Interesting Links for 11-12-2019

[andrewducker]

Vast numbers of Twitter and Facebook accounts spread fake story to undermine photo of child on hospital floor(tags:fraud socialmedia twitter facebook Conservatives )Why the 'Queen of Shitty Robots' Renounced Her Crown(tags:robots confidence videos )Scottish Power to add solar and battery power to wind farms(tags:solarpower windpower batteries

Comments

[woodpijn]

"Across studies, the researchers found that economic status - captured by clothing cues - influenced competency judgments

[andrewducker]

On the one hand I agree that you always have to be careful about the direction of causality.

On the other hand judging whether clothes are expensive is relatively easy, but I can't see any "natural" connection between type of clothes and competence.

[woodpijn]

I am terrible at judging whether clothes are expensive, and I don't think it's that easy

[woodpijn]

Berkson's paradox - that's cool, I didn't know it had a name.
Alex and I kind of stumbled on it independently a few years ago. I reckoned the non-Christians we knew seemed, on average, more intelligent than the Christians we knew, and I was concerned about what that implied about Christianity. But then we realised that the set of people we know comes partly from church connections, which select for Christianity and are neutral on intelligence, and partly from things like university or geeky hobbies, which select for intelligence and are (probably?) neutral on Christianity. So the average Christian among our acquaintance is likely less intelligent than the average non-Christian, without implying anything about Christianity.
(I trust you can appreciate the reasoning even though you probably disagree at the object level.)

[andrewducker]

I've known plenty of smart religious people, so I wouldn't care to comment without doing some serious research!

But yes, the principle stands. I think I first considered something similar with "nerds" and "jocks". Where sporty people aren't less smart necessarily, but their mix is much wider than it will be for nerds.

[andrewducker]

Having now looked at this, I think that anyone drawing anything more than a very simplistic view about religion and intelligence is either not looking at the research or is being partial.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religiosity_and_intelligence?wprov=sfla1#Studies_comparing_religious_belief_and_IQ

It's clearly an area where there are a lot of complex social effects interacting, and it's not something I'm convinced could actually be understood to the point where a simple answer could be given.

(So no, I definitely don't think that religious people are less intelligent than atheists)