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What are good moral and epistemic frameworks for unintelligent people?
One of the issues I keep coming back to is the unspoken assumption a lot of society have that stupidity is a moral failure. That being stupid means you are a bad person, and if you were a better person you would just be smarter. I suppose a blank slatist has to believe this, because they believe everyone has the same potential and therefore if you aren't intelligent it's an intentional failure on your part.
I wholeheartedly reject this. Clearly intelligence is at least part genetic. Some people are just born dumb and it's not their fault. Further, looking at people makes it obvious that intelligence is not the same thing as morality. They're probably positively correlated, but that correlation is not 1, and it's much closer to 0 than it is to 1. There are a lot of really nasty evil smart people, and a lot of kind, wholesome, good people who are dumb as a sack of bricks but somehow brighten the lives of the people around them. I've been friends with several unintelligent people, and I would gladly take them over some college educated scammy salesman or woke busybody. It is obvious to me from empirical evidence that unintelligent people can be good people. But how? How do you reliably determine what is good and bad when everyone is disagreeing on what those mean, and are smarter than you? How does someone with an IQ of 80 ensure that they're actually being a good person and not just being manipulated by virtue signalers?
I think that Humility and/or Fealty is a partial answer. Humility being you don't get yourselves involved in politics or culture warring and just act locally on things that have obviously good first order effects. Work hard, be kind to people, contribute to charities. And most importantly, don't go around lecturing people about morality because you know you are wrong all the time and thus have low confidence in all of your beliefs. Fealty being you pick a person or people smarter than you who seems genuinely kind and you put your trust in them. Whenever complicated moral dilemmas come up you ask them for advice and trust their opinions. The danger here is if you put your faith in the wrong people then you end up just as bad as they are. Being maximally humble and loyal with a random target to trust should allow someone to approximate an average morality (if they choose truly randomly), but also adds the risk of being taken advantage of if the person knows you're trusting them and is a bad person.
Religion is also a partial answer. Many of the unintelligent but kind people I've known have been Christians. You take the teachings and the community around it, learn from it, and trust it. It's harder to be led astray by copying individuals if there's a textual basis for what good and bad means. But even then, this is still subject to issues. There are a lot of different interpretations for what each line means, what's literal and what's metaphorical, and a lot of different variants even within one religion. Someone who just blindly goes to church and believes whatever they're told to believe is likely to end up a better person on average than someone of equal intelligence who just thinks for themselves, but they still risk ending up in a cult or supporting a corrupt pedophile, or just ending up in an evil religion if we're taking enough of an outside view and considering this globally. How does the unintelligent person who isn't good at logical or moral reasoning tell the difference between a good church and a bad church?
Overall I think my question is underspecified, because I'm not entirely sure how to properly adopt an outside view here and set aside my own personal beliefs about what is good and consider a general principle that's simple enough for someone who isn't already me and is less intelligent than me to use to eventually arrive at some approximation of goodness (which I believe is equal to my specific beliefs about what is good, even if I don't always live up to them). But it's not sufficient to just say "do things that seem good." because that doesn't always work. How does someone without the sophistication to understand second order effects not just get one-shot by virtue signallers who sacrifice the greater good in favor of optics and first order appearances?
While I don't disagree that clever evil people exist (nor unintelligent but kind-hearted people), I would caution you that your perceptions of the relative frequency of both is heavily contaminated by selection effects and the availability heuristic.
From the perspective of media coverage, an idiot who's violent and can't be reasoned with is a dog-bites-man story in a very literal sense: many violent people are so because they're literally too stupid to understand the harm their actions cause. By contrast, evil geniuses are man-bites-dog stories: writers of fiction and journalists alike can't get enough of intelligent people who outwardly seem normal and civilised but who are really vicious and cruel. It follows that a given news outlet will devote far more attention and column inches to the crimes and misdeeds committed by intelligent and seemingly civilised people than they will to the crimes committed by idiots. There are ideological reasons for this (progressive outlets don't want to pay much attention to the crimes committed by idiots lest their readers draw conclusions favourable to HBD; for reasons of slave morality/sour grapes, unsuccessful people of either political stripe love to hear stories confirming their belief that everyone who's more successful than them is a moral mutant, especially if they're also a member of the Other Tribe), but even leaving these aside, an intelligent and seemingly civilised person who's secretly a vicious sociopath is just a more incongruous (hence compelling) story on its face than an uncivilised idiot who's also a vicious sociopath. "Intelligent sociopath" is a man-bites-dog story; "idiotic sociopath" is a dog-bites-man story; "intelligent, law-abiding person who works hard and pays his taxes" is not even a story at all, but I dare say a much higher proportion of law-abiding people are above-average in intelligence than vice versa. A person whose model of the world is based on consuming mainstream news outlets could very easily end up with a radically skewed impression of how much crime is committed by intelligent people, as opposed to the reality that the overwhelming majority of violent crime is committed by a very small number of repeat offenders who are none too bright.
Even allowing that you know some kind-hearted but unintelligent people, you certainly aren't seeing the most unintelligent people (unless you work in a care home for people with Down's syndrome), and the unintelligent people you do know are heavily selected for kind-heartedness and responsibility. The Darwin Awards were set up to collect darkly amusing stories about people who inadvertently improve the genetic fitness of the population by selecting themselves out of the gene pool through acts of catastrophic stupidity. Along the same lines, prisons heavily select for idiots. (The latter point, in itself, does not prove a correlation between stupidity and criminality: there might be no correlation at all, and the ones who find themselves in prison are merely those stupid enough to get caught.) It follows that the unintelligent people you know are not a representative cross-section of the entire demographic, but selected for those who are law-abiding and who aren't careless enough to, say, point a loaded gun at their genitals with their finger resting on the trigger. I think it's reasonable to assume that a person who's careless about their own welfare will tend to be careless about other people's welfare, ceteris paribus.
Lastly, I want to talk about the Breakfast Question. For those unfamiliar, an anonymous poster on 4chan claimed to be a psychology researcher who was part of a team conducting intelligence tests in prisons, one of which concerned counterfactual hypotheticals: "If you hadn't eaten breakfast this morning, how would you feel right now?" Many respondents were simply unable to answer the question, insisting that they did have breakfast this morning. It's amusing watching people conduct informal replications of this "study" on social media and receiving similar results. For me, the interesting part of the post was after the titular question, when the poster hypothesised that many inmates in prison were so lacking in intelligence that they literally lacked the imaginative capacity to place themselves in another person's shoes and imagine how they would feel. Expecting these people to empathise with another person was as unreasonable a demand as expecting them to do calculus.*
Obviously this is just an anonymous 4chan post and we have no good reason to believe that the author is who he claims to be, nor that the results of the study he described are accurate, nor that the study itself even exists. Nonetheless, it is a fairly well-established finding in developmental psychology that theory of mind is not innate and must be actively, consciously taught to young children, and that some people (most notably, the severely autistic) really are too unintelligent to ever grasp the concept. (This is also why, as noted by @ymeskhout, unintelligent people make for bad liars: they lack the imaginative capacity to put themselves in another's shoes and thereby construct a lie that would seem convincing to someone in that position.) But the idea that a certain floor of intelligence is a prerequisite for empathy is a disquieting one, and punctures many of our intuitions about the orthogonality of intelligence and morality. How can you possibly expect someone to treat other people as they themselves would like to be treated when, through no fault of their own, they literally cannot imagine what it would be like to be another person?
*Last Friday I mentioned @naraburns's review of Freddie deBoer's The Cult of Smart, and there was one passage that really stuck with me:
The effect size for IQ-vs-getting-caught is pretty huge, and it runs the whole IQ gamut, and it can't be solely selection bias. There aren't enough unsolved violent crimes for every IQ decile to be committing them at the rate of the lowest one!
There's got to be some selection bias, sure. I wonder what we could do to actually estimate how the discrepancy between "criminality" and "convictions" varies with IQ. Plot IQ vs "time and crimes elapsed before getting caught", then try to fit a distribution that would give us a "hasn't gotten caught yet" tail size to estimate? I doubt we have enough data. It would probably vary from crime to crime, too - e.g. how much of the lower clearance rate for property crimes vs violent crimes is "more violent crimes have a witness and are naturally easier to clear", and how much is "smarter criminals stick to crimes where there won't be a witness"?
Even a definite correlation between stupidity and criminality wouldn't necessarily imply a correlation between stupidity and evil. It's possible that smarter evil people tend to avoid getting caught, not by planning the perfect crime, but by realizing the expected value of the crime is negative (both because they're better at such estimation and because they tend to have more socio-economic status giving them more to lose) and just not committing it. Such people would still be evil in the sense that they'd do evil if they could definitely get away with it, but since they can't they just don't try.
I know some psychologists have done studies where they ask people "if you could [do something evil] and be 100% confident that you would face no punishment for it, would you do it?" It would be trivial to plot their responses against their SAT score and see if any correlation presented itself. But such a study would have all the weaknesses of any comparable survey: just because someone says they would/wouldn't do something, doesn't mean they would/wouldn't really do it if they found themselves in such a hypothetical.
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