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In that case, then what is the point of considering the hypothetical of "right for the wrong reasons" versus "wrong for the right reasons"? The former can only be right by accident, and the latter can only be wrong by some sort of mistake. Wrong reasons will inevitably conduce to wrong answers, and right reasons likewise to right answers.
Don't you just, at this point, reduce to "good and smart things are good and smart"? Well, sure, but that's not much of an insight.
In the post I was responding to, you suggested:
Okay, so, let's rephrase the hypothetical a bit.
Group A, which is small, holds position X for well-thought-out reasons.
Group B, which is also small, though larger than Group A, holds position anti-X for well-thought-out reasons.
Group C, which is very large, holds position X for poorly-thought-out reasons.
Should Group A therefore recant position X, and switch to anti-X? Why?
From the position of Group A, maybe Group C have accidentally or arbitrarily landed on a correct position. Is that a reason to turn down Group C's support? I can't see any inconsistency in Group A allying with Group C, and perhaps also aiming to better-educate Group C.
Alternatively, Group A might theorise that there's some deeper, hard-to-express wisdom that is being expressed by Group C, even if Group C are incapable of rationalising it or expressing it. This is the argument you get in The Secret of Our Success, or what concepts like the wisdom of repugnance are getting at. In Catholic theology, this is also called the sensus fidei - the people as a whole may not be able to competently express a doctrine, but they have an 'instinct' for its truth. (A famous example of this is that most lay Catholics cannot define the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, but they have an instinctive, inchoate sense that Mary is special, or in some way set apart by God for a holy task.)
Maybe you buy the idea of some sort of pre-rational folk wisdom, like SooS or the sensus fidei, but even if you don't, I do not see how the existence of Group C constitutes a reason for Group A to reconsider their views. Even if Group C picked a position completely at random, from Group A's perspective, they got lucky and picked the right position. It's certainly not evidence that position X is wrong.
You used the example of social conservatism, but I don't think you have to read this in a partisan way like that. Your post, following Hanania, seems to be written assuming that the intelligent elite will always trend liberal (for some unspecified definition of 'liberal') whereas the masses will be conservative, but that doesn't seem to empirically always be the case. Even on the example he used, sexuality, the masses have switched sides and now the opposite seems to be true - in the West nowadays, position X is pro-LGBT, and it's Group B who are anti-gay. (The intellectual gap is visible as well! Group A, the intellectual pro-LGBT camp, are now the ones who've dived into queer theory and trans liberation and family abolition. Group C, the masses, are the ones who say 'sure, let them marry, don't care one way or the other'.)
But generally and more broadly, it is true that there are sometimes liberal or progressive positions embraced by the masses, while smaller intellectual groups are against them. I don't think you can universally generalise. The masses adopt all sorts of positions - maybe sometimes arbitrarily, sometimes through being honestly persuaded, maybe sometimes due to messy, organic cultural revolution - and I do not consider the fact that the masses hold a particular position to be an argument against that position.
On the individual level, of course you should always try to hold your positions for the right reasons. That goes for everyone. But the existence of large numbers of people who hold the same position for the wrong reasons should not invalidate your reasons, nor cause you any kind of intellectual crisis.
You're right, the hypothetical doesn't really work to begin with. Good reasoning and intelligence are specifically measures meant to reflect the ability to get the correct answers.
Groups with bad reasoning and right answers are broken clocks, they were just lucky. Groups with good reasoning and bad answers are not fools, they are just unlucky.
For instance imagine someone trying to calculate how far a bullet will go, and an idiot says "one inch" randomly cause he doesn't understand gunpowder and thinks the bullet will slide out of the chamber. The genius does a bunch of math, but is blind and doesn't know there's a wall right in front of the gun stopping the bullet.
The idiot is correct from luck, the genius is incorrect from luck. We should not want to be the idiot, because the idiot will be wrong in every other bullet calculation.
That's true to some degree, but a lot of populist beliefs held by the masses are not even particularly left or right leaning to begin with among the general population! Like price controls sound as though they should be left leaning, but look at the major conservative states and they have it too..
A divide among intellectual elites does not necessarily reflect a divide among the general populace.
If smart people trend towards X and dumb people trend towards Y, and everything else you know about it is equal you should go with X. Yes smart people can sometimes be wrong too, but if intelligence doesn't reflect a general ability to get things more correct more often, then we have a bad measurement of intelligence. It shouldn't overwrite all sense and reason you have obviously (especially since often the correct answer is nuanced and can differ based off the situation like how in a video game a top tier character might be top tier because of high execution that a lower rank player can't do, and therefore the character is actually weak in low ranks), but you really should trend towards what smart people do and say.
All other things being equal, that's a reasonable heuristic. If the only things you know about X and Y is that smarter people go for X, then it makes sense to tentatively go for X.
I would suggest, however, that this is only a loose heuristic. I think most people implicitly do something like that anyway - if we don't know about an issue ourselves, we tend to go with the opinions of people we trust.
That said, if you have come to a conclusion yourself, independently, and it turns out that some dumb people also hold that conclusion, I don't think that should cause you to worry.
The last point I'd suggest would be that 'smart' and 'dumb' are not always easily measurable qualities. Most of the time you don't have the ability to stop a conversation and administer a bunch of IQ tests, and while intelligence is surely real, the cultural construction of intelligence is unreliable. In practice "go with what the smart people think" is a heuristic that will encourage conformity with your society's visible intellectual elite, whether that's scientists or priests or natural philosophers or Marxist bureaucrats. It's too easy to think of scenarios where it would hush up much-needed dissent.
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This reasoning leads to the conclusion that a bunch of people you probably don't enjoy calling high intelligence are high intelligence. (Donald Trump seems to have gotten ahead in life far more than the average Mottizen has.) Or else it leads you to say "actually, looking at results isn't enough because they could still get lucky" in which case you just contradicted your own thesis, and also need a measure of intelligence that is not about getting results. (IQ tests?)
Wouldn't your standards require that you conclude black people are low in intelligence?
First of all general trends are general. Rich people can also become rich by things like sports/acting talent/looks/etc. Saying rich people are generally smarter doesn't mean saying a top quarterback must be super bright.
Also of course aging. People's mental facilities slow down and change over the years. You can see this with Biden for instance, in 2008 he was a perfectly normal sounding politician and in 2024 he had the famous dementia brain fart. Trump might have been a genius in the past for all I know, it doesn't mean he is now at 80 years old.
But also yes, Trump is generally smarter than a lot of people. For instance, his protectionism is really stupid and goes against basically everything ever observed in economics. His fanbase is equally dumb (if not worse) for thinking Trump tariff policy would be good.
The general population are price control loving NIMBY populists, Trump being one too doesn't make him especially dumb, it makes him normal dumb.
These are general trends, there is plenty of overlaps and exceptions. The line of best fit shows a strong positive correlation between success and IQ, but there are plenty of outliers of smart people with low success or dumb people with high success (like again, many top athletes)
In general black people do in fact tend to trend less intelligent.
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