There's a certain conflation between being viewed as intelligent and being viewed as high-status. People who don't have the smarts to play the intellectual status game have a couple of obvious choices to increase their perceived status. They can either reject the whole "thinking well is a valuable skill" set of ideas, or they can reject evidence that says that they aren't smart and pretend to be better at the whole thinking thing than they really are.
Both of these are very big stumbling blocks for becoming a more rational and better person. In order to want to join the rationalist community, you need to have the beliefs that you aren't as capable as you could be, that thinking better is good for you, and that you can admit to mistakes without undermining your position. These beliefs are much more present among high-IQ people for what I think are obvious enough reasons that I don't need to enumerate them.
This post is to raise a question about the demographics of rationality: Is rationality something that can appeal to low-IQ people as well?
I don't mean in theory, I mean in practice. From what I've seen, people who are concerned about rationality (in the sense that it has on LW, OvercomingBias, etc.) are overwhelmingly high-IQ.
Meanwhile, HPMOR and other stories in the "rationality genre" appeal to me, and to other people I know. However I wonder: Perhaps part of the reason they appeal to me is that I think of myself as a smart person, and this allows me to identify with the main characters, cheer when they think their way to victory, etc. If I thought of myself as a stupid person, then perhaps I would feel uncomfortable, insecure, and alienated while reading the same stories.
So, I have four questions:
1.) 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? Or should we think, as I suggested, that people with lower IQ's are disposed to find the idea of being rational less attractive?
2.) Ditto, except replace "being rational" with "celebrating rationality through stories like HPMOR." Perhaps people think that rationality is a good thing in much the same way that being wealthy is a good thing, but they don't think that it should be celebrated, or at least they don't find such celebrations appealing.
3.) Supposing #1 and #2 have the answers I am suggesting, why?
4.) Making the same supposition, what are the implications for the movement in general?
Note: 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.