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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2719 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 10, 2024

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Because rationalists love all things IQ, I wanted to ask something here.

Is there reason to think, and is there support for, the idea that people with low intelligence simply lack or rarely develop some of the ways of cognizing, modeling the world, modeling other people, moral cognition, granularity, etc, that highly intelligent people have? Qualitative differences, not just less speed, less depth and breadth of knowledge?

Feel free to point me at research papers or relevant chapters of books if you don't want to write at length. Thanks!

In my experience, being from a low IQ part of the world, they seem incapable of contemplating hypotheticals, "what ifs"... The only things that can be discussed are things experienced (even vicariously through movies). In general I noticed a certain difficulty with language: I need to speak simple sentences without subordinate clauses otherwise it's like their brains cannot handle the cognitive load.

This is one I hear a lot and, coming from a low IQ part of the world myself, I've never understood. It never occurred to me that people literally couldn't hold hypotheticals in their head.

There are many bits of conventional "wisdom" I see in DR circles that I can at least relate to some experience IRL, even if they're unflattering or exaggerated. This one is just totally baffling.

Maybe it's hard to tell when you're in the boiling pot because you're all low IQ and within the same range. But I've lived in the West for about an equal amount of time now and, while many other things pop out, this was not one of those things.

Well, they can contemplate hypotheticals if they already lived a certain experience, like they can answer questions like: "Would you like some tuna in your salad?" because they've already eaten tuna and already eaten salad in the past. But anything more abstract, like: "What would you do with 1 billion euro?" it's like I'm asking to interpret the fundamental metaphysical substrate of reality. The answers I receive are like: "I don't have 1 billion euro!". Ok, but can you imagine? Well, somehow they can't.

That's nothing to do with IQ, though, and more to do with being pragmatic versus being imaginative. Like, I could imagine having morbillion dollars, but what would be the point? Is there value in daydreaming about something so unlikely? Or is it just a distraction?

Like, "what Twilight character would you be" is a thought exercise. It's also a game for children who don't have anything better to think about.

One could offer the person a hundred bucks in exchange for writing an essay (of some clearly stated minimum quality) on "what would you do with a morbillion dollars". Presumably, that would offer an incentive to a pragmatic person who normally refuses to indulge into such daydreams, while accurately accessing their capacity for contemplating hypotheticals.

My experience of low IQ people is that all of them know what they would do with a billion dollars, and those that know what a euro is know what they would do with a billion of them, at least in vague terms. They might not have a great sense of the purchasing power of a billion dollars, but the idea that dumb people aren't capable of knowing what they would do if they had a large influx of cash is easily falsified. Just go talk to some hobos.

Look, I'm an HVAC tech working for a company whose clients are in large part institutional kitchens. I deal with working class blacks, who statistically have an average IQ in the low eighties with a big left tail, every day. They get hypotheticals. They're often dumb, sure, I wouldn't ask any of them for math help. And I can tell from talking to them that they're usually not the sharpest knife in the drawer(usually trouble keeping track of language or changing the subject rapidly. Especially pronouns- particularly dumb people have a lot of trouble keeping track of pronouns/antecedents). All of them can answer the breakfast question.

I strongly suspect that what's happened here is some claim about time preference ( you ask prodigal poor people "what would happen if you saved X% of your paycheck?" and they might give the correct answer but then never do it in practice or constantly have excuses) has become garbled in transmission until we get the idea that people literally cannot respond to hypotheticals.

Then I guess the segment of the poor population that favors the lottery has to be relatively high IQ, or I have even more questions.

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