[Link] FreakoStats and CEV

If they are contrarians for contrarianism's sake, why would I take them into consideration?

I'm just informing you of your audience on LW! Not saying they are right. :)

But I am saying that intelligent people, like to show off their intelligence, this is very obvious on LessWrong. It is no less obvious when you pick up a newspaper or talk at the water cooler about politics. Intelligent people are contrarians. Having different opinions from less intelligent individuals is a great way to distinguish yourself form them. Intellectual fashion seems very much a real phenomena.

High-Iq circles are not monolithic: there are many groups they are be part of, on which different ideas would be 'tribal markers'.

Actually they are. Nearly all of them are university educated or move in social circles among people who are, which is overseen my academia, which does have a left wing bias, because a left-wing bias is self-serving to them. If you check out the GSS you will see education strongly correlating with "leftist" views. Naturally not everyone with a university degree in the US agrees with the ethical consensus of academia, but not every member of the Communist party in the old USSR was a real communist either.

This reminds me if you made a anonymous poll of high IQ people living in the USSR in the 1920s, what do you think their position would on the future prospects of Bolshevik rule? Also what do you think of their policy opinions? The ignorant peasant of 1920s Russia had one great advantage over the well educated and on average much more intelligent teacher, engineer or student. Controlling for class, I'm still pretty sure that those of above average intelligence favoured the Bolsheviks in 1920s Russia compared to their dimmer fellow countrymen.

Smart people are smart enough to know what they need to say, which may or may not be the right answer. They answer and vote in a way that makes them feel morally superior, that makes them feel better than someone else so that they seem higher status. Stupid people just say whatever they happen to be familiar with, which may or may not be the right answer. In a traditional society the default answer has the advantage of being a tested answer. Such a society wasn't designed, it grew.

1) More generally, what if more intelligent people are more resistant to some biases, but equally prone to other biases? Then in opinions of more intelligent people we would see less of the former biases, but perhaps more of the latter biases; and also more of the correct answers. The exact values would depend on exact numbers in models.

For what it's worth (and as I've commented previously on that blog), in reading on heuristics & biases, I've encountered biases which inversely correlate minimally with intelligence like sunk cost, but I don't believe I have seen any biases which correlated with increasing intelligence.

EDIT: Does author really give questionaires and IQ tests to large enough samples of randomly selected people?

How large is 'large enough'? Think of political polling - how many samples do they need to extrapolate to the general population?

Thank you for your interest in the matter.

1) I think even in your example model, the answer chosen by the method would still be C, the correct conclusion, for, as the author says, "The percentage of smart and dull groups choosing each answer is compared and the largest ratio of the smart to dull percentages is the Smart Vote."(emphasis added) As you see, it's not the difference (a subtraction) that matters, but the ratio: A = 50/70 ~ 0.71 B = 40/27 ~ 1.6 C = 10/3 ~ 3.3 Thus, C > B > A.

2) and 3) I don't grok totally Regression Analysis yet (dropped out College, akrasia+depression won), but he emphasises in many comments that he controls for many variables such as income, education, to avoid non-cognitive motivations (I'm not sure this is the right term, but I hope you understand me) and only get the 'smart' decisions.

Regarding biases, he once gave an answer to User:gwern who once commented on his blog, that even though it is true that even bright people are prone to some biases as everyone else, still in these cases they're a little bit less prone, so what counts is the 'trend' from the dumb to the smart. In his words:

"In cases like the sunk cost fallacy high IQ people usually make mistakes like everyone else. The point however is that on average they make them less often. Typically you see stuff like 70% of a smart group get it wrong but 90% of the dull group do. That trend, and not the % correct, is what points to the better answer.

I have a big collection of common logical mistakes people make (gleaned from Tversky & Kahneman mostly, but also many others). On all those I've tried so far - including the sunk cost fallacy - the brighter group does quite a bit better, even though most still get them wrong. Contrary to what you are saying here the Smart Vote does particularly well on such fallacies."

Regarding the question posed in the EDIT, he seems to use the General Social Survey (GSS). According to Wikipedia ,

"The General Social Survey (GSS) is a sociological survey used to collect data on demographic characteristics and attitudes of residents of the United States. The survey is conducted face-to-face with an in-person interview by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, of a randomly-selected sample of adults (18+) who are not institutionalized. The survey was conducted every year from 1972 to 1994 (except in 1979, 1981, and 1992). Since 1994, it has been conducted every other year. The survey takes about 90 minutes to administer. As of 2010 28 national samples with 55,087 respondents and 5,417 variables had been collected. The data collected about this survey includes both demographic information and respondent's opinions on matters ranging from government spending to the state of race relations to the existence and nature of God. Because of the wide range of topics covered, and the comprehensive gathering of demographic information, survey results allow social scientists to correlate demographic factors like age, race, gender, and urban/rural upbringing with beliefs, and thereby determine whether, for example, an average middle-aged black male respondent would be more or less likely to move to a different U.S. state for economic reasons than a similarly situated white female respondent; or whether a highly educated person with a rural upbringing is more likely to believe in a transcendent God than a person with an urban upbringing and only a high-school education."

So, yes, I think it's a fairly comprehensive and diverse sample.

Results for average people: 70% A, 27% B, 3% C. Results for intelligent people: 50% A, 40% B, 10% C. Possible interpretation: B is the correct answer, because here the difference is largest: 13%.

Wouldn't it make more sense to use odds ratios than probability differences?

Perhaps not absolutely, but many topics, especially political ones, are connected to beliefs people already have and vigorously defend. Introduce a new topic that people haven't heard of before, and what will likely happen is that they'll round it to the nearest thing that corresponds in their current worldview.

I'm not sure I understand your argument.

That point was about that high IQ people not having a good understanding of how low IQ people will respond to their preferred policies, while low IQ people have a very good idea of how others like them will respond. High intelligence isn't magic, one still needs to have information. Cognitive stratification is a very real and growing trend. If one is an outlier among one's friends one is very likely to change their opinion to match theirs.

To see how this has played out consider some of the social policies implemented in the past 40 years that where favoured by those with high IQ. They seem to remarkably often result in very little social pathology for those with high IQ, but quite a bit for those with low IQ. A great example of this is the sexual revolution.

Consider someone dumb but politically opinionated. What problem are they solving? Tribal affiliation, probably. As a by-product, their political actions are practically directed by the leaders of the tribe.

Now consider someone a bit less dumb who happens to have just enough inspiration to try to solve the problem of what actually works, rather than tribal affiliation. I think it entirely reasonable that this slight increase in inspiration can actually reduce the effectiveness of policies advocated, if the problem is confusing. Sure, the tribe leaders aren't going to make great decisions, because they're solving a problem of inter-tribe politics rather than just what works. But it's entirely possible to do worse, and many people will.

So you're going to see strange signals in the data as people become smart enough to question the ordinary, fail, do better, and find new things to question. At no point are you really sure if smart people are solving the same problem better, or just failing at a new and interesting question. You can work out some good guesses, though I guess this would depend on the nitty-gritty of what the signals look like.