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Notes -
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.
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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