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Richard Hanania's avatar

You’re taking it too seriously by treating it as a testable theory. People just use it for individual cases where they think the dumb sounding thing happens to be correct. I don’t know if anyone who uses the midwit meme thinks it’s common across issue areas.

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Anatoly Karlin's avatar

> It turns out that this effect is largely specific to conservative beliefs, and when the residuals of republican support independent of conservatism are measured, there is no midwit effect.

Republicanism minus the social conservatism = free markets trending towards libertarianism. Libertarianism is the high IQ ideology.

There's absolutely nothing paradoxical or surprising about this whatsoever??!

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Sebastian Jensen's avatar

That is correct, admittedly it was a friend who proposed that analysis method.

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WoolyAI's avatar

Wait, am I missing something? I read the following,

"It turns out that this effect is largely specific to conservative beliefs, and when the residuals of republican support independent of conservatism are measured, there is no midwit effect."

, as saying that there's a midwit effect disappears for Republican identification once you remove conservative beliefs as a factor but not vice versa, indicating that the midwit effect is in just conservative beliefs.

Do I understand that correctly and, if so, where does libertarianism vs social conservatism appear in the data?

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Sebastian Jensen's avatar

Yes, you understand the data correctly.

It doesn't. It's republican vs cons self-id, and republican residuals from conservatism should correlate strongly with libertarianism, theroetically speaking.

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UBERSOY's avatar

Fantastic article

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Sabugosa's avatar

I don't exactly know if midwit have to do with intelligence. Is more like a personality type. People who will follow all the rules in wish to gain social status in theirs career isn't exactly a intelligent issue. Anyone can do it, the most conformist will do it and the more intelligent you are more conformist you tend to be.

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Sebastian Jensen's avatar

That is my impression to, that the midwit archetype doesn't have to do with intelligence as much as having intelligence be their focal personality trait.

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Compsci's avatar

My understanding of “midwittery” was that the *more* intelligent, the less likely one was to go with the masses. Dutton in his book on such placed a sort of a cutoff for maximum midwittery in academia at 120-125 IQ. Our author in today’s posting seems to support this type of IQ analysis in his first graphic of a bell curve and placement of characters with stated narrations at low average and high IQ.

Of course, one of any intellect can and probably does at times bend their opinion in deference to popular opinion. In that we agree.

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Compsci's avatar

Thanks for today’s posting. Midwit theory has always interested me. Not being the brightest bulb in the box, it’s the one theory in HBD science that depresses me most. :-( In short, I ask myself “Am I a midwit?” I can certainly accept a lowly layman ranking among folks in the field, but to fool oneself is crippling to the ego. The question looms large, “What do I know, as compared to what I think I know—but don’t”. Oh the horror….

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Quizle222's avatar

I came up with a logical rationale for the midwit theory: in wise sayings from ancient Greece, it was considered bad manners for smart people to talk to fools and explain something to them, since it was a waste of time “when a wise man stops to explain something to an idiot, then there will be exactly two idiots on the street ". The problem is that the smartest person will figure out how to convey any thought to a fool in a second, and this cannot be disputed

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Apr 18, 2024
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Apr 19, 2024
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Sebastian Jensen's avatar

I cba to post the p-values

Just check the source

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