Yeah, the Dark Ages before 1980s were a cruel place to live.
I think it mostly works through following the connections from things and people you find on the ’net. If you consistently look for “smarter” and follow the paths to “more smarter” X-), you’ll end in the right area.
I tried this, and maybe I was doing it wrong or maybe just not persistently enough, but essentialy my findings were of two kinds:
1) Instead of “rational smart” I found “clever smart” people. The kind that has a huge raw brainpower, but uses it to study theology or conspiracy theories. Sometimes it seemed to me that the higher-IQ people are, the more crazy they get. I mean, most of the conspiracy theories I knew, I knew them because someone shared them on a Mensa forum, and not jokingly. Or the people who memorized half of the Bible, and could tell you all the connections and rationalizations for anything. They were able to win any debate, they had high status in their community, and they didn’t have a reason to change this.
Essentially, before I found LW, I was using a wrong keyword to google. Instead of “highly intelligent” I actually wanted “highly intelligent and rational”. But I didn’t know how to express that additional constraint; it just felt like “highly intelligent without being highly stupid at the same time”, but of course no one would understand what I meant by saying that. (Did I mean “even better knowledge of the Bible”? Nope. Oh, so “knowedge of how the illuminati and jews rule the world”? Eh, just forget it.)
2) A few (i.e. less than ten) individuals who were highly intelligent and rational, but they were all isolated individuals. Sometimes lonely and lost, just like me. Sometimes doing their thing and being quite successful at it, but admitting that most people seem stupid or crazy (they would tell it more diplomatically, of course) and it is very rare to find an exception. The latter were usually very busy and seemed to prefer being left alone, so when I suggested something like connecting smart and rational people together, there were like “nah, I don’t have time for that, I have already found my own thing that I am good at, it makes me happy, and that’s the only rational way for a smart person to have a happy life”. But I suspect it was simply “better to hope for nothing, than to be disappointed”.
This thread started with talking about establishing schools/communities/etc. of high-IQ people. Note: all high-IQ people. Now you are pointing out that IQ by itself is not sufficient—you want people with both high IQ and appropriate culture/upbringing/interests.
I wonder… but yeah, this is extremely speculative… whether the reason why high-IQ people don’t have more rationality could be analogical to why feral children don’t have better grammar skills.
That is, whether putting high-IQ people together, for a few generations, would increase the fraction of rationalists among them.
Disconnected people don’t create culture. High IQ is biological, but rationality is probably cultural.
But yeah… changing the topic, and the thread is too long already.
I don’t know about that. Social skills and culture are not rationality, they are orthogonal to rationality.
Epistemic rationality is not cultural—it’s basically science, and science is based on matching actual reality (aka “what works”) . There was a comment here recently about Newtonian physics being spread by the sword (the context was a discussion about how Christianity spread) which pointed out that physics might well have spread by cannons—people who “believe” in Newtonian physics tend to have much better cannons than those who don’t.
Instrumental rationality is not such a clear-cut case because culture plays a great role in determining acceptable ways of achieving goals. And real-life goal pursuit is usually more complicated than how it’s portrayed on LW.
people who “believe” in Newtonian physics tend to have much better cannons than those who don’t.
Yeah, I should have said “subculture” instead of “culture”. Because as long as people at the key places in the country believe in physics, they can also bring victory for their physics-ignorant neighbors.
Epistemic rationality is not cultural—it’s basically science and science is based on matching actual reality
But you still learn science at school, and some people still decide that they e.g. don’t believe in evolution, or believe in homeopathy. So although science means “matching the territory”, the opinion that “matching the territory could be somehow important” is just an opinion that some people share and others don’t, or some people use in some aspects of life and not in others, free-riding on the research of others.
No, you don’t. You learn to regurgitate back a set of facts and you learn some templates into which you put some numbers and get some other (presumably correct) numbers as output. This is not science.
the opinion that “matching the territory could be somehow important” is just an opinion that some people share and others don’t
That, um, depends. Most people believe that “matching the territory” with respect to gravity is important—in particular, they don’t attempt to fly off tall buildings. The issues arise in situations where “matching the territory” is difficult and non-obvious. Take a young creationist—will any of his actions mismatch the reality? I don’t expect so. If he’s a regular guy leading a regular life in some town, there is no territory around him which will or will not matched by his young creationist beliefs. It just doesn’t matter to him in practice.
Yeah, the Dark Ages before 1980s were a cruel place to live.
I tried this, and maybe I was doing it wrong or maybe just not persistently enough, but essentialy my findings were of two kinds:
1) Instead of “rational smart” I found “clever smart” people. The kind that has a huge raw brainpower, but uses it to study theology or conspiracy theories. Sometimes it seemed to me that the higher-IQ people are, the more crazy they get. I mean, most of the conspiracy theories I knew, I knew them because someone shared them on a Mensa forum, and not jokingly. Or the people who memorized half of the Bible, and could tell you all the connections and rationalizations for anything. They were able to win any debate, they had high status in their community, and they didn’t have a reason to change this.
Essentially, before I found LW, I was using a wrong keyword to google. Instead of “highly intelligent” I actually wanted “highly intelligent and rational”. But I didn’t know how to express that additional constraint; it just felt like “highly intelligent without being highly stupid at the same time”, but of course no one would understand what I meant by saying that. (Did I mean “even better knowledge of the Bible”? Nope. Oh, so “knowedge of how the illuminati and jews rule the world”? Eh, just forget it.)
2) A few (i.e. less than ten) individuals who were highly intelligent and rational, but they were all isolated individuals. Sometimes lonely and lost, just like me. Sometimes doing their thing and being quite successful at it, but admitting that most people seem stupid or crazy (they would tell it more diplomatically, of course) and it is very rare to find an exception. The latter were usually very busy and seemed to prefer being left alone, so when I suggested something like connecting smart and rational people together, there were like “nah, I don’t have time for that, I have already found my own thing that I am good at, it makes me happy, and that’s the only rational way for a smart person to have a happy life”. But I suspect it was simply “better to hope for nothing, than to be disappointed”.
This thread started with talking about establishing schools/communities/etc. of high-IQ people. Note: all high-IQ people. Now you are pointing out that IQ by itself is not sufficient—you want people with both high IQ and appropriate culture/upbringing/interests.
I wonder… but yeah, this is extremely speculative… whether the reason why high-IQ people don’t have more rationality could be analogical to why feral children don’t have better grammar skills.
That is, whether putting high-IQ people together, for a few generations, would increase the fraction of rationalists among them.
Disconnected people don’t create culture. High IQ is biological, but rationality is probably cultural.
But yeah… changing the topic, and the thread is too long already.
I don’t know about that. Social skills and culture are not rationality, they are orthogonal to rationality.
Epistemic rationality is not cultural—it’s basically science, and science is based on matching actual reality (aka “what works”) . There was a comment here recently about Newtonian physics being spread by the sword (the context was a discussion about how Christianity spread) which pointed out that physics might well have spread by cannons—people who “believe” in Newtonian physics tend to have much better cannons than those who don’t.
Instrumental rationality is not such a clear-cut case because culture plays a great role in determining acceptable ways of achieving goals. And real-life goal pursuit is usually more complicated than how it’s portrayed on LW.
Yeah, I should have said “subculture” instead of “culture”. Because as long as people at the key places in the country believe in physics, they can also bring victory for their physics-ignorant neighbors.
But you still learn science at school, and some people still decide that they e.g. don’t believe in evolution, or believe in homeopathy. So although science means “matching the territory”, the opinion that “matching the territory could be somehow important” is just an opinion that some people share and others don’t, or some people use in some aspects of life and not in others, free-riding on the research of others.
No, you don’t. You learn to regurgitate back a set of facts and you learn some templates into which you put some numbers and get some other (presumably correct) numbers as output. This is not science.
That, um, depends. Most people believe that “matching the territory” with respect to gravity is important—in particular, they don’t attempt to fly off tall buildings. The issues arise in situations where “matching the territory” is difficult and non-obvious. Take a young creationist—will any of his actions mismatch the reality? I don’t expect so. If he’s a regular guy leading a regular life in some town, there is no territory around him which will or will not matched by his young creationist beliefs. It just doesn’t matter to him in practice.