Most people go through life using cultural memes that they soak up from their environment. These cultural memes have had lots of selective pressure acting on them, so most of the time they won't be obviously harmful: for example, most cultures don't have memes advocating that you stick your hand in fires. Following these cultural memes is a low-variance strategy: you might not become overwhelmingly successful this way, but you'll also avoid many failure modes.

A basic aspect of LW-style rationality involves questioning and rethinking everything, including these cultural memes. As such, it's a high-variance strategy: you might end up with new memes that are much better or much worse than standard memes. This might be okay if you're quite good at questioning and rethinking things, but if you aren't (and even if you are!), you might afflict yourself with a memetic immune disorder and head towards all sorts of failure modes as a result (joining a cult being the sort of stereotypical thing).

I think most people will be averse to LW-style rationality as part of a general aversion to things that seem too weird, and I think this is probably overall a reasonable aversion for most people to have, as it helps them avoid many failure modes.

I have been tossing around the idea of not-high-IQ rationalist fiction. Problem is, it's really hard to write. If they act rationally, people stop identifying the person as unintelligent. You get intelligence creep or an unsatisfying story.

The best route I can see is to make them well-substandard in intelligence. Rationalist!Forrest Gump, say.

ETA: Another problem is that adventures are usually sub-optimal. No one writes about the Amundsen expedition or equivalents (*) - they write about Scott expeditions.

*(except for Le Guin, who managed it because she's amazing)

I don't know about "low" IQ, but plenty of people who don't necessarily have genius IQ have very strong instrumental rationality.

Things like stable family life, network of friends, community, conservative approach to money, religion and charity with a social component, work ethic, temperate living, exercise, etc.

Doing these things may correlate with IQ on the low end; but it has little to do with the genius-level IQ which is so common at LW.

Reading this discussion makes me realise I don't have a very good mental model for what a low IQ person's internal processing is like. Most of the behaviours i tend to associate with stupidity in real life are related to rationality (e.g. excessive compartmentalisation, failure to take arguments to their logical conclusion) rather than a lack of processing power or speed.

Assuming you want to convince anyone outside our base demographic of anything, it is highly inadvisable to refer to people within 1SD of mean IQ as "low-IQ people".

I understand that on a website where the mean IQ is about 140, people with an IQ of 100 might seem dumb. But the vast majority of the population will be justifiably offended at using the term "low-IQ" to mean "people of average intelligence."

The popularity of LW rationality among high IQ people is probably strongly influenced by a quasi-aesthetic judgment that being correct is valuable unto itself. Most people (of all IQs) would also prefer to be right, but they also want to be successful, and they probably want to be successful more than they want to be right. Being successful and being rational both require effort, and the most efficient way to become successful for a low IQ individual is probably not through rationality training, but through more direct and applicable prescriptions, like reading How to Win Friends and Influence People, learning money management skills, networking, or whatever else is well-known and directly applicable to their situation. Thus, it is likely rational for low IQ people not to highly value direct rationality training, which doesn't appeal to their comparative advantages.

Based on three sets of experiences, I'd say there is a strong overlap between people who do not value intelligence and people who have little of it (in three different ways).

First, I've worked with deaf people who are acquiring language late in life. Second, I've worked with young children. Third, I've worked with homeless people. Some of each of these are blindingly intelligent by any measure. Some are not depending on how intelligence is measured. Among the later, higher intelligence is mistrusted and seen as making trouble.

The exception in life is clergy, who are granted smarts as a good. The exception in fiction is 'nerd on a leash' - the doctor or navigator or smart guy kept for his use by a barbarian horde.

If it is possible to write successful stories of highly intelligent people who consistently fail (just think Big Bang Theory; there obviously needed to make them likeable for a general audience) then it should be equally possible to write the opposite where an average huy wins by just applying the rules.

It is a story. You could have a protagonist which in each episode applies just one rationality method (exploit one bias, apply one routine). Say he reads one chapter of the sequences at a time and is presented as unable to grasp them all at once and has to learn and concentrate a lot to get it. But then win big by .- by plot chance - applying just this method in the right circumstances.

Example:

Overconfidence and/r Planning fallacy. Story: Protagonist is middle manager. Big project is comming. Boss calls meeting to estimate project. Protagonist meticulously collects all the outside view evidence beforehand. Meeting attendees give their estimates of all the steps and sum. He gives outside view estimate but is looked down upon. Guess who is right in the ende?

I think that a lot of our traditional rationality memes (like "lose your faith in intellectual authority", "figure everything out for yourself" and "take an idea seriously if and only if you are personally convinced of it") could be especially dangerous for people who aren't very smart.

This post is to raise a question about the demographics of rationality: Is rationality something that can appeal to low-IQ people as well?

This question is best answered if you look from the other direction: do people 10-15 IQ points higher than you benefit more from "rationality" than you do?

There's a certain conflation between being viewed as intelligent and being viewed as high-status. People who don't have the smarts to play the intellectual status game have a couple of obvious choices to increase their perceived status. They can either reject the whole "thinking well is a valuable skill" set of ideas, or they can reject evidence that says that they aren't smart and pretend to be better at the whole thinking thing than they really are.

Both of these are very big stumbling blocks for becoming a more rational and better person. In order to want to join the rationalist community, you need to have the beliefs that you aren't as capable as you could be, that thinking better is good for you, and that you can admit to mistakes without undermining your position. These beliefs are much more present among high-IQ people for what I think are obvious enough reasons that I don't need to enumerate them.

When you know for yourselves that, "These qualities are unskillful; these qualities are blameworthy; these qualities are criticized by the wise; these qualities, when adopted & carried out, lead to harm & to suffering" — then you should abandon them.

When you know for yourselves that, 'These qualities are skillful; these qualities are blameless; these qualities are praised by the wise; these qualities, when adopted & carried out, lead to welfare & to happiness' — then you should enter & remain in them.

Selected part from the Kalama Sutta. Seems like a good rule of thumb; combining virtue ethics, deontology, and consequentialism. This would be my first instrumental rationality lesson for the low-IQ people. The rest of the lesson would be specific examples and discussion.

The low-IQ people would probably benefit from non-meta advice.

As a part of raising the sanity waterline, it could be useful to compose a textbook of good advice for average people. But we probably shouldn't expect to make them able to create such books for themselves.

It's like a division of labor -- the people who are good at thinking (i.e. intelligent and rational) should do the thinking. The others are more efficient when then follow such advice. Yes, this has a lot of problems. I just don't see a way to avoid them, if the person has a low IQ. And the low-IQ person is probably going to follow someone else's advice anyway, because that's all they can do. Giving them some good advice at least gives them a chance of picking a good advice to follow; because the bad advice is already there.

We should see people as what they are, not as we wish them to be.

You might want to look at The Millionaire Next Door books-- they're about people of average or slightly above average intelligence applying rationality to accumulating money.

"Intelligence" is one of my favorite examples of Reification - a cluster of concepts that were grouped together into a single word to make communication easier, and as a result is often falsely thought of as a single concept, rather than an abstract collection of several separable ideas.

Knowledge of relevant facts, algorithmic familiarity, creativity, arithmetic capabilities, spatial reasoning capabilities, awareness and avoidance of logical fallacies, and probably dozens of others are all separable concepts that all could reasonable be described as intelligence, but that correlate with each other to an unknown degree, and the effects of which can be observed in [near] isolation.

While intelligence remains useful as a word, it is a troublesome one.

IQ is no less troubling. It measures only a small fraction of the skills that could be described as intelligence. In addition, it appears to measure significantly more than just intelligence, with variation as big as 20 points being subject to cultural, or unknown environmental factors. http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/1987-17534-001

One problem I remember reading about was the "odd item out" style of question historically found in many IQ tests - four objects were presented, and subjects were supposed to decide which one didn't belong. Unless 3 out of the 4 objects were identical, this task is ambiguous - and one anthropologist [citation needed] found that different cultures can have a different generally accepted "correct answer" to such a question.

TL;DR "Intelligence" isn't only vague, but it is an abstract combination of many semi-correlated skill-sets IQ on the other hand is a well-defined test, but it is not free of bias. It measures only a subset of what we would call "intelligence", and really only reliably predicts how well someone will do on future IQ tests.