Rationality & Low-IQ People

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.

This suggests that instead of trying to influence the behaviors of low-IQ folks, we're better off trying to influence the behavior of folks whose IQs are slightly lower than ours, then, having influenced them successfully, aim for a slightly lower IQ, etc. Figure that the dumber you are, the greater the degree to which you have learned to distrust your own bad reasoning and "go with the herd". So to get to the low-IQ folks, create a wave throughout the population starting with the high-IQ folks.

(Actually a more straightforward implication of this might be to work harder saturating the high-IQ echelons with LW ideas, since they still haven't been saturated, then start working on lower-IQ folks.)

Excellent points.

I observe this in regard to religion and it's memes, and I think it applies to the non-rationalist community generally.

I think most people will be averse to LW-style rationality as part of a general aversion to things that seem too weird...

It perhaps makes more sense to replace "too weird" with "too different from the cultural norm". Christianity, for instance, has very weird beliefs compared to what science and common sense tells us. Adherents persist in believing in large part to continue conforming to the cultural norm, despite it's weirdness.

The interesting question (to me) is whether someone who is not predisposed to enjoying LW-style rationality ought to pursue it if they seek to optimize their happiness. If you are a happy Christian who believes God is madly in love with you and can't wait to bring up to your mansion in heaven post mortem, then LW is going to be depressing.

Even if you're just a regular old None or agnostic who likes to believe in warm fuzzy concepts like "everything happening for a reason" and Karm and Serendipity, then LW's deterministic, magic-killing, purely materialist views are a bit of a buzzkill.

It is possible that rationality training is a net bad for ceratin individuals because ignorance really is bliss in many circumstances.

See also

This is a good observation. It still leaves open the question of helping (or self-help advise) for people of sufficient intelligence to perceive that LW-style "rationality" is correct in some sense, but cannot quite put it together themselves into a useful framework from a bunch of blog posts :). I do think CFAR has a role in this, Stanford's Ron Howard took it all the way to (non gifted-) high school level:

http://www.orms-today.org/orms-8-04/teaching.html

http://decisioneducation.org/

The two things this can accomplish is to create better "non-weird" cultural memes than society provides out of the box, and in the long term perhaps establishing priesthood of rationality where people can escalate important/complicated decisions to more expert authorities.

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.

R> survey2013 <- read.csv("http://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/182368464/lwsurvey/2013.csv", header=TRUE)
R> age <- survey2013[survey2013$Age>=25,]
R> degree <- function (x) { x!=" " & x!="2 year degree" & x!="High school" & x!="None" }
R> bachelors <- age[sapply(age$Degree, degree),]
R> length(is.na(bachelors$WorkStatus) | bachelors$WorkStatus==" ")
[1] 700
R> sum(!is.na(bachelors$WorkStatus) & bachelors$WorkStatus!=" ")
[1] 691
R> levels(bachelors$WorkStatus)
[1] " "                                "Academics (on the teaching side)"
[3] "For-profit work"                  "Government work"                 
[5] "Independently wealthy"            "Non-profit work"                 
[7] "Self-employed"                    "Student"                         
[9] "Unemployed"                 
R> sum(bachelors$WorkStatus=="Unemployed",na.rm=TRUE)
[1] 38
R> sum(bachelors$WorkStatus=="Unemployed" | is.na(bachelors$WorkStatus) | bachelors$WorkStatus==" ")
[1] 47
R> c(38/691, 47/700)
[1] 0.05499 0.06714
R> binom.test(38,691, p=0.033)

    Exact binomial test

data:  38 and 691
number of successes = 38, number of trials = 691, p-value = 0.002649
alternative hypothesis: true probability of success is not equal to 0.033
95 percent confidence interval:
 0.03921 0.07470
R> binom.test(47,700, p=0.033)
    Exact binomial test

data:  47 and 700
number of successes = 47, number of trials = 700, p-value = 6.492e-06
alternative hypothesis: true probability of success is not equal to 0.033
95 percent confidence interval:
 0.04975 0.08829

people who don't necessarily have non-genius IQ

Did you mean this double negative?

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 have a better sense of how the fundamental rules differ from the simpler, easier to understand formulations taught to beginners. A not-very-intelligent rationalist would probably be kind of like a beginning level writer. They know that the point of following the rules is to make good decisions, the way that a beginning writer knows that the point of following the rules is to produce good writing. But they would only be able to explain to a very limited extent why those rules lead to better decisions than their alternatives, and they certainly wouldn't be able to grasp the deeper rules underlying them, and understand what sort of situations function as exceptions to the more basic incarnations.

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).

You'd go pretty far just telling the audience the character was unintelligent, by giving them unintelligent status markers. Give them a blue-collar career, and very low academic achievement, while also coming from a stable family and average opportunity.

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?

There are scattered examples of this sort of "humble working man, who lives honest and true" throughout fiction.

Keep in mind that people who apply serious life-changing ideas after reading about them in fiction are the exception rather than the norm. Most people who aren't exceptionally intellect-oriented need to personally encounter someone who "has something" that they themselves wish they had, and then have some reason to think that they can imitate them in that respect. Fiction just isn't it, except possibly in some indirect ways. Rationalist communities competing in the "real-world" arena of people living lives that other people want to and can emulate are a radically more effective angle for people who don't identify strongly with their intellectual characteristics.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_the_Fool

Also

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tao_of_pooh

Aren't detective/mystery books and shows an example of middlbrow rationalist fiction?

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.

failure to take arguments to their logical conclusion

Informal arguments often rely on perceived lack of alternatives to arrive at the conclusions, and thus even if you don't have any alternatives you can't trust it.

E.g. "we both seen blerg, and the only way blerg could happen is because of blurp, and therefore, blurp must have happened", that's only as trustworthy as your enumeration of the ways blerg could happen is complete, which is usually not at all.

Frequently, otherwise smart (i.e. high IQ individuals), especially those with little training in formal proofs, keep insisting that unless you come up with an alternative cause for blerg, you must believe in blurp, and get rather pissed off at the insolence of being dubious about the blurp without providing an alternative cause for the blerg. (Then when you provide an alternative cause they go on how the blurp must have a probability of ~50%)

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.

Agreed. Perhaps I should have said "Normal-IQ people?" That still sounds a bit bad though.

True. The same goes for other prestigious qualities - beautiful people value beauty, for instance. Generally people tend to acquire metrics for judging people according to which they are highly valued. Cf Nietzsche's theory that slaves were inclined to adopt Christianity because it "reversed the values" the Romans had in a way that benefited the slaves (e.g. poverty was seen as a virtue, wealth as a vice).

I agree with this in part. But there seem to be two distinct types of dim people. Self-aware dim people go the Nietzchean route and devalue the virtue of intelligence. But there are also what you might call Dunning-Krueger dim people. These people don't devalue intelligence; they just don't realize how little of it they possess.

Yes they do (Scott H. Young is way smarter than me and he has developed a method of soaking up really complicated ideas in a matter of weeks or days).

I don't think this is a useful question though, there is no reason to think that the gains in ability to utilize LW-style rationality are linear. I think its more likely that there is some threshold level of intelligence that is needed to make use of the techniques then the gains get smaller. Other skills are similar - calculus, basketball (where the property is height rather than intelligence), physics etc.

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 end?

Being right because you expected your team to do badly and work slowly doesn't make you look very good. In fiction we tend to see the opposite: someone is way more confident than they have any right to be, and they manage to pull it off (just barely) making themselves and their team-members look admirable.

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!

In a social species, believing authority is probably quite adaptive to the less intelligent just for getting things right. And then there is the adaptive value of going with the herd, because the herd likes that.

Epistemic rationality is really only valued by mutants with a fetish for it, and the capability to be relatively good at it. And while they get some benefits from their fetish, they pay a social cost for it too.

Everyone appreciates decreased effort, right? Much of rationality could easily be reframed as methods to avoid wasting effort. The rest should follow kind of naturally, if rationality is indeed a coherent system of thought.

The thing that "average" people need isn't so much a textbook as a recognition that maybe intelligent people are better role models than the latest football star or rapper.

If you don't have the status the advice that you are giving won't be heard.

I don't believe that interpretation of Alloway's research and if you read her results, I think you'll see why.

IQ has the added benefit of being deducible from standardized tests and also something that far far more people have had already done.

I think it appeals to some subset, notably those who want to win and have enough self-discipline to apply proper tools.

I think that conflicts with our evidence. That subset is fairly large, yet (it seems) very few of them if any are on LW.

By "celebrating rationality" I meant something like what you meant by "popularizing rationality." The difference isn't important, but for what it is worth it has something to do with the intended effect of the art on people who already like the ideas it popularizes.

Which "movement"? There ain't no movement.

What would you call it then? A trend? A faction? A meme? Any of those classifications would satisfy me; my question still stands as-yet-unanswered however you choose to phrase it.

Did Star Trek get watched by people who aren't nerds?

It struck me the other day that conservatism could be a rational adaptation to low intelligence. If you can't figure out which new or foreign things are a threat, it is safest to treat them all as threats

I think there a plenty of people who are successful despite ignoring a lot of "rules of rationality" that don't have to do with "make the winning move".

Rather, one is subject to the consequences of one's irrationality?

143, tested as a teenager.

Standard tests don't really discriminate well in that region and upwards.