs of thought derived from those inputs, news at 11.

WalterBright 4y ago

Intelligence isn't knowledge. Wisdom is the combination of intelligence with knowledge.

lliamander 4y ago
I agree that intelligence and knowledge are not the same, but I would say that wisdom is more than just the sum of the other two. The way I see it: 1. Intelligence is how fast you can go 2. Knowledge is where you start from 3. Wisdom (or "perspective" as Alan Kay would say) is the direction you are going. If we think of intellectual activity as searching on the terrain of ideas for truth, knowledge and intelligence can both help you get to the truth faster, but ultimately what matters most is whether you are pointed in the right direction.

scarmig 4y ago

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.

wutbrodo 4y ago
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.
- AnimalMuppet 4y ago
  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.
  - wutbrodo 4y ago
    I don't understand. Holding directly-contradictory beliefs sounds a lot more like "mutilating reality" to me.
  - redeeman 4y ago
    > Or they are less willing to mutilate reality in order to try to make it fit within some intellectual/philosophical/political system. what we are seeing a certain political leaning do these days would seem to very very strongly disprove this :)
    - eternalban 4y ago
      One is an intellectual response and the other emotional. To wit, the mascot of this entire affair ..

tbrownaw 4y ago

Hubris, the third great virtue. The more you're confident in your own ability to figure things out, the less you need to seek out an established consensus to follow. Sometimes it'll work, sometimes it won't, but hopefully on net it works more than it doesn't.

cardanome 4y ago

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, embrace radicalism.

dllthomas 4y ago
Then you should be very surprised that they seem to have found higher test scores implying more demand for change.
AlgorithmicTime 4y ago
orthecreedence 4y ago
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 a randomized lottery, then there's no point in preserving the status quo. And that's only analyzing one aspect: me. There are a lot of other reasons the world should change beyond what benefits just me.
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- sharadov 4y ago
  Do you work in tech, WFH and make upwards of 200K/year :-)
- 4y ago

woodruffw 4y ago

So convenient a thing is it to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for every thing one has a mind to do[1]. [1]: http://jjcweb.jjay.cuny.edu/awinson/public_html/eng100-act/eng100-articles/Benjamin%20Franklin.htm http://jjcweb.jjay.cuny.edu/awinson/public_html/eng100-act/e...

hackerlight 4y ago

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 knowledge that it's even an option.

thwayunion 4y ago
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.
- solveit 4y ago
  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 of people. Instead, we have more general problem-solving skills that allowed us to develop things like statistics and economics and political theory. I leave it to the reader to determine how much social and emotional intelligence is required to excel at those. (As opposed to the merely analytical intelligence that IQ measures, I suppose. I have yet to see a definition of social/emotional intelligence that is coherent enough to be measured, and also actually meaningfully exists when measured.)
  - thwayunion 4y ago
    > If only there were half a century of research into exactly what IQ does and doesn't correlate with! Nice quip, but what's your point? ;-) > 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 of people. I at least have a high degree of belief in the contrapositive -- if one doesn't have a high degree of social and emotional intelligence then they won't be able to assess the likely effectiveness of a political system.

abeppu 4y ago

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<0.001 - the positive correlation between intelligence and income at 42 is 0.05, highly significant, p<0.001 - the positive correlation between income at 30 and income at 42 is 0.11, highly significant, p<0.001, and this was the strongest correlation of any variable with income at 42. I.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.

Jensson 4y ago
> 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.
- selimthegrim 4y ago
  Workplace politicking and climbing the career greasy pole does not always correlate with intelligence.
  - pedrosorio 4y ago
    The comment you replied to does not mention intelligence
- thwayunion 4y ago
  I'd guess voluntary career phase transition. Women is a really good guess. 30 is sort of a terrible age to choose for this sort of thing... Another possibility: lots of high earners are "done but not retired" by 40. They have a big enough nest egg to step off the corporate ladder, but not enough of a nest egg to stop working entirely. So they have part-time income from teaching university courses or consulting, but it's nowhere near their highest-earning years (which wouldn't been in their 30s).

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anigbrowl 4y ago

While the degree of economic extremism (perhaps better described as investment or fluency) seems to correlate well with intelligence, I think it's unlikely that one can decide whether a given economic philosophy is the 'smarter' choice. Economic preferences may not be the outcome of pure rationality so much as differing values which in turn are based on different criteria of emotional satisfaction. There is some evidence* that these value preferences are independent of experience and established quite early in life. It might be that a lot of theoretical sophistication is an elaborate rationalization of the axiomatic preferences rather than objective assessments of 'reality'. It's also worth considering that preferential attachment and assortivity could lead to clustering of particular value systems at local, regional, or national levels. A policy which is 'natural' and 'efficient' in a society where one value system prevails might not work elsewhere, because the people there to be more competitive, or more cooperative, or more risk averse. Their aggregate economic outcomes would then be poorer because the policy is at odds with their social norms. * https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.1600451 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.1600451 The speculated-upon correlation with big 5 personality factors in the current paper is intriguing and worthy of further research.

thwayunion 4y ago
> Economic preferences may not be the outcome of pure rationality so much as differing values which in turn are based on different criteria of emotional satisfaction. The dyadic games paper is interesting, but I think you're perhaps a bit quick to dismiss banal self-interest as a very likely missing causal variable. To what extent are extreme economic ideologies simply post-hoc intellectual justifications camouflaging basically self-interested preferences? There is a correlation between family socioeconomic status and IQ. What if it's merely that advantaged groups: 1. have the resources to provide the early life advantages that give an IQ boost, 2. have the resources to develop and defend coherent ideological systems that justify their allotment (eg, by funding think tanks and so on), and 3. tend to pass those social interests down to the next generation either directly (family-owned businesses/assets) or indirectly via cultural knowledge and connection (eg, doctor/professor/etc. kids are more like to become doctors/professors/etc.). In particular, - what economic beliefs do "non-extreme" people have? Are their beliefs non-extreme, or do they simply have a consistent bucket of (perhaps quite extreme) economic beliefs which don't have a clear name? What if all we're measuring here is that the children of professors have Brookings and an army of intellectuals to give names to things, while the children of business owners have AEI and an army of other intellectuals who also give names to things? - what happens to this result if we control for SES? I ask the first question because most people in my orbit from lower SES describe themselves as centrists on economic issues but actually have a haphazard bucket of deeply held cultural beliefs which are not located at the center of anything in particular.

fallingfrog 4y ago

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.

legitster 4y ago

I suspect this isn't limited to economic attitude. Intelligence is likely associated all over the place to having strong opinions about things in every which way. > Conservative economic attitudes have been theorized as symptoms of low cognitive ability. This has to be the most formalized way of saying "only dumb people could be conservatives".

mountainriver 4y ago
Eh strong opinions are usually morally based, and have little to do with intelligence.

lliamander 4y ago

> While this reveals motives such as malicious envy accounting for around half of support for redistribution (Lin & Bates, 2021; Lin & Bates, 2022; Sznycer et al., 2017) Holy smokes, half? I'll admit this is something that appeals to my biases, but that seems like a rather significant finding (if true)

ScipioAfricanuz 4y ago

Is this taking into consideration that only an educated subset of the population may know about radical stances and therefore you’re already sampling an above average group of people i.e someone with a low iq may not even know the radical options

aaron695 4y ago

tsol 4y ago

>Conservative economic attitudes have been theorized as symptoms of low cognitive ability. Studies suggest the opposite, linking more conservative views weakly to higher, not lower, cognitive ability, but with very large between-study variability. Here, we propose and replicate a new model linking cognitive ability not to liberal or conservative economics, but to economic extremism: Maybe none of these are indicative of intelligence. It would be neat if our collective political opinions becoming more extreme was because we are really are just so much smarter, but I don't actually see a reason why there should be any relation between the two. Whether it's more intelligent to take a conservative stance or a liberal stance, whether it's more intelligent to take an extreme stance or a moderate stance-- I think really depends on the situation. If anything it would seem to me that the more unintelligent view might be to too heavily identify with any single point of view.

zackmorris 4y ago

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

iroh2727 4y ago

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).