Frankly I think that most people have no business having confident beliefs about any controversial topics. It’s a bit weird to argue what an average IQ person “should” believe, because, applying a metric like “what is the average IQ of people holding this belief” is not something they’re likely to do. But it would probably yield better results than whatever algorithm they’re using.
Your first sentence isn’t really a sentence so I’m not sure what you were trying so say. I’m also not sure if you’re talking about the same thing I was talking about since you’re using different words. I was talking specifically about the mean IQ of people holding a belief. Is this in fact higher or not?
I concede the point (not sure if you were trying to make it) that a high mean IQ of such a group could be because of filter effects. Let’s say A is the set of all people, B ⊂ A the set of all people who think about Marxism, and C ⊂ B the set of all people who believe in Marxism. Then, even if the mean IQ of B and C are the same, meaning believing in Marxism is not correlated to IQ among those who know about it, the mean IQ of C would still be higher than that of A,, because the mean IQ of B is higher than that of A. because people who even know about Marxism are already smarter than those who don’t.
So that effect is real and I’m sure applies to AI. Now if the claim is just “people who believe in the singularity are disproportionately smart” then that could be explained by the effect, and maybe that’s the only claim the article made, but I got the impression that it also claimed “most people who know about this stuff believe in the singularity” which is a property of C, not B, and can’t be explained away.
I didn’t think you were talking about means of two different populations.… I was mainly making the point that having a population of smarter people than just an individual believing in an idea, wasn’t great evidence for that idea for that individual.
but I got the impression that it also claimed “most people who know about this stuff believe in the singularity”
I didn’t get that impression. But if you expand on what you mean by stuff we can try and get evidence for it one way or another.
Frankly I think that most people have no business having confident beliefs about any controversial topics. It’s a bit weird to argue what an average IQ person “should” believe, because, applying a metric like “what is the average IQ of people holding this belief” is not something they’re likely to do. But it would probably yield better results than whatever algorithm they’re using.
Your first sentence isn’t really a sentence so I’m not sure what you were trying so say. I’m also not sure if you’re talking about the same thing I was talking about since you’re using different words. I was talking specifically about the mean IQ of people holding a belief. Is this in fact higher or not?
I concede the point (not sure if you were trying to make it) that a high mean IQ of such a group could be because of filter effects. Let’s say A is the set of all people, B ⊂ A the set of all people who think about Marxism, and C ⊂ B the set of all people who believe in Marxism. Then, even if the mean IQ of B and C are the same, meaning believing in Marxism is not correlated to IQ among those who know about it, the mean IQ of C would still be higher than that of A,, because the mean IQ of B is higher than that of A. because people who even know about Marxism are already smarter than those who don’t.
So that effect is real and I’m sure applies to AI. Now if the claim is just “people who believe in the singularity are disproportionately smart” then that could be explained by the effect, and maybe that’s the only claim the article made, but I got the impression that it also claimed “most people who know about this stuff believe in the singularity” which is a property of C, not B, and can’t be explained away.
I didn’t think you were talking about means of two different populations.… I was mainly making the point that having a population of smarter people than just an individual believing in an idea, wasn’t great evidence for that idea for that individual.
I didn’t get that impression. But if you expand on what you mean by stuff we can try and get evidence for it one way or another.