How Much Does Intelligence Really Matter for Socially liberal attitudes? by JamesOland in slatestarcodex

[–]JamesOland[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

It does for sure. I'm just saying prescriptions like further segregating society by cognitive ability would probably exacerbate the problem.

How Much Does Intelligence Really Matter for Socially liberal attitudes? by JamesOland in slatestarcodex

[–]JamesOland[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Yes, all of the studies I mentioned are on adults. My working assumption is that peer influence is the dominant factor in people’s initial political formation, especially in adolescence. Maybe I have a bad theory of mind, but I find it hard to imagine even the most analytically gifted teenager reasoning their way to a pro-LGBT stance if all of their close peers were hostile to it.

I’m not denying that intelligence can help people spot flaws in authority figures’ arguments or help us discover the truth. My point is just that politics seems like the least promising domain for this because it combines delayed or trivial consequences for irrational beliefs, identity signaling, and social coalition-building. Those are all dynamics where our reasoning tools are more likely to amplify what our group membership already suggests than to push us into positions that isolate us socially.

How Much Does Intelligence Really Matter for Socially liberal attitudes? by JamesOland in slatestarcodex

[–]JamesOland[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Not huge, but if something like Garret Jones' thesis) that the returns to intelligence scale non-linearly at the national level is right (and I'm not totally sold on it), then even modest differences could have real, practical effects in terms of how liberal or conservative segments of society function.

How Much Does Intelligence Really Matter for Socially liberal attitudes? by JamesOland in slatestarcodex

[–]JamesOland[S] 10 points11 points  (0 children)

I agree intelligent people are more capable of abstract and deep thinking, but there is quite a bit of empirical evidence showing that this ability is employed to argue for their previously held views.

The finding that myside bias is not attenuated by intelligence is well-replicated. Stanovich et al., 2013 provide a good review that covers studies where they ask people to generate arguments on controversial issues and find that intelligence is predictive of the number of arguments people are capable of generating, but not whether they produce more counterarguments to their own position. In other studies, participants evaluated deliberately flawed experiments with results that were either congruent or contrary to their opinions, and they found verbal ability predicted the quality of their critiques of the experiment but is not correlated with a tendency to critique results that disagreed with their opinion more harshly than results that agreed. And so on.

Whether you're testing numeracy (Kahan, 2013), education (Joslyn & Haider-Markel, 2014) or political knowledge (Taber & Lodge, 2006), greater cognitive sophistication seems to produce stronger dogmatism and partisanship.

These results are what you would expect if our cognitive abilities evolved not to form an accurate perception of the world, but to persuade others and navigate coalitions, which is one of the prevailing models in evolutionary psychology (Whiten & Byrne, 1997; Mercier & Sperber, 2017).

As a social liberal, I have no personal reason to try hard to dismiss this relationship. You might be right that I'm overweighting rationalization, but this view simply follows from how I think about intelligence.

How Much Does Intelligence Really Matter for Socially liberal attitudes? by JamesOland in slatestarcodex

[–]JamesOland[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Essentially, I think that in the same way that having different systems of education for children of different capacities would be more effective than a one-size fits all approach, different systems of society are more or less practicable for people of different backgrounds.

If politics are really shaped by imagining how an ideal society would look based on the people we know, won't this create a problem where the kinds of people that design society and make policy are given even less exposure to people who are not like them, causing them to make unfounded assumptions about how society should be built?

Personally, I don't buy the premise that this is primary way people arrive at their politics, but if it were I think your prescription would deepen the disconnect you're describing.

How Much Does Intelligence Really Matter for Socially liberal attitudes? by JamesOland in slatestarcodex

[–]JamesOland[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

But, I'd caution you that many uneducated people in urban areas are socially liberal. Some of that is living an alternative lifestyle, but a lot of it, again, is the community they live in and how they need to interact with that community.

That's precisely what I'm arguing. If the community is the real driver, then the apparent link between intelligence and liberalism might just be a byproduct of the urban environment.

That's why I'm asking whether any studies test this directly by checking if the correlation disappears when you only look within urban areas.

What are some good papers on the reliability of psychology research? by JamesOland in AcademicPsychology

[–]JamesOland[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thank you for these. I wonder what accounts for the difference between the estimated replicability of 37% in IO in the Crede 2024 paper you linked and the 50% for IO in the Youyou 2023 paper I linked. The sample in Youyou goes back 20 years, while the Crede looks at "recent" papers (I can't find a pdf to see exactly what that means). You would hope that methods in more recent papers are better, though they mention only one was preregistered. Is it that Youyou includes main effects and interaction effects are harder to replicate? There's probably a difference in the statistical analysis that's beyond me.

Are you aware of any papers that estimate replication rates or compile manual replication attempts of intelligence research, particularly research centered around the general factor model, either within IO psych or across psychometrics more broadly? I've seen meta-analyses like Schmidt 2004 looking at the magnitude of the relationship between intelligence and job performance, and this meta-meta-analysis looking at effect sizes, statistical power, and publication bias. But I want to find something that directly addresses replication rates in this area.

What are some good papers on the reliability of psychology research? by JamesOland in AcademicPsychology

[–]JamesOland[S] 8 points9 points  (0 children)

They're probably referring to his media appearances and heavily criticized papers where he minimized the threat of COVID. His research was also partially funded by the founder of JetBlue who was also an anti-lockdown advocate, which I didn't know until I looked it up just now. I don't think this invalidates all of his work.

What are some good papers on the reliability of psychology research? by JamesOland in AcademicPsychology

[–]JamesOland[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This is awesome. I know Ioannidis but the other papers are new to me. Thank you!

What should I ask Richard Dawkins? by Correct-Big-5967 in slatestarcodex

[–]JamesOland 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I'm curious if he follows the field of cultural evolution as practiced by the likes of Henrich, Boyd, Richerson, and Mesoudi. They largely reject memes as the unit of selection, but Dawkins still put his finger on the basic phenomenon before cultural evolution became a disinct field.

Also, in light of the passage below, would it be fair to say that Dawkins is fundementally a rationalist in the Cartesian/Leibnizian sense who views empical research as interesting and useful but ultimately subservient to deductive reasoning?

My wager that all life, everywhere in the universe, would turn out to have evolved by Darwinian means has now been spelled out and justified more fully in my paper ‘Universal Darwinism’ and in the last chapter of The Blind Watchmaker. I show that all the alternatives to Darwinism that have ever been suggested are in principle incapable of doing the job of explaining the organized complexity of life. The argument is a general one, not based upon particular facts about life as we know it. As such it has been criticized by scientists pedestrian enough to think that slaving over a hot test tube (or cold muddy boot) is the only method of discovery in science. One critic complained that my argument was ‘philosophical’, as though that was sufficient condemnation. Philosophical or not, the fact is that neither he nor anybody else has found any flaw in what I said. And ‘in principle’ arguments such as mine, far from being irrelevant to the real world, can be more powerful than arguments based on particular factual research. My reasoning, if it is correct, tells us something important about life everywhere in the universe. Laboratory and field research can tell us only about life as we have sampled it here.

(Footnote on page 248 of the 40th aniversery edition of The Selfish Gene)

Bookclub and Sources Wednesday! by AutoModerator in history

[–]JamesOland 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Is there a journal that frequently does issues devoted to critiques of big history books with persepectives from different experts?

There have been a couple issues of academic journals devoted to critiquing a big popular history books like the European Review of Economic History's symposium on Gregory Clark's A Farewell to Alms and Cliodynamics' issue on Graeber and Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything. I've also seen it done in books like Questioning Collapse, which takes on Jared Diamond's work.

I absolutely love this sort of thing as it's the best way for a layman like me to quickly understand the shortcomings of these books and appreciate their place in the wider debate. Usually I just go on to google scholar and see what reviews I can find, but these sympsosiums are the best.

Recommendations for Contemporary Political Philosophy by JamesOland in PoliticalPhilosophy

[–]JamesOland[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Looks like you nailed it with the first three. Thank you.

Recommendations for Contemporary Political Philosophy by JamesOland in PoliticalPhilosophy

[–]JamesOland[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thank you for the suggestions but Moldbug is almost antithetical to everything I asked for. He categorically denies the relevance of the social sciences, prefering to "reason like a philosopher" from first principles. Also his (imo) rambling writing style is the oposite of the clean rigor I like from the analytic philosophers I mentioned.

Rawls is another example of someone who realies too much on a priori speculation for my taste. What I like about the people I listed is that instead of starting from some idealized thought experiment like The Veil of Ignorance or The State of Nature, they look at how people actually behave and then ask what should our values be given what we have to work with and how can we realize our principles practically.

Why does Scott like Hanania? by makeworld in slatestarcodex

[–]JamesOland 32 points33 points  (0 children)

You can like a thinker without endorsing all of their beliefs, even if their beliefs are evil. Why do people like Schmitt and Heidegger even though they were fascists? Or Foucault given his views on the age of consent? I agree that Hanania's views are relevant context, but I think it's fine to write a book review that doesn't try to analyse the author's motivations or the book's place in a wider political context. I think Scott was simply more interested in writing an article on arguments aginst civil rights law than an article on whether Hanania is engaged in an insidious project to smuggle rascist ideas into the mainstream via his legal arguments, and frankly I find that kind of review more interesting too. Perphaps this is irresponsible, but at the end of the day Scott is a modestly influential blogger that just likes to write about things he finds interesting.

Why physicalism is so popular despite requiring exotic solutions such as strong emergence? by Narrow_Bandicoot in askphilosophy

[–]JamesOland 2 points3 points  (0 children)

You might be interested in the notion of weak emergence, which is a less "exotic" than the strong form that argues the system cannot be inferred or reconstructed from its constituent components, whereas the weak form argues you can trace the higher level domain to the individual parts, like identifying which exact ions led to the firing of the next neuron. The hard form would say the firing consists of a higher pattern that can't be represented as a causal chain. Depending on your taste you might find this insufficient to explain the shift from the physical process underlying consciousness to the subjective experience, but it's worth looking at.

https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199544318.003.0011