This kind of thing makes me wish that all the rational people could club together and go have a country of their own, and leave the irrational people to reap what they sow.
Of course, in a sense, that has already happened. We call the countries where the irrational people live “the third world”.
[Poor institutions that result from certain kinds of cognitive or knowledge deficits or cultures that are not conducive to civilization working very well are, in my opinion, the real reason why these countries have failed to get anywhere. Perhaps not idential with rationality, but certainly related]
People in third world countries are certainly less well educated, but I don’t think it’s clear that either the leaders or the general populace are notably less rational than people in the first world on average. They have a lot less to work with, after all, and while first world voters and leaders make plenty of bad decisions, they have a safety net of prosperity to cushion them from any disasters resulting.
We’ve got people in the first world claiming that condoms are morally wrong, that they don’t prevent HIV, that AIDS is not caused by HIV, and so on. Those claiming that they don’t prevent HIV or that AIDS is not caused by it are marginalized because the populace is better educated, and probably also because it’s not so big a problem here as to motivate simply hiding from it. The populace in the third world is less educated, and so has less reason to see this as a defiance of evidence, and the leaders both tend to be less well educated than those in the first world, and have more problems that are likely to be intractable, and so they’re motivated to question the data. When you look at how recently first world politicians have been denying anthropogenic climate change, it doesn’t look like we set a much higher standard, our failures simply aren’t as visible.
“certain kinds of cognitive or knowledge deficits or cultures that are not conducive to civilization working very well”
it’s not really less-wrongian irrationality that is the problem, as such. Irrationality is the wrong word. It’s something more general than that: it’s whether the individuals’ brains are wired in a way that is conducive to civilization working well. Irrationality is a special case.
If a government is run on bribes to the extent that people with low and middle level jobs have to collect bribes because that’s the only way they can pay the bribes required by their superiors, it doesn’t sound like a problem with the way their brains are wired.
Bribes, let us not forget, are a “conspiracy against the public” , i.e. they are negative sum.
That people support a regime where negative sum games are par for the course is, in fact, a problem with the way their brains are wired. In the first world we go to great lengths to emphasize the immorality of bribary and corruption, and to punish it.
We understand a lot more about the relationship between ideas and behavior than we understand about the relationship between brain wiring (by which I assume you mean the way neurons are connected) and behavior.
Of course, in a sense, that has already happened. We call the countries where the irrational people live “the third world”.
I would call it »more« or »less« rational. All one needs is some degree of it in some people, and more ignorance of the rest. Compare that to place where people who could read were killed (as in Cambodia during revolutionary times), or were books are burned just for being books. Being left alone is really really helpful.
I wonder what a place made up of rational people would look like. So far I have doubts it actually would work.
For one it is really hard to create a homogeneous community. The libertarians try for a while, and maybe you can by a seastead some day. But you would still give up a lot.
Then there is no real need to have a society consisting only of rationalists. There are many jobs that do not need a full blown rational person, so you always have some other people doing stuff. Probably a majority. You need some great minds in the right places, that is all.
Then there is the tendency that great minds often have trouble getting things done and this. Very bright people I met often achieve things because of their respective support network that takes care of more mundane things.
I experienced the occasional talk out while putting some project together, when action was required.
From the other angle I wonder how much reason can actually be implemented on a wider scale. I get the impression a lot of advancement was achieved by pumping the right cached ideas into the population.
And then you meat decent programmers who are creationists, or into homeopathy.
I think that the greatest barriers to creating an above-average IQ, above average rationality society are realpolitik-based, rather than some theoretical failing about how smart people can’t do practical stuff.
Think about it on the margin. Garret Jones has basically porved from existing data that +1 IQ point = +15% GDP per capita (or something of that form).
I’d expect that an average score increase of +0.1 on the cognitive reflection test would have a similarly large effect on getting rid of creationism, bad economic policies like protectionism, etc.
Well, this is why it seems like a silly idea to me.
If a society restricted to higher-IQ people would be richer, then everybody would want to join it. You’d have to get pretty draconian about keeping people out. Never mind that starting new countries is nearly a fantasy idea in the modern world. (Yeah, I know, if you will itit is nodream).
On the other hand, if we developed ways to biologically enhance human IQ, even a little, I’d see it as a public health measure. There’s also eugenics, I suppose, but I doubt most residents in democracies want to be part of a Bene Gesserit breeding program.
And if you wanted an organization restricted to the rational, there’s always the possibility of founding a university that admitted people on non-standard principles. Instead of looking for leadership, extracurriculars, etc., which basically selects for affluence and cooperativeness, you could actually just give a battery of tests and require students to write an essay that proves they can think rationally.
Most countries keep immigrants out fairly well, that’s not the problem.
The problem is, as you say, that you just can’t found a country.
As for a “rational” university, it is probably not big enough to internalize the benefits of rationality.
Really the question is “what is the most feasible group that would internalize the benefits of rationality and thereby prove empirically that rationality works?”
There’s a much more obvious link between the majority of third world countries, which is that until recently they were colonies. And quite a lot of previously third world countries have “got somewhere”, the more appropriate comparison is between these and the countries that have maintained or further declined from their colonial status, not between the victors and losers of the massively economically significant wars of the preceding centuries. And for that matter the various first world countries that failed to “get anywhere” relative to others in the same position as them at the beginning of the 20th. But to take the India’s failure to completely recover from the economic damage of the 19th century as evidence that they would never have got anywhere in the first place is, well, the just world phenomenon doesn’t quite cover it. Compare say, Italy, India, France and the DRC. Which have a political culture conducive to growth, and which ones have a history of famines, invasions and repressive governments conducive to poverty? Because as far as I can see, these two factors are only loosely correlated, and the latter is a much more significant predictor of third world status than the former.
more obvious link … which is that until recently they were colonies
I call BS on this. I think it is used pervasively as an excuse which panders to left-wing white guilt, but doesn’t actually do any explanatory work. E.g. America was once a colony (and had good growth not too long after), Hong Kong was a colony until 1999, Vietnam was until recently a colony but now has GDP growth that most first world countries would be proud of. Israel was until recently a colony, populated by people who have been until recently harshly persecuted, and to boot got invaded several times by surrounding hostiles. Yet has excellent GDP per cap, growth, etc. South Korea was until recently a colony. etc etc.
And one African country that didn’t start off as a colony, Liberia, is an utter disaster, having displayed the usual sequence of coup, civil war, dictatorship and ethnic tensions. Many Liberians live on less than $1 per day.
The independence of Ethiopia was interrupted by the Second Italo-Abyssinian War and Italian occupation (1936–1941).[67] During this time of attack, Haile Selassie appealed to the League of Nations in 1935, delivering an address that made him a worldwide figure, and the 1935 Time magazine Man of the Year.[68] Following the entry of Italy into World War II, British Empire forces, together with patriot Ethiopian fighters, officially liberated Ethiopia in the course of the East African Campaign in 1941, while an Italian guerrilla campaign continued until 1943.
Ethiopia is arguably another example of a non-colonized state, since it was only invaded and occupied for a few years. If we define that as colonization the same can be said of most of Eastern Europe, which would bolster your position even more.
I’d like to point out that America (i.e. the USA, and most other nations on the continent) are “successful colonies”: the colonizers have killed the natives (USA) or driven them out or made them into economically second-class citizens (Israel), and the financial success belongs to the colonists.
Whereas in African colonies, the natives have taken economic and political control, and the economic failures are theirs.
You need to explicitly dislaim any possibility of a racist/eugenicist connotation, at least I would say it wise to. Not for me, but for others reading.
Colonisation is the link between third world countries, not the common thread of their poverty, which varies massively within this group as we both pointed out, and I’m quite open to the idea that the post-colonial performance of these countries is down to cultural and institutional factors. But third world status is defined by their economic position at the start of the Cold War, at which point the majority of these countries were only just gaining independence. It’s ridiculous to assert their positions here were due to the culture of groups that were at best an advisory body to colonial administrators, rather than differences in colonial regimes. And culture being influenced heavily by economics, it is difficult to draw a line between these starting positions and the cultural structures that developed, or for that matter to see what purpose it serves except to “pander to left wing white guilt” (what does this even mean, is anticolonialism a primarily white phenomenon where you come from?)
That said, your using America and Vietnam as counterpoints to my argument suggests that we may be talking at cross-purposes somewhat.
Okay actually lets try and reel this in, this is how I see this conversation:
1) You claim that third world countries are an example of irrational collections of people, citing their poor economic performance as evidence
2) I point out that many third world countries have seen very good economic performance since gaining independence, and their low absolute wealth is more easily explained by their poor or negative performance under colonialism.
3) You point out that many third world and first world countries have performed well post-independence, and give one example of a country that did well under colonial rule as well.
4) I concede* that intra-Third World performance may be due to cultural/institutional factors, while reiterating that the First/Third world differences are a legacy of 19th century wars, both economic and military.
Can you see any failures of communication or understanding here? I don’t see how your response at 3 backs up your point at 1, so one of us must have misread the other.
*I feel the need to point out that this is implicit in my response at (2) though I would hope the obvious wrongness of the converse would make this obvious.
Are you sarcastic? Is there some UN body or other collection of idiots that is actually going around using “Third World” to describe whatever countries are in need of it’s poverty reduction mechanisms, or something like that? The term has always been understood to mean those countries that were neutral in the fight between the First and Second worlds during the Cold War, on account of their new independence. If what you meant was poverty in countries correlates well with cultural and institutional barriers to growth well, I have no quarrel with that, though that “in a sense” bit in your original post is doing a lot of work. But third world properly refers to a set of states which contain some of the most rational state-craft in the world, certainly better than some countries whose membership in the first world seems, at this point, to be mostly a matter of historical accident, though I’m aware that this is basically code for “set of circumstances I don’t yet understand”.
I genuinely didn’t know that the third world meant “those countries that were neutral in the fight between the First and Second worlds during the Cold War,”.
According to wikipedia, “The term continues to be used colloquially to describe the poorest countries in the world.”, which was what I meant. The cold war is ancient history now, so I guess I’m just too young to have come across the former meaning.
Well I could name you states whose leaders I admire but am wary about dragging this conversation even deeper into mind-killer territory than it already is, I think the more salient point is that few commentators would have difficulty coming up with a list, whether it’d be composed of Asian tigers or Kerala and Bolivia or BRIC (though I’m uncertain if Brazil was ever considered Third World). The difference in membership between the political category of the third world and the colloquial one is evidence of good governance in the former.
This kind of thing makes me wish that all the rational people could club together and go have a country of their own, and leave the irrational people to reap what they sow.
Of course, in a sense, that has already happened. We call the countries where the irrational people live “the third world”.
[Poor institutions that result from certain kinds of cognitive or knowledge deficits or cultures that are not conducive to civilization working very well are, in my opinion, the real reason why these countries have failed to get anywhere. Perhaps not idential with rationality, but certainly related]
People in third world countries are certainly less well educated, but I don’t think it’s clear that either the leaders or the general populace are notably less rational than people in the first world on average. They have a lot less to work with, after all, and while first world voters and leaders make plenty of bad decisions, they have a safety net of prosperity to cushion them from any disasters resulting.
look for: african countries, and statements of their respective health ministers about aids and/or condoms
We’ve got people in the first world claiming that condoms are morally wrong, that they don’t prevent HIV, that AIDS is not caused by HIV, and so on. Those claiming that they don’t prevent HIV or that AIDS is not caused by it are marginalized because the populace is better educated, and probably also because it’s not so big a problem here as to motivate simply hiding from it. The populace in the third world is less educated, and so has less reason to see this as a defiance of evidence, and the leaders both tend to be less well educated than those in the first world, and have more problems that are likely to be intractable, and so they’re motivated to question the data. When you look at how recently first world politicians have been denying anthropogenic climate change, it doesn’t look like we set a much higher standard, our failures simply aren’t as visible.
I repeat:
“certain kinds of cognitive or knowledge deficits or cultures that are not conducive to civilization working very well”
it’s not really less-wrongian irrationality that is the problem, as such. Irrationality is the wrong word. It’s something more general than that: it’s whether the individuals’ brains are wired in a way that is conducive to civilization working well. Irrationality is a special case.
I’m not sure exactly what you’re claiming here.
If a government is run on bribes to the extent that people with low and middle level jobs have to collect bribes because that’s the only way they can pay the bribes required by their superiors, it doesn’t sound like a problem with the way their brains are wired.
Bribes, let us not forget, are a “conspiracy against the public” , i.e. they are negative sum.
That people support a regime where negative sum games are par for the course is, in fact, a problem with the way their brains are wired. In the first world we go to great lengths to emphasize the immorality of bribary and corruption, and to punish it.
Why frame it as a matter of brain wiring rather than as holding false beliefs?
Because false beliefs are a special case of “brain not wired correctly”. And the latter covers other important factors, such as:
cultural mores surrounding how things ought to be run, e.g. democracy, upholding integrity of institutions, free markets, rule of law
lower/higher IQ
lower/higher cognitive reflectiveness
religiosity and anti-science tendencies
loyalty or lack thereof to the nation-state,as opposed to the tribe
We understand a lot more about the relationship between ideas and behavior than we understand about the relationship between brain wiring (by which I assume you mean the way neurons are connected) and behavior.
I would call it »more« or »less« rational. All one needs is some degree of it in some people, and more ignorance of the rest. Compare that to place where people who could read were killed (as in Cambodia during revolutionary times), or were books are burned just for being books. Being left alone is really really helpful.
I wonder what a place made up of rational people would look like. So far I have doubts it actually would work.
an interesting question. I am curious, why do you think it wouldn’t work?
First some fictional evidence.
For one it is really hard to create a homogeneous community. The libertarians try for a while, and maybe you can by a seastead some day. But you would still give up a lot. Then there is no real need to have a society consisting only of rationalists. There are many jobs that do not need a full blown rational person, so you always have some other people doing stuff. Probably a majority. You need some great minds in the right places, that is all.
Then there is the tendency that great minds often have trouble getting things done and this. Very bright people I met often achieve things because of their respective support network that takes care of more mundane things.
I experienced the occasional talk out while putting some project together, when action was required.
From the other angle I wonder how much reason can actually be implemented on a wider scale. I get the impression a lot of advancement was achieved by pumping the right cached ideas into the population. And then you meat decent programmers who are creationists, or into homeopathy.
Lets collect some ideas on how to achieve it.
I think that the greatest barriers to creating an above-average IQ, above average rationality society are realpolitik-based, rather than some theoretical failing about how smart people can’t do practical stuff.
Think about it on the margin. Garret Jones has basically porved from existing data that +1 IQ point = +15% GDP per capita (or something of that form).
I’d expect that an average score increase of +0.1 on the cognitive reflection test would have a similarly large effect on getting rid of creationism, bad economic policies like protectionism, etc.
Well, this is why it seems like a silly idea to me.
If a society restricted to higher-IQ people would be richer, then everybody would want to join it. You’d have to get pretty draconian about keeping people out. Never mind that starting new countries is nearly a fantasy idea in the modern world. (Yeah, I know, if you will it it is no dream).
On the other hand, if we developed ways to biologically enhance human IQ, even a little, I’d see it as a public health measure. There’s also eugenics, I suppose, but I doubt most residents in democracies want to be part of a Bene Gesserit breeding program.
And if you wanted an organization restricted to the rational, there’s always the possibility of founding a university that admitted people on non-standard principles. Instead of looking for leadership, extracurriculars, etc., which basically selects for affluence and cooperativeness, you could actually just give a battery of tests and require students to write an essay that proves they can think rationally.
Most countries keep immigrants out fairly well, that’s not the problem.
The problem is, as you say, that you just can’t found a country.
As for a “rational” university, it is probably not big enough to internalize the benefits of rationality.
Really the question is “what is the most feasible group that would internalize the benefits of rationality and thereby prove empirically that rationality works?”
There’s a much more obvious link between the majority of third world countries, which is that until recently they were colonies. And quite a lot of previously third world countries have “got somewhere”, the more appropriate comparison is between these and the countries that have maintained or further declined from their colonial status, not between the victors and losers of the massively economically significant wars of the preceding centuries. And for that matter the various first world countries that failed to “get anywhere” relative to others in the same position as them at the beginning of the 20th. But to take the India’s failure to completely recover from the economic damage of the 19th century as evidence that they would never have got anywhere in the first place is, well, the just world phenomenon doesn’t quite cover it. Compare say, Italy, India, France and the DRC. Which have a political culture conducive to growth, and which ones have a history of famines, invasions and repressive governments conducive to poverty? Because as far as I can see, these two factors are only loosely correlated, and the latter is a much more significant predictor of third world status than the former.
I call BS on this. I think it is used pervasively as an excuse which panders to left-wing white guilt, but doesn’t actually do any explanatory work. E.g. America was once a colony (and had good growth not too long after), Hong Kong was a colony until 1999, Vietnam was until recently a colony but now has GDP growth that most first world countries would be proud of. Israel was until recently a colony, populated by people who have been until recently harshly persecuted, and to boot got invaded several times by surrounding hostiles. Yet has excellent GDP per cap, growth, etc. South Korea was until recently a colony. etc etc.
And one African country that didn’t start off as a colony, Liberia, is an utter disaster, having displayed the usual sequence of coup, civil war, dictatorship and ethnic tensions. Many Liberians live on less than $1 per day.
Ethiopia is arguably another example of a non-colonized state, since it was only invaded and occupied for a few years. If we define that as colonization the same can be said of most of Eastern Europe, which would bolster your position even more.
I’d like to point out that America (i.e. the USA, and most other nations on the continent) are “successful colonies”: the colonizers have killed the natives (USA) or driven them out or made them into economically second-class citizens (Israel), and the financial success belongs to the colonists.
Whereas in African colonies, the natives have taken economic and political control, and the economic failures are theirs.
Note also many succesful colonies in asia, e.g. Singapore, Hong Kong, postwar Japan, South Korea.
Certainly. I wasn’t commenting on your argument, but saying some of the supporting arguments are wrongly applied.
I agree with the factual content here. Though the connotation is dangerously close to racist/eugenicist.
This claim is rather unfairly discriminatory against eugenicists!
What connotation?
You need to explicitly dislaim any possibility of a racist/eugenicist connotation, at least I would say it wise to. Not for me, but for others reading.
I ask again: exactly what connotation are you talking about?
Colonisation is the link between third world countries, not the common thread of their poverty, which varies massively within this group as we both pointed out, and I’m quite open to the idea that the post-colonial performance of these countries is down to cultural and institutional factors. But third world status is defined by their economic position at the start of the Cold War, at which point the majority of these countries were only just gaining independence. It’s ridiculous to assert their positions here were due to the culture of groups that were at best an advisory body to colonial administrators, rather than differences in colonial regimes. And culture being influenced heavily by economics, it is difficult to draw a line between these starting positions and the cultural structures that developed, or for that matter to see what purpose it serves except to “pander to left wing white guilt” (what does this even mean, is anticolonialism a primarily white phenomenon where you come from?)
That said, your using America and Vietnam as counterpoints to my argument suggests that we may be talking at cross-purposes somewhat.
Okay actually lets try and reel this in, this is how I see this conversation:
1) You claim that third world countries are an example of irrational collections of people, citing their poor economic performance as evidence 2) I point out that many third world countries have seen very good economic performance since gaining independence, and their low absolute wealth is more easily explained by their poor or negative performance under colonialism. 3) You point out that many third world and first world countries have performed well post-independence, and give one example of a country that did well under colonial rule as well. 4) I concede* that intra-Third World performance may be due to cultural/institutional factors, while reiterating that the First/Third world differences are a legacy of 19th century wars, both economic and military.
Can you see any failures of communication or understanding here? I don’t see how your response at 3 backs up your point at 1, so one of us must have misread the other.
*I feel the need to point out that this is implicit in my response at (2) though I would hope the obvious wrongness of the converse would make this obvious.
I didn’t know this. I thought that it was a dynamic measure defined in terms of GDP per cap, literacy, Life-expectancy, etc.
Are you sarcastic? Is there some UN body or other collection of idiots that is actually going around using “Third World” to describe whatever countries are in need of it’s poverty reduction mechanisms, or something like that? The term has always been understood to mean those countries that were neutral in the fight between the First and Second worlds during the Cold War, on account of their new independence. If what you meant was poverty in countries correlates well with cultural and institutional barriers to growth well, I have no quarrel with that, though that “in a sense” bit in your original post is doing a lot of work. But third world properly refers to a set of states which contain some of the most rational state-craft in the world, certainly better than some countries whose membership in the first world seems, at this point, to be mostly a matter of historical accident, though I’m aware that this is basically code for “set of circumstances I don’t yet understand”.
I genuinely didn’t know that the third world meant “those countries that were neutral in the fight between the First and Second worlds during the Cold War,”.
According to wikipedia, “The term continues to be used colloquially to describe the poorest countries in the world.”, which was what I meant. The cold war is ancient history now, so I guess I’m just too young to have come across the former meaning.
Because of this confusion, I typically say “developing countries” instead of Third World.
The term I’d prefer would be “underdeveloped” countries.
I’m interested in details about this.
Singapore under Lee Kuan Yew seems a good example of a extremely well run state, though obviously it is no longer considered “third world”.
Well I could name you states whose leaders I admire but am wary about dragging this conversation even deeper into mind-killer territory than it already is, I think the more salient point is that few commentators would have difficulty coming up with a list, whether it’d be composed of Asian tigers or Kerala and Bolivia or BRIC (though I’m uncertain if Brazil was ever considered Third World). The difference in membership between the political category of the third world and the colloquial one is evidence of good governance in the former.
Of course it was. Russia is the odd one on the list since it is formerly a Second World state.