Some of you picked up on my statement a while ago that it's easier to fool educated people than poorly educated ones. Here is an discussion of that concept. poorly educated people will go for the "Occam's Razor" solution. Highly educated people are more liable to want to "nuance."
unz.com “The Difference Between Rationality and Intelligence”
Steve Sailer • September 16, 2016 • 800 Words • 26 Comments • Reply
From the New York Times:
The Difference Between Rationality and Intelligence
Gray Matter
By DAVID Z. HAMBRICK and ALEXANDER P. BURGOYNE SEPT. 16, 2016
ARE you intelligent — or rational? The question may sound redundant, but in recent years researchers have demonstrated just how distinct those two cognitive attributes actually are.
It all started in the early 1970s, when the psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky conducted an influential series of experiments showing that all of us, even highly intelligent people, are prone to irrationality.
Across a wide range of scenarios, the experiments revealed, people tend to make decisions based on intuition rather than reason.
In one study, Professors Kahneman and Tversky had people read the following personality sketch for a woman named Linda: “Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in antinuclear demonstrations.”
Then they asked the subjects which was more probable: (A) Linda is a bank teller or (B) Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement. Eighty-five percent of the subjects chose B, even though logically speaking, A is more probable. (All feminist bank tellers are bank tellers, though some bank tellers may not be feminists.)
In the Linda problem, we fall prey to the conjunction fallacy — the belief that the co-occurrence of two events is more likely than the occurrence of one of the events.
An alternative explanation is that readers assume that the authors wouldn’t be wasting their time with what would be irrelevant details if Linda isn’t a feminist. If you started to read a novel full of pointless trivia that wasn’t tied into anything else, you’d soon put it aside.
I reviewed in Taki’s Magazine Kahneman’s bestseller. I wrote in 2012,
As con men, conjurors, and comedians demonstrated long before Kahneman, most people trust in the speaker’s good faith. They play along and try to guess what is being implied. So it’s easy to pull the rug out from under us.
Back to the NYT:
But starting in the late 1990s, researchers began to add a significant wrinkle to that view. As the psychologist Keith Stanovich and others observed, even the Kahneman and Tversky data show that some people are highly rational. In other words, there are individual differences in rationality, even if we all face cognitive challenges in being rational. So who are these more rational people? Presumably, the more intelligent people, right?
Wrong. In a series of studies, Professor Stanovich and colleagues had large samples of subjects (usually several hundred) complete judgment tests like the Linda problem, as well as an I.Q. test. The major finding was that irrationality — or what Professor Stanovich called “dysrationalia” — correlates relatively weakly with I.Q. A person with a high I.Q. is about as likely to suffer from dysrationalia as a person with a low I.Q. In a 2008 study, Professor Stanovich and colleagues gave subjects the Linda problem and found that those with a high I.Q. were, if anything, more prone to the conjunction fallacy.
People with high IQs tend to be better at reading novels and making sense out of the patterns imposed by the author’s choice of details than people with low IQs.
Here’s my prediction: all else being equal, more women than men would fall for the famous Linda trick question because women are less Aspergery on average.
Based on this evidence, Professor Stanovich and colleagues have introduced the concept of the rationality quotient, or R.Q. If an I.Q. test measures something like raw intellectual horsepower (abstract reasoning and verbal ability), a test of R.Q. would measure the propensity for reflective thought — stepping back from your own thinking and correcting its faulty tendencies.
This sounds like a test of nerdishness.
Also, higher IQ people probably tend to be more trusting — high IQ environments tend to be more honest and cooperative (e.g., I noticed when I got to Rice U. that I could accidentally leave valuables, like calculators and cameras, out and not have them stolen) — and many of Kahneman’s trick questions work to trip up the trusting.
I bet the correlation between IQ and doing well on Kahneman’s puzzles goes up when the subjects are told that these are trick questions.
There is also now evidence that rationality, unlike intelligence, can be improved through training.
Sure, because what they are calling “rationality” is more like becoming harder to fool with common tricks.
For example, if you read 20 detective novels in a row, you’d probably be less likely to fall for red herring distractions in the 21st detective novel.
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