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Why Smart People Are Stupid
nicholast writes "There's a good piece by Jonah Lehrer at the New Yorker about why smart people are often more likely to make cognitive errors than stupid people. The article examines research about the shortcuts that our brains take while answering questions, and explains why even the smartest people take these shortcuts too. Quoting: 'One provocative hypothesis is that the bias blind spot arises because of a mismatch between how we evaluate others and how we evaluate ourselves. When considering the irrational choices of a stranger, for instance, we are forced to rely on behavioral information; we see their biases from the outside, which allows us to glimpse their systematic thinking errors. However, when assessing our own bad choices, we tend to engage in elaborate introspection. We scrutinize our motivations and search for relevant reasons; we lament our mistakes to therapists and ruminate on the beliefs that led us astray. The problem with this introspective approach is that the driving forces behind biases—the root causes of our irrationality—are largely unconscious, which means they remain invisible to self-analysis and impermeable to intelligence. In fact, introspection can actually compound the error, blinding us to those primal processes responsible for many of our everyday failings.'"
The article examines research about the shortcuts that our brains take while answering questions, and explains why even the smartest people take these shortcuts too.
Because without taking shortcuts those very smart people wouldn't be able to achieve their goal of getting first post.
Yes you commit more mistakes when you think more about things. Guess what, you also reach a lot more correct conclusions. The best way to avoid making mistakes is not doing anything at all. Same principle.
I don't get it.
yo dawg
i heard you like to overthink shit
so i overthought the shit you're overthinking
so you can overthink shit
while i overthink you overthinking the shit you're overthinking
i must be stupid (as in smart, not smart as in stupid) because i got those little word problems correct. the lily pad example was really easy.
insensitive clod overlords obligatory xkcd car analogy russian reversals whoosh pedant fanbois ftfy in 3...2...1..PROFIT
The premise here is that "introspection" (a vague name for a wide range of practices) cannot reveal unconscious biases, bring them into consciousness, and enable self-analysis and intelligent adjustment of them. We are to accept this premise why? In my experience, it's quite possible to gain a conscious vantage on previously-unconscious biases, and subsequently lessen and/or compensate for them. If Lehrer can't do the same, maybe he isn't very good at introspection. No reason to condemn an activity others do well and productively just because you suck at it, Jonah.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
I'd trust a teenage bimbo to get hair, makeup and social pecking order right, but not with advance math.
I trust a physics professor to get the math and science right but few of them have any idea of the bimbo's areas of expertise.
It's just a question of different skill sets. Smart does not mean smart at everything.
Or perhaps high SAT scores do not correlate well with intelligence, but rather correlate with being able to answer questions quickly through the use of mental shortcuts or the ability to recall what was learned through rote learning?
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Certainly the most attention-grabbing.
1. Some dumb person makes up retarded hypothesis about how being more self-aware would actually mean being less self-aware which obviously is wrong, since being less self-aware does *not* mean the unconscious things become *more* visible, now do they? ... ... aand now, cue the dumb people defending what they wish to be true and hating me for making them aware that they consider themselves to be dumb people. ^^
2. Some other dumb person misunderstands things with a lot of wishful thinking to be able to accept himself, and forms a typical statement-in-question-form title of what he wishes to be true.
3.
4. HEADLINE!
5. *fapfapfap* We are actually better than those fucking smart people! *fapfapfap* We can finally love ourselves again! *fapfapfap*
My theory is that smart people are mostly stupid, and that stupid people are fully stupid.
Who ordered that?
Scott had trouble with a pager, it wouldn't work and wouldn't work. He took out the battery, put it back in, tried a different one and still no success. Finally took the pager to a service center where the tech looked at it for about 10 seconds, took out the battery, flipped it around and put it back in - so the pager worked.
It's a question of competency at some things does not translate into a competency at all things.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Try reading that article. It's full of smart sounding long-winded sentences, which all basically translate to: "Dude, you're overthinking it".
Then, the article ronically ends with: "We spin eloquent stories, but these stories miss the point. The more we attempt to know ourselves, the less we actually understand."
Dude...
So, average people have inherent cognitive faults.
But smart people merely make cognitive errors as a result of their short-cutting brilliance.
IOW, the difference between an average and a smart person is that the latter bullshits more.
My wife works at a school and she says many of the teachers have masters degrees and some can not fill out a simple time sheet. Things like travel requests or purchase orders are even more likely to be completely wrong. She calls them the smartest dumb people I know.
Excellence in anything, including smarts can easily boost one's ego to the point where it cloudstheir judgement.
Hereâ(TM)s a simple arithmetic question: A bat and ball cost a dollar and ten cents. The bat costs a dollar more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?
The vast majority of people respond quickly and confidently, insisting the ball costs ten cents. This answer is both obvious and wrong. (The correct answer is five cents for the ball and a dollar and five cents for the bat.)
Why on earth would you ever think that it was 10 cents for the ball and a dollar for the bat? You'd have to be stupid, or something.
In a lake, there is a patch of lily pads. Every day, the patch doubles in size. If it takes 48 days for the patch to cover the entire lake, how long would it take for the patch to cover half of the lake?
Your first response is probably to take a shortcut, and to divide the final answer by half. That leads you to twenty-four days. But thatâ(TM)s wrong. The correct solution is forty-seven days.
What the fuck? Do I need to to take a dope test or something? Why the hell would you think I'd "take a shortcut" and divide the answer by two? Fuck's sake, the clue is right there! IT DOUBLES IN SIZE EVERY DAY! So it's twice as big today as it was yesterday, so if it fills the lake in 48 days it half-fills it in 47 days. Jeez, how the hell can you even think people would say 24 days? Is there something wrong with your brain?
Also, what the hell kind of lilies grow in your lake, that they crowd the whole damn thing out in a month and a half? Don't you ever rake them back and dredge it? Your fish are going to suffer from lack of light and oxygen with all that crap in there.
Ghod pop-psychologists make my piss boil.
Therefore I automatically jump to thinking that something I said has incurred the wrath of botters who insta - down-vote me.
Perhaps its simply the mods don't like me.
Actually, learning about fallacies is very much a good exercise. Especially for pointing out all the errors in everything everyone *else* says. My personal favorite is understanding how people find their conclusion, then find the reasons.
In my own experience--both by observing smart people and by being one (if I may be so bold), I've noticed that the more "smart" a person is (by several definitions; see below), the more easily he/she can convince him/herself--and others--of incorrect things. Furthermore (as these findings suggest), a person who possesses unusually great capacity for self-analysis often becomes quite accustomed to analyzing things on a much "higher level" than what actually motivates one to (erroneous) thought and action.
For example, a "stupid" person might see another person as a threat to getting into a relationship with someone he/she, him/herself, likes, and will therefore treat that person poorly--while probably having few illusions about why he/she is doing so. A "smart" person, on the other hand, will have that same "root" motivation cause him/her to come up with "rational" reasons (which aren't nearly so rational as assumed, of course) for why that rival is actually bad at his/her job, "annoying," unethical, unreliable, unintelligent, etc., and will then treat that person badly without realizing just how "base" or "primal" the root cause of the behavior is.
Notably, I've seen/experienced this with people who are "smart" by way of IQ, and "smart" by way of education (and, of course by way of the two, combined; though--as we all know here--the two aren't always the same thing). Apparently, simply engaging the analytical portion of one's brain habitually--whether by training or nature--almost invariably creates this effect--and can often lead to some truly irritating "smart" people (myself at the forefront, at times, I'll admit).
I'm glad that someone with "license to wear a lab coat" has also determined as much in a somewhat more scientific/official fashion.
Except that liberals are not more educated. Conservatives are.
People generally don't vote for what they think is "right". Instead they vote for what they think is in their own interest. As people become more educated, their income goes up, and they benefit more from low taxes than they do from high government spending. So they tend to become more fiscally conservative. Poorly educated people tend to have low incomes and vote for liberal policies, because that is in their self-interest.
Somewhat counter-intuitively, states with higher levels of college graduates tend to be more liberal, but still, within those states the more educated people tend to be more fiscally conservative.
So liberals are not stupid because they are better educated, conservatives are!
“A grand collection of logical fallacies.” I can think of no better words to characterize the body of “liberal” political thought.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
An interesting extension of this issue of introspection is that: In some cases, AI systems perform much better than humans.
To a machine, there is no such thing as subconscious. Given the limitations of hooks built in to a system, one can always ask a machine to 'explain itself' when it makes a decision. This could take the form of a cor dump, list of fired rules, or scores of each alternative path at every decision node.
In addition, humans can build knowledge bases from various sources. And at the time knowledge is acquired, it can be weighted by the credibility of its origin. But, once committed to memory, the origins of these 'training sets' is often forgotten. And should some reason arise to downgrade the credibility of a knowledge source, machines can much more easily recalculate the rule weights leading from it.
Have gnu, will travel.
I find myself primed by statements like âoeHere is a simple arithmetic questionâ to answer quickly. Its probably pride, in that I think of myself as able to answer difficult questions, to attempt to answer the question as quickly as possible.
I hope I wouldnâ(TM)t employ such a cavalier approach to anything important, like a questionnaire for an important research paper. Sadly, unless I am analyzed by a thick outsider (perhaps a psychologist?), I will never know.
I know, dumping on psychologists for questionable experimental processes is like baiting clergy - way too easy, yet never gets old. They really have their work cut out for them. Unless you can create a sense of consequence for mistakes - maybe a quick electric shock, to steal a clever idea from the history of psychology experiments - you arenâ(TM)t observing abilities.
I'd argue that the guy who went into debt to finance his MFA in Byzantine Art History is several times stupider, on multiple levels, than the High School graduate who apprenticed himself to a plumber at age 18.
Really? My observation has been the opposite, that you can't go to university without absorbing some degree of liberal (re. left wing) thought. That said, I think if you scratch below the surface one will find that universities are filled with those who are left supporters and those who are two scared to disagree.
I am not just going to agree with the popular view. In other words I have bad Karma.
Both problems given in the article were word math problems.
and
I got them both right almost immediately, but I think I understand why people would frequently make the errors the article mentioned.
Ultimately, I think that the reason people make those mistakes is not because they are naturally irrational, but because they simply have not had enough practice at those types of math problems.
The former took me back to grade 7 math... where I was always solving for x. How I would have done it on paper is as follows:
I happened to solve this particular one in my head, but the mental steps I took still reflected the above process. And I think it's the sheer amount of practice that I got solving those types of problems in grade 7 and 8 that I didn't get hung up on anything.
The latter problem was so obvious, I didn't even have to arrange a formula to solve it... saying it doubles every day, and filling after 48 days means it *MUST* be half full after 47 days. There's probably a formula for it, but I didn't happen to notice it.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
@#$%@#$% *too not two. Brain work well not daytwo
I am not just going to agree with the popular view. In other words I have bad Karma.
So other people, even stupid people, will have a relatively easy time spotting my mistakes? Meaning that all I have to do is listen to them when they try to point them out to me. Problem solved.
Its not that conservatives are generally stupid, it is that the stupid people are generally conservative. It is the base of support they lean upon.
Apologies to JSMill for the poor paraphrase.
When I'm playing a weaker opponent in chess I tend to be extremely careless with my queen and I put her in dangerous places that are quite threatening. The strategy relies on the fact that weaker chess players get squeamish when an opponent's queen hangs out on their side of the board and they start investing too many of their moves into defense, thus ceding board control.
The downside is that a strong opponent knows to relentlessly attack the queen until she's either dead or in a position that isn't advantageous. Another downside is that, even against weaker opponents, she's still in a vulnerable position and I tend to lose her that way.
A computer would never do what I do with my queen (and I would never use the strategy vs. a computer . . . again). What makes people intelligent is their ability to make estimates, predictions, and generalizations that compensate for the limitations of memory. I may not be able to beat my computer in chess, but my computer works harder than an entire nation of brains to kick my ass at it.
I don't like the article confusing this way of thinking with irrationality, concluding that, "we're not nearly as rational as we believe." One's thinking can be rational and imprecise. It can also be rational and wrong. These little tests these researchers are doling out catch people on common fallacies. The more intelligent you are the less likely you are to second guess your answer, the more likely you are to rely on a logical shortcut. Like playing a weak chess opponent. And then, when you've lost, your weak chess opponent can point and laugh and say something stupid that he somehow thinks is clever, like, "hah! Smart people are stupid!"
That's why, in the rematch after losing to a weaker opponent, I dot all my i's and cross all my t's. I don't experiment and I double (triple, quadruple, etc.) check my moves before committing to them. Then, after my pride has been returned, I go back to poking and prodding with attempts to scholar's mate my opponent in some variation because no other victory is more satisfying.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
Another good example is in real-estate. Smart people don't generally get in on these flip-this-house and other property bubble schemes as it is obvious that it is going to blow up in your face. It always seems to be morons who are driving their $100,000 cars with 9 rental properties and their shirts unbuttoned down to their navel (1 button for every million in assets). It is not that these people are lazy but that they are completely blind to the certainty of what goes up soon comes down; thus smart people leave all that money on the table.
In this last bubble the wall street people tried joining in on the fun; don' know how to explain that one.
Not sure it is pride so much as incorrect training. I immediately leapt to the wrong answer to the bat and ball but then I subtracted the two, got 90 cents, realised I had messed up and corrected myself. What I was always taught as an undergrad in physics - and what I now try to teach to undergrads myself - is that no matter how smart you are you will always make mistakes. The trick is to cross check your answer to see whether it makes sense. You won't catch everything (at least I don't!) but every error caught is one less mistake.
The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us
If you care at all about understanding how your brain works, this is important. The book is very well researched and explained and full of real examples in many areas and backed up with serious science. Our brains lie to us about what they do and how well they do it in nearly every respect. I almost want to force feed it to everyone I know, because it's just that significant. Please read it.
Mississippi is the most conservative state and last in education. Education in general is decried as liberal by the right. While there may be plenty of degrees on both sides of the aisle conservatives have done nothing to associate themselves on the side of education and often treat education in a very adversarial manner.
It sounds a lot like when a you watch a friend play a hand in poker and you can see all the mistakes, but when you are in the hand you are blind to them.
Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise - William Shakespeare
The reason this "problem" will yield a common answer of 1 dollar is because so many of us have seen the same thing over and over in school. It has been over the course of 5+ years engraved into our thought process to separate pieces of the sentence into logical portions and stop as soon as we have enough information (ie: to assume most of it is useless information). So as soon as the reader sees the intentionally deceptively worded sentence, it's effectively an expected response from this programmed behavior: most people stop where I'm about to show you:
Immediately, we have a situation: a + b = 110, a = 100. We immediately deduce that b = 10, and have a solution instantaneously without completing the thought. This is what standardized testing and predictable word problems with extraneous information teaches people. This isn't a result of their intelligence, this is a result of cognitive process sculpted by years of stupid, pointless exercises. You'd have to be outrageously stupid to think this is somehow unexpected. The people who we classify as "smart" are people who perform well at these tasks (high score on standardized test, breezed through courses with similar problems). This is causation -- people who make this mental leap are considered "smart." So you ask "why are all these smart people making this stupid mistake!?" The answer is clear -- your fundamental measure of intelligence is wrong. The solution is that these so-called "smart" people aren't very smart at all. They're just good at solving tricky word problems as quickly as possible, primarily by ignoring information. In my experience, this methodology is often the inverse of an intelligent process.
Now for the second problem:
What most people will do, because this is how they've been taught, is to read sentence one. Note it as an interesting fact, then proceed. Upon finishing the second sentence, we realize we didn't come up with an answer yet, so we refer to only the information in the latter part of the question. What most people just read is:
We aren't used to thinking in terms of exponentiation, so it's natural to assume a linear growth rate when you completely discard the first sentence.
While I agree, these are both absurd questions, they have something in common: people tend to ignore part of the question and answer the question with incomplete information. This is not something I do very often, intentionally. This is something, though, that I recall being the fundamental "trick" to answering 99.99999999999% of questions on standardized tests. They gave you extraneous information. When literally every problem exposed to you has extraneous information, of 2 forms: A, B or B, A, where B = worthless information, it becomes habitual to process information in this manner, especially when the problem is worded like a problem you'd find on a high-school level standardized test (you know, you never really forget how to ride a bike, like you never forget how to solve very badly designed problems that don't test intelligence in any way).
I don't know, maybe I'm too smart for this researcher. But the answer seems obvious: years and yea
sound like people with BAs in CS doing IT
They may have book smarts but there IT smarts are mostly theory with out the hands on parts.
Tying your self worth to being smart might also mean you question potential mistakes less often.
You're right and everyone else is wrong because a stupid person couldn't possibly have a better answer.
"Kahneman, who admits in “Thinking, Fast and Slow” that his decades of groundbreaking research have failed to significantly improve his own mental performance."
So this guy was unable to find a way to make himself more intelligent and is now trying to explain why. Douchenozzle.
Well there are more factors.
Blue states tend to have more colleges, because blue states have more/bigger cities.
Cities in order to operate work best with liberal principals. Bigger government to offer services because in the city you don't have resources to be fully self reliant. You need city water and sewer because there isn't room for well and septic systems. Too many cars you need a good public transit system to move around faster. When you live in a city the government is the good guy.
Red states are In rural areas you have land and you are more self reliant. Your house your own infrastructure, you will wait public transit just won't work so you need your own car. The government is seen as a force that taxes your income for services you don't use and maker of rules that restrict your freedom. So you are more apt to favor conservatives.
In college the more conservative students are more apt to hit the books and study, while the liberal ones will party more. However the liberal students are less career minded and will more likely go directly into higher education.
So are liberal or conservatives smarter? Probably not much of a difference, in terms of smarts. But more into life choices.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
You need to get accustomed to the reality that you are in part unconsciously driven and with the help of introspection and external feedback you can develop an appreciation of your own unconsciously processes allowing for a deeper sense of agency and the ability to meet reality as it is.
This whole article is BS about trying to rationalize his therapy. I imagine it went something like this.
- The therapist finally convinces the patient he made a stupid choice (whatever it is)
- The patient then says in a Sheldonian way "but I'm smart. I can't make stupid choices!"
- The doctor, not wanting to alienate his patient by the cold hard truth says "even smart people make stupid choices sometimes" (which is strictly speaking true - what differs is the frequency)
- And the next thing we see is this drivel posted to slashdot.
Might I be bold enough to suggest that if you are routinely making enough choices that you require the aid of a therapist, then perhaps you're not as smart as you think you are (at least in that particular area)?
This is just an article designed to make stupid people feel better about themselves.
Most people really start forming rational political preferences out of college. College is such a protected environment, shelter food education gym huge amounts actives going on, all paid for by student loans that you don't need to worry about yet. Any money you make will first go to books and after that it is all recreational spending. This is good for education because you can focus on your studies without the worries of real life problems. However your political opinion at the time isn't complete.
After you leave college and money becomes a serious issue in your life you may find the conservative (rugged indivualism) more appealing as those taxes that out of your paycheck are as much as your rent.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I don't really agree with the conventional idea of people being "smart" and "dumb", the concepts are used in shallow ways. Most people I've met are "smart" in some form, even as so many have proven themselves dumb in another form. I believe that it's a matter of how it manifests.
Some people are good at memorizing things. Some people have a keen perception of patterns which gives them insight into what might logically come next. Some people just put a lot of effort into studying and work their way into understanding a subject through sheer diligence. Some are fast learners. And that thug loitering on the street corner that barely knows how to speak properly? He picks up on body language in a way nobody else can.
Meanwhile those people all have their flaws. The memorization guy might have horrible social skills. Perhaps insightful pattern guy gets sentimental about the things he believes in, and thus becomes stubborn and irrational about things that don't match his views. The diligent one is really just a stubborn person faking it-- they are terrible and it takes them a long time to learn, but they invest the time beating it into their head. The fast learner picks up on something quickly, but then becomes bored of it right away and moves on with only a superficial understanding of the subject. Or, the fast learner never learned to study, so when the time comes he is in a fix. I think you can fill in the blanks as you wish for the thug on the street corner.
This is the reason why society manages to function while we witness so many stupid people.
Well, you've got the "coward" part down pat.
When you want something built, come see me. If you want correct grammar and spelling, get a F*ing liberal arts student.
LSD is great for getting a better understanding of your subconscious processes. When you look at things on acid sometimes it's like you're seeing the thing for the first time without a lifetime of biases built up. Other times you become conscious of all the associations you have with certain things, sometimes going far back into your childhood. It's really a shame it's illegal.
. We scrutinize our motivations and search for relevant reasons; we lament our mistakes to therapists and ruminate on the beliefs that led us astray. The problem with this ... is that the driving forces behind biasesâ"the root causes of our irrationalityâ"are largely unconscious, which means they remain invisible to self-analysis and impermeable to intelligence. ...blinding us to those primal processes responsible for many of our everyday failings.
Uh, I think a therapist would tell you that's why you need them.
Just sayin'
im glad that your personal experience about college being protected has transformed your view of everyone else in the worlds college this most is just unbelievably stupid and shaped off such a limited experience. dont know why even post this
Please cite your sources.
Because what I've observed is that Conservatives are currently just spouting propaganda, ie just making stuff up and or spinning the facts. (Example Fox News)
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
A smart person can't be smart without interaction with others. Preferably other intelligence. It's called iron sharpening iron.
Starbucks, Harbuckle of Breath.
We scrutinize our motivations and search for relevant reasons; we lament our mistakes to therapists and ruminate on the beliefs that led us astray. The problem with this introspective approach is that the driving forces behind biases—the root causes of our irrationality—are largely unconscious, which means they remain invisible to self-analysis and impermeable to intelligence.
I call Bullshit!
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
So I'm guessing that by your above (GP) post and this PP following it that you are highly educated likely from Berkley or Stanford (RPI and MIT grads don't make those kinds of errors :p )
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
You really can't extrapolate the legislature's education level to the rest of the country... If that was possible then 90 something percent of us would be lawyers.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
If you've got a Bachelor of Engineering you really do get a starting point in every type of engineering and a few sciences. That can be built on to produce some capability in a wide range of fields. Of course there's a huge difference between someone that dabbles and a true professional in a field, or somebody that has sat on that starting point and barely moved since.
I used to be an engineer, but then somebody had to look after a cluster a bit over a decade ago and I can't call my job engineering any more.
I didn't understand this until I learned about my wife. Her ACT score was only ~+1 standard deviation above the norm--nothing special really--but she graduated cum laude in college and then top 15% in medical school (AOA). She has OCD, and it inhibits her on any question presented using the paradox of choice.
I think a lot of people have analogous problems--they may fully understand the concept being tested but remain unable to demonstrate that in their test score or other metric for whatever reason. I think language and terminology are common culprits.
I think you are making up shit that you hope supports your opinion without even trying to get it to fit reality. I went through college without a single loan, working part time and full-time summers (most summers full time working and full-time college). Even with money a serious issue, I didn't turn conservative. Most likely, it's the rejection of people and loss of empathy that you get when the only people you deal with are exceptions to the rules (family) and people you hate (everyone at work or in traffic on the way there, or the DMV for an occasional renewal). If you had remained as socially active and connected as you were in college, you wouldn't have become a jackass (a requirement for the brand of conservativism practiced in the US, where they'll claim "fiscal responsibility" when cutting a program, when it is actually cheaper to fund the program and not deal with the social effects of safety nets being cut).
Learn to love Alaska
Mississippi [venturamojo.com] is the most conservative state and last in education.
As conservatives hate public education, it makes sense. The most conservative states will cut education until they are last, then brag about it. That doesn't mean that lack of education causes conservativism, but more likely, conservativism causes anti-intellectual ripples. It's a great cone of ignorance. with the conservatives at the middle.
Learn to love Alaska
Read Kahneman's book - it is one of the most important books I have read in years.
n college the more conservative students are more apt to hit the books and study, while the liberal ones will party more. However the liberal students are less career minded and will more likely go directly into higher education.
I never noticed any such thing. Have you seen something to suggest that, or are you just making it up. Yale is a study school, and Chico State is a party school, or something like that?
Learn to love Alaska
I'm so used to doing 2 things at once that when I do one, like listen to someone or do math, I get distracted by what can only be called attention surplus disorder. That's my theory.
Here's why smart people get the wrong answer more often than expected. First you have to realize that the example problems are designed to illustrate so-called "fast and frugal" mental heuristics. Whether you got the answer right or wrong, in all likelihood the first answer to instantaneously pop into your head was the wrong answer. The wrong answer comes not from crappy math, but from a biological short-circuit in your brain that tries to calculate these things automatically, except the algorithm it uses will result in a conspicuously wrong answers in these cases.
Second, you have to understand that intelligent people are more likely to invent similar heuristics, often unintentionally or without reflection. There's the famous case of Asimov, who could calculate change from a transaction seemingly instantaneously. People thought he was a savant, except all he really was was yet another person who taught himself to habitually break up a calculation into easier intermediate calculations. He then wrote a book about it after he realized that not everybody calculated change that way.
So the more intelligent you are, the more likely you are to use and rely on a toolbox of heuristics. And because you're not always aware that you're using
these heuristics, you don't realize that you unintentionally rely on them to come to answers quickly. And without understanding that, you're less likely to catch yourself responding with the wrong answer---derived from a trusty mental heuristic---to the above questions.
Now, that's my analysis. How the authors go from that simple explanation to an existential crisis of the liberal intelligenstia, I have no idea.
But rather, stupid people who others think are smart, are stupid. Seriously, I've seen people who would otherwise be called mentally retarded being labeled as "gifted" for no reason other than they did well on an IQ test.
People who are not "smart" are poor judges of others' intelligence and are prone to thinking themselves or others as being geniuses for the most inane of reasons.
Ah, yes, "rugged individualism," two words, together or separately, that in a decade of living next to the Capitol Hill Club have never occurred to me as descriptive of a singlre, solitary member of the place. You'll find more of that sort of thing at the local Radical Faeries club, conveniently located two blocks away.
You were never worried about your student loans? Wow, I worried about them every month.
Sheltered? I'd say my experience was a bit different, I was surrounded by people who for the first time in their lives actually had to do things on their own, manage their own personal economy, get up in the morning, cook their own food, deal with authorities and the associated paperwork...
High school, now there was a sheltered environment. Kids living off their parents' money, a dictatorial environment where the leaders (teachers) would pretend there was a semblance of democracy but the moment the kids disagreed it was back to the teachers making the decisions as "benevolent" dictators. The vast majority of kids really not having any major worries. That's where the goofball ideologies flourished, the kids on the right where neo-liberals, anarcho-capitalists, nazis, libertarians, "randroids" and the like, the kids on the left were anarchists, syndicalists, marxists, maoists, anarcho-primitivists...
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
There is nothing wrong with posting AC. STFU
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
If we, for a moment define "right wing" as Republican and "left wing" as Democrat (and ignore for a moment third parties and independent voters and the inconsistencies between labeling them right wing and left wing)
The majority of universities are left wing because that is in their best self interest. Look at who pays professors at state-run universities: the state. In general, democrats spend more on education meaning the university gets more money and they get paid more. Similarly if you are in the "pure science" fields (science for the sake of science) you'd vote democrat because they support public funding for sciences more than republicans.
The majority of students at universities will tend to, at least for a while, support the policies of the democrats. Why? Who is paying for their college? Usually its federal loans and federal grants. Who supports increasing the amount of financial aid? Democrats. Students usually also have a lower tax burden, are working lower-paying jobs and consume more government assistance.
The higher education you have the more likely you are to be in a university job which means you want more funding which means you vote democrat.
On the other hand, the person who gets a decent paying job doing manual work is likely to pay higher taxes sooner (though perhaps less overall because they most likely will make less in their lifetime), they would favor less government assistance (when the college kids are making part-time minimum wage, they are advancing the ladder in their chosen trade and generally wouldn't qualify for assistance and aren't going to use grants and federal financial aid) and would vote republican.
Education makes you more liberal is true, but it is simply on a matter of self interest and should not be taken as those who think better are liberal, merely that those with higher education levels tend to work in areas financed by the government such as universities and "pure" sciences which receive grants while those with only high school or bachelor's degrees tend to work for the private sector.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
This is very short sighted, and assumes that everything students do is driven by money. Which is isn't. During my time in college (I'm 28), Your political views were generally driven by social issues rather than anything to do with taxes or federal funding of loans.
Interesting... I definitely over thought the problem. But, I did come to the correct answer.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Integrate[2^x%2C+{x%2C+0%2C+a}]+%2F+Integrate[2^x%2C+{x%2C+0%2C+48}]%29+%3D+.5
I guess from the beginning of the problem, before I finished reading it, I started wondering how much was covering the pond after just one day (The first day)... which is something I thought I couldn't do in my head, which then led me down this path.
See, that's why the educational system is so left-leaning! Liberal principals!
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
It seems to me this is an argument for why dumb people are dumb -- impatiently blurting out a guess yields an obvious and incorrect answer, wereas doing the actual computation yields the correct answer easily.
Big mouthed people who love to hear themselves talk and espouse their own brilliance are just dim bulb slobs who can barely get their shoes tied in the morning -- pretty much like everyone else.
I think the most dangerous bias in normal people is the assumption that the entirety of their irrationality lies within their emotions. The idea, in other words, that those ideas and motivations represented by the non-emotional “reasoning” portion of their mind is somehow safer from irrationality's taint than the “clearly irrational” emotional side. The non-emotional is not a haven from irrationality.
The fine line separating the genius from the lunatic marks the difference between having the presence and strength of mind to exert reasoned rationality as a control on the ego and not. Living with the mind of a mad man only makes you a mad man if you allow your ego to believe everything that pops up from your subconscious. In this, the lunatic who knows he's crazy has the advantage over the oblivious lunatic as well as over the average person who is over confident in his unemotional reasoning.
Deal with the tides of irrationality that those who dance that fine line experience daily and you develop an OCD like manner of self examining your every thought, emotional or not, before accepting it as rational. To do otherwise could mean a one-way ticket to loony land or worse.
But on the other hand, I'm crazy so don't listen to me.
There is no such thing as objectivity, only bias that has been acknowledged to allow others to search for its effects.
But at least I'm smarter than the “...more than fifty per cent of students at Harvard, Princeton, and M.I.T” who “gave the incorrect answer to the bat-and-ball question...”
So I have that going for me.
P.S. Would it be pedantic of me to point out that the bat and ball question is a simple algebra problem and not “a simple arithmetic question” as stated in the article?
(ref.: http://www.armoredpenguin.com/math/)
Jello, you're conflating the different uses of the terms liberal and conservative.
I wrote a long post about how I'm socially conservative but politically liberal, but who cares what some random AC has to say about himself, so instead I'll just point you in the direction of Wikipedia's article on the political spectrum.
I like that when I use the moderation on my Android phone, I have to select from the radio buttons then hit "ok". On my windows 7 laptop I don't get that second chance.
(FYI I'm posting this to undo an incorrect mod)
Red states are In rural areas you have land and you are more self reliant.
Actually Red states are higher recipients of Federal aid than Blue states.
In college the more conservative students are more apt to hit the books and study, while the liberal ones will party more. However the liberal students are less career minded and will more likely go directly into higher education.
Complete and utter horse-shit. When I was in school, it was the more liberal students who kept long hours in the library and hit the books, whilst the more conservative-leaning tended to join social fraternities and stay drunk. Associates of mine, regardless of whether they went to state schools or private institutions, will back me up. Your post seemed somewhat insightful until that last paragraph, with which your entire argument ran off the rails.
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
This [...] assumes that everything students do is driven by money.
Not necessarily, it can be much more subtle. As a university employee, it is easy to see why spending more on university is a good idea, and harder to see why taxing production more is a bad idea (and vica versa for people owning production facilities). This makes it easier to agree with left-wing politicies than with right-wing ones*. The views of the professors will affect (or even effect) the views of the students, so it is possible to end up with students being left-wing for economic reasons, without it being for their own, short-sighted selfinterest.
*In this post, left-wing is defined as high-tax, high-public-spending, and right-wing is the opposite. This doesn't match the US political system, but that is another point.
from the alt text: "No, I don't need to read your thesis, I can imagine roughly what it says."
And this is different from any other "political thought" exactly how?
Politics is the way you further your interests in the society. That's what politics is all about. "Conservative" political thought is the same thin layer of logical fallacies to cover your own interests. For each school of thought and each fundamental principle in it there is a counterexample where following this principle as proven to make things worse.
why smart people are often more likely to make cognitive errors than stupid people.
The article is not talking about any cognitive errors. It is talking about problems that are specifically designed to induce these kind of errors. If the tests comprised of questions like "the bat and the ball cost together $1.13. The bat costs $87. How much does the ball cost?" you would find that those 'stupid' people would make more mistakes.
Furthermore the research itself seems dishonest. They state that knowing about these biases does not help a person to avoid them. So did they make a test where they warned the participants that the questions were specifically designed to provoke wrong answers? If they did, they forgot to mention the results.
Don't ever let your brain get in the way of a good time.
I am getting the impression that the SAT score correlates rather strong with Verbal intelligence. While the type of puzzles, which I answered correctly within a second, are very much depending on non-verbal (performal/visual) intelligence. I think this is true for many of the Slashdot readers. But on the other hand, I have to agree, I often see intelligent people (especially those who are strong on verbal skils) make thinking errors like the one mentioned in the article, and I also often caught myself making these kind of mistakes, while I am rather strong non-verbal thinker. I guess that my experience with debugging has learned me to think things through and not rely on the first answer that pops up in my mind. I also have come to the realisation that real thinking is hard and requires effort. But it is also a fact that many intelligent people stumble on problems like the Monty Hall puzzle, and that some of those cannot be convinced of the correct answer. I have come to the conclusion that some people with a PhD degree are lacking the non-verbal intelligence required to understand a problem like the Monty Hall puzzle, which sometimes frustrates me.
I may commit more mistakes but i do them all in my head and arrive at a right answer then post/write..etc.
STUPID people just blither on and on and try everything slowly and out loud and write mistakes and et all.
DUMBEST post on slashdot ever guess the posters of articles feel threatened that intelligence lurks about them.
The thing about trick questions is that they are INTENDED to trip people up. Therefore when it doesn't trip people up enough, a different question is posed until one gets enough failures. And after a while, the "correct" answer is from a specific chain of causaility and therefore hard to follow through.
Add to that that people are trusting the questions to be honest, they aren't looking for the trip-up, therefore they are tripped up.
On a blog there was a question posed:
A man says he has two children, the elder one is male. What is the chance that the younger is male?
The "correct" answer is supposed to be 0% because the poser of the question says you need to infer that if the older one is male and specified, then this must mean that the eldest is specifically the male and therefore the younger not male, else the statement would have been "one of them is male" without the specific of the age.
Except that this doesnt' have to be the case.
But it is insisted to be so because this is a trick question.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
"The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than average. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their mistakes.[1]"
We are also into our second generation of kids who have not had honest feedback on their abilities. The PC position is that people with high self esteem are more successful in life. Real life studies show just the reverse. Prisons are full of people with inflated egos and a sense of entitlement while people with low self esteem and a need to prove themselves go on to win the Nobel Prize, create art and found companies like Google.
I should be a genius then, based on the amount of mistakes of this kind a fall in. :D
Except that both of the presidential candidates went to Harvard...
War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Intelligence is Ignorance.
Personally as a member of the human race I think that would be a fairly ignominious way to die off.
Alien Teacher: You see in this example the race of "Humans" actually managed to kill themselves off by creating a common "lily pad" (similar to our Xanopods here on Trellic) that reproduced much too quickly. It quickly choked out all food supplies and eventually the Humans themselves.
Alien Kid: But teacher, that is stupid why would they do that?
Alien Teacher: Because class, sometimes even very smart people can be stupid when they take cognitive shortcuts. OK class that is all for today, dismissed!
People are good at what they care about. That's it.
I was skeptical, and looked up some data. It seems this is indeed correct.
http://taxfoundation.org/article/federal-spending-received-dollar-taxes-paid-state-2005
Quite interesting.
This is a troll. Every election year in the US this one makes the rounds. It's a dig against "liberal intelligentsia".
To quote a popular Slashdot sig, "I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization."
Indeed smart people can be dumb, like the ones who wrote this article.
“people who were aware of their own biases were not better able to overcome them.”
While it may be true some smart people cannot overcome their own biases, the first step in being smarter than others is being able to identify your biases, so you can work on overcoming them. The willfully ignorant person has no chance if they don't know what they don't know.
Also, they have an interesting definition of bias. Yes, I got the math questions wrong because I am lazy and didn't take them seriously. I don't refute I got them wrong, however. If I were biased, I would not accept the fact that I was wrong, even when faced with evidence to the contrary...or at least that's what bias means to me. I also suck at math, and can't come to the correct conclusions on my own, but I DO understand and accept the correct answer when they are laid before me. To that regard, I consider myself unbiased. My cognition was only biased by my laziness, in this case.
When I think bias in the terms of intellect, I think people who cannot and/or refuse to accept a empirical evidence because of their pre-disposed belief system (be it religion, ignorance, money, corruption). Think "Al Gore" and "Environmentalism". He wants his beliefs to be true so badly, that he exaggerates what is actually true, and ignores anything that refutes his belief. (Please, spare me any political banter, because I voted for Gore and I do my part for the environment, just using him as an example since he seems to be a bit 'out there').
Cheers. ~stewie
I won't bother look up in the litterature but inr eality the following correlation happens : the smarter you are, the more likely you know you can be in error, and the more likely you will double check/give dsclaimer etc..., whereas slightly less smart people (but still in the average) will in fact lean forward and pretend their knowledge is sure, or say they are on solid ground. Case in point : the dunning kruger effect.
Red states are In rural areas you have land and you are more self reliant.
I call bovine manure.
Red states suck more money from the federal government than they put in. The largest transfer payments are to elderly and disabled people in red states because the overhead in providing medical services to them is so much more than providing these benefits to the elderly in larger population centers (plus - interesting factoid - a smaller number of them continue to work after retirement age than in urban areas). In addition, rural people tend to get farm subsidies, take more money to get roads to them, and get subsidized benefits like grazing on federal land. These idiots endlessly suck at federal and state government's teats while all the while bitching about government being too large and costing too much.
It's like my conservative brother who was just elected to be a circuit judge - for years he was bitching about government employees. Now that he works for the government, suddenly, they're not that bad. Red state conservatives are the most hypocritical fools I've ever met.
That is all.
Like my father used to say..."vote your pocketbook, son!". To which I say, my dad was an idiot.
You could have cut down your entire post by simply acknowledging that Universities lean left because critical thinking, empirical evidence, scientific inquiry, meta-cognition, and heavy doses of skepticism are staples for both.
You also failed to acknowledge that what qualifies as "right wing" and "left wing" swings wildly based on era and geography. I registered Republican in the 1980s. I haven't had anyone in my party to vote for since G. H. W. Bush left office. I've also lived in Georgia and Texas, but grew up in the Northwest. I'm more liberal than some so called "Democrats" in those states. I've also lived in England and Germany, where the concept of right and left are on completely different scales.
So, no, I don't think your analysis is very accurate. In fact, it sounds like the same sort of anti-intellectual rationalization for not having an education that I hear daily on conservative talk radio.
Exactly, the problem is a big part of what makes humans efficient is to solve new problems using old solutions. When I walk up to a door, it's good to assume that it functions like every other door, and not assume it's some sort of trick door and spend a few minutes considering how the door functions. I was able to get the right answer to the tests questions because I assumed they were trying to trick me because it was a test given my psychologists. Do I always assume that? No, my productive thinking would be consume by paranoia over minutia. The goal is to have alarms go off when things have a higher probability to trick you.
Treating the social effect as a cost is loaded with assumptions. The loss of a safety net costs me nothing if I don't rely on it myself. Ceasing to voluntarily alleviate someone else's suffering doesn't make me responsible for their condition that would also exist even if I didn't. So if they turn around and impose actual costs on me through force, then they are responsible for that decision, not the end of the program. It may be cheaper to provide such programs at least in the short term, but danegeld usually is. That doesn't necessarily mean it's a good idea. Disclaimer: I may not find social saftety nets inherently moral, but their practical effects are ususally such that I don't care about them and don't really mind paying taxes for them. I personally like helping other people out. I just detest it when someone will force someone else to pay for something and then pretend that they are being benevolent themselves
All that being said, I don't think any neat narratives about when political positions get formed will ever be accurate. Life isn't generally that neat. That goes both for the GP's suggestiong about real life starting after college, and your point about
"Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny! Free men pull in all sorts of directions" -- Havelock Vetinari
This is a great comment and a perfectly rational explanation for the findings. We are so used to having problems worded in a particular way, presenting information in a particular way, etc. that it can make it difficult to spot something that makes the question a little more complex.
I also think subtle details can change the way people answer these questions. Suppose the first question instead was:
A bat and ball cost $1.10 total. The ball costs $0.84 less than the bat. How much does the ball cost?
I guarantee you that the results would favor those with higher SAT scores. In fact, even if you just changed the difference in prices to a number that is less round, it will cause people to think differently. As the question is worded, it encourages the reader to associate "a dollar and ten cents" with "a dollar" only a few words later. If you make that association less strong, even by changing "a dollar and ten" to $1.10, it will already change the results.
Also, the choice of subject in each sentence is important. When you say "A bat and a ball cost..." then "A bat costs..." and then "How much does the ball cost," it encourages a quick reader to break down the "a dollar and ten" into its constitutent "a dollar" and then "ten cents." If you switch the emphasis, as I did, to the fact that "a ball costs less," then "how much does the ball cost?", that would also disrupt the tendency to parse incorrectly.
It would also be in line with simple word problem structure, which often tends to make a series of statements about X and then ask a further question about X. (e.g., "X is taller than..." "X is wider than..." followed by "How big is X?")
In contrast, the structure of this problem encourages a reader to make assignments: X and Y cost... X costs... how much is Y? That's a different problem type, but it's also common, and that's probably why many people who have taken a lot of tests stumble here.
I'm not an expert on these things, but I have taught for a number of years, and I was on a number of committees that developed standards for testing. I think most people who write tests are aware of how these sorts of details in wording the question will trip people up -- did the psychologists not actually talk to people who write test questions?
I also think context plays a huge role. If you preface the first question with "Here's a simple arithmetic question:" that will encourage the person hearing/reading the question to think of it as such. As written, however, the question is worded as an algebra question. In other words:
Arithmetic: X + Y = Z, X is X, find Y. Answer: Y = Z - X.
Algebra: X + Y = Z, X = Y + N, find Y. Answer: Y = (Z - N) / 2
The problem is not a "simple arithmetic" problem for most people, particularly if round numbers weren't involved.
Of course, when I read the description in the article of a "simple arithmetic question," it merely put me on guard and made me read the question more carefully, because the subject of the article convinced me that I should pay attention.
Context is everything.
They're just good at solving tricky word problems as quickly as possible, primarily by ignoring information. In my experience, this methodology is often the inverse of an intelligent process.
I do have to disagree here. The reality is that the only way you can become more intelligent is by learning to process information efficiently. Some of that is being able to distill essential information quickly, which also means ignoring stuff that isn't important. I'm not talking about "taking a standardized test" efficiency -- I'm talking about real-world comprehension of events around you, where smart people need to be able to quickly connect chains of related information into a coherent whole, either to solve a particular problem, or to learn how to do more complex ones without a bunch of "baby step
Who cares what the answers are and how fast you can reach them? Isn't it all about procreation and passing on your genes? Genghis Khan probably would have answered both questions wrong before lopping the questioner's head off yet a huge portion of the human population have his genes inside them.
Nice troll. Oh, wait, you actually believe that? Oops.
There are some issues with those numbers. My home state of Montana for instance. Who is the primary beneficiary of an interstate through farm areas, the farmers, or the urban dwellers who want food to be shipped cheaply? Should Montana pay for maintenance of land which is federally owned? We have vast national forest regions in addition to glacier national park and a small section of Yellowstone. Are payments to Indian Tribes included? The people in this state would overwhelmingly prefer to end the same programs which are shipping so many funds this way...You might want to consider actually ending those federal programs and let the chips fall where they may.
Back to the original point, even with more federal funds, the lack of people nearby would still leave you more self reliant as an individual. Even Montana has urbanized areas though, which makes it tricky to actually separate rural and urban on a per state basis.
"Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny! Free men pull in all sorts of directions" -- Havelock Vetinari
I wouldn't extrapolate from your friend. Most red state conservatives would be happy to see the government programs which send so much money their way end. Why does the federal government own and manage so much land in the first place? Should you really hold the cost of maintenance of federal land against the people of the state those lands lie in? Do roads to farms primarily benefit the farmer, or everyone who buys food from them?
The factoid about elderly workers makes sense to me, since urban areas are going to have more jobs which are light on physical labor.
"Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny! Free men pull in all sorts of directions" -- Havelock Vetinari
IIRC people with less than high school/GED trend liberal, HS to 4 years of college trend conservative, and grad school trends liberal again. All trends are fairly weak. One source. Others can be found with more searching, and those numbers are old.
"Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny! Free men pull in all sorts of directions" -- Havelock Vetinari
Or is it more likely that because I identify more as X than Y, clearly X must be superior in all the ways that I believe myself to be superior, which is what your argument basically comes down to.
People vote for who they think will benefit them the most. People with higher education tend to work in education because in the business world with a few exceptions (law fields, medical fields) having an advanced degree really doesn't transfer to all that better pay and a better job. In general, democrats tend to vote in ways that favor education funding. Republicans tend to vote in ways that favor the private sector. Naturally those who are in education will vote democrat if they think it will help education and therefore will help them. Those in the private sector will vote republican if they think it will help the private sector and therefore will help them.
As for your last part I said in my comment
If we, for a moment define "right wing" as Republican and "left wing" as Democrat (and ignore for a moment third parties and independent voters and the inconsistencies between labeling them right wing and left wing)
meaning that I recognize the fact that left wing and right wing make no sense but I used them because the poster I replied to used them.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Which you then play for 10 years in a row.
That's why you're still kids, because you're stupid!
Which is more likely, the fact that individuals are acting with their own self interest in mind and the fact that people tend to vote with people who they perceive to benefit from. The fact that most democrats tend to vote in favor of federally funded science programs and universities and are general proponents of aid for college.
I have a simpler explanation. PEOPLE (not Democrats) vote in favor of federally funded science programs and universities and are proponents of aid for college because it's good for society. So sure, if that's what you mean by "self-interest", I agree. For me a better society is in everyones self-interest.
Or is it more likely that because I identify more as X than Y, clearly X must be superior in all the ways that I believe myself to be superior, which is what your argument basically comes down to.
Says you. That's not my argument at all, nor did I say anything to infer as much.
People vote for who they think will benefit them the most.
I'm a "people" and I don't vote that way. I'm sure there are millions more who don't vote this way either. I was in the military for 10 years and I never advocated increasing the defense budget, for one small example.
People with higher education tend to work in education because in the business world with a few exceptions (law fields, medical fields) having an advanced degree really doesn't transfer to all that better pay and a better job.
This is pretty awful logic. Since having an advanced degree is a requirement for all people working in higher education, it only makes sense that all people in higher education have advanced degrees (duh). The reason people without advanced degrees don't work in higher education is because they aren't qualified. I have an advanced degree in Education and I make 6 figures as a training manager. I'm pretty sure there are zero teachers with BA degrees that make 6 figures. It appears there are more fields out there other than law and medical that reward higher salaries for higher education than you suggest.
Can't agree more. Thanks
Treating the social effect as a cost is loaded with assumptions. The loss of a safety net costs me nothing if I don't rely on it myself.
So you'd have no prisons, no jails, no courts, no government of any kind? If the nets are gone and people who are desperate turn to crime, what will you do without your net of the police? If you arrest them yourself, what will you do with them without courts and prisons?
I just detest it when someone will force someone else to pay for something and then pretend that they are being benevolent themselves
Taxes aren't force. Move out of the US and renounce your citizenship, and no more US taxes. You choose to stay and be responsible for the implicit social contract. As you agreed to it, it's no longer force. It's done by the government that represents you. You obviously hate democracy, as sometimes things get voted in by the majority that some minority doesn't like.
Learn to love Alaska
"You are a product of your environment." --Clement Stone
Casteism
People vote for who they think will benefit them the most.
No they don't. People are thinking all sorts of things when they cast their vote, but to pretend it is some kind of economic maximizing proposition is clearly false. In my experience, very few people actually vote such a way. The people I know vote based on concepts like freedom (libertarians), helping others (social liberals), religious views (social conservatives), etc.
Thinking about it, if someone told me that they voted solely based on which party would push the most money towards them, do you know what party I would associate that person with? I'd think of them as being in the Sociopath Party.
Courts, prisons, jails, etc are not a social effect, they are a government effect. A social effect would be, for instance, the human suffering of the individuals previously on the safety net. Paying a prison to hold people who end up choosing crime after their safety net is cut may be more expensive for any given individual... but only a subset of them would do so, so even on purely utilitarian grounds it may be cheaper overall. Since I'm a libertarian rather than an anarchist, I'm perfectly willing to claim that the bare minimum responsibilites of government are more legitimate than an expansive safety net.
Taxes are force. What gives you, or even the majority, the right to demand that I comply or move? That demand is itself backed up by force. I don't hate democracy in particular, I just recognize that majority support doesn't automatically mean something is moral. Democracy still is better at avoiding certain failure modes than other forms of government. If you separate the program from it's funding, I'm willing to concede that a government program can be beneficial in it's effects. But the taxes used to pay for it are not. You can't objectively subtract the cost of one from the benefit of the other, because the values are subjective. It's not just money on either the cost or benefit side. I personally subjectively value, as an example, limited unemployment benefits more than the cost of providing those benefits. But I recognize that the cost of providing those benefits is coercion, and I'd just as soon allow people the option to forgo both if they so choose.
Also, note the recent furor over someone actually trying to renounce their citizenship to avoid US taxes.
"Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny! Free men pull in all sorts of directions" -- Havelock Vetinari
Interesting that my recent experience seems to contradict yours then.
Perhaps about 50% of liberals are party animals, and 50% of conservatives are as well, and we're just observing some sort of population biasing at our respective schools. (aka, my school was more conservative, and I observed more conservative students in the library, so I just assume that the liberal students are out partying, and you observed and concluded the same thing except with the political leanings switched.)