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Right but we've moved back from 'is liking the NYT a sign of low intelligence' to 'is there something wrong with the NYT, and the media and politics as a whole'. I think it's an observable fact about the world that most high IQ people aren't very distrustful of the media. So it shouldn't be a sign of low intelligence that you like the NYT.
You said 'This makes me think less of his intelligence rather than more given the NYT articles I've actually read'. I agree that not noticing all the intellectual contortions the NYT and other outlets do does say something bad about you relative to people who do. But it mostly isn't mediated by intelligence. I think the initial statement mixes together various different senses in which someone can be wrong in a way that creates a misleading sense that the people you disagree with do so because they're dumber. That'd be nice, because the right would win more quickly, but they aren't.
It does make one more dangerous, more able to mess things up at a large scale, but I think the good more than compensates for the bad, it enables you to do more of and more deeply everything interesting and worthwhile.
I don't think I can accept this, given that a lot of high IQ people I've known and engaged with are in fact incredibly distrustful of the media - this seems to me like a case of duelling anecdotes. I can believe that high IQ people in your cultural milieu read the NYT but no further, and that isn't enough to make your point convincing. Second, I don't necessarily think that IQ is a perfect measure of intelligence - it is one of the better ones that we have and g is clearly important in a lot of ways, but that doesn't make it the be-all and end-all. I am honestly not quite certain about my own definition of intelligence given how complicated a problem that is, but I think continuing to read a paper like the NYT and giving them credence/respect is, given their track record, stupid.
I don't actually disagree, save for the misleading part, because I think that consuming information from the NYT to the point that you read it cover-to-cover every day means that you are, in effect, dumber. If you have an IQ of 200 but that IQ only interacts with reality through a lens or paradigm that feeds you incorrect information, I feel like there's a real sense in which you're stupider than someone with an IQ of 135 who has a more accurate view of the world. Obviously IQ plays a part in how you pick up that worldview and this problem becomes insanely complicated, but fully explicating that is the sort of work I'd need to be paid to do - it would be a significant research project after all.
I don't care about the right winning. I don't think that the left/right lens produces useful information about politics anymore and my own positions on various issues fall on all sides of that spectrum.
It CAN. It can also make you more capable of messing things up at a smaller, more personal scale as well. At the same time, it means you're better at justifying your actions, even mistaken ones. This isn't even getting into the developmental trade-offs that come with it either.
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