Most people go through life using cultural memes that they soak up from their environment. These cultural memes have had lots of selective pressure acting on them, so most of the time they won't be obviously harmful: for example, most cultures don't have memes advocating that you stick your hand in fires. Following these cultural memes is a low-variance strategy: you might not become overwhelmingly successful this way, but you'll also avoid many failure modes.

A basic aspect of LW-style rationality involves questioning and rethinking everything, including these cultural memes. As such, it's a high-variance strategy: you might end up with new memes that are much better or much worse than standard memes. This might be okay if you're quite good at questioning and rethinking things, but if you aren't (and even if you are!), you might afflict yourself with a memetic immune disorder and head towards all sorts of failure modes as a result (joining a cult being the sort of stereotypical thing).

I think most people will be averse to LW-style rationality as part of a general aversion to things that seem too weird, and I think this is probably overall a reasonable aversion for most people to have, as it helps them avoid many failure modes.

I don't know about "low" IQ, but plenty of people who don't necessarily have genius IQ have very strong instrumental rationality.

Things like stable family life, network of friends, community, conservative approach to money, religion and charity with a social component, work ethic, temperate living, exercise, etc.

Doing these things may correlate with IQ on the low end; but it has little to do with the genius-level IQ which is so common at LW.

I have been tossing around the idea of not-high-IQ rationalist fiction. Problem is, it's really hard to write. If they act rationally, people stop identifying the person as unintelligent. You get intelligence creep or an unsatisfying story.

The best route I can see is to make them well-substandard in intelligence. Rationalist!Forrest Gump, say.

ETA: Another problem is that adventures are usually sub-optimal. No one writes about the Amundsen expedition or equivalents (*) - they write about Scott expeditions.

*(except for Le Guin, who managed it because she's amazing)

Reading this discussion makes me realise I don't have a very good mental model for what a low IQ person's internal processing is like. Most of the behaviours i tend to associate with stupidity in real life are related to rationality (e.g. excessive compartmentalisation, failure to take arguments to their logical conclusion) rather than a lack of processing power or speed.

Assuming you want to convince anyone outside our base demographic of anything, it is highly inadvisable to refer to people within 1SD of mean IQ as "low-IQ people".

I understand that on a website where the mean IQ is about 140, people with an IQ of 100 might seem dumb. But the vast majority of the population will be justifiably offended at using the term "low-IQ" to mean "people of average intelligence."

Based on three sets of experiences, I'd say there is a strong overlap between people who do not value intelligence and people who have little of it (in three different ways).

First, I've worked with deaf people who are acquiring language late in life. Second, I've worked with young children. Third, I've worked with homeless people. Some of each of these are blindingly intelligent by any measure. Some are not depending on how intelligence is measured. Among the later, higher intelligence is mistrusted and seen as making trouble.

The exception in life is clergy, who are granted smarts as a good. The exception in fiction is 'nerd on a leash' - the doctor or navigator or smart guy kept for his use by a barbarian horde.

This post is to raise a question about the demographics of rationality: Is rationality something that can appeal to low-IQ people as well?

This question is best answered if you look from the other direction: do people 10-15 IQ points higher than you benefit more from "rationality" than you do?

If it is possible to write successful stories of highly intelligent people who consistently fail (just think Big Bang Theory; there obviously needed to make them likeable for a general audience) then it should be equally possible to write the opposite where an average huy wins by just applying the rules.

It is a story. You could have a protagonist which in each episode applies just one rationality method (exploit one bias, apply one routine). Say he reads one chapter of the sequences at a time and is presented as unable to grasp them all at once and has to learn and concentrate a lot to get it. But then win big by .- by plot chance - applying just this method in the right circumstances.

Example:

Overconfidence and/r Planning fallacy. Story: Protagonist is middle manager. Big project is comming. Boss calls meeting to estimate project. Protagonist meticulously collects all the outside view evidence beforehand. Meeting attendees give their estimates of all the steps and sum. He gives outside view estimate but is looked down upon. Guess who is right in the ende?

I think that a lot of our traditional rationality memes (like "lose your faith in intellectual authority", "figure everything out for yourself" and "take an idea seriously if and only if you are personally convinced of it") could be especially dangerous for people who aren't very smart.

The popularity of LW rationality among high IQ people is probably strongly influenced by a quasi-aesthetic judgment that being correct is valuable unto itself. Most people (of all IQs) would also prefer to be right, but they also want to be successful, and they probably want to be successful more than they want to be right. Being successful and being rational both require effort, and the most efficient way to become successful for a low IQ individual is probably not through rationality training, but through more direct and applicable prescriptions, like reading How to Win Friends and Influence People, learning money management skills, networking, or whatever else is well-known and directly applicable to their situation. Thus, it is likely rational for low IQ people not to highly value direct rationality training, which doesn't appeal to their comparative advantages.

The low-IQ people would probably benefit from non-meta advice.

As a part of raising the sanity waterline, it could be useful to compose a textbook of good advice for average people. But we probably shouldn't expect to make them able to create such books for themselves.

It's like a division of labor -- the people who are good at thinking (i.e. intelligent and rational) should do the thinking. The others are more efficient when then follow such advice. Yes, this has a lot of problems. I just don't see a way to avoid them, if the person has a low IQ. And the lo... (read more)

I chose to use IQ in this post instead of a more vague term like "intelligence," but I could easily have done the opposite. I'm happy to do whichever version is less problematic.

I suggest we change focus from IQ to working memory.

Since working memory is a better predictor of ability than IQ, it is more relevant. A state of less (especially verbal) working memory is more easily modeled. And it makes testable predictions about what kind of presentation of information would work for people with it. Repetition becomes very important, as well as mu... (read more)

Do we have reason to believe that the kind of rationality promoted on LW, OvercomingBias, CFAR, etc. appeals to a fairly normal distribution of people around the IQ mean?

I think it appeals to some subset, notably those who want to win and have enough self-discipline to apply proper tools.

Otherwise it seems to me that the stupider you are, the harder it is for you to consciously use rationality and so you will value it less.

Ditto, except replace "being rational" with "celebrating rationality...

I don't know what "celebrating ratio... (read more)

I sort of thought this was the idea behind Star Trek. You get lofty principles expounded by Team Good Guy, with a Straw Vulcan to assure you that this isn't just for nerds, but for popular kids like you, dear viewer!

How do you know low IQ people aren't being instrumentally nationalist already? Maybe it is beneficial for them to play along with the religious beliefs of their neighbours, etc.

By rationalist, do you mean instrumentality rationalist, epistemically rationalist, atheist, or what?