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gwern comments on The Criminal Stupidity of Intelligent People - Less Wrong
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And then there's the bullshit:
'Just as prone'? I would be fascinated to see any evidence beyond the anecdotal for this...
Actually, this kinds of reminds me of Stanovich's Dysrationalia and also of Eliezer's "Outside the laboratory", if only more uncompromising and extreme than those two. Then again, I tend to have a charitable interpretation of what people write.
The problem is, Stanovich's work (based on his 2010 book which I have) doesn't support the thesis that intelligent people have more false beliefs or biases than stupid people, or just as many; they have fewer in all but a bare handful of carefully chosen biases where they're equal or a little worse.
If one had to summarize his work and the associated work in these terms, one could say that it's all about the question 'why does IQ not correlate at 1.0 with better beliefs but instead 0.5 or lower?'
No, no, no. The point is: for any fixed set of questions, higher IQ will be positively correlated with believing in better answers. Yet people with higher IQ will develop beliefs about new, bigger and grander questions; and all in all, on their biggest and grandest questions, they fail just as much as lower-IQ people on theirs. Just with more impact. Including more criminal impact when these theories, as they are wont to do, imply the shepherding (and often barbecuing) the mass of their intellectual inferiors.
Stupid people seem to have no problem believing in answers to the biggest and grandest questions, like 'it's the Jews fault' or 'God loves me'.
I'm not sure I share enough of a common definition with the guy about what intelligence is, judging by this post, in order for his statement to even be meaningful to me.
Even so, I suspect that the capacity to effectively rationalize generally exists in roughly direct proportion to the capacity to engage in effective rational thought, so I have to confess that it doesn't immediately come into apparent conflict with my priors using my own definition.