Wednesday, December 12, 2018

High IQs and the Ability to Understand Reality

In a post over at LRC titled, "Why Such Smart Jews Are Nevertheless Disproportionately Socialist," Prof. Walter Block notes that: "Ashkenazi Jews have the highest IQs of any such group. Yet, they are disproportionately socialist."

In other words, there has to be something else to properly understanding reality than high IQ. If you don't get that socialism kills, kills and kills, something is missing in your analytical skills somewhere.

High IQ may be necessary to understand complex issues but it is certainly not sufficient. My suspicion is that high IQ people, like most others, have a wire crossed somewhere when it comes to accepting all of reality when it goes against the crowd or some preconceived notion.

There needs to be more work done on this point but it would take a high IQ person that for some reason is clear of crossed wires in this realm, that is an outlier way out there on the high IQ bell curve.

You just can't take a high IQ person from the belly of the high IQ bell curve who has the crossed wires to study this. These type thinkers are the last group that will be able to understand that reality comprhension requires more than just a high IQ.

-RW 

14 comments:

  1. Was not Von Mises such a high IQ person who could explain this seeming anomaly?

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  2. They're intelligent on paper but suffer from "mind blindness." I think that's pretty well incurable.

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    1. I think you're right. It's a belief that they tie to their sense of self. So if they find out their belief (not thinking) is wrong, it means there's a problem with who they are as a person and a defensive mechanism kicks in to protect their sense of self.

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  3. Intelligent people mostly try to apply basic engineering principles to social "problems". They reason that they are intelligent, so they can simply treat everyone else as plug-in blocks on which to apply their engineering principles.

    To some extent, belief in the free market requires "faith". Faith that other people can solve problems, and/or produce things that I need or more correctly "want" without me having to get involved in anything other than the final transaction.

    I have no idea how to make toothpaste, yet I have faith that toothpaste will be available for me to buy the next time I want a tube. When it comes to more complex issues like terminal diseases, the free market may fail me, and I might die, yet I have faith that the best possible approach to someday being able to solve that issue is the "neural net" of millions of independent transactions seeking out that solution and balancing it against all the other issues people want to solve.

    Intelligent people may be intelligent, but most are too anal and controlling to trust the engineering of chaos over their standard linear engineering practices. It's as if one believes their brain is not functioning optimally, so they want to replace it with a mostly-linearly-functioning computer chip. It's the wrong engineering approach.

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    1. Intelligent people may be intelligent, but most are too anal and controlling to trust the engineering of chaos

      This can be true for logic intelligence but if you have a mix of left and right brain intellect the high intelligence can get stuck in its analyses. I have both and been there and done that. The faith in components that are not absolutes can be achieved but dialing in the focus becomes the issue.

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    2. In my grad work in the social sciences, I never once heard of praxeology.

      Mises was correct in criticising the use of natural science methods in social science. Your comment reminded me of that thought.

      There is a reason p=.05 in social science, and .01 or even .001 in the physical sciences.

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    3. You are describing the typical Progressive pretty accurately: Social engineering and central-planning by "us smart people....because we can't leave it to you Plebes and gutter-folk..."

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    4. P is lower and misleading in social science because it doesn't know the distributions of and correlations between the events it studies.
      Physical science lives in a deterministic world where p values are useful and the future is predictable.

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  4. I don't know why 19th and early 20th century industrial thinking is laid out as engineering thinking. Such thinking IMO is an indulgence of management but not particularly useful to an engineer trying to get something done. There has to be faith people will do their jobs.

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  5. Is it simply that the highly intellectual socialist, see themselves at the top of the food chain, and could care less what happens to the masses, since they enrich themselves with socialism?

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    1. Bingo. Psychological pathology through and through. It's a sort of belief in magic reinforced by vanity.

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  6. The error that hi IQ people, politicians, journalists and 18-year-olds often suffer from is the illusion that - being so smart - they see the "big picture". Having seen it, they are tempted to "adjust" it. The truth, of course is that no one sees the big picture which is why it is best to mind your own business (libertarianism in a nut shell). A mind which fits in a 6 inch wide skull just isn't big enough to run much more than a single life. That's why each body has its own mind installed and, however humble it may be, it is the best qualified to run that life. Sadly, smart people often prefer parasitism masquerading as altruism and they are often smart enough to get away with it.

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  7. Normal people seek a sense of well-being and belonging by creating various bonds within their community---i.e. their neighbors, religious institutions, fraternal clubs and associations, local community, family and extended family, local schools, etc. Robert Nisbet wrote on this in "The Quest for Community."
    Probably with busy-body, nanny-state Progressives, their own sense of belonging, well-being, and especially sense of worth, come from the ego-trip of being in lock-step with fellow social-planners and power-mongers; Their group-conceit and aggregated narcissism must be very intoxicating, very addictive indeed...

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