Consider the problem of an agent who is offered a chance to improve their epistemic rationality for a price. What is such an agent's optimal strategy?
A complete answer to this problem would involve a mathematical model to estimate the expected increase in utility associated with having more correct beliefs. I don't have a complete answer, but I'm pretty sure about one thing: From an instrumental rationalist's point of view, to always accept or always refuse such offers is downright irrational.
And now for the kicker: You might be such an agent.
One technique that humans can use to work towards epistemic rationality is to doubt themselves, since most people think they are above average in a wide variety of areas (and it's reasonable to assume that merit in at least some of these areas is normally distributed.) But having a negative explanatory style, which is one way to doubt yourself, has been linked with sickness and depression.
And the inverse is also true. Humans also seem to be rewarded for a certain set of beliefs: those that help them maintain a somewhat-good assessment of themselves. Having an optimistic explanatory style (in an nutshell, explaining good events in a way that makes you feel good, and explaining bad events in a way that doesn't make you feel bad) has been linked with success in sports, sales and school.
If you're unswayed by my empirical arguments, here's a theoretical one. If you're a human and you want to have correct beliefs, you must make a special effort to seek evidence that your beliefs are wrong. One of our known defects is our tendency to stick with our beliefs for too long. But if you do this successfully, you will become less certain and therefore less determined.
In some circumstances, it's good to be less determined. But in others, it's not. And to say that one should always look for disconfirming evidence, or that one should always avoid looking for disconfirming evidence, is idealogical according to the instrumental rationalist.
Who do you think is going to be more motivated to think about math: someone who feels it is their duty to become smarter, or a naive student who believes he or she has the answer to some mathematical problem and is only lacking a proof?
You rarely see a self-help book, entreprenuership guide, or personal development blog telling people how to be less confident. But that's what an advocate of rationalism does. The question is, do the benefits outweigh the costs?
It implies no such thing; hence my asking for ideas rather than presenting them. The only thing we know for certain is that, due to how IQ tests are measured and calibrated, there is no particular reason why they SHOULD represent an actual, consistent metric - they merely note where on the bell curve of values you are, not what actual value that point on the bell curve represents. (At core, of course, it simply represents "number of questions on a particular IQ test that you got right", and everyone agrees that that metric is measuring SOMETHING about intelligence, but it would be nice to have a more formal metric for "smartness" that actually has real-world consequences.)
ETA: I certainly have an intuitive idea for what "smartness" would mean as an actual quantifiable thing, which seems to have something to do with pattern-recognition / signal-extraction performance across a wide range of noisy media. This makes some sense to me, since IQ tests - especially the ones that attempt to avoid linguistic bias - typically involve pattern-matching and similar signal extraction/prediction tasks. So intuitively, I think intelligence will have units of Entropy per [Kolmogorov complexity x time], and any unit which measures "one average 100 IQ human" worth of Smartness will have some ungodly constant-of-conversion comparable to Avogadro's number.
NOTE 2: Like I said, this is an intuitive sense, which I have not done ANY formal processing on.
Well, you need some framework. You said that IQ points are not "necessarily a consistent metric for cognitive function". First, what is "cognitive function" and how do you want to measure it? If you have no alternate metrics then how do you know IQ points are inconsistent and what do you compare them to?
The usual answer is that it is measuring the g factor, the unobserved general-intelligence capability. It was originally formulated as the first principal comp... (read more)