I think that most people who do not have severe cognitive deficiencies are capable of understanding what “efficient charities” are. I think that most people are quite capable of understanding the statement, “Ethanol will waste a lot of money and will still generate as much (or more) pollution than gasoline. To top it off, it will also raise the price of food products, both for you and for people who will actually starve as a result.” Most issues like this, one can figure out what’s going on by reading wikipedia for half an hour. Perhaps that takes a high IQ, but from my experience, when people are given clear and accurate arguments, they are generally capable of getting them. The problem is that they never bother seeking out decent arguments. They either just don’t care, or they seek out arguments that support whatever their beliefs happen to be.
In other words, the problem is not that people are stupid. The problem is that people simply don’t give a damn. If you don’t fix that, I doubt raising IQ will be anywhere near as helpful as you may think.
I think that most people who do not have severe cognitive deficiencies are capable of understanding what “efficient charities” are
I have specific empirical evidence against this point from attempting to convince people on facebook causes to instead support more efficient causes. I am considering a top-level post on it.
Well be sure to clarify if they were really trying to understand. People who do not want to understand can look a lot like people unable to understand.
How does one check for this? If someone has stated goal X and is performing action A, and I provide rock solid evidence that action B will better achieve that goal, and I am told to “shut up” etc, do we classify this as can’t or won’t?
Does this mean they don’t understand, they don’t care, or they don’t share your utility function? The fact that they disagree does not mean they don’t understand.
If a less intelligent person is presented with correct and only correct arguments, they may have a higher probability of voting in accordance with them. But often in reality they will be presented with “fake” arguments, especially by naughty politicians or religious leaders. For example, arguments like “evolution is only a theory” that are specifically designed to be persuasive without being true. Intelligence is required to tell the difference.
I’m not sure this is correct. I might endorse a statement to the effect that fluid g is necessary in order to learn the more advanced skills of distinguishing sophistry, but very few people, high-g or otherwise, actually learn such a skill.
It is probably possible for a less intelligent person to learn (to some extent) to distinguish sophistry from solid argument. But it is much easier and comes more naturally for a smart person.
The amount of mental determination required to do a task decreases as the task becomes easier; the amount of ability required to perform a task decreases as the determination to succeed increases.
I suspect that it will be easier to persuade people to take a pill that makes them smarter than to persuade them to spend months or years studying critical thinking.
But it is much easier and comes more naturally for a smart person
No, no, no! It’s harder and more difficult for a smart person to learn this, because they’re so much better at producing clever rationalizations to explain away their cognitive dissonance.
The person it’s easiest to fool is yourself, and the more IQ you have, the better you are at coming up with really convincing stupidity. Recognizing valid reasoning and forcing yourself to adhere to the standards that define it requires something IQ doesn’t measure.
“Seems reasonable” is not a valid criterion for judgment.
Your claim is factually incorrect. The ability to tell the difference between sophistry and valid arguments rests on two things: first, awareness of the standards of validity, and second, the capacity to override the convictions that come from our associative thinking and evaluate the situation rationally.
High IQ permits people to come up with very complex and sophisticated rationalizations. It doesn’t help them distinguish rationalization from rationality.
Ditto… although being ill-informed can’t help either.
I once heard a certain political figure speak at a university. He said that when he gave speeches in areas in which the majority supported his political party, explaining what problems he was trying to solve, they would simply react as a supportive audience—but when he gave speeches in areas where his party was unpopular, they also approved of him, saying that they were horrified and angry because nobody had ever told them about this problem before. He concluded by saying that a Republican is a Democrat who doesn’t know what’s going on.
Sure, but I will address rationality seperately. Consider, though, how hard it is and how long it takes to inform even a smart person about human biases.
Ethanol will waste a lot of money and will still generate as much (or more) pollution than gasoline.
As an aside, given that the pollutant du jour is atmospheric carbon, it’s worth noting that burning ethanol is essentially carbon neutral. Ethanol also means not being dependent on foreign nations run by crazy religious whackjobs.
Not that corn ethanol is a good idea overall, but it does have points to recommend it vs. petroleum. It just has… a lot of points to disrecommend it in general.
Thing is liquid fuel (oil or otherwise) is traded on a mostly open, global, market. So the price of ethanol and gasoline are both dictated to a large extent by the supply produced by OPEC. So producing ethanol can only make us “independent” in the sense that it makes OPEC/Venezuelan/Russian oil a smaller fraction of global energy production. But as long as those sources constitute a decent fraction of global production (and you can’t grow enough ethanol to change that) they can still drive up prices on a whim.
I also think the jury is still out on the carbon neutrality thing (at least as far as I can tell surveying the research)- especially if you were already growing corn or had to chop down a rain forest to get your farm land.
Seriously? Do we actually trade fuel ethanol? Why would anyone want it, and if they did, how could we compete with Brazil’s sugar cane ethanol? How odd. My impression is that the only reason corn ethanol is as cheap as gas is because of huge government subsidies to the corn growers. Perhaps the whole situation is even sillier than I realized.
Also, I think the main idea of “energy independence” is that, if it came down to it, we could switch to completely internal energy sources and tell the rest of the world to go shove it. It’d be a diplomatic stick to beat people with in the sense of “we don’t need you”, not an otherwise significant on-going economic factor.
I also think the jury is still out on the carbon neutrality thing (at least as far as I can tell surveying the research)- especially if you were already growing corn or had to chop down a rain forest to get your farm land.
The carbon in the ethanol was extracted from the atmosphere in the past couple years, burning it releases it back. That’s pretty much the definition of carbon-neutral. Pretty much the same should be the case for anything else you do with the corn, including eating it. But, you’re right, there are other considerations. Chopping down rainforest is absolutely not carbon-neutral.
My point is just that the whole energy independence thing is a red herring since energy is traded on an open market. If we suddenly had to depend only on energy produced in the U.S. the resulting price increases would be prohibitive for everyone but the military (and we already have strategic oil reserves).
The whole concept of energy independence is a political cudgel to turn energy politics into security politics by taking advantage of people’s mercantilist intuitions about resources. But in a global free market those intuitions are wrong. Strictly speaking you don’t get to decide where your energy comes from. Often it is cheaper to get it from nearby sources but it is all part of the same pricing system. So yeah, increased domestic production might make us more independent in the sense that foreign countries won’t have quite the same ability to knock prices up but there isn’t a magic line where suddenly we’re “independent”.
Lets say we have 100 oil. 50 of it is produced in the Middle East and the U.S. uses 40 but currently produces 20. The remaining 30% is produced by other countries. An OPEC embargo leaves us with 50 oil about doubling the price (for convenience, usually supply curves are exponential but I’m not an economist I don’t know what the price would really do beyond going up, a lot.). If the U.S. increases production to 40% prices pre-embargo will be lower (since we have a supply of 120) but prices will still increase by a similar amount when we lose 50 of that 120 supply leaving us with only 70 oil. If the whole world turned against us prices would triple (according to our invented price model) as we would have only 40 in supply where once we had 120.
In order to make it so the rest of the world really couldn’t affect us we’d have to be producing a preponderance of the world’s energy such that foreign embargoes would only slightly affect total supply. Either that or we embargo foreign energy imports. But we’d be independent like chopping off your legs makes you independent of bicycles. Also, I imagine if our transportation infrastructure was such that it didn’t use gasoline we’d be much better insulated from price shifts in foreign oil. Like if our cars were all solar powered or if we were taxing CO2 to a prohibitive extent already. But in those cases technology has either rendered oil irrelevant or our economy has already internalized the cost of a foreign oil embargo.
You are. I obviously haven’t thought the issue through clearly and it’s not something I care deeply about, since ethanol is silly for many other, larger reasons, therefore I won’t waste your time with further questions. Definitely moving the whole “energy independence” thing to the “I have no idea” column for now.
In short, we’re “independent” when the cost of importing fossil fuels exceeds the cost of domestic production. The two ways this can happen are drastic technological improvements, and subsidies/tariffs on fuel resulting in economically wasteful overproduction. In the US we tend to give lip service to the former while actually implementing the latter.
I think that most people who do not have severe cognitive deficiencies are capable of understanding what “efficient charities” are. I think that most people are quite capable of understanding the statement, “Ethanol will waste a lot of money and will still generate as much (or more) pollution than gasoline. To top it off, it will also raise the price of food products, both for you and for people who will actually starve as a result.” Most issues like this, one can figure out what’s going on by reading wikipedia for half an hour. Perhaps that takes a high IQ, but from my experience, when people are given clear and accurate arguments, they are generally capable of getting them. The problem is that they never bother seeking out decent arguments. They either just don’t care, or they seek out arguments that support whatever their beliefs happen to be.
In other words, the problem is not that people are stupid. The problem is that people simply don’t give a damn. If you don’t fix that, I doubt raising IQ will be anywhere near as helpful as you may think.
I have specific empirical evidence against this point from attempting to convince people on facebook causes to instead support more efficient causes. I am considering a top-level post on it.
More detail would be wonderful!
Well be sure to clarify if they were really trying to understand. People who do not want to understand can look a lot like people unable to understand.
How does one check for this? If someone has stated goal X and is performing action A, and I provide rock solid evidence that action B will better achieve that goal, and I am told to “shut up” etc, do we classify this as can’t or won’t?
Does this mean they don’t understand, they don’t care, or they don’t share your utility function? The fact that they disagree does not mean they don’t understand.
I was criticising them for behaving in a way that failed to optimally fulfill their goals. I may post some of the most classic responses.
If a less intelligent person is presented with correct and only correct arguments, they may have a higher probability of voting in accordance with them. But often in reality they will be presented with “fake” arguments, especially by naughty politicians or religious leaders. For example, arguments like “evolution is only a theory” that are specifically designed to be persuasive without being true. Intelligence is required to tell the difference.
Intelligence, while useful, isn’t what’s required in that scenario.
Skepticism, curiosity, and intellectual integrity are.
I claim that intelligence—specifically IQ - helps people to tell the difference between sophistry and genuine arguments. This seems reasonable to me.
I’m not sure this is correct. I might endorse a statement to the effect that fluid g is necessary in order to learn the more advanced skills of distinguishing sophistry, but very few people, high-g or otherwise, actually learn such a skill.
It is probably possible for a less intelligent person to learn (to some extent) to distinguish sophistry from solid argument. But it is much easier and comes more naturally for a smart person.
The amount of mental determination required to do a task decreases as the task becomes easier; the amount of ability required to perform a task decreases as the determination to succeed increases.
I suspect that it will be easier to persuade people to take a pill that makes them smarter than to persuade them to spend months or years studying critical thinking.
No, no, no! It’s harder and more difficult for a smart person to learn this, because they’re so much better at producing clever rationalizations to explain away their cognitive dissonance.
The person it’s easiest to fool is yourself, and the more IQ you have, the better you are at coming up with really convincing stupidity. Recognizing valid reasoning and forcing yourself to adhere to the standards that define it requires something IQ doesn’t measure.
“Seems reasonable” is not a valid criterion for judgment.
Your claim is factually incorrect. The ability to tell the difference between sophistry and valid arguments rests on two things: first, awareness of the standards of validity, and second, the capacity to override the convictions that come from our associative thinking and evaluate the situation rationally.
High IQ permits people to come up with very complex and sophisticated rationalizations. It doesn’t help them distinguish rationalization from rationality.
Yes, this is the key problem that people don’t really want to understand. That is the problem futarchy is intended to solve.
Agree. Or, one might say: the problem is not so much one of intelligence as one of (surprise!) rationality.
Ditto… although being ill-informed can’t help either.
I once heard a certain political figure speak at a university. He said that when he gave speeches in areas in which the majority supported his political party, explaining what problems he was trying to solve, they would simply react as a supportive audience—but when he gave speeches in areas where his party was unpopular, they also approved of him, saying that they were horrified and angry because nobody had ever told them about this problem before. He concluded by saying that a Republican is a Democrat who doesn’t know what’s going on.
More disturbingly, giving someone a list of falsehoods often causes people to later remember them as being true. (See also this Eliezer post.)
Sure, but I will address rationality seperately. Consider, though, how hard it is and how long it takes to inform even a smart person about human biases.
As an aside, given that the pollutant du jour is atmospheric carbon, it’s worth noting that burning ethanol is essentially carbon neutral. Ethanol also means not being dependent on foreign nations run by crazy religious whackjobs.
Not that corn ethanol is a good idea overall, but it does have points to recommend it vs. petroleum. It just has… a lot of points to disrecommend it in general.
Thing is liquid fuel (oil or otherwise) is traded on a mostly open, global, market. So the price of ethanol and gasoline are both dictated to a large extent by the supply produced by OPEC. So producing ethanol can only make us “independent” in the sense that it makes OPEC/Venezuelan/Russian oil a smaller fraction of global energy production. But as long as those sources constitute a decent fraction of global production (and you can’t grow enough ethanol to change that) they can still drive up prices on a whim.
I also think the jury is still out on the carbon neutrality thing (at least as far as I can tell surveying the research)- especially if you were already growing corn or had to chop down a rain forest to get your farm land.
Seriously? Do we actually trade fuel ethanol? Why would anyone want it, and if they did, how could we compete with Brazil’s sugar cane ethanol? How odd. My impression is that the only reason corn ethanol is as cheap as gas is because of huge government subsidies to the corn growers. Perhaps the whole situation is even sillier than I realized.
Also, I think the main idea of “energy independence” is that, if it came down to it, we could switch to completely internal energy sources and tell the rest of the world to go shove it. It’d be a diplomatic stick to beat people with in the sense of “we don’t need you”, not an otherwise significant on-going economic factor.
The carbon in the ethanol was extracted from the atmosphere in the past couple years, burning it releases it back. That’s pretty much the definition of carbon-neutral. Pretty much the same should be the case for anything else you do with the corn, including eating it. But, you’re right, there are other considerations. Chopping down rainforest is absolutely not carbon-neutral.
My point is just that the whole energy independence thing is a red herring since energy is traded on an open market. If we suddenly had to depend only on energy produced in the U.S. the resulting price increases would be prohibitive for everyone but the military (and we already have strategic oil reserves).
The whole concept of energy independence is a political cudgel to turn energy politics into security politics by taking advantage of people’s mercantilist intuitions about resources. But in a global free market those intuitions are wrong. Strictly speaking you don’t get to decide where your energy comes from. Often it is cheaper to get it from nearby sources but it is all part of the same pricing system. So yeah, increased domestic production might make us more independent in the sense that foreign countries won’t have quite the same ability to knock prices up but there isn’t a magic line where suddenly we’re “independent”.
Lets say we have 100 oil. 50 of it is produced in the Middle East and the U.S. uses 40 but currently produces 20. The remaining 30% is produced by other countries. An OPEC embargo leaves us with 50 oil about doubling the price (for convenience, usually supply curves are exponential but I’m not an economist I don’t know what the price would really do beyond going up, a lot.). If the U.S. increases production to 40% prices pre-embargo will be lower (since we have a supply of 120) but prices will still increase by a similar amount when we lose 50 of that 120 supply leaving us with only 70 oil. If the whole world turned against us prices would triple (according to our invented price model) as we would have only 40 in supply where once we had 120.
In order to make it so the rest of the world really couldn’t affect us we’d have to be producing a preponderance of the world’s energy such that foreign embargoes would only slightly affect total supply. Either that or we embargo foreign energy imports. But we’d be independent like chopping off your legs makes you independent of bicycles. Also, I imagine if our transportation infrastructure was such that it didn’t use gasoline we’d be much better insulated from price shifts in foreign oil. Like if our cars were all solar powered or if we were taxing CO2 to a prohibitive extent already. But in those cases technology has either rendered oil irrelevant or our economy has already internalized the cost of a foreign oil embargo.
Hopefully I’m making some sense.
You are. I obviously haven’t thought the issue through clearly and it’s not something I care deeply about, since ethanol is silly for many other, larger reasons, therefore I won’t waste your time with further questions. Definitely moving the whole “energy independence” thing to the “I have no idea” column for now.
In short, we’re “independent” when the cost of importing fossil fuels exceeds the cost of domestic production. The two ways this can happen are drastic technological improvements, and subsidies/tariffs on fuel resulting in economically wasteful overproduction. In the US we tend to give lip service to the former while actually implementing the latter.