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Comment by brundolf | Hacker News Reader

Seeing a lot of self-congratulatory nodding here

I'll just say, this doesn't necessarily line up with my experience. The extremely intelligent people I know are every bit as likely to be politically intolerant as the less-intelligent people I know. They just have different reasons (overconfidence in their own logic/education, in their mental modeling, in the stupidity of the other side, etc)

Would be curious to see a study where one high-IQ group is shown a fictional study with this conclusion and one isn't

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In corner A, a published and peer reviewed N=2408 study that tracks political tolerance and its stability over several years across two countries.

In corner B, your personal qualitative impression of your immediate acquaintance group.

Is it possible that your skepticism is itself an example of overconfidence?

Skepticism can lead to hypothesis which can lead to new studies which can be superior to previous studies

Sure. There's nothing wrong with saying "this is counterintuitive to me, and I think it's worth exploring with an open mind why my mental model and the study diverge." But it's not really an interesting contribution to the dialogue to say "meh, I don't buy it" without any kind of followup. What are we meant to do with that?

Good job that’s not what they did then, I suppose.

They gave examples of why they’re skeptical, theories about what might be causing those discrepancies, and proposed an experiment for how to tease that out. You are meant to engage with what they actually wrote.

N=2408 members of the Danish military or mechanical Turk participants, in a paper with one citation but a huge amount of retweets, in the time of the replication crisis. How is this paper credible?

In the replication crisis, psychology and sociology papers replicated about 30-35% of the time IIRC. In your experience, do random internet comments have a higher or lower chance of being true?

As a random internet commenter, I think I face a bit of a paradox when answering this question. Do you, a random internet commenter, think this is a good paper? Should I believe you and the other people here? Should I look at how many upvotes this has on HN and see it as a sign of credibility, when all the upvotes come from random internet people?

I think evaluating credibility by placing a paper in the evidence pyramid is generally a good idea. I don't think the replication crisis is a reason to outright dismiss a paper, but certainly skepticism before replication is always warranted. I think one should also always be skeptical of how universal one's own experience truly is.

I think I'd place this paper alone only a hair above someone's qualitative judgement, on the evidence pyramid, to be honest.

I don't know. It features thousands of data points from different groups in two different countries showing the same trend. That's substantially more compelling than anecdotes IMO, even after tempering expectations due to the replication crisis, but to each their own.

The only reason we're seeing it is because a largely untrained audience decided to upvote it, because it matches their anecdotal experience enough that they think it's a good paper.

As another random internet commenter, I anecdotally find that the least tolerant people I know are indeed substantially dumb.

Thus, whatever probability you assign, between this comment and the original equally valid one contradicting it, we can derive no information, and must therefore rely on the study as the tiebreaker, however suspect we find it.

Some of the (outwardly?) most tolerant people I know are quite dumb, and I know many extremely intelligent people capable of tremendous feats of abstract thought who are both very tolerant and very intolerant.

This is an unreplicated social science paper. It’s worth approximately the paper it isn’t printed on.

> Seeing a lot of self-congratulatory nodding here

I mean yeah...you see that in every HN thread though.

More intelligent people base on data, statistics and facts often than less intelligent ones, which are driven by emotions, feelings and intuition. And data are often against political tolerance/correctness. That's my opinion.

I don't want to be too abrasive, but are you sure they are actually more intelligent, and not just more confident in their own intelligence?

Yes, I have in mind people that I know quite well (several of whom I've worked with)

The biggest predictor I've seen for political tolerance is exposure (or lack of) to those they disagree with (in non-political contexts). It's really easy to demonize people you've never gotten to know or develop rapport with as an individual, multifaceted person. And demons don't need political rights

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