Suppose I am a smart person and I prefer to associate with smart people. As a result of this, I see evidence everywhere that being smart is anticorrelated with all the other things I care about. (And indeed that they are all anticorrelated with one another.) As a result of this, I come to have a “bias against general intelligence”.
What happens then? Aren’t I, with my newly-formed anti-g bias, likely to stop preferring to associate with smart people? And won’t this make those anticorrelations stop appearing?
First, I don’t necessarily know that this bias is strong enough to counteract other biases like self-serving biases, or to counteract smarter people’s better ability to understand the truth.
But secondly, I said that it creates the illusion of a tradeoff between g and good things. But g still has things that gives it advantages in the first place, since it’d still generally correlate to smart ideas outside of whatever thing one is valuing.
But also, I don’t know that people are being deliberate in associating with similarly intelligent people. It might also have happened as a result of stratification by job, interests, class, politics, etc.. Some people I know who have better experience with how social networks form across society claim that this is more what tends to happen, though I don’t know what they are basing it on.
First, there’s nothing very special about g here. If I tend to associate with smart people, socialists and sadomasochists[1], doesn’t this argument suggest that as well as starting to think that smart people tend to be sexually repressed fascists I should also start to think that socialists are sexually repressed and stupid, and that sadomasochists are stupid fascists? Shouldn’t this mechanism lead to a general disenchantment with all the characteristics one favours in one’s associates?
[1] Characteristics chosen for the alliteration and for being groups that a person might in fact tend to associate with. They aren’t a very good match for my actual social circles.
There’s the special thing that there is assortment on g. That special thing also applies to your examples, but it doesn’t apply to most variables.
Generally: points taken. On the last point: there may not exactly be assortment on other variables, but surely it’s true that people generally prefer to hang out with others who are kinder, more interesting, more fun to be with, more attractive, etc.
As you select for more variables, the collider relationship between any individual variable pair gets weaker because you can’t select as strongly. So there’s a limit to how many variables this effect can work for at once.
My argument (I think) bypasses this problem because 1. there’s a documented fairly strong assortment on intelligence, 2. I specifically limit the other variable to whichever one they personally particularly value.
First, I don’t necessarily know that this bias is strong enough to counteract other biases like self-serving biases, or to counteract smarter people’s better ability to understand the truth.
But secondly, I said that it creates the illusion of a tradeoff between g and good things. But g still has things that gives it advantages in the first place, since it’d still generally correlate to smart ideas outside of whatever thing one is valuing.
But also, I don’t know that people are being deliberate in associating with similarly intelligent people. It might also have happened as a result of stratification by job, interests, class, politics, etc.. Some people I know who have better experience with how social networks form across society claim that this is more what tends to happen, though I don’t know what they are basing it on.
There’s the special thing that there is assortment on g. That special thing also applies to your examples, but it doesn’t apply to most variables.
Generally: points taken. On the last point: there may not exactly be assortment on other variables, but surely it’s true that people generally prefer to hang out with others who are kinder, more interesting, more fun to be with, more attractive, etc.
As you select for more variables, the collider relationship between any individual variable pair gets weaker because you can’t select as strongly. So there’s a limit to how many variables this effect can work for at once.
My argument (I think) bypasses this problem because 1. there’s a documented fairly strong assortment on intelligence, 2. I specifically limit the other variable to whichever one they personally particularly value.