Fiction is not only not real, it differs from reality in systematic ways. For example, characters in novels, plays, TV tend to be more attractive, articulate, expressive, and principled than real people. Now we also like to tell stories about ourselves and the events we see around us. These stories are more constrained by the facts we see than fictional stories, but I suspect they suffer from similar biases. That is, I suggest we have a
I don't think you can get accuracy by just reversing this bias. Remember, the bias in favor of fiction could also influence behavior to more closely match fiction. This is why people sometimes think about what their favorite fictional hero would do as a guide for making decisions.
Hero wins bias: people tend to overestimate their own chances of success. I would be SHOCKED if this didn't come at least SOMEWHAT from fiction.
Also its inverse: society sucks bias: a disproportionately negative view of the world due to (and I realize this is non-fiction!) over-reporting of bad news and under-reporting of good news. News media actually filter out good news because it gets less ratings.
I think both those biases are really just components of possibly the most annoying, stupid bias in modern thinking: twists. Because there is a twist in almost every single novel, film and TV show, people now seem to expect them in life. It's almost as if they're disappointed when they get to the end of existence and all their dead friends don't arrive and tell them it was all just the product of a terrible, highly-advanced AI hell-bent on world domination, and now is the time to act.
To get away from the rather silly IQ theories here (a couple of suggestions only: people who want to join high-IQ societies may be a queer bunch, high-IQ societies were formed and run by a certain kind of people, and it's not hard to increase your score on IQ tests greatly with a little practice) I offer the following suggestions of fiction bias:
Anti-happiness bias: It's a happy family in a sunny village, the kids are singing, the parents are waving ... there must be something rotten underneath, to be gradually unraveled! Either that or they will meet a horrible fate pretty soon. I think traditional ways of achieving happiness are seriously undervalued because of this trend in fiction.
Dark secret bias: Did you know Hitler was really a jew? Well, OK, he wasn't, but it has been claimed more than once. And just now I saw a discussion board where people discussed a murderer who had killed a gay man, and what was the suggestion? "I bet he was a supressed gay himself!". Because they always are in the stories (wasn't there some homophobia=closet gay logic in a recent movie?)
I'm with Hopefully Anonymous, though I can't really contribute much more beyond what he said. I suppose that the way I imagine the relationship between IQ and unbiasedness is one with an asymptote rather than a maximum anywhere.
Michael, once again your examples are causing me to doubt your hypothesis. In this case of NAZI party participation by intellectuals in Austria. First I don't see much acknowledgment of the distinction between performance of belief/bias and actual belief/bias. I think a good test is the fluidity of external performance by these intellectuals post-NAZI regime. If for example, they were demonstrably quicker to power-align with new regimes post-NAZI reich than the general population, that would be an indication that their NAZI alignment was performative and that a higher IQ allowed them to be more fluid and adaptable performers. It's an empirical question which is probably researchable.
I'm (hopefully) anonymous, but in my non-anonymous life I think it would be in my interest to publicly perform a belief system (including biases) which is normatively likeable, at least for the social circles and situations in which it is optimal for me to be liked. And the smarter I am (the better I am at pattern recognition, etc.) the better I think I'd be at these performances. Although I'll grant your point that relatively optimized hardware (cocktail party personality) can often trump a even a very positively deviantly good ability to analyze patterns to innovate social interaction strategies (or whatever it is one would do to apply one's high IQ to the challenges of situational social success).
Hopefully: I don't think you followed my example. "Where C actually aligns with natural biases, as for instance in the scientific racism of the early 20th century, it is entirely plausible along my model that the least biased will be the least cultured, which might mean something similar to the least intelligent individuals without organic retardation."In other words, no persistent disagreement here, my hypothesis coincides with yours.
Extremely high IQ people who also have certain personality traits such as high openness and low agreeableness may be much more likely than the population norm to acquire expertise in the identification of logical flaws and consequentially to reject illogical or empirically trivially disprovable theories, but there are abundant data confirming, for instance, high NAZI party participation among intellectuals (especially in Austria) strongly suggesting that unusual personality as well as intelligence is required to reject cultural superstitions.
This is crazy. Fairy tales, epic poetry, and other fiction that predates copyright often encapsulates a great deal of folk wisdom. Aesop, Grimm, and Homer are all fiction, right? There's a spectrum with such works at one end and hacks cranking out work for profit at the other. The insights of hacks into collective belief might be useful to identify bias, but it's a pretty limited probe.
Michael,Frankly your examples are causing me to doubt your theory. I don't think increasing intelligence beyond the 99th% would make an early 20th century individual more susceptible to actually believe scientific racism theories, although I grant that it might make people of average or moderately above average intelligence more susceptible to those theories that people a standard deviation in intelligence or more below. It might make them more likely to perform belief in scientific racism, which is different from actual belief (although it may be difficult for observers to separate performance from actual belief, perhaps increasingly difficult as the performer becomes more intelligent).
I know we've had a continuing disagreement on this topic, but I think it has been fruitful.
The bottom line in my opinion is it doesn't take much empirical inquiry or critical thinking to cast doubt on many elements of scientific racism, and Frederick Douglass was hardly either inaccessible or a lone agent as a person of african descent from which one could determine intelligence variance in that population. I'm not even sure how scientific racists addressed intelligence variance within as opposed to between members of racial groups in that era, but I doubt it becomes something harder to consider as the assessor's IQ exceeds the 99th%.
So, I think having an IQ significantly above the 99th% would only make it easier to see logical flaws and empirical weaknesses as underpinnings to fashionable scientific theories of a given era -which would argue for an increasingly lower actual bias (even if they may perform a higher bias than people of 99th%, for example, to outcome optimization as a relatively smart person in the midst of a biased population).
Hopefully: Keep in mind that I am talking about minimum aggregate bias by some undefined metric as a result of the C vector. Specific biases will reach nadir at levels of learning speed that depend on the degree to which C points away from natural biases. Where C actually aligns with natural biases, as for instance in the scientific racism of the early 20th century, it is entirely plausible along my model that the least biased will be the least cultured, which might mean something similar to the least intelligent individuals without organic retardation. For instance, "learned professors" and the like might have rejected the plausibility of Fredrick Douglas actually writing his essays due to their supposedly scientific belief that a black man could not plausibly have attained that level of verbal fluency. Earlier still, young earth scientific theories would have probably lead to some threshold beyond which more intelligent people rejected the theory of evolution at a greater rate than less intelligent people who understood the basic idea of evolution but not the more complex content of thermodynamics did. It is possible that some group of people might build evidence based models by which they can personally debias themselves in a more fine-tuned fashion than is done by C. Such a group, if small, might lead to the existence of a low bias outliers with respect to certain actively confronted biases at some IQ level far above the low-bias peak generated by C, but would not lead to the average level of bias at the group's average IQ being substantially lower than that at the C generated peak.
Anyway, it doesn't seem to me that other people are still participating on this thread and my wrists limit my typed words per day. Call me if you want to discuss this more.
Michael, thanks for the detailed response. My intuitive doubts that minimum bias peaks at some point well below the highest IQ levels (such as at the 99% level)remain, but I appreciate your thorough and clear explanation of your thoughts on the topic and how you arrived at them.
Hopefully: A few points.First, my model only predicts increasing bias in so far as the relationship between intelligence, culture, and bias is as I suggested and only so far as the relationship between the characteristics found at very high IQ (about which we have limited data) and high IQ is the same as that between high and average or average and low IQ. It does so simply by magnifying the C vector which initially has a net bias reducing effect past the point where it's effect is net bias reducing (though it may still be bias reducing in some components). Niagara is vaguely North of New York City, so going North will take me closer to Niagara up to a point and then farther from Niagara.
Second: Higher IQ means, basically, accelerated learning and improved pattern detection. (the pattern detection helps accelerate the learning by enabling the patterns to be learned to initially be detected). These *can* help one to model how people think via psychology, in so far as psychology contains accurate models, but the patterns found in human behavior, or even in the behavior of fairly simple animals are basically FAR too subtle for casual recognition using general hardware at any human IQ. For detecting such patterns without becoming entangled in a heap of superstitions you need to either use the scientific method, which is basically a slow collective enterprise, or to use dedicated hardware which already implicitly contains the patterns you are looking for. In the latter case, you either use the pattern detection that evolution has already done for you or you model others *as* yourself and then use "theory of mind" to make very crude modifications. When starting from a self-model and using "theory of mind", the more different you are from the person being modeled the more modification you have to make. Large IQ differences are one of several major classes of difference that make this more difficult. No evidence that I am aware of indicates that higher IQ makes a person's "theory of mind" significantly more powerful (why would we expect it to any more than it makes, say, vision more acute) while the existence of high-functioning autism strongly suggests that general capabilities are only crudely able to substitute for it. Evidence from Williams Syndrome suggests that just the use of dedicated hardware can be surprisingly effective.
Third: James Simon and Sergey Brin are not individuals who you selected as exemplars of high IQ, but rather as exemplars of business success specifically in fields likely to benefit from low bias (finance and start-ups). Gates dropped out of college, but that doesn't mean that the probability of dropping out of college increases with IQ.
Michael,I see how you got to bias reduction as one reaches the 99th% in IQ (access to further education/culture derived anti-bias tools/instruction?), but can you elaborate on why your model suggests bias may increase as one goes beyond the 99th% in IQ? Because I don't see that. If anything, I'd think a 99.99% IQ person could model how a 99th% IQ person thinks, and thus perform anti-bias analysis of the world to the degree that it would help them in outcome optimization.
For example, I don't see James Simon or Sergey Brin as more prone to bias than a median competency family physician.
Robin: Lets propose a model where unbiasing is only a weak function of education, culture, etc (they certainly work at least partially to eliminate, say, the bias to perceive objects and forces as alive and intentional). Lets posit a vector in human mind configuration space in which the verbal and ritual environment (lets call that C for 'culture) pushes a person in a direction with an average loading against the direction of an average bias of .3 and a SD for this loading of .2. Assume that the vector is strong enough to eliminate 80% of the average bias in the average person, and that like most forms of educational achievement that it's strength grows exponentially with IQ over a 5-fold range from an IQ of about 90 to one of about 120. Extrapolating this multiplier out a bit further, once IQ gets to the mid 130s one has a new set of cultural biases in addition to one's initial endowment of biases. The average strength of bias is substantially lower than it initially was, and the direction of one's new bias vector is essentially random relative to that of the initial bias vector.Data suggestive of education speed multiplier effects from IQ beyond the 99th percentile is seriously lacking (though research showing school achievement after multiple grade accelerations tracking with IQ expectations rather than age expectations indicates that it might). The model above does suggest something interesting however, namely that further increases in IQ would tend to increase net bias by increasing the strength of vector C past the point where it's effect was net-neutral. The frequent observation that IQ seems to constitute a bag of mixed benefits of different magnitudes up to about this level but seems to be systematically associated with certain weaknesses above about this level (possibly a slightly lower level, but hey, I made up the numbers in the model without evidence, surely they are weak approximations).
Matt, it is certainly true that fiction might help us to see reality better, by giving is vivid examples of things somewhat outside the usual range of experience. But even if fiction does perform this function, there remains the question of whether our perceptions of reality are biased toward fictional tendencies.
I don't think you can get accuracy by just reversing this bias. Remember, the bias in favor of fiction could also influence behavior to more closely match fiction. This is why people sometimes think about what their favorite fictional hero would do as a guide for making decisions.
Hero wins bias: people tend to overestimate their own chances of success. I would be SHOCKED if this didn't come at least SOMEWHAT from fiction.
Also its inverse: society sucks bias: a disproportionately negative view of the world due to (and I realize this is non-fiction!) over-reporting of bad news and under-reporting of good news. News media actually filter out good news because it gets less ratings.
Although could twists be called a bias? The Pro-Twist bias... I need to get to bed.
@Harold's post.
I think both those biases are really just components of possibly the most annoying, stupid bias in modern thinking: twists. Because there is a twist in almost every single novel, film and TV show, people now seem to expect them in life. It's almost as if they're disappointed when they get to the end of existence and all their dead friends don't arrive and tell them it was all just the product of a terrible, highly-advanced AI hell-bent on world domination, and now is the time to act.
To get away from the rather silly IQ theories here (a couple of suggestions only: people who want to join high-IQ societies may be a queer bunch, high-IQ societies were formed and run by a certain kind of people, and it's not hard to increase your score on IQ tests greatly with a little practice) I offer the following suggestions of fiction bias:
Anti-happiness bias: It's a happy family in a sunny village, the kids are singing, the parents are waving ... there must be something rotten underneath, to be gradually unraveled! Either that or they will meet a horrible fate pretty soon. I think traditional ways of achieving happiness are seriously undervalued because of this trend in fiction.
Dark secret bias: Did you know Hitler was really a jew? Well, OK, he wasn't, but it has been claimed more than once. And just now I saw a discussion board where people discussed a murderer who had killed a gay man, and what was the suggestion? "I bet he was a supressed gay himself!". Because they always are in the stories (wasn't there some homophobia=closet gay logic in a recent movie?)
I'm with Hopefully Anonymous, though I can't really contribute much more beyond what he said. I suppose that the way I imagine the relationship between IQ and unbiasedness is one with an asymptote rather than a maximum anywhere.
Michael, once again your examples are causing me to doubt your hypothesis. In this case of NAZI party participation by intellectuals in Austria. First I don't see much acknowledgment of the distinction between performance of belief/bias and actual belief/bias. I think a good test is the fluidity of external performance by these intellectuals post-NAZI regime. If for example, they were demonstrably quicker to power-align with new regimes post-NAZI reich than the general population, that would be an indication that their NAZI alignment was performative and that a higher IQ allowed them to be more fluid and adaptable performers. It's an empirical question which is probably researchable.
I'm (hopefully) anonymous, but in my non-anonymous life I think it would be in my interest to publicly perform a belief system (including biases) which is normatively likeable, at least for the social circles and situations in which it is optimal for me to be liked. And the smarter I am (the better I am at pattern recognition, etc.) the better I think I'd be at these performances. Although I'll grant your point that relatively optimized hardware (cocktail party personality) can often trump a even a very positively deviantly good ability to analyze patterns to innovate social interaction strategies (or whatever it is one would do to apply one's high IQ to the challenges of situational social success).
Hopefully: I don't think you followed my example. "Where C actually aligns with natural biases, as for instance in the scientific racism of the early 20th century, it is entirely plausible along my model that the least biased will be the least cultured, which might mean something similar to the least intelligent individuals without organic retardation."In other words, no persistent disagreement here, my hypothesis coincides with yours.
Extremely high IQ people who also have certain personality traits such as high openness and low agreeableness may be much more likely than the population norm to acquire expertise in the identification of logical flaws and consequentially to reject illogical or empirically trivially disprovable theories, but there are abundant data confirming, for instance, high NAZI party participation among intellectuals (especially in Austria) strongly suggesting that unusual personality as well as intelligence is required to reject cultural superstitions.
This is crazy. Fairy tales, epic poetry, and other fiction that predates copyright often encapsulates a great deal of folk wisdom. Aesop, Grimm, and Homer are all fiction, right? There's a spectrum with such works at one end and hacks cranking out work for profit at the other. The insights of hacks into collective belief might be useful to identify bias, but it's a pretty limited probe.
Michael,Frankly your examples are causing me to doubt your theory. I don't think increasing intelligence beyond the 99th% would make an early 20th century individual more susceptible to actually believe scientific racism theories, although I grant that it might make people of average or moderately above average intelligence more susceptible to those theories that people a standard deviation in intelligence or more below. It might make them more likely to perform belief in scientific racism, which is different from actual belief (although it may be difficult for observers to separate performance from actual belief, perhaps increasingly difficult as the performer becomes more intelligent).
I know we've had a continuing disagreement on this topic, but I think it has been fruitful.
The bottom line in my opinion is it doesn't take much empirical inquiry or critical thinking to cast doubt on many elements of scientific racism, and Frederick Douglass was hardly either inaccessible or a lone agent as a person of african descent from which one could determine intelligence variance in that population. I'm not even sure how scientific racists addressed intelligence variance within as opposed to between members of racial groups in that era, but I doubt it becomes something harder to consider as the assessor's IQ exceeds the 99th%.
So, I think having an IQ significantly above the 99th% would only make it easier to see logical flaws and empirical weaknesses as underpinnings to fashionable scientific theories of a given era -which would argue for an increasingly lower actual bias (even if they may perform a higher bias than people of 99th%, for example, to outcome optimization as a relatively smart person in the midst of a biased population).
Hopefully: Keep in mind that I am talking about minimum aggregate bias by some undefined metric as a result of the C vector. Specific biases will reach nadir at levels of learning speed that depend on the degree to which C points away from natural biases. Where C actually aligns with natural biases, as for instance in the scientific racism of the early 20th century, it is entirely plausible along my model that the least biased will be the least cultured, which might mean something similar to the least intelligent individuals without organic retardation. For instance, "learned professors" and the like might have rejected the plausibility of Fredrick Douglas actually writing his essays due to their supposedly scientific belief that a black man could not plausibly have attained that level of verbal fluency. Earlier still, young earth scientific theories would have probably lead to some threshold beyond which more intelligent people rejected the theory of evolution at a greater rate than less intelligent people who understood the basic idea of evolution but not the more complex content of thermodynamics did. It is possible that some group of people might build evidence based models by which they can personally debias themselves in a more fine-tuned fashion than is done by C. Such a group, if small, might lead to the existence of a low bias outliers with respect to certain actively confronted biases at some IQ level far above the low-bias peak generated by C, but would not lead to the average level of bias at the group's average IQ being substantially lower than that at the C generated peak.
Anyway, it doesn't seem to me that other people are still participating on this thread and my wrists limit my typed words per day. Call me if you want to discuss this more.
Michael, thanks for the detailed response. My intuitive doubts that minimum bias peaks at some point well below the highest IQ levels (such as at the 99% level)remain, but I appreciate your thorough and clear explanation of your thoughts on the topic and how you arrived at them.
Hopefully: A few points.First, my model only predicts increasing bias in so far as the relationship between intelligence, culture, and bias is as I suggested and only so far as the relationship between the characteristics found at very high IQ (about which we have limited data) and high IQ is the same as that between high and average or average and low IQ. It does so simply by magnifying the C vector which initially has a net bias reducing effect past the point where it's effect is net bias reducing (though it may still be bias reducing in some components). Niagara is vaguely North of New York City, so going North will take me closer to Niagara up to a point and then farther from Niagara.
Second: Higher IQ means, basically, accelerated learning and improved pattern detection. (the pattern detection helps accelerate the learning by enabling the patterns to be learned to initially be detected). These *can* help one to model how people think via psychology, in so far as psychology contains accurate models, but the patterns found in human behavior, or even in the behavior of fairly simple animals are basically FAR too subtle for casual recognition using general hardware at any human IQ. For detecting such patterns without becoming entangled in a heap of superstitions you need to either use the scientific method, which is basically a slow collective enterprise, or to use dedicated hardware which already implicitly contains the patterns you are looking for. In the latter case, you either use the pattern detection that evolution has already done for you or you model others *as* yourself and then use "theory of mind" to make very crude modifications. When starting from a self-model and using "theory of mind", the more different you are from the person being modeled the more modification you have to make. Large IQ differences are one of several major classes of difference that make this more difficult. No evidence that I am aware of indicates that higher IQ makes a person's "theory of mind" significantly more powerful (why would we expect it to any more than it makes, say, vision more acute) while the existence of high-functioning autism strongly suggests that general capabilities are only crudely able to substitute for it. Evidence from Williams Syndrome suggests that just the use of dedicated hardware can be surprisingly effective.
Third: James Simon and Sergey Brin are not individuals who you selected as exemplars of high IQ, but rather as exemplars of business success specifically in fields likely to benefit from low bias (finance and start-ups). Gates dropped out of college, but that doesn't mean that the probability of dropping out of college increases with IQ.
Michael,I see how you got to bias reduction as one reaches the 99th% in IQ (access to further education/culture derived anti-bias tools/instruction?), but can you elaborate on why your model suggests bias may increase as one goes beyond the 99th% in IQ? Because I don't see that. If anything, I'd think a 99.99% IQ person could model how a 99th% IQ person thinks, and thus perform anti-bias analysis of the world to the degree that it would help them in outcome optimization.
For example, I don't see James Simon or Sergey Brin as more prone to bias than a median competency family physician.
Great point Matt!
Robin: Lets propose a model where unbiasing is only a weak function of education, culture, etc (they certainly work at least partially to eliminate, say, the bias to perceive objects and forces as alive and intentional). Lets posit a vector in human mind configuration space in which the verbal and ritual environment (lets call that C for 'culture) pushes a person in a direction with an average loading against the direction of an average bias of .3 and a SD for this loading of .2. Assume that the vector is strong enough to eliminate 80% of the average bias in the average person, and that like most forms of educational achievement that it's strength grows exponentially with IQ over a 5-fold range from an IQ of about 90 to one of about 120. Extrapolating this multiplier out a bit further, once IQ gets to the mid 130s one has a new set of cultural biases in addition to one's initial endowment of biases. The average strength of bias is substantially lower than it initially was, and the direction of one's new bias vector is essentially random relative to that of the initial bias vector.Data suggestive of education speed multiplier effects from IQ beyond the 99th percentile is seriously lacking (though research showing school achievement after multiple grade accelerations tracking with IQ expectations rather than age expectations indicates that it might). The model above does suggest something interesting however, namely that further increases in IQ would tend to increase net bias by increasing the strength of vector C past the point where it's effect was net-neutral. The frequent observation that IQ seems to constitute a bag of mixed benefits of different magnitudes up to about this level but seems to be systematically associated with certain weaknesses above about this level (possibly a slightly lower level, but hey, I made up the numbers in the model without evidence, surely they are weak approximations).
Matt, it is certainly true that fiction might help us to see reality better, by giving is vivid examples of things somewhat outside the usual range of experience. But even if fiction does perform this function, there remains the question of whether our perceptions of reality are biased toward fictional tendencies.