A tip of the hat to the blogger, Borepatch, who alerted me to a post by a contrarian soul who has an interesting take on the Climate Debate...and elections...and the voting public. Is it true that politicians aim for the lowest common denominator? It certainly worked for Rahm Emmanuel in nearby Chicago. He flooded the airwaves with ads that used only his first name to make him seem so warm and friendly. Rahm cares about the people, Rahm cares about the schools...Rahm is the candidate of the Democratic Machine so a cardboard cutout could probably win but still. That warm, friendly Rahm sent his kids to private schools and immediately began laying off city workers. Ah, the warm fuzzies! If the Democrats told Chicagoans to line up to have some Flavor-Ade would they do it?
Well, warts and all, here is Half Sigma. I am going to point out a massive wart after the article, see if you catch it?
General intelligence, social reasoning, and global warming
As I’ve previously stated, the vast majority of people believe what they believe because other people believe it, and not because they have actually attempted to reason through the evidence to come to the correct answer themselves.
When there is a divergence of opinion on a subject matter, people are far more likely to use whatever reasoning ability they have not to figure out the actual truth of the matter, but rather to figure out which group they should believe.
This leads to the phenomenon of partisan politics, because when there’s a divergence of opinion on some political issue, part of the reasoning process of figuring out which opinion to believe includes an analysis of what the “correct” group believes, so a liberal will figure out his beliefs on a particular issue based on what other liberals believe, and conservatives will do likewise.
People with higher general intelligence (let’s call that fluid g) are better at reasoning, but they aren’t more likely to use their reasoning ability to figure out the actual truth of a matter, they are just better at figuring which group’s opinions to mimic. People with higher intelligence also have a greater degree of social conformity than people with lower intelligence. A former commenter to this blog (who I haven’t seen around recently) once explained to me that smarter children are more easily socialized and in fact become “oversocialized” because the socialization process is geared towards socializing those of average intelligence.
One of the reasons why intelligence seems to have such a high correlation with higher-class behaviors is that smarter people are better at ascertaining how more successful people behave and they attempt to mimic those behaviors. There seems to be an exception for nerds. For example, nerdy computer programmers, smart enough to figure out the intricacies of design patterns, are known to enjoy drinking soda and eating Big Macs, because they don’t seem to get that these are now considered to be low-class foods, and that they ought to be eating an artisanal sandwich and drinking pomegranate juice.
Mass media (that’s newspapers and radio, then television, and now the internet) has the result of increasing conformity because now it’s easier than ever to determine how to think and how to behave by figuring out how other people are thinking and behaving.
This leads me to the recent bit in the news about how Mitt Romney says he believes in global warming but Governor Rick Perry of Texas doesn’t. Rick Perry has the correct beliefs about global warming. It’s what people who are smart, are knowledgeable about physics, and who think for themselves believe. People like the physicist Jonathan Katz of Washington University. Jonathan Katz also believes in HBD. That’s how I know I can trust his opinion on global warming. Belief in HBD is a great litmus test because anyone who believes in HBD not because they are racist KKK or white nationalist types, but because they simply understand it’s the correct explanation for differences in human behavior and abilities, demonstrate themselves to be freethinkers who can be trusted to give you the correct opinions in their areas of expertise.
Unfortunately, Rick Perry has the correct belief about global warming not because he’s smarter than Mitt Romney but because he’s stupider than Mitt Romney. We have reached the sad state in which the majority of smart people believe in global warming, and smart people figure out what to believe based on what other smart people believe, and that is how Mitt Romney has come to the wrong conclusion on global warming and why Rick Perry has failed to come to the wrong conclusion on global warming. Rick Perry isn’t smart enough to realize how stupid he appears to smart people when he says that he disbelieves in global warming.
When there is a divergence of opinion on a subject matter, people are far more likely to use whatever reasoning ability they have not to figure out the actual truth of the matter, but rather to figure out which group they should believe.
This leads to the phenomenon of partisan politics, because when there’s a divergence of opinion on some political issue, part of the reasoning process of figuring out which opinion to believe includes an analysis of what the “correct” group believes, so a liberal will figure out his beliefs on a particular issue based on what other liberals believe, and conservatives will do likewise.
People with higher general intelligence (let’s call that fluid g) are better at reasoning, but they aren’t more likely to use their reasoning ability to figure out the actual truth of a matter, they are just better at figuring which group’s opinions to mimic. People with higher intelligence also have a greater degree of social conformity than people with lower intelligence. A former commenter to this blog (who I haven’t seen around recently) once explained to me that smarter children are more easily socialized and in fact become “oversocialized” because the socialization process is geared towards socializing those of average intelligence.
One of the reasons why intelligence seems to have such a high correlation with higher-class behaviors is that smarter people are better at ascertaining how more successful people behave and they attempt to mimic those behaviors. There seems to be an exception for nerds. For example, nerdy computer programmers, smart enough to figure out the intricacies of design patterns, are known to enjoy drinking soda and eating Big Macs, because they don’t seem to get that these are now considered to be low-class foods, and that they ought to be eating an artisanal sandwich and drinking pomegranate juice.
Mass media (that’s newspapers and radio, then television, and now the internet) has the result of increasing conformity because now it’s easier than ever to determine how to think and how to behave by figuring out how other people are thinking and behaving.
This leads me to the recent bit in the news about how Mitt Romney says he believes in global warming but Governor Rick Perry of Texas doesn’t. Rick Perry has the correct beliefs about global warming. It’s what people who are smart, are knowledgeable about physics, and who think for themselves believe. People like the physicist Jonathan Katz of Washington University. Jonathan Katz also believes in HBD. That’s how I know I can trust his opinion on global warming. Belief in HBD is a great litmus test because anyone who believes in HBD not because they are racist KKK or white nationalist types, but because they simply understand it’s the correct explanation for differences in human behavior and abilities, demonstrate themselves to be freethinkers who can be trusted to give you the correct opinions in their areas of expertise.
Unfortunately, Rick Perry has the correct belief about global warming not because he’s smarter than Mitt Romney but because he’s stupider than Mitt Romney. We have reached the sad state in which the majority of smart people believe in global warming, and smart people figure out what to believe based on what other smart people believe, and that is how Mitt Romney has come to the wrong conclusion on global warming and why Rick Perry has failed to come to the wrong conclusion on global warming. Rick Perry isn’t smart enough to realize how stupid he appears to smart people when he says that he disbelieves in global warming.
Now, does that reasoning make sense to you? Frankly, deciding to believe EVERYTHING one guy says because he agrees with you on one issue is not really all that intelligent. HBD or ""Human Biodiversity" is something of a scientific codeword for racism. Eurasian Sensation gives you a good overview here.
It is unwise to accept somebody's word in one area because you agree with him in another area of expertise. I would be very glad to have Paul Konerko teach a group of little leaguers all about hitting a baseball, but I would hesitate to have him discuss the cellular processes such as the ATP Synthase engine or Kinesin.
So why present Half Sigma's point of view at all? Because some of what he says is of great value. It is true that many people seek to agree with the majority opinion in hopes of being more socially acceptable and being aligned with the majority. It is certainly true that the news media has a definite slant that is not based on whether something is right or wrong but rather more along the lines of whether it is pleasing to the more liberal inhabitants of the two coasts. Truth lags behind acceptable and acceptable trails far behind an uncomfortable truth. The inconvenient truth behind Al Gore's Global Warming fervor was his investments in carbon offset initiatives. If he really believed it, would have have mansions the size of several city blocks, drive SUVs and take private jet planes from place to place? Of course not!
If you are terribly interested in whether mankind has anything to do with the climate you do have to question why Michael Mann would intentionally release a graph designed to fudge the data and why officials of the CRU and IPCC have been shown to have lied, tried to hide data and in fact the United Nations and the United States Government have all joined Al Gore in the pretense that "the science is settled" when in fact science has had little to do with the idea of Global Warming. Ideology and financial gain? Yes. Scientific proof? Hardly. Feel free to read some actual climate science blogs to get a better idea of the actual scientific discussion:
I can take some of the suspense out of the search process - the primary mover and shaker of the climate of Earth is the Sun. When Solar activity is high, the Earth warms. When the Sun is quiet (known as a Maunder period) then the Earth cools. The percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere is far too tiny to have any hand in the fluctuation of temperatures. Actually, since 1999 there has been more of a cooling than a warming trend. Perhaps all that snow we had last season had already clued you in to that? Now that we have several arrays of deep-diving drones in the oceans and have satellites checking surface temperatures, the intentional rigging of weather reporting stations to make it appear to the public that the temperatures were rising dangerously will be offset and, in case you haven't noticed, the Global Warming people are now calling it Climate Change? Guess what? The climate always changes.
Rick Perry is not necessarily less intelligent than Mitt Romney, but more likely Mitt Romney is the better politician. He knows what the lowest common denominator of voters will likely believe and there is a great probability he will try to hit the conservative side of that group smack in the middle. He'll avoid looking like a radical to the liberal press but keep the conservative side happy by trying to keep as many Tea Party planks in his platform as he can without losing the moderates and independents and the mass of folks who just want to vote for the winner. Romney may well believe that Global Warming or any man-made climate change at all is complete bunk, but he wants to stay ahead of the wave. Can he be a conservative-sounding alternative to Barack Obama? Can he beat Obama to death with the failures of the President's Administration, the struggling economy and the horror of Obamacare and skyrocketing deficits? Almost any Republican candidate at all should find the President and his policies a very easy target. All Mitt has to do is get through the primaries and win that convention. That is how he has it figured, anyway.
