How could I have better predicted this?
I think your problem is not that you couldn't predict someone's political views, but rather that you had far too much confidence in your predictive ability.
To fix this, you should generally have only weak expectations about what other people believe. Unless you know someone quite well, you shouldn't be "shocked" to hear them express any view with a small but significant base rate in the population.
I consider it likely that among those reading this, more of you grew up in families of intelligent, educated people than the national average. It is also likely that the number of readers who grew up in liberal and nonreligious families exceeds the norm. Not all, certainly. Quite possibly not even the majority. However, I think there must be many among you who understand the shock of leaving your family and community, perhaps to go to college, and slowly discovering that there are people who don't think like you.
Those of us who grew up in religious, working class families and were the first in our families to attend college also had the experience of learning that there are people who don't think like us. We just experienced it earlier in life. And then when we went off to college, we slowly discovered that there are people who do think like us.
...My experience dictated that the conversation would start with "Isn't this a terrible thing?" and proceed to "Oil companies shouldn't be allowed to make a mess they can't clean up." or "Shouldn't we invest in clean energy?" However, though the conversation began as I expected, I was subsequently infor
I was being snarky. I suspect that the OP failed to present a perfectly factual account of the conversation. But her account did have a high level of truthiness.
I would also guess, based on even less evidence, that if her upstate teachers were to be interrogated by someone as snarky as myself, they would probably have to admit that their anti-Obama statements (whatever they were) were not perfectly factual either. But they would claim (in good faith) that their statements in that lunch-room conversation carried a sufficient level of truthiness to absolve them of any charge of misrepresentation. "The administration messed up the Gulf spill response somehow," they would claim.
People tend to find facts boring these days. The important thing seems to be to fashion a narrative which makes it easy to distinguish the good guys from the bad guys.
I don't have direct answers to your questions, but the main point that I would make here is that such stated beliefs don't necessarily run very deep.
I would guess the people who you were teaching with probably are quite similar to you and that their stated beliefs which seem so foreign function as belief as attire, serving primarily to bind them together. Such beliefs tend to be compartmentalized and need not have a strong impact on their views about things overall.
There's an incident I heard about at the time: a Belgian (Danish? Dutch? I don't remember exactly) dredging company offered to lend dredging ships, got a "no thanks," and went to their local press to blame it on the Jones Act, which is protectionist legislation that requires only using American-made ships unless the President grants an exception. It got picked up by the conservative blogosphere, made it to conservative TV as a "look at how pro-union legislation hampers our emergency response and destroys our environment, and how Obama doesn't really care because otherwise he would have granted an exemption" and then got responded to by administration officials and at about this point I stopped paying attention.
So, there's a way to have factual support for that position, but it's obviously unclear whether or not they had that in mind.
How do we model for people whose cultural contexts and information delivering authorities are fundamentally different from our own, without lumping them into a faceless group?
A giant question mark. Don't try to extend your beliefs to cover as much as possible but as little as you can defend.
I think elitism is valuable in that it helps prevent this error (amongst other reasons). I despise false humility from the highly intelligent in this pro egalitarian age.
There is no contradiction in believing that a prototypical human is smarter than most humans. Perhaps the variance in human intelligence is mostly explained by different degrees of divergence from the prototype due to developmental errors.
If you want to predict how someone will answer a question, your own best answer is a good guess. Even if you think the other person is less intelligent than you, they are more likely to say the correct answer than they are to say any particular wrong answer.
Similarly, if you want to predict how someone will think through a problem, and you lack detailed knowledge of how that person's mind happens to be broken, then a good guess is that they will think the same sorts of thoughts that a non-broken mind would think.
Are you looking for a better answer than talking to them to explore what they believe and why they believe it?
Certainly there are better answers, but I don't know of a better way to reach those answers than through the exercise of doing precisely that, and the hope that over time my generic model of people broadens to include the communities that at first seem alien, confusing and discomfiting, so that they start to seem... well, human, I guess.
To some extent, that does involve modeling a faceless group... or, rather, a lot of different and more-or-less ov...
(I realize that this reveals a potential bias on my part regarding a correlation between intelligence and a liberal bent).
I wouldn't expect an intelligent conservative to posit this:
the reason it had not been cleaned up already was a conspiracy on the part of President Obama
So I don't see a bias if that idea shocked you (unless I share your bias). On the other hand, if you expected this:
"Oil companies shouldn't be allowed to make a mess they can't clean up." or "Shouldn't we invest in clean energy?"
simply because they were i...
I consider it likely that among those reading this, more of you grew up in families of intelligent, educated people than the national average. It is also likely that the number of readers who grew up in liberal and nonreligious families exceeds the norm. Not all, certainly. Quite possibly not even the majority. However, I think there must be many among you who understand the shock of leaving your family and community, perhaps to go to college, and slowly discovering that there are people who don't think like you.
I think you are actually generalizing...
Perhaps you're drawing the wrong moral. I don't know why it's generally important to predict disagreements, but I can think of other reasons the encounter could be, probably should be, profoundly disturbing.
If you take Robert Aumann's theorem seriously--which, put crudely, says you have no right to be cocksure of your position if your epistemic equals disagree--learning that some (perhaps numerous) intelligent, educated people have fundamentally different beliefs ought to induce (assuming you seek truth) serious doubt about your own views' accuracy. Mayb...
How could I have better predicted this? I remain at a loss.
It's not a good answer, but statistics. Currently you have something like
I have met intelligent people who believe in all sorts of nonsense. 9/11 conspiracy, God, whatever. They usually have one or two beliefs of that kind and are very reasonable in the rest of their lifes.
Were you surprised because you literally hadn't expected that an educated intelligent person can believe in different facts, or because they all believed the same?
Looking at the numbers always helps. Statistically speaking, the majority of public school teachers are liberals. However, in your geographic area, that probability seems like it would need to be revised downwards. Still, even if you use probabilities to draw conclusions about the world, that doesn't mean that you'll never be surprised.
However, I think there must be many among you who understand the shock of leaving your family and community, perhaps to go to college, and slowly discovering that there are people who don't think like you.
Not really - because, as a member of a conservative fundamentalist Christian family, I was warned over and over that most other people didn't think like us.
I'd like to see more exploration of the contradiction pointed out in your first paragraph.
You can get some feel for what typical Americans are like by reading the comments on youtube videos. They'r...
I have lately been pondering two contradictory human beliefs: the belief in our own exceptionalism and the belief in our own ordinariness. We model the world with ourselves as prototypical humans, using our own emotions and reactions and thought processes to run a program predicting the behavior of others. That is, after all, what our mirror neurons evolved for. However, when it comes to our abilities or our intelligence or our problems, we believe we are something out of the ordinary.
I was thinking of writing an article on this topic this morning....
It is also likely that the number of readers who grew up in liberal and nonreligious families
What the "liberal" has to do here? It's not as clever as it sounds to be "liberal".
In the US, when you compare intelligence to self-identifying political views, there are two correlations that stand out: 1) more intelligent means more likely to have non-moderate views 2) more intelligent are more likely to self-identify as liberal, or support policies generally thought of as liberal. That is, there's movement away from identifying as centrist or moderate to either extreme, and more of that movement is to the left end of the spectrum. These results are fairly robust, see for example the GSS, using WORDSUM as a proxy for intelligence (it is highly correlated with IQ).
Also, people who self-identify as not religious are also much more likely to self-identify as liberal, and both political leanings and religious leanings are highly hereditary. Again, see GSS data. Note that this correlation becomes weaker if you hold fixed to a specific degree of intelligence, but it still exists.
So, the comment is making correct conclusions. Obviously there are some caveats, such as the issue that intelligence is not necessarily correlated with rationality or correctness, and that memetic issues could potentially cause an anti-correlation. There's also evidence that by some metrics...
I'm not an US citizen, so my knowledge of US politics may not be deep enough to grasp some of the subleties of the topic, but my overall impression was that unless you are very rich, it is in your best interest - and thus clever - to be liberal.
It's weird how often people express this idea.
Since the marginal effect of your political affiliation upon the policies of a nation of 300 Million people is trivial, we shouldn't really expect it to be "in your interest" to vote for the bloc that promises you income transfers/lower taxes, etc. Rather, it is "clever" for people to vote their affiliations (i.e. what their family, friends, and coworkers vote for). This model actually correlates with the way people actually vote.
Rather, it is "clever" for people to vote their affiliations (i.e. what their family, friends, and coworkers vote for).
It is clever to say that you vote your affiliations.
This model actually correlates with the way people actually vote.
Our 'voting' instincts come from a (slightly misapplied) execution of strategies that are adapted for political environments where support is giving via public declaration rather than anonymous ballot. At a national and global level it may well be one of humanity's greatest weaknesses.
the reason it had not been cleaned up already was a conspiracy on the part of President Obama.
That seems pretty absurd, but remember the same people probably also believe there once lived a man who was the son of the maker of heaven and earth, who was stone dead for three days and then rose again. Compared to that, the thing about Obama is downright sane.
I have lately been pondering two contradictory human beliefs: the belief in our own exceptionalism and the belief in our own ordinariness. We model the world with ourselves as prototypical humans, using our own emotions and reactions and thought processes to run a program predicting the behavior of others. That is, after all, what our mirror neurons evolved for. However, when it comes to our abilities or our intelligence or our problems, we believe we are something out of the ordinary. The second bias is easier to compensate for than the first, but it is the first that interests me, because even when confronted with significant evidence of your own difference, it is extremely difficult to really internalize it and change your model of the world.
I consider it likely that among those reading this, more of you grew up in families of intelligent, educated people than the national average. It is also likely that the number of readers who grew up in liberal and nonreligious families exceeds the norm. Not all, certainly. Quite possibly not even the majority. However, I think there must be many among you who understand the shock of leaving your family and community, perhaps to go to college, and slowly discovering that there are people who don't think like you. People who don't share your foundational knowledge, who trust different authorities, who have completely different default settings.
There are two separate pieces to this: the first is our default setting for the beliefs and authorities of others as similar to our own, and the second is our modeling of other people's mental processes as similar to our own. The second is seldom run across in everyday life, unless engaging in a discussion of mental processes as in the comments on this post. The first is run across fairly frequently, but here I must apologize for bringing up the mind-killer, for it is most apparent in politics. I will endeavor to keep my example brief.
In the spring of 2010 I was substitute teaching in a rural area of upstate New York. I was in the teacher's room eating lunch, with ten or so other teachers, when the subject of the BP oil spill arose, as it was the major current event at the time. My experience dictated that the conversation would start with "Isn't this a terrible thing?" and proceed to "Oil companies shouldn't be allowed to make a mess they can't clean up." or "Shouldn't we invest in clean energy?" However, though the conversation began as I expected, I was subsequently informed that the oil companies were fully capable of cleaning it up, and that the reason it had not been cleaned up already was a conspiracy on the part of President Obama.
This was particularly shocking to me because there were no warning signs. These were people who were all educated to a Master's Degree level. I had spoken to several on more innocuous topics, and they seemed both interesting and intelligent. (I realize that this reveals a potential bias on my part regarding a correlation between intelligence and a liberal bent). They seemed, in every respect, to be people like me.
How could I have better predicted this? I remain at a loss. The only significant difference between that group and the people who react according to my model is region of origin, but that oversimplifies the question. I am not only confused, I am viscerally uncomfortable. How do we model for people whose cultural contexts and information delivering authorities are fundamentally different from our own, without lumping them into a faceless group?