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Comment by scarmig | Hacker News Reader

People like the sense that their views are coherent. Intelligent people are more likely to see how their point of view is incoherent. So they adopt points of view that are more coherent. Our world, both in its material basis and the ideology under/overlying it, is a messy hodgepodge, so those points of view tend to be radical i.e. a rejection of the existing basis of the world.

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Or they just pick the view that benefits them, with no regard to how it affects others. Smart people definitely do better in a fuck you got mine economy than dumb people.

Or they pick the view that benefits everybody but nobody wants that because they are busy exploiting something that gives them relative advantage and don't see how they would be better off if they would have less relative advantage but better commons. Smart people have historically often been left destitute for their convictions.

Smart people do better than dumb people at everything, ceteris paribus. If they didn’t then evolution would never have selected for intelligence.

I guess it depends on your definition of “doing better”, but for example in the Soviet Union the average factory worker made much more than an academic researcher, and I’d bet that academics would score better on an IQ test. So it’s definitely possible to build an economic system where lower-IQ individuals do better.

I hate to be the "source please" guy, but I can't manage to craft a search query to corroborate your claim about factory workers vs academics in the USSR. Which particular five year plan are you talking about? What kind of factory work versus what kind of researcher?

Given what I know about political infighting in the modern American academy though, I'd bet that the smart ones went to the politburo where they got to be the "who" and not the "whom" and it was the midwits at best who stuck around in the academy waiting to get shipped to the gulags for publishing something Stalin disliked.

In other words, realizing how the system actually works instead of naively believing how it's claimed to work is just another intelligence test.

Yea, related effects are well-established in politics: "elite" voters (esp as measured by education) are more coherent and thus more extremist, while the average voter is all over the map because they're not as interested in (or capable of?) having a coherent model of reality.

Or they are less willing to mutilate reality in order to try to make it fit within some intellectual/philosophical/political system.

And the more radical the system is, the more it mutilates reality in order to try to make it fit within the system.

> Or they are less willing to mutilate reality in order to try to make it fit within some intellectual/philosophical/political system.

what we are seeing a certain political leaning do these days would seem to very very strongly disprove this :)

One is an intellectual response and the other emotional. To wit, the mascot of this entire affair ..

I don't understand. Holding directly-contradictory beliefs sounds a lot more like "mutilating reality" to me.

There's some truth here, and I think it relates to the stereotype of highly intelligent people having poor social skills.

If you've carried out your ideas to their logical conclusion and reached a socially inappropriate truth, well... you're forced to decide to either self-censor, or be perceived as a nut.

Or! Find a community of nuts and fit right in.

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