Comment by scandox
10 hours ago
I think IQ is an incredibly bad measure of anything. So many IQ smart people I know make bad decisions and it's always because they don't judge other people well.
10 hours ago
I think IQ is an incredibly bad measure of anything. So many IQ smart people I know make bad decisions and it's always because they don't judge other people well.
Okay but dampen their IQ and you end up with worse. Lead poisoning robs a nation of a generation.
Which measure would you recommend instead?
How does it compare to the number of IQ smart people you know who do less bad decisions than you do? How does this rate look like for the IQ stupid?
IQ is a rough measure of how big the engine is, like horsepower in a car. It says nothing about the quality of the driver or anything else about the car. A car with a huge engine in the hands of a bad driver can ram itself into a tree with great force.
In my experience I've met a ton of extremely high IQ people who believe insane things: the Moon landings didn't happen, bizarro political theories that fall apart if you look at them funny, occult mumbo jumbo, Scientology, vaccines cause autism and similar (RFJ Jr. probably has a high IQ), etc.
I wonder if having a high IQ means you can delude yourself better. Whether God can build a mountain he can't climb over may be a paradox, but humans with high IQ can absolutely create traps for their own mind they can't think their way out of.
I've also found that high IQ correlates -- at least in my sample -- with authoritarian political beliefs, with a roughly equal split between authoritarian leftism (Communism / tankie Marxism, technocratic socialism) and authoritarian rightism (race nationalism, fascism, neoreaction, authoritarian traditionalism / theocracy). I think this stems from an intuition on the part of the person that because they seem smarter than average and have trouble running their own life, there's no way an average person can be part of self-governing. I think they're both underestimating other people and overestimating the inherent efficacy of "smart" people.
> I've also found that high IQ correlates -- at least in my sample -- with authoritarian political beliefs
I think that’s just a side effect of being told “you’re very smart” a lot as a kid. You think that you can understand facts about the universe that others cannot, which steers you away from (boring, unthinking) normie positions.
>In my experience I've met a ton of extremely high IQ people who believe insane things
My working hypothesis is that in individuals with high IQ, the brain has a stronger propensity to make connections autonomously. Then there is the exposures to common public information, ranging from unscientific beliefs like home remedies and crystals, and noticing in news articles, through reasoning ability, that there are omissions, inaccuracies, and outright lies. This can be great, the doubts and misapprehension about mainstream or even specialist knowledge has caused many breakthrough and discoveries.
But this goes haywire when their brain starts making connections between the nonsense and domains they only have a superficial knowledge of, often overestimating their understanding due to intellectual confidence, often driven by cognitive biases like pattern-seeking or overconfidence. For example, if a high IQ person pursued physics and engineering, they would quickly understand most rocketry and its capacities(moon landings certainly happened), but in less familiar domains, their pattern-seeking can lead to flawed conclusions.
The mix of information(pseudoscience,inaccurate news) that is prominent, as described above, combined with personal predispositions or exposure to specific communities, causes some to lose faith in the mainstream and influences whether they become occultists, moon landing deniers, or the like.
"vaccines cause autism and similar"
RFK Jr. did win a lawsuit over injuries caused by a vaccine, although it wasn't autism.