That’s a convenient assumption. Why do you think know high IQ is correlated with reasonable politics? Maybe it’s just correlated with being better at the dark arts.
Greater choice of occupations like asteroid miner
You want to be an asteroid miner? Why? That sounds even less fun, and more dangerous, than an ordinary miner.
There’s an arms race between politicians and voteres. The politicians try to convince the voters to vote for them, promising to do something while in office. The voters try to correctly predict what they will really do once in office.
If both sides become smarter, then the techniques both sides use improve. The politicians become better at convincing and lying, and the voters become better at predicting behavior and perhaps detecting lies.
Why would this lead to more reasonable debate? Let’s make sure we think of the same thing when we say “reasonable”.
You might be thinking of reasonable in the sense of rational debate, where politicians on TV and in Parliament must explicitly state their terminal goals, then propose instrumental goals, and argue about them only on the basis of evidence, effectiveness, and alliances and compromises.
Or if applied to voting, you have rational voting, where voters vote based on their best prediction of politicians’ behavior in office; not e.g. on how tall they are, their party affiliation, or their speech mannerisms. They want politicians to approach the ideal of making every decision in office the way the voters would want it made.
Or you might be thinking of reasonable in the sense of “moderate”, so that opinions you label as “unreasonable” would be less represented than they are today. Fewer politicians who are religious, or anti-science, or whatever.
I don’t see strong evidence that higher IQs would lead to any of these results.
Or you might be thinking of reasonable in the sense of “moderate”, so that opinions you label as “unreasonable” would be less represented than they are today. Fewer politicians who are religious, or anti-science, or whatever.
I don’t see strong evidence that higher IQs would lead to any of these results.
It’s true that intelligence is strongly correlated with political opinion—both the opinions listed in that article, and other ones (and political opinions tend to form clusters with strong internal correlations).
So if you select the top 10% most intelligent people today, the spectrum of opinion would be different from that of all society. And perhaps it would also be narrower, meaning no new extremist opinions would emerge that are at merely 1% today but happen to be held by 10% of the 10% most intelligent people.
But it’s not clear to me how much of that correlation would go away if you control for all the other factors that intelligence is also correlated with, and that would still be varying in a higher-intelligence society. For instance intelligence is correlated with wealth, status, certain social circles. It’s correlated with certain political affiliations beyond those examined by the article you link to, and political affiliations tend to clump into highly correlated clusters.
Being conscious of one’s own high intelligence is probably correlated with respecting intelligence as such, and hence respecting the opinions of other people known to be intelligent; whereas being conscious of having low intelligence is probably correlated with anti-intelligence (anti-rational, anti-science) beliefs. (Which partly explains why more intelligent people agree more with economists, who are high-status on the intelligence scale. After all, the study doesn’t say that intelligent people independenly came up with the same conclusions as economists. At least I assume it doesn’t, since it’s behind a paywall.)
Some of my uncertainty is merely a matter of how we construct our counterfactual intelligent society, so let’s take a concrete example. Suppose all new people born starting tomorrow will have the mean IQ of their parents + 40%. Would the current correlations between intelligence and political opinion win over the current correlations between the political opinions of parents and their children, or of children growing together in communities with uniform political opinions? I don’t feel I have enough evidence for a high degree of confidence here.
The data from twin studies and intrafamily correlations suggest that their political beliefs would change substantially, but their partisan affiliation not so much. This would change policy by changing what wins primaries in parties, and what parties fight over vs agree on.
That isn’t especially related to my original point, because it seems specific to the current structure of U.S. politics; it’s not very applicable to countries that don’t have a few large long-lived political parties. For instance, in Israel, many people were born before the establishment of the state, and no party has survived since then.
We need to look at aspects of U.S. political belief to make good U.S.-specific predictions. And in that, you are surely better informed than I am. So I accept your conclusion that in that context, intelligence is causative of rational and of moderate beliefs. But the specific reasons and dynamics that lead to that seem highly contigent.
Yes, the first-past-the-post geographical constituency system has quite different effects on partisan structure than many other electoral systems, and other countries have more fluid partisan identity.
“So I accept your conclusion that in that context, intelligence is causative of rational and of moderate beliefs.”
I think the belief point holds much more broadly. Similar studies have been done with data about other political beliefs from European countries, e.g. by people in Deary’s lab in the U.K.
You might be thinking of reasonable in the sense of rational debate, where politicians on TV and in Parliament must explicitly state their terminal goals, then propose instrumental goals, and argue about them only on the basis of evidence, effectiveness, and alliances and compromises.
I was thinking of something more in that ballpark, though not particularly in terms of explicit goals; more in terms of the content of political debates (candidate vs. candidate, or politician vs. journalist), where cheap shots, simplifications, righteous indignation and misdirection would be less effective, and nuance, complex models and discussions of tradeoffs and incentives would be more effective than they are now.
Complex models provide more room for complex rhetorical and logical maneuvers that trick or mislead your opponent in the debate.
If two people debating publicly are dishonest, willing to lie or mislead when they can get away with it, and are not trying to refute their own argument the way a truth-seeking rationalist would, then increasing their intelligence only improves their techniques, it doesn’t force them to be more honest. Unless you think that with higher intelligence, defense will become stronger than offence (i.e. it will become harder to decieve than to expose deception and prove it to a third party observer).
I’m not claiming the politicians would be more honest, I’m claiming we would see less idiotic arguments, which to my eyes counts as “more reasonable political debate”.
If two people debating publicly are dishonest, willing to lie or mislead when they can get away with it, and are not trying to refute their own argument the way a truth-seeking rationalist would, then increasing their intelligence only improves their techniques, it doesn’t force them to be more honest.
Again, the biggest effects doesn’t come from improving their intelligence, but improving the public’s intelligence: even if those two people stay completely dishonest, a smart public shifts the topics they can talk about; instead of birth certificates and conspiracy theories and Jesus they can talk about fiscal policy and other substantive issues (even if they lie just as much as before!).
So instead of idiotic arguments, they’d be presenting cunning, apparently sane arguments that are actually full of misleading lies and traps. I prefer the idiotic arguments—at least then I can easily tell they’re wrong, and they’re not wasting anything but the time spent arguing.
Why do you think know high IQ is correlated with reasonable politics?
The Bryan Caplan link by Carl Shulman below and some other similar material. Plus, it takes some time to go through arguments. Even that level of input requires factors that are generally associated with a high IQ.
You want to be an asteroid miner? Why? That sounds even less fun, and more dangerous, than an ordinary miner.
Sorry, an old childhood dream surfaced here. My more general point about greater choice of occupations holds.
That’s a convenient assumption. Why do you think know high IQ is correlated with reasonable politics? Maybe it’s just correlated with being better at the dark arts.
You want to be an asteroid miner? Why? That sounds even less fun, and more dangerous, than an ordinary miner.
The biggest effect would be from the IQ increase in voters, not in politicians.
There’s an arms race between politicians and voteres. The politicians try to convince the voters to vote for them, promising to do something while in office. The voters try to correctly predict what they will really do once in office.
If both sides become smarter, then the techniques both sides use improve. The politicians become better at convincing and lying, and the voters become better at predicting behavior and perhaps detecting lies.
Why would this lead to more reasonable debate? Let’s make sure we think of the same thing when we say “reasonable”.
You might be thinking of reasonable in the sense of rational debate, where politicians on TV and in Parliament must explicitly state their terminal goals, then propose instrumental goals, and argue about them only on the basis of evidence, effectiveness, and alliances and compromises.
Or if applied to voting, you have rational voting, where voters vote based on their best prediction of politicians’ behavior in office; not e.g. on how tall they are, their party affiliation, or their speech mannerisms. They want politicians to approach the ideal of making every decision in office the way the voters would want it made.
Or you might be thinking of reasonable in the sense of “moderate”, so that opinions you label as “unreasonable” would be less represented than they are today. Fewer politicians who are religious, or anti-science, or whatever.
I don’t see strong evidence that higher IQs would lead to any of these results.
http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2010/10/intelligence_ma.html
It’s true that intelligence is strongly correlated with political opinion—both the opinions listed in that article, and other ones (and political opinions tend to form clusters with strong internal correlations).
So if you select the top 10% most intelligent people today, the spectrum of opinion would be different from that of all society. And perhaps it would also be narrower, meaning no new extremist opinions would emerge that are at merely 1% today but happen to be held by 10% of the 10% most intelligent people.
But it’s not clear to me how much of that correlation would go away if you control for all the other factors that intelligence is also correlated with, and that would still be varying in a higher-intelligence society. For instance intelligence is correlated with wealth, status, certain social circles. It’s correlated with certain political affiliations beyond those examined by the article you link to, and political affiliations tend to clump into highly correlated clusters.
Being conscious of one’s own high intelligence is probably correlated with respecting intelligence as such, and hence respecting the opinions of other people known to be intelligent; whereas being conscious of having low intelligence is probably correlated with anti-intelligence (anti-rational, anti-science) beliefs. (Which partly explains why more intelligent people agree more with economists, who are high-status on the intelligence scale. After all, the study doesn’t say that intelligent people independenly came up with the same conclusions as economists. At least I assume it doesn’t, since it’s behind a paywall.)
Some of my uncertainty is merely a matter of how we construct our counterfactual intelligent society, so let’s take a concrete example. Suppose all new people born starting tomorrow will have the mean IQ of their parents + 40%. Would the current correlations between intelligence and political opinion win over the current correlations between the political opinions of parents and their children, or of children growing together in communities with uniform political opinions? I don’t feel I have enough evidence for a high degree of confidence here.
The data from twin studies and intrafamily correlations suggest that their political beliefs would change substantially, but their partisan affiliation not so much. This would change policy by changing what wins primaries in parties, and what parties fight over vs agree on.
That isn’t especially related to my original point, because it seems specific to the current structure of U.S. politics; it’s not very applicable to countries that don’t have a few large long-lived political parties. For instance, in Israel, many people were born before the establishment of the state, and no party has survived since then.
We need to look at aspects of U.S. political belief to make good U.S.-specific predictions. And in that, you are surely better informed than I am. So I accept your conclusion that in that context, intelligence is causative of rational and of moderate beliefs. But the specific reasons and dynamics that lead to that seem highly contigent.
Yes, the first-past-the-post geographical constituency system has quite different effects on partisan structure than many other electoral systems, and other countries have more fluid partisan identity.
“So I accept your conclusion that in that context, intelligence is causative of rational and of moderate beliefs.”
I think the belief point holds much more broadly. Similar studies have been done with data about other political beliefs from European countries, e.g. by people in Deary’s lab in the U.K.
I was thinking of something more in that ballpark, though not particularly in terms of explicit goals; more in terms of the content of political debates (candidate vs. candidate, or politician vs. journalist), where cheap shots, simplifications, righteous indignation and misdirection would be less effective, and nuance, complex models and discussions of tradeoffs and incentives would be more effective than they are now.
Complex models provide more room for complex rhetorical and logical maneuvers that trick or mislead your opponent in the debate.
If two people debating publicly are dishonest, willing to lie or mislead when they can get away with it, and are not trying to refute their own argument the way a truth-seeking rationalist would, then increasing their intelligence only improves their techniques, it doesn’t force them to be more honest. Unless you think that with higher intelligence, defense will become stronger than offence (i.e. it will become harder to decieve than to expose deception and prove it to a third party observer).
I’m not claiming the politicians would be more honest, I’m claiming we would see less idiotic arguments, which to my eyes counts as “more reasonable political debate”.
Again, the biggest effects doesn’t come from improving their intelligence, but improving the public’s intelligence: even if those two people stay completely dishonest, a smart public shifts the topics they can talk about; instead of birth certificates and conspiracy theories and Jesus they can talk about fiscal policy and other substantive issues (even if they lie just as much as before!).
So instead of idiotic arguments, they’d be presenting cunning, apparently sane arguments that are actually full of misleading lies and traps. I prefer the idiotic arguments—at least then I can easily tell they’re wrong, and they’re not wasting anything but the time spent arguing.
The Bryan Caplan link by Carl Shulman below and some other similar material. Plus, it takes some time to go through arguments. Even that level of input requires factors that are generally associated with a high IQ.
Sorry, an old childhood dream surfaced here. My more general point about greater choice of occupations holds.