My contention with rational and irrational beliefs lies in the source of such beliefs;
- something is rational by nature if it is directed towards its goals
- beliefs are probablistic judgements about the world based on an aggregate assessment of personal feelings, other feelings', personal bias, encounter rate of experiences, knowledge obtained and researched, general theories of
how the world works, general theories of how things behave and operate, and the general principles behind phenomena
- personal feelings are value judgements made after re-iterative interactions with entities, and other entities, which is mediated by agreeableness, propensity to conformity/desire to belong, outgroup/ingroup-ness
- encounter rate of experience(s) are dependent on the availability of such classes of experiences, and the rate at which one continues to seek such experiences (which can lead to bifulcations/extremes [i.e. echo chambers])
- knowledge obtained/researched/filtered are dependent on the credibility of such sources, the reasoning processes behind the schemas of such purported knowledge and the extent to scrutiny of filtration of such knowledge
- general theories of how things behave and work are dependent on a cognitive and social component
thus a rational belief is a constructed belief that is rooted in an abductive reasoning process between inferred links of circumstantial information generalized from the associations made upon stumbling them
(i.e. a body was found dead near Y, and you find someone near there with a hoodie 'yo kill ditz' and has some blood on his clothes and they seem plausibly dull enough to not have run/escaped from the vicinity immediately, or
you followed a lineage of beliefs espoused by some families and you infer their moves following their actions preceding them thereafter generations later)
an irrational belief is a constructed belief that is rooted in feelings that do not reflect the nature or the valence of assigned entities to a particular association (i.e. The states is doing X -- states is BAD|GOOD,
or I romanticize the stars/existence of extra-sensory beings to associate with anything good/bad I feel regardless because just so)
If you never encounter counterfactual material, you cannot develop an effective 'c-theory' unless you actuate a mental model of the processes and abdicate some effort in processing the c-theories that are counterfactual
to MSM (which is also another latent factor). Interest levels affect discovery rates/inclinations towards knowledge obtainment/filtration of said knowledge which affects the belief level.
It makes the most sense to have a neutral (neither tilt) or slight if you have a slight valence association to such entity for any belief as a rational belief or rational entity.
The degree of your belief should increase in proportion to the amount of positive (confirming) and negative (disaffirming) evidence that you encounter after reasoning about both available evidence and their credibility/conflict of interests,
if second or third-hand sources. A general knowledge of the mechanics between processes of anything makes it much easier to judge what is, and what is not -- misdirection is most applied at partial truths/or giving partial models/projections
without substantiated reasoning.
The intelligentsia/slightly more intelligent population are more subject to indoctrination because they have more status to lose for not agreeing with their peers, hence have a higher groupthink bias.
The beliefs they hold that are the most irrational tend to be the nature characterized by a generalized model of how things operate, and their convincing belief in such models even if the presuppositions or assumptions are wrong,
about what is actually meaningful.
The unintelligent also have a disposition to associate through emotivity but lack the ability to comprehend models, so their disposition of irrational believes tend to reside in the reverance or worship of rules, objects, gods,
abilities, classes of people to whatever holds the most immediate meaningful reward/power/harm.
The highly highly intelligent are more impartial if they have a higher degree of disagreeability as they have an inclination to systemize everything and scrutinize every detail, and tend to be unorthodox in their thinking methods
to reach conclusions, which also means more associations between disparate experiences, which can lead to a higher degree of conspirational judgements, given they have a more detailed mental model of the processes underlying
the motives behind individuals; if they have a paranormal belief it is likely metaphysical in nature or philosophically rationalized, rather than because they experience a few coincidences and labelled it as 'divine' or 'god did it'.
i.e. consider for 911, X has Y boxcutters, X has never flown planes (or instructors said they flew at beginner level), all camera footage disappeared beforehand, we know Gov't did have an operation Northwood document before (negative valence). Probability that precisely X entities did it is unlikely would be a rational belief given such information.
If anything in my view, it is rational to hold a negative belief about Z entities if such entities are noted to have diminished trust through known defections before, and the magnitude of such defections are significant, even if one does not know how such actions arise about such Z entities although the more specific the claims, the more evidence is required and vice versa (ambiguous) affords more degree of leeway to assign cui bono targets. Reasoning by 'who benefits' usually works amongst humans because our brains are hard-wired to make emotional associations, because people behave consistently in a manner that is observed in the past, and that includes large entities.
It is not a statistical analysis, so I don't know the margins of difference. Since IQ correlates highly with rationality, you would need to measure this in all participants to determine an accurate number related to autism.
The reason that males and autistic people (who have an extreme male brain) are more rational, is because males do not require as much group strategy. Cognitive biases are almost all related to maintaining group membership (groupthink, reputation management) or increasing social standing within the group (illusory superiority, tall poppy syndrome).
Females are less rational because they have less food and bodily autonomy, while autistics are more rational because they have greater food and bodily autonomy (solitary forager hypothesis).
As a woman with an above average (not genius) level IQ, I agree with this article 100%. I have a hard time being around women, honestly, because they are too emotional, want to be liked, and come off as disingenuous (not all, but most I've met.) The world is a disaster because women have decided that their career, their self, and their money are more important than their children or a commitment to their family. No one is raising their kids, they are paying others to "watch" them. Huge difference. In my opinion, rational thinking should be required to run companies, countries, and to vote. IQ plus Rationality is the winning makeup for success. Also, just to throw this in...when you have men now saying they are real women, the affirmative actions, the protections, the irrational, emotional movements include anyone and everyone. They are disastrous.
Trying to publish a study that "proves" men are more rational than women is a trap. Similar to studies about IQ and race. You'll be cancelled. What we can study are more neutral topics and there are a lot of studies done on this.
Studying voting patterns is perfectly fine and there are lots of them. Women tend to vote for more government intervention in everything. They want government to fix their problems. Women support universal basic income more than men. Childless single women especially support far left policies.
As for rationality, just look at the who goes to psychics, palm readers and taro cards and reads horoscopes. That customer base is almost entirely women.
It seems reasonable to me that what you're referring to as "rationality" here can actually be decomposed into what I'm going to call explicit vs. implicit rationality.
Explicit rationality would be something like "How rational are you when you're given an explicit logical problem that you're trying to solve consistently/rationally/optimally?". This is the type of skill that I personally know a lot of STEM-type people would be quite good at.
Implicit rationality would be like how rational or self-consistent their day-to-day views are that aren't explicitly being challenged, and I think this is where we all know a smart person who is not rational. A reason for this could be status quo bias to conformity (there may be wisdom to crowds but not rationality).
This idea of implicit rationality is also cohesive with your viewpoint of autism tending to more rationality, since autists tend to reject status quo bias, don't value conformity for its own sake if it doesn't make sense etc.
On a personal note when I was a teenager it deeply intrinsically bothered me that I could have inconsistencies in my logic and I adopted a natural self-doubt/check to make sure that all my opinions were congruent with each other (and also stayed this way as I learned more and they changed over time). This is probably because of autism on my part, but this is exactly the type of thing I don't think every smart person does.
Economists are social scientists, and they are divided by ideology even among respectable mainstream types, plus they have a terrible ability to predict things, so I don't know why you think people should take Economist opinions too seriously.
For example, you say that higher government spending is bad for economic growth, but this is disputed at best, and obviously false at worst. One could argue that Denmark basically proves that is not true. If you compare the Nordics with the Anglos, two very cooperative NW European groups, and one with lower taxes than the other, the Anglos are not richer than the Nordics, which is the opposite of what you would expect if government spending is bad for economic growth. The US is the only richest Anglo, but there are other things going on with the US in particular. In fact, looking at NW Europeans in general, there don't seem to be significant differences based on government size.
One of the failure modes of rationalism is to imagine that people use their reason to determine what they believe in when in fact most normies just follow the beliefs of their peer group which is usually a pretty rational thing to do.
So asking if someone believes in astrology is pointless unless you know if their peer group believes in astrology or not. If someone believes in astrology and her peer group does not maybe you have something. Otherwise you are just measuring how popular certain ideas are to various demographics.
There is positive correlation between social liberalism and IQ. I remember noah karl have paper about it. And i guees there is positive correlation woke ideology and IQ in international level.
Most of prominent socialist were males in history. Socialism rose in 19/20th century before cognitive dsygenic process in high IQ countries(europe/east asia).
Great post. As you pointed out, there's quite a bit of evidence that women are more likely to support astrology, homeopathy, and other unscientific stuff.
How is disagreeing with the government/corporatate controlled
monopoly on common sense irrational? Many "conspiracy theories" are true and rational, so this is a poor proxy for rationality. The phrase "conspiracy theory" itself was invented to describe anyone who thought Oswald didn't act alone, which would describe 80% of the population then.
For the record it's obvious the CIA and/or their allies killed JFK. Oswald himself had tons of CIA contacts.
Also if Christians are so irrational why are there so many of them, and why do they reproduce do much more than non religious people? Clearly "rational" people aren't smart enough to come up with an alternative framework of reality to encourage their own continued existence. I love how "high IQ" people are too stupid to have kids and propagate their IQ lol
My contention with rational and irrational beliefs lies in the source of such beliefs;
- something is rational by nature if it is directed towards its goals
- beliefs are probablistic judgements about the world based on an aggregate assessment of personal feelings, other feelings', personal bias, encounter rate of experiences, knowledge obtained and researched, general theories of
how the world works, general theories of how things behave and operate, and the general principles behind phenomena
- personal feelings are value judgements made after re-iterative interactions with entities, and other entities, which is mediated by agreeableness, propensity to conformity/desire to belong, outgroup/ingroup-ness
- encounter rate of experience(s) are dependent on the availability of such classes of experiences, and the rate at which one continues to seek such experiences (which can lead to bifulcations/extremes [i.e. echo chambers])
- knowledge obtained/researched/filtered are dependent on the credibility of such sources, the reasoning processes behind the schemas of such purported knowledge and the extent to scrutiny of filtration of such knowledge
- general theories of how things behave and work are dependent on a cognitive and social component
thus a rational belief is a constructed belief that is rooted in an abductive reasoning process between inferred links of circumstantial information generalized from the associations made upon stumbling them
(i.e. a body was found dead near Y, and you find someone near there with a hoodie 'yo kill ditz' and has some blood on his clothes and they seem plausibly dull enough to not have run/escaped from the vicinity immediately, or
you followed a lineage of beliefs espoused by some families and you infer their moves following their actions preceding them thereafter generations later)
an irrational belief is a constructed belief that is rooted in feelings that do not reflect the nature or the valence of assigned entities to a particular association (i.e. The states is doing X -- states is BAD|GOOD,
or I romanticize the stars/existence of extra-sensory beings to associate with anything good/bad I feel regardless because just so)
If you never encounter counterfactual material, you cannot develop an effective 'c-theory' unless you actuate a mental model of the processes and abdicate some effort in processing the c-theories that are counterfactual
to MSM (which is also another latent factor). Interest levels affect discovery rates/inclinations towards knowledge obtainment/filtration of said knowledge which affects the belief level.
It makes the most sense to have a neutral (neither tilt) or slight if you have a slight valence association to such entity for any belief as a rational belief or rational entity.
The degree of your belief should increase in proportion to the amount of positive (confirming) and negative (disaffirming) evidence that you encounter after reasoning about both available evidence and their credibility/conflict of interests,
if second or third-hand sources. A general knowledge of the mechanics between processes of anything makes it much easier to judge what is, and what is not -- misdirection is most applied at partial truths/or giving partial models/projections
without substantiated reasoning.
The intelligentsia/slightly more intelligent population are more subject to indoctrination because they have more status to lose for not agreeing with their peers, hence have a higher groupthink bias.
The beliefs they hold that are the most irrational tend to be the nature characterized by a generalized model of how things operate, and their convincing belief in such models even if the presuppositions or assumptions are wrong,
about what is actually meaningful.
The unintelligent also have a disposition to associate through emotivity but lack the ability to comprehend models, so their disposition of irrational believes tend to reside in the reverance or worship of rules, objects, gods,
abilities, classes of people to whatever holds the most immediate meaningful reward/power/harm.
The highly highly intelligent are more impartial if they have a higher degree of disagreeability as they have an inclination to systemize everything and scrutinize every detail, and tend to be unorthodox in their thinking methods
to reach conclusions, which also means more associations between disparate experiences, which can lead to a higher degree of conspirational judgements, given they have a more detailed mental model of the processes underlying
the motives behind individuals; if they have a paranormal belief it is likely metaphysical in nature or philosophically rationalized, rather than because they experience a few coincidences and labelled it as 'divine' or 'god did it'.
i.e. consider for 911, X has Y boxcutters, X has never flown planes (or instructors said they flew at beginner level), all camera footage disappeared beforehand, we know Gov't did have an operation Northwood document before (negative valence). Probability that precisely X entities did it is unlikely would be a rational belief given such information.
If anything in my view, it is rational to hold a negative belief about Z entities if such entities are noted to have diminished trust through known defections before, and the magnitude of such defections are significant, even if one does not know how such actions arise about such Z entities although the more specific the claims, the more evidence is required and vice versa (ambiguous) affords more degree of leeway to assign cui bono targets. Reasoning by 'who benefits' usually works amongst humans because our brains are hard-wired to make emotional associations, because people behave consistently in a manner that is observed in the past, and that includes large entities.
Autistic people are more rational, I just wrote a post summarising the main studies. https://windsorswan.substack.com/p/9-autism-and-rationality?sd=pf
It is not a statistical analysis, so I don't know the margins of difference. Since IQ correlates highly with rationality, you would need to measure this in all participants to determine an accurate number related to autism.
The reason that males and autistic people (who have an extreme male brain) are more rational, is because males do not require as much group strategy. Cognitive biases are almost all related to maintaining group membership (groupthink, reputation management) or increasing social standing within the group (illusory superiority, tall poppy syndrome).
Females are less rational because they have less food and bodily autonomy, while autistics are more rational because they have greater food and bodily autonomy (solitary forager hypothesis).
As a woman with an above average (not genius) level IQ, I agree with this article 100%. I have a hard time being around women, honestly, because they are too emotional, want to be liked, and come off as disingenuous (not all, but most I've met.) The world is a disaster because women have decided that their career, their self, and their money are more important than their children or a commitment to their family. No one is raising their kids, they are paying others to "watch" them. Huge difference. In my opinion, rational thinking should be required to run companies, countries, and to vote. IQ plus Rationality is the winning makeup for success. Also, just to throw this in...when you have men now saying they are real women, the affirmative actions, the protections, the irrational, emotional movements include anyone and everyone. They are disastrous.
Trying to publish a study that "proves" men are more rational than women is a trap. Similar to studies about IQ and race. You'll be cancelled. What we can study are more neutral topics and there are a lot of studies done on this.
Studying voting patterns is perfectly fine and there are lots of them. Women tend to vote for more government intervention in everything. They want government to fix their problems. Women support universal basic income more than men. Childless single women especially support far left policies.
As for rationality, just look at the who goes to psychics, palm readers and taro cards and reads horoscopes. That customer base is almost entirely women.
It seems reasonable to me that what you're referring to as "rationality" here can actually be decomposed into what I'm going to call explicit vs. implicit rationality.
Explicit rationality would be something like "How rational are you when you're given an explicit logical problem that you're trying to solve consistently/rationally/optimally?". This is the type of skill that I personally know a lot of STEM-type people would be quite good at.
Implicit rationality would be like how rational or self-consistent their day-to-day views are that aren't explicitly being challenged, and I think this is where we all know a smart person who is not rational. A reason for this could be status quo bias to conformity (there may be wisdom to crowds but not rationality).
This idea of implicit rationality is also cohesive with your viewpoint of autism tending to more rationality, since autists tend to reject status quo bias, don't value conformity for its own sake if it doesn't make sense etc.
On a personal note when I was a teenager it deeply intrinsically bothered me that I could have inconsistencies in my logic and I adopted a natural self-doubt/check to make sure that all my opinions were congruent with each other (and also stayed this way as I learned more and they changed over time). This is probably because of autism on my part, but this is exactly the type of thing I don't think every smart person does.
Economists are social scientists, and they are divided by ideology even among respectable mainstream types, plus they have a terrible ability to predict things, so I don't know why you think people should take Economist opinions too seriously.
For example, you say that higher government spending is bad for economic growth, but this is disputed at best, and obviously false at worst. One could argue that Denmark basically proves that is not true. If you compare the Nordics with the Anglos, two very cooperative NW European groups, and one with lower taxes than the other, the Anglos are not richer than the Nordics, which is the opposite of what you would expect if government spending is bad for economic growth. The US is the only richest Anglo, but there are other things going on with the US in particular. In fact, looking at NW Europeans in general, there don't seem to be significant differences based on government size.
hence all the autists in the HBD movement. \\ source?
One of the failure modes of rationalism is to imagine that people use their reason to determine what they believe in when in fact most normies just follow the beliefs of their peer group which is usually a pretty rational thing to do.
So asking if someone believes in astrology is pointless unless you know if their peer group believes in astrology or not. If someone believes in astrology and her peer group does not maybe you have something. Otherwise you are just measuring how popular certain ideas are to various demographics.
There is positive correlation between social liberalism and IQ. I remember noah karl have paper about it. And i guees there is positive correlation woke ideology and IQ in international level.
Most of prominent socialist were males in history. Socialism rose in 19/20th century before cognitive dsygenic process in high IQ countries(europe/east asia).
Great post. As you pointed out, there's quite a bit of evidence that women are more likely to support astrology, homeopathy, and other unscientific stuff.
There is this amazing clip of actress Shirley MacLane explaining why she thinks there are more women in the New Age spiritual movement, and she pretty much says it all: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ns1g_TN0hYk&ab_channel=OWN
How is disagreeing with the government/corporatate controlled
monopoly on common sense irrational? Many "conspiracy theories" are true and rational, so this is a poor proxy for rationality. The phrase "conspiracy theory" itself was invented to describe anyone who thought Oswald didn't act alone, which would describe 80% of the population then.
For the record it's obvious the CIA and/or their allies killed JFK. Oswald himself had tons of CIA contacts.
Also if Christians are so irrational why are there so many of them, and why do they reproduce do much more than non religious people? Clearly "rational" people aren't smart enough to come up with an alternative framework of reality to encourage their own continued existence. I love how "high IQ" people are too stupid to have kids and propagate their IQ lol