If I might jump in on the listing of delusions, I think that perhaps one of the most important things to understand about widespread delusions is who, in fact, holds them. A bunch of rednecks in Louisiana not believing in evolution isn’t important, because even if they did, it wouldn’t inform other parts of their worldview. In general, the specific delusions of ordinary people (IQ < 120) aren’t important, because they aren’t the ones who are actually affecting anything. Even improving the rationality and general problem awareness of smart people (120 < IQ < 135) doesn’t really help, because then you get people who will expend enormous effort doing things like evangelizing atheism to the ordinary people and fighting global warming and the like. Raising the sanity waterline is important, but effort should be focused on people with the ability to actually use true beliefs.
In general, the specific delusions of ordinary people (IQ < 120) aren’t important, because they aren’t the ones who are actually affecting anything.
I’m less sure. I would have thought that they affect things indirectly at least through social transmission of beliefs, what they choose to spend their money on, and the demands they make of politicians.
Even improving the rationality and general problem awareness of smart people (120 < IQ < 135) doesn’t really help, because then you get people who will expend enormous effort doing things like evangelizing atheism to the ordinary people and fighting global warming and the like.
Arguably, one should expect it to help less than improving the rationality and awareness of people with IQ < 120, just because there are 11 times as many people with IQ < 120 than there are with 120 < IQ < 135.
I sincerely hope that you are using IQ as only the crudest shorthand for “ability to actually use true beliefs,” but your point in general is very well taken. Please do jump in if you have a listing of the most harmful delusions. :-)
IQ >= 120 is a fairly low bar. IQ is also a strong indicator for the potential for someone’s behavior to be influenced by delusions (rather than near mode thinking + social pressure being the dominant adaptation.)
Do you mean do say that people of ordinary intelligence, as a general rule, don’t actually believe whatever it is they say they believe, but instead just parrot what those around them say? You might be right. I think I need to find a way to re-immerse myself in a crowd of people of average intelligence; it’s been far too long, and my predictive/descriptive powers for such people are fraying.
Note that none of this is sarcasm; this comment is entirely sincere.
Wedrifid only said “potential”; most people, smart or not, behave as you say. And I would expand “delusion” to ’belief”: being smart is correlated with being influenced by beliefs, true or false.
That people act on beliefs or have at all coherent world-views is the most dangerous widespread delusion. (“The world is mad.”) Immersing yourself in a crowd of average intelligence might help you see this, but I rather doubt that your associates act on their beliefs.
Another thing that is dangerous is the people that actually act on their beliefs. They are much harder to control. People ‘acting as if’ pragmatically don’t do things that we strongly socially penalize.
I rather doubt that your associates act on their beliefs.
Not on their stated beliefs; surely, but don’t most people have a set of actual beliefs? Can’t these actual beliefs, at least in some contexts, be nudged so as to influence the level and direction of cognitive dissonance, which in turn can influence actions?
There’s certainly evidence that intelligent people are more likely to have more coherent worldviews. For example, the GSS data shows that higher vocabulary is associated with more extreme political views to either end of the traditional political spectrum. There’s similar research for IQ scores but I don’t have a citation for that.
Are you saying more extreme political views are more coherent?
That seems like an almost self-evident observation to me. I have never seen anyone state clearly any political or ideological principles, of whatever sort and from whatever position, whose straightforward application wouldn’t lead to positions that are utterly extremist by the standards of the present centrist opinion.
Getting people with regular respectable opinions to contradict themselves by asking a few Socratic questions is a trivial exercise (though not one that’s likely to endear you to them!). The same is not necessarily true for certain extremist positions.
That seems like an almost self-evident observation to me.
And it seems self-evidently false to me, so I’m very curious what exactly you mean.
If you take any one principle and apply it across the board, to everything, without limitation, you’ll end up with an extremist position, basically by definition. So in that sense, extremist positions may be simpler than moderate ones. But that’s more “extrapolation” and “exaggeration” than “straighforward application”.
Moderate positions tend to carefully draw lines to balance out many different principles. I’m not sure how to discuss this without giving contemporary political examples, so I’ll do so with the warning that I’m not necessarily for or against any of the following moderate positions, and I’m not intending to debate any of them; I’m just claiming that they’re moderate and consistent.
The government should be able to impose a progressive tax on people’s incomes, which it can then use for national defense, infrastructure, and social programs, while still allowing individuals to make profits (contrast communism and pure libertarianism)
Individuals over 18 who have not been convicted of a felony should be able to carry a handgun, but not an automatic weapon, after a brief background check, except in certain public places (contrast with complete banning of guns and with a free market on all weapons)
The government should regulate and approve the sale of some kinds of chemicals, completely banning some, allowing some with a doctor’s prescription, and allowing some to be sold freely over the counter after careful review
People over a certain age X should be able to freely have consensual sex in private with each other without government interference; people under X-n should not be allowed to engage in sex; people in between should be allowed to have sex only with people close to their own age
The country should guard its borders and not let anyone in without approval, and deport anyone found to have entered illegally, but should grant entry to tourists and grant a visa to a small number of students and workers
You can feel free to add your own if you’d like. But I don’t see how any of these are incoherent or contradictory. What Socratic questions would expose them?
What you list are explicit descriptions of concrete positions on various issues, not the underlying principles and logic. However, what I had in mind is that if you take some typical persons whose positions on concrete issues are moderate and respectable by the contemporary standards, and ask them to state some abstract principles underlying their beliefs, a simple deduction from the stated principles will often lead to different and much more extreme positions in a straightforward way. If called out on this, your interlocutors will likely appeal to a disorganized and incoherent set of exceptions and special cases to rationalize away the problem, even though before the problem is pointed out, they would affirm these principles in enthusiastic and absolute terms.
Let me give you an example of Socratic questioning of this sort that I applied in practice once. In the remainder of the comment, I’ll assume that we’re in the U.S. or some other contemporary Western society.
Let’s discuss the principle that religion and state should be separate, in the sense that each citizen should be free to affirm and follow any religious beliefs whatsoever as long as this doesn’t imply any illegal actions, and the state should consider religious beliefs as a matter of purely private and personal choice, like a taste in food or music. You’ll probably agree that this principle doesn’t sound too extreme when stated in these words, and many people with ideological affiliations not too far from the center would enthusiastically affirm it.
But now take these people and ask them: should the government considered religion as a protected category in anti-discrimination laws? Currently, it does. Your employer may demand from you to look and behave in certain ways, and the burden is on you to comply under the threat of getting fired; pleading that this would be contrary to your personal tastes and preferences won’t help you at all. Yet if this is contrary to your religion, the government will intervene and compel him to accommodate you within reasonable (and, arguably, sometimes unreasonable) limits. But this is clearly contrary to the above stated principle. How can the state flex its muscle to support your religious beliefs, if it considers them equivalent to mere personal preferences and gives no special support to religion over other sorts of interests and hobbies people have?
Trouble is, arguing that religious beliefs shouldn’t be protected by anti-discrimination laws is definitely an extreme position nowadays. It opposes a firm consensus of the entire contemporary mainstream, and to make things even more incoherent, it will provoke hostility especially among certain ideological groups whose members normally consider secularism as a part of their core principles. Among the people who affirm the above principle in the abstract, very few will bite that bullet—people normally never bite bullets based on abstract principles—so you’ll likely hear a stream of incoherent special pleading aimed to justify its non-application here. That’s the sort of incoherence typical of the contemporary moderates I’m talking about.
On the other hand, someone who doesn’t accept the separation of religion and state at all, or who is a principled libertarian opposed to anti-discrimination laws altogether—which are both extremist positions by today’s standards—won’t suffer from this incoherence.
Do you ever find people who bite the other bullet and say that, well, the principle wasn’t really all that good after all, since it didn’t allow for this particular exception?
As far as I’m concerned, religious beliefs should be given exactly the same protections as political beliefs, and no more. (Religion is given all too much deference in the United States today.) If you can refuse to hire people because they belong to the Raving Loonies Party—and it’s legal to do so in most states—then it should also be legal to refuse to hire people who belong to the Church of Raving Loonies.
If we started treating religious and political beliefs as commensurate, I think this would result in—at least in some regions—greater deference to politics, not lesser deference to religion.
the state should consider religious beliefs as a matter of purely private and personal choice, like a taste in food or music.
OK, what if we reword this as “the state should consider religious beliefs as a matter of purely private and personal choice, because they are very important and the state is not good at identifying or encouraging appropriate religious beliefs.”
Isn’t that a coherent, moderate principle that explains much of American policy on what to do when religion intrudes onto the public sphere? According to this principle, the state can ban religious discrimination because this reinforces private choice of religion and does not require the state to inquire at all into which religious beliefs are appropriate. Yet, also according to this principle, public schools should not allow prayer during class time, because this would interfere with private choice of religion and requires the state to express an opinion about which religious beliefs are appropriate.
I don’t deny the general assertion that many Americans fail the “express Socratically consistent principles and policies” test, but I’m with Blueberry in that I think moderate, coherent principles are quite possible.
OK, what if we reword this as “the state should consider religious beliefs as a matter of purely private and personal choice, because they are very important and the state is not good at identifying or encouraging appropriate religious beliefs.” [...] According to this principle, the state can ban religious discrimination because this reinforces private choice of religion and does not require the state to inquire at all into which religious beliefs are appropriate.
Trouble is, this still requires that the state must decide what qualifies as a religious belief, and what not. Once this determination has been made, things in the former category will receive important active support from the state. There is also the flipside, of course: the government is presently prohibited from actively promoting certain beliefs because it would mean “establishing religion” according to the reigning precedent, but it can actively promote others because they don’t qualify as “religious.”
Now, if there existed some objective way—a way that would carve reality at the joints—to draw limits between religion on one side and ideology, philosophy, custom, moral outlook, and just plain personal opinions and tastes on the other, such determination could be made in a coherent way. But I don’t see any coherent way to draw such limits, certainly not in a way that would be consistent with the present range of moderate positions on these issues.
(By the way, another interesting way to get respectable-thinking folks into a tremendous contradiction is to get them to enthusiastically affirm that legal discrimination on the basis of attributes that are a pure accident of birth is evil—and then point out that this implies that any system of citizenships, passports, visas, and immigration laws must be evil. Especially if you add that religion is usually much easier to change than nationality! Pursuing this line of thought further leads to a gold mine of incoherences in the whole “normal” range of beliefs nowadays, as regularlydemonstrated on Overcoming Bias.)
I don’t deny the general assertion that many Americans fail the “express Socratically consistent principles and policies” test, but I’m with Blueberry in that I think moderate, coherent principles are quite possible.
Another thing I should perhaps make sure to point out is that I don’t necessarily consider coherence as a virtue in human affairs, though that’s a complex topic in its own right.
Typically, yes. People with extreme views typically don’t fail to make inferences from their beliefs along the lines of “X is good, so doing Y, which creates even more of X’s goodness, would be even better!” Y might in fact be utterly stupid and evil and wrong, and a moderate with less extreme views might be against it, but the moderate and the extremist might both agree with X, even though the failure of logic that leads the extremist to endorse the evil Y is the belief that X is good.
There’s certainly evidence that intelligence people
You really should watch your grammar, syntax, and spelling while commenting on intelligence. The irony is distracting, otherwise. Unless you were referring to the CIA and FBI?
It might be more generally a sign that I shouldn’t comment when it is late at night in my timezone. Also, it should constitute evidence that we need better spellcheckers that don’t just catch non-words but also words that are clearly wrong from minimal context (although in this particular case catching that that was the wrong word would almost seem to require solving the natural language problem unless one had very good statistical methods).
I differentiate between ‘actually believe’ and ‘act as if they are an agent with the belief that’. All people mostly do the latter but high IQ people are somewhat more likely to let ‘actual beliefs’ interfere with their lives.
I would say that people of ordinary intelligence don’t actually have anything that I would identify as a non-trivial belief. They might say they believe in god, but they don’t actually expect to get the pony they prayed for (even if they say that they do). However, they do have accurate beliefs regarding, say, how to cook food, or whether jumping off a building is a healthy idea, because they actually have to use such beliefs.
If I might jump in on the listing of delusions, I think that perhaps one of the most important things to understand about widespread delusions is who, in fact, holds them. A bunch of rednecks in Louisiana not believing in evolution isn’t important, because even if they did, it wouldn’t inform other parts of their worldview. In general, the specific delusions of ordinary people (IQ < 120) aren’t important, because they aren’t the ones who are actually affecting anything. Even improving the rationality and general problem awareness of smart people (120 < IQ < 135) doesn’t really help, because then you get people who will expend enormous effort doing things like evangelizing atheism to the ordinary people and fighting global warming and the like. Raising the sanity waterline is important, but effort should be focused on people with the ability to actually use true beliefs.
I’m less sure. I would have thought that they affect things indirectly at least through social transmission of beliefs, what they choose to spend their money on, and the demands they make of politicians.
Arguably, one should expect it to help less than improving the rationality and awareness of people with IQ < 120, just because there are 11 times as many people with IQ < 120 than there are with 120 < IQ < 135.
I sincerely hope that you are using IQ as only the crudest shorthand for “ability to actually use true beliefs,” but your point in general is very well taken. Please do jump in if you have a listing of the most harmful delusions. :-)
IQ >= 120 is a fairly low bar. IQ is also a strong indicator for the potential for someone’s behavior to be influenced by delusions (rather than near mode thinking + social pressure being the dominant adaptation.)
Do you mean do say that people of ordinary intelligence, as a general rule, don’t actually believe whatever it is they say they believe, but instead just parrot what those around them say? You might be right. I think I need to find a way to re-immerse myself in a crowd of people of average intelligence; it’s been far too long, and my predictive/descriptive powers for such people are fraying.
Note that none of this is sarcasm; this comment is entirely sincere.
Wedrifid only said “potential”; most people, smart or not, behave as you say. And I would expand “delusion” to ’belief”: being smart is correlated with being influenced by beliefs, true or false.
That people act on beliefs or have at all coherent world-views is the most dangerous widespread delusion. (“The world is mad.”) Immersing yourself in a crowd of average intelligence might help you see this, but I rather doubt that your associates act on their beliefs.
Another thing that is dangerous is the people that actually act on their beliefs. They are much harder to control. People ‘acting as if’ pragmatically don’t do things that we strongly socially penalize.
Not on their stated beliefs; surely, but don’t most people have a set of actual beliefs? Can’t these actual beliefs, at least in some contexts, be nudged so as to influence the level and direction of cognitive dissonance, which in turn can influence actions?
There’s certainly evidence that intelligent people are more likely to have more coherent worldviews. For example, the GSS data shows that higher vocabulary is associated with more extreme political views to either end of the traditional political spectrum. There’s similar research for IQ scores but I don’t have a citation for that.
Are you saying more extreme political views are more coherent? I’m not following this.
Blueberry:
That seems like an almost self-evident observation to me. I have never seen anyone state clearly any political or ideological principles, of whatever sort and from whatever position, whose straightforward application wouldn’t lead to positions that are utterly extremist by the standards of the present centrist opinion.
Getting people with regular respectable opinions to contradict themselves by asking a few Socratic questions is a trivial exercise (though not one that’s likely to endear you to them!). The same is not necessarily true for certain extremist positions.
And it seems self-evidently false to me, so I’m very curious what exactly you mean.
If you take any one principle and apply it across the board, to everything, without limitation, you’ll end up with an extremist position, basically by definition. So in that sense, extremist positions may be simpler than moderate ones. But that’s more “extrapolation” and “exaggeration” than “straighforward application”.
Moderate positions tend to carefully draw lines to balance out many different principles. I’m not sure how to discuss this without giving contemporary political examples, so I’ll do so with the warning that I’m not necessarily for or against any of the following moderate positions, and I’m not intending to debate any of them; I’m just claiming that they’re moderate and consistent.
The government should be able to impose a progressive tax on people’s incomes, which it can then use for national defense, infrastructure, and social programs, while still allowing individuals to make profits (contrast communism and pure libertarianism)
Individuals over 18 who have not been convicted of a felony should be able to carry a handgun, but not an automatic weapon, after a brief background check, except in certain public places (contrast with complete banning of guns and with a free market on all weapons)
The government should regulate and approve the sale of some kinds of chemicals, completely banning some, allowing some with a doctor’s prescription, and allowing some to be sold freely over the counter after careful review
People over a certain age X should be able to freely have consensual sex in private with each other without government interference; people under X-n should not be allowed to engage in sex; people in between should be allowed to have sex only with people close to their own age
The country should guard its borders and not let anyone in without approval, and deport anyone found to have entered illegally, but should grant entry to tourists and grant a visa to a small number of students and workers
You can feel free to add your own if you’d like. But I don’t see how any of these are incoherent or contradictory. What Socratic questions would expose them?
What you list are explicit descriptions of concrete positions on various issues, not the underlying principles and logic. However, what I had in mind is that if you take some typical persons whose positions on concrete issues are moderate and respectable by the contemporary standards, and ask them to state some abstract principles underlying their beliefs, a simple deduction from the stated principles will often lead to different and much more extreme positions in a straightforward way. If called out on this, your interlocutors will likely appeal to a disorganized and incoherent set of exceptions and special cases to rationalize away the problem, even though before the problem is pointed out, they would affirm these principles in enthusiastic and absolute terms.
Let me give you an example of Socratic questioning of this sort that I applied in practice once. In the remainder of the comment, I’ll assume that we’re in the U.S. or some other contemporary Western society.
Let’s discuss the principle that religion and state should be separate, in the sense that each citizen should be free to affirm and follow any religious beliefs whatsoever as long as this doesn’t imply any illegal actions, and the state should consider religious beliefs as a matter of purely private and personal choice, like a taste in food or music. You’ll probably agree that this principle doesn’t sound too extreme when stated in these words, and many people with ideological affiliations not too far from the center would enthusiastically affirm it.
But now take these people and ask them: should the government considered religion as a protected category in anti-discrimination laws? Currently, it does. Your employer may demand from you to look and behave in certain ways, and the burden is on you to comply under the threat of getting fired; pleading that this would be contrary to your personal tastes and preferences won’t help you at all. Yet if this is contrary to your religion, the government will intervene and compel him to accommodate you within reasonable (and, arguably, sometimes unreasonable) limits. But this is clearly contrary to the above stated principle. How can the state flex its muscle to support your religious beliefs, if it considers them equivalent to mere personal preferences and gives no special support to religion over other sorts of interests and hobbies people have?
Trouble is, arguing that religious beliefs shouldn’t be protected by anti-discrimination laws is definitely an extreme position nowadays. It opposes a firm consensus of the entire contemporary mainstream, and to make things even more incoherent, it will provoke hostility especially among certain ideological groups whose members normally consider secularism as a part of their core principles. Among the people who affirm the above principle in the abstract, very few will bite that bullet—people normally never bite bullets based on abstract principles—so you’ll likely hear a stream of incoherent special pleading aimed to justify its non-application here. That’s the sort of incoherence typical of the contemporary moderates I’m talking about.
On the other hand, someone who doesn’t accept the separation of religion and state at all, or who is a principled libertarian opposed to anti-discrimination laws altogether—which are both extremist positions by today’s standards—won’t suffer from this incoherence.
Do you ever find people who bite the other bullet and say that, well, the principle wasn’t really all that good after all, since it didn’t allow for this particular exception?
As far as I’m concerned, religious beliefs should be given exactly the same protections as political beliefs, and no more. (Religion is given all too much deference in the United States today.) If you can refuse to hire people because they belong to the Raving Loonies Party—and it’s legal to do so in most states—then it should also be legal to refuse to hire people who belong to the Church of Raving Loonies.
If we started treating religious and political beliefs as commensurate, I think this would result in—at least in some regions—greater deference to politics, not lesser deference to religion.
OK, what if we reword this as “the state should consider religious beliefs as a matter of purely private and personal choice, because they are very important and the state is not good at identifying or encouraging appropriate religious beliefs.”
Isn’t that a coherent, moderate principle that explains much of American policy on what to do when religion intrudes onto the public sphere? According to this principle, the state can ban religious discrimination because this reinforces private choice of religion and does not require the state to inquire at all into which religious beliefs are appropriate. Yet, also according to this principle, public schools should not allow prayer during class time, because this would interfere with private choice of religion and requires the state to express an opinion about which religious beliefs are appropriate.
I don’t deny the general assertion that many Americans fail the “express Socratically consistent principles and policies” test, but I’m with Blueberry in that I think moderate, coherent principles are quite possible.
Mass_Driver:
Trouble is, this still requires that the state must decide what qualifies as a religious belief, and what not. Once this determination has been made, things in the former category will receive important active support from the state. There is also the flipside, of course: the government is presently prohibited from actively promoting certain beliefs because it would mean “establishing religion” according to the reigning precedent, but it can actively promote others because they don’t qualify as “religious.”
Now, if there existed some objective way—a way that would carve reality at the joints—to draw limits between religion on one side and ideology, philosophy, custom, moral outlook, and just plain personal opinions and tastes on the other, such determination could be made in a coherent way. But I don’t see any coherent way to draw such limits, certainly not in a way that would be consistent with the present range of moderate positions on these issues.
(By the way, another interesting way to get respectable-thinking folks into a tremendous contradiction is to get them to enthusiastically affirm that legal discrimination on the basis of attributes that are a pure accident of birth is evil—and then point out that this implies that any system of citizenships, passports, visas, and immigration laws must be evil. Especially if you add that religion is usually much easier to change than nationality! Pursuing this line of thought further leads to a gold mine of incoherences in the whole “normal” range of beliefs nowadays, as regularly demonstrated on Overcoming Bias.)
Another thing I should perhaps make sure to point out is that I don’t necessarily consider coherence as a virtue in human affairs, though that’s a complex topic in its own right.
Typically, yes. People with extreme views typically don’t fail to make inferences from their beliefs along the lines of “X is good, so doing Y, which creates even more of X’s goodness, would be even better!” Y might in fact be utterly stupid and evil and wrong, and a moderate with less extreme views might be against it, but the moderate and the extremist might both agree with X, even though the failure of logic that leads the extremist to endorse the evil Y is the belief that X is good.
Do more extreme political views signify more coherent worldviews?
You really should watch your grammar, syntax, and spelling while commenting on intelligence. The irony is distracting, otherwise. Unless you were referring to the CIA and FBI?
It might be more generally a sign that I shouldn’t comment when it is late at night in my timezone. Also, it should constitute evidence that we need better spellcheckers that don’t just catch non-words but also words that are clearly wrong from minimal context (although in this particular case catching that that was the wrong word would almost seem to require solving the natural language problem unless one had very good statistical methods).
I differentiate between ‘actually believe’ and ‘act as if they are an agent with the belief that’. All people mostly do the latter but high IQ people are somewhat more likely to let ‘actual beliefs’ interfere with their lives.
I would say that people of ordinary intelligence don’t actually have anything that I would identify as a non-trivial belief. They might say they believe in god, but they don’t actually expect to get the pony they prayed for (even if they say that they do). However, they do have accurate beliefs regarding, say, how to cook food, or whether jumping off a building is a healthy idea, because they actually have to use such beliefs.
In a democracy, specific delusions of ordinary people are important.
In a representative democracy, the specific delusions of the elected and unelected officials are important.