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.
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.