An obvious objection would be that smart people would have in many cases common interests
Huh, that’s not what I expected. I expected (okay, hoped for) the analogy to politics, where people at different levels of intelligence are actually solving different problems, leading to a breakdown of the assumptions.
How come? If you mean they would solve different problems due to different levels of education, or income, I think the regression analysis was meant to handle those. If you have another thing in mind, I’m afraid I don’t understand you.
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.
Ah! Indeed, without the distributions—from dumb to smart -, one can’t be much certain. However, in many (if not all) cases he doesn’t merely calculate what the smart vote is. He analyses and interprets it, and in a very artful way (the guy is smart), although sometimes art is not really necessary, e.g. as in an graph of an increasing monotonical dumb-smart function.
Anyway, you do raise an obvious problem: even if a graph dumb-smart represented something like a monotonic function, how would one know that, after a while, eg. at the 300 IQ point, there isn’t going to be a radical change?
That we cannot measure intelligence reliably after a certain point does not imply that there are not (infinite?) levels of intelligence after it. There are certainly—at least theoretically—levels of fluid intelligence that correspond to IQs of 170, 180, 300..., and it was in this theoretical sense that I raised my question.
Huh, that’s not what I expected. I expected (okay, hoped for) the analogy to politics, where people at different levels of intelligence are actually solving different problems, leading to a breakdown of the assumptions.
How come? If you mean they would solve different problems due to different levels of education, or income, I think the regression analysis was meant to handle those. If you have another thing in mind, I’m afraid I don’t understand you.
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.
I would have said “intra-tribe”.
Ah! Indeed, without the distributions—from dumb to smart -, one can’t be much certain. However, in many (if not all) cases he doesn’t merely calculate what the smart vote is. He analyses and interprets it, and in a very artful way (the guy is smart), although sometimes art is not really necessary, e.g. as in an graph of an increasing monotonical dumb-smart function.
Anyway, you do raise an obvious problem: even if a graph dumb-smart represented something like a monotonic function, how would one know that, after a while, eg. at the 300 IQ point, there isn’t going to be a radical change?
Current IQ tests are pretty meaningless past >160, so as long as this works in the 70-160 range, we’re fine.
That we cannot measure intelligence reliably after a certain point does not imply that there are not (infinite?) levels of intelligence after it. There are certainly—at least theoretically—levels of fluid intelligence that correspond to IQs of 170, 180, 300..., and it was in this theoretical sense that I raised my question.