In order to plumb the very lowest depths of irrationality, you have to be an intellectual. The low IQ people may go to church and sing and believe vaguely in God and then go home and be no worse off for it, but the most brilliant scholars of the Church invented transubstantiation and decided that the filioque and the apostolic succession would be grounds for religious wars.
This is very true. Smart people can be crazy in ways that less intelligent people would never manage to rationalize. Looking at past and present human societies one begins to appreciate the real downside of the ruling classes tendency to be being above average when it comes to intelligence..
I recommend the book http://www.amazon.com/What-Intelligence-Tests-Miss-Psychology/dp/030012385X on this topic. I don’t remember tests measuring aspects of “rationality” were uncorrelated with IQ tests, but they were not highly correlated. Higher IQ people do do better at “rationality” tests when they are prompted with a description of rational behavior, but otherwise they do not do much better.
There is? On average you would expect individual of IQ 75 to be about as rational as individuals of IQ 140? That seems like a stretch.
In order to plumb the very lowest depths of irrationality, you have to be an intellectual. The low IQ people may go to church and sing and believe vaguely in God and then go home and be no worse off for it, but the most brilliant scholars of the Church invented transubstantiation and decided that the filioque and the apostolic succession would be grounds for religious wars.
This is very true. Smart people can be crazy in ways that less intelligent people would never manage to rationalize. Looking at past and present human societies one begins to appreciate the real downside of the ruling classes tendency to be being above average when it comes to intelligence..
I recommend the book http://www.amazon.com/What-Intelligence-Tests-Miss-Psychology/dp/030012385X on this topic. I don’t remember tests measuring aspects of “rationality” were uncorrelated with IQ tests, but they were not highly correlated. Higher IQ people do do better at “rationality” tests when they are prompted with a description of rational behavior, but otherwise they do not do much better.
http://lesswrong.com/tag/whatintelligencetestsmiss/