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This makes me think less of his intelligence rather than more given the NYT articles I've actually read. That paper has been incredibly suspect and dubious the entire time I've been paying attention to the media.
This is ... generously ... a severe cognitive bias on your part. There are a lot of smart people who are enthusiastic liberals. In fact, most of the smartest people at every level who are politically engaged are liberals. So it can't be a knock on someone's intelligence. If anything, by Bayes, it's weak evidence for intelligence.
Like, let's construct a pseudo-syllogism here, based on easily observable facts.
Easily observable fact 1: Most science and math professors at universities are liberals. This is easily confirmed by anecdote, or by surveys.
Easily observable fact 2: Most smart liberals read, and like, the New York Times. Also easily confirmed by anecdote.
Okay, so smart science and math professors probably read the NYT..
Now this is real life, categories and proposition don't apply to nebulous contingent phenomena in the way they do to math. Maybe university professors, still, don't read the NYT. Let's spot check: Smart math professor? Terry Tao. Social media? Mastodon. His most recent post? New York Times. Also, your suspicion of the NYT is based on the claims they make and beliefs they have, and that applies to liberal media and beliefs generally - liberal professors, even if they didn't read the NYT, would still fail your standard for intelligence.
This isn't even a partisan thing. The Daily Wire or Fox isn't more reality-based than the NYT, both have significant flaws, and a decent number of high IQ CS and engineering people still eat that up. For many reasons - alienation, incentives, lack of personal knowledge, more not worth getting into here - otherwise smart people are retarded on politics. There's a reason yud called it the mind-killer. I agree that a lot of the NYT is quite bad.
??? That has nothing to do with my objections to the NYT. It isn't the direction of the political content that I object to, but the quality of the journalism involved. My contention is that the NYT produces terrible journalism, and is largely riding on the coattails of previous generations who built up substantial "reputational capital" for the paper. Smart specialists continuing to read a paper that used to be good but is now substantially less reliable is actually exactly what I would expect to happen, given that they presumably have more important topics on their mind. The fact that the long march through the institutions happened and academia became heavily politicised in one direction is also immaterial here.
He is reporting that an event he was an important part of received an article in the NYT. I don't see anything here that supports the claim that he religiously reads the paper...but again, that has nothing to do with my original contention.
Wow, this is news to me! I was under the impression that telling your interlocutors what they actually believe was considered poor form on here, but apparently not. That said, I have to disagree (you'll have to forgive me for not posting a proper citation) - it is actually the quality of the journalism I dislike as opposed to the directionality. My own political positions are heterodox and don't map neatly onto the left/right divide, and so "Liberal professors" actually don't fail my standard for intelligence in a vacuum. There are plenty of them that would fail my standard, but it isn't because they're liberal professors.
Hm. I probably failed at 'arguing against the person you're replying to, instead of an amorphous blob of all the people on the internet making similar arguments', sorry. I still think the inference 'reads NYT religiously and loves it -> low IQ' is very very wrong, though.
Can you name another paper that has, on the whole, better journalism? I can think of a bunch of equivalents, but nothing better that isn't also much more specialized.
And more generally, I know a decent number of high-IQ people who respect the NYT, and via social media have observed a whole lot more. The easy explanation here is they don't specialize in politics and thus will be hopelessly confused about it no matter what their positions are. But even among those who dedicate their careers to politics, plenty of very smart people continue to respect the NYT. Overall, I think it should be obvious that there's no correlation, as things stand today, between IQ as confirmed by things like scientific or mathematical achievement and 'recognizing the NYT is bad'.
That said, I think I agree with your object-level claim about the NYT's journalism today, although I am not sure it was any better in the past.
I can't think of anything that isn't much more specialized either, but that does nothing to improve the NYT. If I have a choice between a map that is wrong and no map at all, then I'm going to go without the map and make my own judgements.
I think that if you tried to tie IQ to this you would actually find a really complicated morass. IQ would be a factor, but so would tribal affiliation, income, cultural context, social milieu, etc. The degree to which someone is willing to disregard pro-social illusions ("The NYT is a trustable and reliable source of information about the world") isn't necessarily correlated to IQ, but at the same time I will absolutely lower my estimation of someone who takes that paper seriously as a factual source of information about the world. A higher IQ isn't an unalloyed good, and doesn't necessarily mean that you always make the correct decision either. But if you do take the NYT seriously and view it as a useful source of true information about the world then you are displaying a lack of curiosity and discernment that makes me think less of you all the same - unless you're just so busy elsewhere with real work that you don't have the time to seriously interrogate your media diet, like Terence Tao.
Right but we've moved back from 'is liking the NYT a sign of low intelligence' to 'is there something wrong with the NYT, and the media and politics as a whole'. I think it's an observable fact about the world that most high IQ people aren't very distrustful of the media. So it shouldn't be a sign of low intelligence that you like the NYT.
You said 'This makes me think less of his intelligence rather than more given the NYT articles I've actually read'. I agree that not noticing all the intellectual contortions the NYT and other outlets do does say something bad about you relative to people who do. But it mostly isn't mediated by intelligence. I think the initial statement mixes together various different senses in which someone can be wrong in a way that creates a misleading sense that the people you disagree with do so because they're dumber. That'd be nice, because the right would win more quickly, but they aren't.
It does make one more dangerous, more able to mess things up at a large scale, but I think the good more than compensates for the bad, it enables you to do more of and more deeply everything interesting and worthwhile.
I don't think I can accept this, given that a lot of high IQ people I've known and engaged with are in fact incredibly distrustful of the media - this seems to me like a case of duelling anecdotes. I can believe that high IQ people in your cultural milieu read the NYT but no further, and that isn't enough to make your point convincing. Second, I don't necessarily think that IQ is a perfect measure of intelligence - it is one of the better ones that we have and g is clearly important in a lot of ways, but that doesn't make it the be-all and end-all. I am honestly not quite certain about my own definition of intelligence given how complicated a problem that is, but I think continuing to read a paper like the NYT and giving them credence/respect is, given their track record, stupid.
I don't actually disagree, save for the misleading part, because I think that consuming information from the NYT to the point that you read it cover-to-cover every day means that you are, in effect, dumber. If you have an IQ of 200 but that IQ only interacts with reality through a lens or paradigm that feeds you incorrect information, I feel like there's a real sense in which you're stupider than someone with an IQ of 135 who has a more accurate view of the world. Obviously IQ plays a part in how you pick up that worldview and this problem becomes insanely complicated, but fully explicating that is the sort of work I'd need to be paid to do - it would be a significant research project after all.
I don't care about the right winning. I don't think that the left/right lens produces useful information about politics anymore and my own positions on various issues fall on all sides of that spectrum.
It CAN. It can also make you more capable of messing things up at a smaller, more personal scale as well. At the same time, it means you're better at justifying your actions, even mistaken ones. This isn't even getting into the developmental trade-offs that come with it either.
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