Aretae

The virtue of excellence

Friday, March 16, 2012

PoTD

For the HBD, pro-IQ folks in the crowd.  Best IQ-ist since Griffe du Lion.

Commentary:  great analysis...but not deep enough after round one.  Jehu will like it a lot.

I think that he ignores the Rationalist argument (Stanovich), and the affiliationist argument (example: Krugman  -- picking conclusions via groupism, regardless your intelligence).  And he ignores critical aspects in epistemology, in particular the map/territory distinction...approaching everything from a school-ist right/wrong approach rather than a real world ignorance model (my model is 70% predictive vs yours which I think is 60% predictive, even though the predictivity doesn't overlap).


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7 comments:

Jehu said...

Aretae,
His analysis is likely sound for the domain that he considers---things like solving a murder case, getting an X gpa or Y grade on an exam---basically things that are not value-loaded or inherently tribal.

The problem is most of the things that are truly---on the table, so to speak---tend to be in domains where what you call affiliationism is more the rule. Attempting to apply the methods of Bayses is counterproductive in such arenas because the side with the advantage in the cultural battlespace will always work very hard to poison your available information to make updates (e.g. arguments about a 'scientific consensus').

March 16, 2012 at 8:50 AM
Alrenous said...

Jehu, would you agree that this lying is caused by different tribes benefiting differently from various received wisdoms or conclusions?

March 17, 2012 at 11:25 AM
Jehu said...

Alrenous,
Pretty much only on non-politicized topics can you count on any reasonable probability that the probability of a correct belief increases with increasing IQ. A lot of beliefs also have U-shaped distributions, where the misbelief is highest in the moderately intelligent---those I call the 'Second Sigma'.
Unfortunately, ever increasing sections of reality get politicized.

March 17, 2012 at 1:57 PM
Alrenous said...

I haven't heard of the U-thing before, though it sounds plausible. The smartest get it, the dumbest know to ignore the ivory tower, but the middle listen and are thus fooled. Do you have data?

Also, sorry, I'm not sure if that counts as a 'yes' or a 'no.' I'm biased toward 'yes,' to avoid conflicts.

March 17, 2012 at 2:41 PM
Jehu said...

I don't think anyone has any large scale data on the positions of the 3rd, 4th, and 5th sigma. That's probably because they're difficult to get unbiased samples for. Anecdotally, the most common positions in that region tend towards the 'leave me alone'. But the bottom part of the U is well established---working class whites have a far more realistic worldview as regards HBD than the SWPLs.

March 17, 2012 at 4:54 PM
Aretae said...

Jehu,

I am generally happy with your analysis, but I'd like to toss in a 3rd category where his analysis is fishy: Areas with unclear, unverifiable, or partial truthiness. Of course, I believe that this constitutes most (90%) issues...and the affiliationist view constitutes most of the rest (9%) and the clear answers issue is the other 1%.

March 18, 2012 at 3:08 PM
perfidy said...

I first ran across the U-distribution reading Robert Conquest - who noted that serious scholars of the Soviet Union during the cold war had no illusions as to its real nature. Nor did the common man. The people who were deluded were the forebears of the SWPLs.

From Reflections on a Ravaged Century:

"Intelligence alone is thus far from being a defense against the plague. Students, in particular, have traditionally been a reservoir of infection. The Nazis won the German students before they won the German state, and there are many similar examples. In much the same way, a leading scholar of Russian affairs (Ronald Hingley of Oxford) noted during the Soviet period that basic misapprehensions about it in the West were rare among truly serious scholars, and also among ordinary people, being confined to those of fair intelligence. He commented, "For it is surely true, if not generally recognized, that real prowess in wrong-headedness, as in most other fields of human endeavor, presupposes considerable education, character, sophistication, knowledge, and will to succeed.""

That Hingley quote is one of my all time favorites.

March 21, 2012 at 6:19 AM

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