Posts
Comments
I wonder whether anyone has thoughts how applicable this is to people who are generally good sleepers? I fall asleep pretty much instantly as soon as I go to bed, no matter the time, but the non goal directedness, all of the air quality topics and wakeup timing seems interesting still?
I'm not sure if I'd agree on that, especially when it comes to political topics, stupid people with strong exposition to mass media tend to perform significantly worse than random: Thus using the opposite of what said stupid person supported seems to have at least a mildly higher chance of being true in T/F question.
One point Hans Rosling tried to convey constantly in Factfulness is that most stupid people perform significantly worse than random (than "the chimps" as he portrayed it). He argued that this results from biases etc. If this generalises to more than people's perception of how the world is doing and increases in strength for less intelligent people or people with more exposition to mass media, this could potentially apply to silliness and alien intervention not being orthogonal but having significant correlation as well. Similarly, "most stupid people vote republican" is then at least some mild evidence that this party actually is more "wrong" (although I think this is weaker for a two-party system like the US, and stronger for European multiparty systems: If a party's actions correlate with the preferences of stupid people (and those perform worse than random), that's some evidence that they're wrong and thus at least mildly relevant to a political debate.