I would like to point you guys to the blog FreakoStats, by Garth Zietsman, who according to his profile, "Scored an IQ of 185 on the Mega27 and has a degree in psychology and statistics and 25 years experience in psychometrics and statistics." The main concept discussed there is "The Smart Vote", whose essence, in the author’s words, is as follows:
"If there is no difference of opinion by intelligence then reason is not relevant in deciding between them and none of the opinions being considered is more correct than any of the others. However if opinions do differ systematically with intelligence then relatively more correct or better alternatives probably do exist, and that they are those relatively more favoured by the more intelligent. Statistical differences in the independent opinions of people of different intellectual ability point to the most reasonable responses to controversies”
Many of his posts are based on the choice of relevant, if controversial, topics , and his analysis of the direction and the proportionality of which an opinion on it is related to intelligence, as measured by IQ scores.
An obvious objection would be that smart people would have in many cases common interests, and this could bias the results simply to their interests, in detriment to the interests of the less smart.
Zietsman answers it with the statistical fact that people many times don’t vote selfishly, and that he can (and will) control for some of their interests anyway:
"My first response is that this isn’t always a factor. Political research shows that people frequently don’t vote their narrow selfish interests e.g. the elderly are less likely to vote for social security than the young and women are less likely to support abortion on demand than men. However there are enough cases where narrow interests obviously do play a role for it to be taken seriously. Fortunately this possibility can be dealt with by controlling for interest differences. For example we could control for class when looking at musical taste, income when looking at welfare, age when looking at social security policy, race when looking at affirmative action, etc."
This seems somewhat related to the notorious concept of Coherent Extrapolation Volition (CEV) of humankind. To have a clue of the direction it might take, I believe it is a nice idea to look at the opinion of the smarter (“if we knew more, thought faster, […]”), corrected for selfish interests (“[…]were more the people we wished we were, had grown up farther together[…]”), specially bearing in mind that most results tend to converge (“[…]where our wishes cohere rather than interfere; extrapolated as we wish that extrapolated[…]”).
There are analyses on issues such as Abortion, Free Speech ,Capital Punishment and Corporal Punishments on Children ,Immigration, Gay Rights and many more. The results look good to me personally, and I wouldn't be surprised if they pleased many here too.
If they are contrarians for contrarianism's sake, why would I take them into consideration? Those are the true dangerous ones: in most cases, those people are just autodidacts who when confronted with a true expert, have their theories pretty much discredited.
Take in mind, for instance, Yvain's (who's a student of Medicine) triumphant answers to Hanson on Medicine (so harsh that he regrets on his blog being so incisive), or Kalla724's comment on cryonics which made many people lower their estimates of cryonics being of any worth. And that's because true experts won't take much of their time arguing with those people! It's funny that Hanson himself sometimes complains of 'rational folks' being ignorant about Sociology, which he has a PhD in, or how much he changed his mind on the power of actual Economics after getting a degree on it.
High-Iq circles are not monolithic: there are many groups they are be part of, on which different ideas would be 'tribal markers'. And there are the people who are intelligent and are not even in high-Iq circles, due to having low income etc. And the analyses, controlled for many variables, many times show clear intellectual trends, turning the fact that people individually are biased not very relevant, really.
I'm just informing you of your audience on LW! Not saying they are right. :)
But I am saying that intelligent people, like to show off their intelligence, this is very obvious on LessWrong. It is no less obvious when you pick up a newspaper or talk at the water cooler about politics. Intelligent people are contrarians. Having different opinions from less intelligent individuals is a great way to distinguish yourself form them. Intellectual fashion seems very much... (read more)