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michael_vassar3 comments on Reversed Stupidity Is Not Intelligence - Less Wrong
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If the same majority of smart people as stupid people are conservative then the statement that "Not all conservatives are stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives." is actually completely irrelevant, but I don't think that anyone believes otherwise. If there is a positive correlation between intelligence and the truth of one's beliefs (a claim the truth of which is probably assumed by most people to be true for any definition of intelligence they care about) then the average intelligence of people who hold a given belief is entangled with the truth of that belief and can be used as Bayesian evidence. Evidence is not proof of course, and this heuristic will not be perfectly reliable.
The statistical evidence is that liberalism, especially social liberalism, is positively correlated with intelligence. This does not prove that liberalism is correct; but it does provide some mild evidence in that direction.
How are values are true or false. You seem to be arguing for objectivist morality.
Consider, all the greatest minds in Philosophy, specifically ethics, believed in consequentialism. This provides no weight towards or against that particular ethical system. No one has value expertise. People can value one thing (security) or another (liberty). Inset whatever values as necessary.
The same is true with progressives and conservatives generally.
That fact provides no weight towards what we should value.
No, he's saying that liberalism and conservatism also come with sets of beliefs about the nature of reality and sets of predictions about the consequences of their actions. Some of which are wrong (for both groups). And he's saying we should be able to guess which group has a better understanding of the world by comparing their IQs. Which I think is a valid point, except that the example he chose is one where IQ clearly creates a bias of its own, and one where black people probably miscategorise themselves.
Declaration of bias: I am a liberal, I am intelligent, but I'm not a Democrat or Republican.
It's hard to measure liberalism. For example, half the black people say they are conservative and half say they are liberal. But most outsiders would say most black people are liberal (and it's common for 100% of black people in an area to vote for Obama). People judge their liberalism against people like themselves, so it's hard to compare groups.
If you count most black people as liberals, then that intelligence difference between liberals and conservatives might disappear (if it exists, I haven't checked). For example, it's a proven fact that Republicans are smarter than Democrats (because of black people with an average IQ of 85 voting Democrat), although just between white people there is no real difference.
You also need to consider that intelligence comes with biases, even though it also improves your thinking. Intelligent people are biased towards things that benefit intelligent people, eg. complexity, even if they hurt other people.
Intelligent people are biased towards letting people do whatever they want, because intelligent people like themselves will do sensible things when given the choice. They aren't used to stupid people, who do stupid things when allowed to do whatever they want. Intelligent people need freedom, while stupid people need strong inviolable guidelines about acceptable behaviour.
Could you give a citation for this? I've heard other studies claiming the opposite, and I'm not inclined to accept either at face value without knowing what actually went into the studies.
This article has a lot of bell-curve verbal IQ graphs from GSS (General Social Survey) data for the years 2000-2012, using the wordsum score as a measure of intelligence:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2012/04/verbal-intelligence-by-demographic/
It shows Republicans as smarter than Democrats, but Liberals smarter than Conservatives, and White people smarter than Black people, and some other comparisons.
I'd expect the correlation between IQ and WORDSUM to be much weaker when controlling for educational attainment, so some of those graphs will have to be taken with a grain of salt.
What would this statement predict about the WORDSUM distributions by educational level? Is that what that graph shows? (If the graph doesn't have enough data to answer that question, how else could you answer it?)
So... I think the correlation between IQ and WORDSUM is mostly mediated by education (i.e., in terms of Stuff That Makes Stuff Happen, there's an arrow from IQ to education and one from education and WORDSUM -- there's also one directly from IQ to WORDSUM but it's thinner). So I'd expect that the third graph in that article to show an effect more extreme than if you used IQ instead.
But educational attainment is directly caused by IQ, so that wouldn't make any sense.
Not exclusively IQ -- parents' socio-economic status also matters.
Kind of; the great thing about those distributions is that you can talk about more of the distribution than one summary statistic. There's a clump of high IQ democrats, a clump of low IQ democrats, and then a clump of medium IQ democrats, whereas the Republicans look like one clump of medium IQ republicans. There are more Democrats from 0 to 5, more Republicans from about 6 to 8, and a tiny few more Democrats from 9 to 10.
This matches with the prediction that there is a significant group of low-vocabulary people who vote predominantly Democratic, the middles voting somewhat more Republican, and the highs about evenly split.
It would provide significantly useful evidence, if we had no other information to determine the truth of the tenets of conservatism. Given that we do, and that the 'evidence' provided by who believes liberalism vs conservatism is not strong, I suggest it is better to ignore it.
Why? Because using these sorts of arguments are very dangerous because they so readily degenerate into overvaluing social proof.
Why would the number of stupid people who believe something anticorrelate with the number of smart people who believe it? Most stupid people and most smart people believe the sky is blue. A shift in the fraction of stupid people who do X can take place without any corresponding shift in the fraction of smart people who do X one way or another. Some smart people actively prefer not to affiliate themselves with stupid people and will try to believe something different, but they are committing the error of the OP and should not be listened to anyway.