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.
These cultural memes have had lots of selective pressure acting on them, so most of the time they won't be obviously harmful
For the meme; not necessarily for the person who holds it. Dying for one's fatherland can be a very successful meme. And that's exactly why questioning memes is often a good thing for the questioner.
I think the reason most people are averse to questioning is simply due to the social drive to conform, which does not strongly depend on the quality of the norms you're conforming to. And the drive to associate in cliques and dislike outsiders, which sometimes causes people to associate in similar-IQ cliques and dislike those other stupid/smart people and their rationalist/irrational ideas.
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.
Seeing how common akrasia and all that is on LW, I would go as far as to say that many "normal" people are better at instrumental rationality than the people here. If you look at it from the point of view of instrumental rationality, many things here are probably just a waste of time. They might be useful at some point, but focusing on more practical things will very likely be far more useful.
edit. But this is for an individual, I think LW could be really useful for the society as whole. Raising the sanity waterline and popularizing things like effective altruism will be irreplaceably valuable.
I think you're underestimating how common akrasia is among the rest of the world. It's just not seen as that bad of a thing if people spend their time off watching TV, eating unhealthily, or spending hours on the internet.
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)
If you want to make a character who's actually both a rationalist and not particularly intelligent, rather than simply being intelligent beyond the expectations of their position, I'd suggest having them know just a few basic heuristics, which are simple if not intuitive to wield.
They might not have the smarts to pick up all the subtle signs to know when someone is trying to con them, for instance, but they'll be the first person to think to communicate important information to avoid a conflict. And they understand the importance of being able to actually change their mind, so if they're experiencing doubts about something, their response would be to go to someone they think has good judgment and is likely to be impartial, ask what they think, and then accept that answer, even if it's not the one they would have been most comfortable with.
When it comes to writing, people are generally taught a set of "rules," but are told that really good writers can "break" these rules once they really learn what they're doing. But of course, nobody can really break the fundamental rules of good writing without harming the quality of their work, it's just that expert writers ...
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.
Don't show them thinking, show them doing. If you show their thoughts at all, show their conclusions, not their reasons. They think and reason, but you don't put it on the page. Have them be involved in matters not stereotypically associated with intelligence but which actually have scope for its application: craftsmen rather than scientists, sergeants rather than generals, etc.
In short, have them actually be as intelligent and rational as you like, but omit all the superficial clothing that people mistake for these things, and use the opposite clothing.
Yeah. I expect not-high-IQ rationalist fiction would involve a lot of sitting and thinking and making lists and remembering rationalist sayings, instead of just doing it all in the head on the fly.
Do we have any examples of not-high-IQ rationalists in real life? We could model fiction on how they handle things. Maybe they exist all around us, and are called "Practical."
What about a protagonist of standard-to-high-IQ but an obvious cognitive defect? (e.g. innumeracy, illiteracy, prosopagnosia, any dissassociative disorder, severe mood disorders).
It's been a while since I watched it, but do you think Ben Affleck's character in Good Will Hunting was rational, but of limited intelligence?
Yep, a pretty good example, I think
Look, you're my best friend so don't take this the wrong way, but if you're still living here in 20 years, still working construction, I'll fuckin' kill ya. Tomorrow, I'm gonna wake up and I'll be fifty, and I'll still be doing this shit. And that's alright, that's fine. But you're sitting on a winning lottery ticket and you're too scared to cash it in, and that's bullshit. Cause I'd do fucking anything to have what you got. Hanging around here is a waste of your time.
So far, so normal, you don't need to be a rationalist to say these sorts of things to make your friend start using their talents.
Every day, I come by your house, and I pick you up. We go out, have a few drinks, a few laughs, it's great. You know what the best part of my day is? It's for about ten seconds, from when I pull up at the curb to when I get to your door. Cause I think maybe I'll get up there and I'll knock on the door and you won't be there. No goodbye, no see-ya-later, no nothing. You just left.
Now this is what it looks li...
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.
David Ogilvy) was a highly successful advertising executive, often called "The Father of Advertising" and he created several iconic advertising campaigns. However, his IQ was very average:
Including intelligence, said he. They both took an IQ test he found in the back of a book. He got a 96 (“par for ditch diggers”), and she (his wife, Herta Lans) got 136. It changed their relationship. “Suddenly she’s pretty and clever and I’m ugly and dumb.”
source: The King of Madison Avenue: David Ogilvy and the Making of Modern Advertising
So if you're actually interested, you could look into his life.
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."
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."
Fortunately, as you observe, most of them are not here to be offended.
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.
I don't consider those as "our" memes, except if you meant Western culture in general. Those seem like bad ideas, smart or not smart. I would prefer something like "Distinguish intellectual authorities that have reasons to be correlated with truth (because of the incentive structures) from authorities who derive their status from other things (success in unrelated fields, good communication skills, saying what people want to hear), and take the first kind seriously."
"Trying to figure everything out yourself" is something I associate with smart-but-not-rational people who are likely to waste a lot of time or even get things completely wrong because they noticed they were smarter than their primary school teacher, and extrapolated to deduce they were smarter than established experts, which is certainly pleasant to think!
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.
When you know for yourselves that, "These qualities are unskillful; these qualities are blameworthy; these qualities are criticized by the wise; these qualities, when adopted & carried out, lead to harm & to suffering" — then you should abandon them.
When you know for yourselves that, 'These qualities are skillful; these qualities are blameless; these qualities are praised by the wise; these qualities, when adopted & carried out, lead to welfare & to happiness' — then you should enter & remain in them.
Selected part from the...
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...
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 or...
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...
"Intelligence" is one of my favorite examples of Reification - a cluster of concepts that were grouped together into a single word to make communication easier, and as a result is often falsely thought of as a single concept, rather than an abstract collection of several separable ideas.
Knowledge of relevant facts, algorithmic familiarity, creativity, arithmetic capabilities, spatial reasoning capabilities, awareness and avoidance of logical fallacies, and probably dozens of others are all separable concepts that all could reasonable be described...
Maybe I'm a bit of an idealist, but I don't see any reason that rationality can't be taught to the average person.
Surely learning the basics of rationality (e.g. use Bayes Theorem) can be learned and applied by everyday folk, if memes like PEMDAS can be learned and remembered by average people (I think I learned PEMDAS in junior high school). I think it just takes changing the education curricula found in most primary education... which is, admittedly, a much harder goal.
I vaguely remember elementary school in the 80s and in history lessons learning how gr...
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...
You might want to look at The Millionaire Next Door books-- they're about people of average or slightly above average intelligence applying rationality to accumulating money.
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?
http://www.philosophersmail.com/290114-what-whoarewe.php
Seems relevant. The dude behind this idea was on NPR.
As a kid I loved watching Ally Mc Beal because of the way it presented interesting moral dilemas that stimulate myself to think about what's right and wrong.
I know other people who liked Ally Mc Beal because of the way it presents office gossip. You can easily add a love subplot to a rational story.
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.
A lot of people find the story of badma...
David Ogilvy) was a highly successful advertising executive, often called "The Father of Advertising" and he created several iconic advertising campaigns. However, his IQ was very average:
Including intelligence, said he. They both took an IQ test he found in the back of a book. He got a 96 (“par for ditch diggers”), and she (his wife, Herta Lans) got 136. It changed their relationship. “Suddenly she’s pretty and clever and I’m ugly and dumb.”
source: The King of Madison Avenue: David Ogilvy and the Making of Modern Advertising
So if you're actually interested, you could look into his life.
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.