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Acty
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I did a bit of googling, and it really surprised me. I thought the social science IQs would be lower on average than the STEM IQs, but I found a lot of conflicting stuff. Most sources seem to put physics and maths at the top of the ranks, but then there’s engineering, social science and biology and I keep seeing those three in different orders. If you split up ‘social science’ and ‘humanities’, then humanities stays at the top and social science drops a few places, presumably because law is a very attractive profession for smart people (high prestige and pay) and law is technically a humanity. I’m not very confident in any of my Google results, though—they all looked slightly dodgy—so I’m not linking to any and would love it if someone else could find some better data.
I don’t think it’s an argument for disregarding social science, even if we did find data that showed all social scientists are stupider than STEM scientists. I mean, education came last for IQ on almost all of the lists I looked up. Education. Nobody is going to say that this means we should scrap education. If education really does attract a lot of stupid people, I think that is cause to try and raise the prestige and pay of education as a profession so that more smart people do it—not to cut funding for schools. (Though the reason education is so lowly ranked for IQ could be that a lot of countries don’t require teachers to have education degrees, you get a different degree and then a teaching certificate, so you only take Education as a bachelor’s if you want to do Childhood Studies and go into social care/work.)
It’s clearly very important that our governments are advised by smart social scientists who can do experiments and tell them whether law X or policy Y will decrease the crime rate or just annoy people, or we’re just letting politicians do whatever their ideology tells them to do. So, even though the IQ of people in social sciences is lower on average than the IQ of people in physics, we shouldn’t conclude that social science is worthless—I think we should conclude that efforts must be made to get more smart people to consider becoming social scientists.
I also don’t think you necessarily need a high IQ to be a successful social scientist. Being a successful mathematician requires a lot of processing power. Being a successful social scientist requires a lot of rationality and a lot of carefulness. If you’re trying to do some problems with areas of circles, then you will not be distracted by your religious belief that pi is an evil number and cannot be the answer, nor will you have to worry about the line your circle is drawn with being a sentient line and deliberately mucking up your results. Social scientists don’t need as much processing power to throw at problems, but it takes a lot of care and ability to change one’s mind to do good social science, because you’re doing research on really complicated high-level things with sentient agents who do weird things and you were probably raised with an ideology about it. Without a good amount of rationality, you will just end up repeatedly “proving” whatever your ideology says.
To make physics worthwhile you need high IQ; without that, you’d produce awful physics. To make social science worthwhile, you need to be very very careful and ignore what your ideology is telling you in the back of your mind; without that, you produce awful social science. Unfortunately, our society’s ability to test for IQ is much better than our society’s ability to test for rationality, which could explain why more people get away with BS social science than they do with BS physics. (The other explanation is that there are both awful social science papers and awful physics papers, but awful physics papers get ignored by everyone, whereas awful social science papers are immediately picked up by whatever group whose ideology they support and linked to on facebook with accompanying comments in all-caps.)
Well, “providing universal healthcare and welfare will lead to a massive drop in motivation to work” is a scientific prediction. We can find out whether it is true by looking at countries where this already happens—taxes pay for good socialised healthcare and welfare programs—like the UK and the Nordics, and seeing if your prediction has come true.
The UK employment rate is 5.6%, the United States is 5.3%. Not a particularly big difference, nothing indicating that the UK’s universal free healthcare has created some kind of horrifying utility drop because there’s no motivation to work. We can take another example if you like. Healthcare in Iceland is universal, and Iceland’s unemployment rate is 4.3% (it also has the highest life expectancy in Europe).
This is not an ideological dispute. This is a dispute of scientific fact. Does taxing people and providing universal healthcare and welfare lead to a massive drop in utility by destroying the motivation to work (and meaning that people don’t work)? This experiment has already been performed—the UK and Iceland have universal healthcare and provide welfare to unemployed citizens—and, um, the results are kind of conclusive. The world hasn’t ended over here. Everyone is still motivated to work. Unemployment rates are pretty similar to those in the US where welfare etc isn’t very good and there’s not universal healthcare. Your prediction didn’t come true, so if you’re a rationalist, you have to update now.
I’m not sure this is necessarily always true. There are absolutely certainly instances of this happening, but more and more governments are adopting “evidence-led policy” policies, and I’d hope that at least sometimes those policies do what they say on the tin. The UK has this: https://www.gov.uk/what-works-network and I’m going to try and do more reading up on it to see whether it looks like it’s doing any good or just proving what people want it to prove.
It would certainly be preferable to live in a world where social scientists did good unbiased social science and then politicians listened to them. The question is, how do we change our current world into such a world? It certainly isn’t by disparaging social science or assigning it low prestige. We need to make it so that science>ideology in prestige terms, which will be really tricky.
Um, how exactly do you want to preserve older things while I want to tear everything down and build it back up again? I don’t want to tear things down. I want the trends that are happening—everything gets fairer and more liberal over time—to continue. To accelerate them if I can. (To design a whole new State if and only if it seems like it will make most people much happier, and even then I kinda accept that I’d need to talk to a whole lot of other people and do a whole lot of small scale experiments first.) None of those trends are making society end in fire. They’re just nice things, like prejudiced views becoming less common, and violence happening less. I’m trying to optimise for making people happy; if you’re optimising for something else, then I’m afraid I’m just going to have to inform you that your ethics are dumb. Sorry.
The problem with “life experience” as an argument is that people use “life experience” as a fully general counterargument. If you’re older than me, any time I say something you don’t like, you can just yell “LIFE EXPERIENCE!” and nothing I can do—no book you can suggest, nothing I can go observe—will allow me to win the argument. I cannot become older than you. This would be fine as an argument if we observed that older people were consistently right and younger people were consistently wrong, but as you’ll know if you have a grandparent who tries to use computers, this just ain’t so.
Just because you have been made jaded and cynical by your experience of the world, that doesn’t mean that jaded and cynical positions are the correct ones. For one thing, most other people of your own age who also experienced the world ended up still disagreeing with you. There’s a very good chance that I get to the age you are now, and still disagree with you. And if you observe most other people your own age with similar experiences (unless you’re old enough that you’re part of the raised-very-conservative generation) most of them will disagree with you. What is magic and special about your own specific experience that makes yours better than all those people who are the same age as you? Why should I listen to your conclusions, backed up by your “life experience”, when I could also go and listen to a lefty who’s the same age as you and their lefty conclusions backed up by their “life experience”?
Life experience can often make people a lot less logical. Traumatised people often hold illogical views—like, some victims of abuse are terrified of all men. That doesn’t mean that, because they have life experience that I don’t, I should go, ‘oh, well, I actually think all men aren’t evil, but I guess their life experience outweighs what I think’. It means that they’ve had an experience that damaged them, and we should have sympathy and try and help them, and we should even consider constructing shelters so they don’t have to interact with the people they’re terrified of, but we certainly shouldn’t start deferring to them and adopting their beliefs just because we lack their experiences. The only things we should defer to should be logical arguments and evidence.
“Life experience”, as a magical quality which you accumulate more of the more negative things happen to you, is pretty worthless. Rationalists do not believe in magical qualities.
If there is a version of the “life experience” argument that can be steelmanned, it’s “I’ve lived a long time and have observed many things which caused me to make updates towards my beliefs, and you haven’t had a chance to observe that.” But that still makes no sense because you should be able to point out the things you observed to me, or show your observations on graphs, so I can observe them too. If you observed someone being a total idiot, and that makes you jaded about the possibility of a system that requires a lot of intelligence to function, then you should be able to make up for the fact that I haven’t observed that idiocy by pulling out IQ charts or studies or other evidence that most people are idiots. If you can’t produce evidence to convince someone else, consider that your experience may be anecdata that doesn’t generalise well.
Perhaps your argument is “I’ve lived a long time and have observed very many very small pieces of evidence, and all of those small pieces of evidence caused me to make lots of very small updates, such that I cannot give you a single piece of evidence which you can consider which will make you update to my beliefs, but I think mine are right anyway.” However, even if you can’t give me a single piece of evidence that I can observe and update on, you ought to be able to produce graphs or something. Graphs are good at showing lots-of-small-bits-of-evidence-over-time stuff. If you want me to change my beliefs, you still have to produce evidence, or at least a logical argument. Appeals to “life experience” are nothing more than appeals to elder prestige.
Now, to address your actual argument. It seems to be (correct me if I misunderstand): liberal views are correct and work, but there are many stupid people in the world and liberal views don’t work well for stupid people. Stupid people need clear rules that tell them in simple terms what to do and what not to do.
But if I were going to make up a set of really clear simple rules to tell a stupid person what to do and what not to do, they would be something like: 1. Be nice to people and try not to hurt people. 2. Don’t try and prevent clever people from doing things you don’t understand. Listen to the clever people. 3. Try and be productive and contribute what you can to society.
I cannot see any evidence that adding more rules beyond those three, like, “Defer to males because male-ness is loosely correlated with prestige-wanting and protectiveness” (even though male-ness isn’t correlated with prestige-deserving, that seems about equal between genders) would do any good whatsoever. Since there are just as many stupid males as stupid females—male average IQ is actually slightly lower than female average IQ—a rule like that wouldn’t do any good, would certainly not prevent people letting young kids have cigarettes or people beating one another or anything like that, and would in fact just lead to a lot of stupid people going “oh, it must be okay to hurt and disparage females and not let them have education then” and going around hurting lots of women.
And the view of mine, that liberal views don’t hurt people and sexist/racist views do hurt people… certainly seems to fit the evidence. Liberal views are increasing over time, and crime and violence are decreasing over time. I can’t find any studies, but I predict that if we do a study, we’ll find that holding the belief “women and men are equal” is strongly correlated with being non-violent and not hurting women, and almost all of the violence and abuse cases committed against women will be by people who don’t think they are equal. Similarly, doing stupid things like giving cigarettes to children and giving away products for free will be correlated with holding conservative views—though admittedly that could just be ’cause being uneducated is correlated with holding conservative views. And because men are on average more violent and more likely to hurt people. But then, that’s a very good argument against putting them in charge, isn’t it...?
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I think to an extent, physics is more intellectually satisfying to a lot of smart people. It’s much easier to prove things for definite in maths and physics. You can take a test and get right answers, and be sure of your right answers, so when you’re sufficiently smart it feels like a lot of fun to go around proving things and being sure of yourself. It feels much less satisfying to debate about which economics theories might be better.
Knowing proven facts about high level physics makes you feel like an initiate into the inner circles of secret powerful knowledge, knowing a bunch about different theories of politics (especially at first) just makes you feel confused. So if you’re really smart, ‘hard’ sciences can feel more fun. I know I certainly enjoy learning computer science and feeling the rush of vague superiority when I fix someone’s computer for them (and the rush of triumph when my code finally compiles). When I attempt to fix people’s sociological opinions for them, there’s no rush of vague superiority, just a feeling of intense frustration and a deeply felt desire to bang my head against the wall.
Then there’s the Ancient Greek cultural thing where sitting around thinking very hard is obviously superior to going out and doing things—cool people sit inside their mansions and think, leaving your house and mucking around in the real world actually doing things is for peasants—which has somehow survived to this day. The real world is dirty and messy and contains annoying things that mess up your beautiful neat theories. Making a beautiful theory of how mechanics works is very satisfying. Trying to actually use the theory to build a bridge when you have budget constraints and a really big river is frustrating. Trying to apply our built up knowledge about small things (molecules) to bigger things (cells) to even bigger things (brains) to REALLY BIG AND COMPLICATED things (lots and lots of brains together, eg a society) is really intensely frustrating. And the intense frustration and higher difficulty (more difficult to do it right, anyway) means there’s more failure and less conclusive results / slower progress, which leads some people to write off social science as a whole. The rewarding rush of success when your beautifully engineered bridge looks shiny and finished is not something you really get in the social sciences, because it will be a very long time before someone feels the rewarding rush of success that their beautiful preference-satisfying society is shiny and perfect.
I do think that the natural sciences are hopelessly lost without the social sciences, but for most super-clever people, is studying natural science more fun than doing social science? Definitely—I mean, while the politics students are busy reading books and banging their heads against walls and yelling at each other, physics students are putting liquid nitrogen in barrels of ping pong balls so that the whole thing explodes! (I loved chemistry in secondary school for years, right up until I finally caught on that coloured flames were the closest we were going to get to scorching our eyebrows off. Something about health and safety, thirteen year olds, and fire. I wish I hadn’t stopped loving chemistry, because I hear once you’re at university they do actually let you set things on fire sometimes.)
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Eh, I’m not sure I’m an anything-ist. Socialist ideas make a lot of sense to me, but really I’m a read-a-few-more-books-and-go-to-university-and-then-decide-ist. If I have to stand behind any -ist, it’s going to be “scientist”. I want to do research to find out which policies most effectively make people happy, and then I want to implement those policies regardless of whether they fall in line with the ideologies that seem attractive to me.
But yeah, I do think that it is morally wrong to let people suffer and morally right to make people happy, and I think you can create a lot of utility by taking money from people who already have a lot (leaving them with enough to buy food and maybe preventing them from going on holiday / buying a nice car) and giving it to people who have nothing (meaning they have enough money for food and education so they can survive and try and change their situation). So I agree with taxing people and using the money to provide universal healthcare, housing, food, etc. Apparently that makes me a socialist.
Given this fact, it gives very good support to an argument like “we should scrap Masters programs in education”. But it could also give very good support to “we should try out a few variations on Masters programs in education to see if any of them would do better than the current one, and if we find one that actually works, we should change our current one to that thing. If and only if we try a bunch of different variations and none of them work, we should scrap Masters programs in education.”
I mean, if we could create a program that consistently made people better teachers, that would be a very worthwhile endeavour. If our current program aiming to make people better teachers is utterly failing, maybe we should scrap that particular program, but surely we should also have a go at doing a few different programs and seeing if any of those succeed?
Ah, I’m sorry—I actually agree with everything you just wrote. I fear I may have miscommunicated slightly in the comment you’re replying to.
You’re right, I did point that out. And I do think that it can be harder in social science to weed out the good stuff from the bad stuff, and as such, you can get reasonably far in social science terms by being well-spoken and having contacts with a similar ideology even if your science isn’t great. This is an undesirable state of affairs, of course, but I think it’s just because doing good social science is really difficult (and in order to even know what good social science looks like, you’ve gotta be smart enough to do good social science). It’s part of the reason I think I can be useful and make a difference by doing social science, if I can do good rational social science and encourage others to do more rational social science.
My point isn’t that you don’t need to be as smart to do social science; doing it well is actually harder, so you’d expect social scientists to be at least as smart as hard scientists. I think that social science and hard science require slightly different kinds of intelligence, and IQ tests better for the hard science kind rather than the social science kind.
It’s really difficult to make a formula that calculates how to get a rocket off the ground. You have to crunch a lot of numbers. However, once you’ve come up with that formula, it is easy to test it; when you fire your rocket, does it go to the moon or does it blow up in your face?
It’s really easy to come up with a social science intervention/hypothesis. You just say “people from lower classes have worse life outcomes because of their poor opportunities (so we should improve opportunities for poor people)” or “people from lower classes are in the lower class because they’re not smart, and their parents were not smart and gave them bad genes, so they have worse life outcomes because they’re not smart (so we should do nothing)” or “people from lower classes have a culture of underachievement that doesn’t teach them to work hard (so we should improve life/study skills education in poor areas)”. I mean, coming up with one of those three is way easier than designing a rocket. However, once you’ve come up with them… how do you test it? How do you design a program to get people to achieve higher? Run an intervention program involving education and improved opportunities for years, carefully guarding against all the ideological biases you might have and the mess that might be made by various confounding factors, and still not necessarily have a clear outcome? There’s not as much difficulty in hypothesis-generation or coming-up-with-solutions, but there’s a lot more difficulty in hypothesis-testing and successful-solution-implementing.
Hard science requires more raw processing power to come up with theories; social science requires more un-biased-ness and carefulness in testing your theories. They’re subtly different requirements and I think IQ is a better indicator of the former than the latter.
Meetup : Reading First Meetup!
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You make me suddenly, intensely curious to find out what a Reynolds number is and why it can make streamlining increase drag. I am also abruptly realising that I know less than I thought about STEM fields, given I just kind of assumed that astrophysicists were the official People Who Know About Space and therefore rocketry must be part of their domain. I don’t know whether I want to ask if you can recommend any good fluid dynamics introductions, or whether I don’t want to add to the several feet high pile of books next to my bed...
Okay—so why do you think quantum mechanics became more “cool” than fluid dynamics? Was there a time when fluid dynamics held the equivalent prestige and mystery that quantum mechanics has today? It clearly seems to be more useful, and something that you could easily become curious about just from everyday events like carrying a cup of tea upstairs and pondering how near-impossible it is not to spill a few drops if you’ve overfilled it.
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Hey! <retracted because I changed my mind about the sensibleness of putting personal info on the internet and more people started recognising my name than I’m happy with>