opinion polls attached to IQ tests

[Jebus]

I realize this is a pipe dream, but I would love to see a few questions at the end of IQ tests that poll opinions on common controversies, such as:

Is this earth flat?
Was the moon landing a hoax?
Does animal agriculture harm the environment?
Should Covid vaccines be mandated?
Do you think Donald Trump is a good president?

The results could be presented as follows?

X percent of people inside the 80-90 IQ range believe the moon landing was a hoax.
X percent of people inside the 90-100 IQ range believe the moon landing was a hoax.
X percent of people inside the 100-110 IQ range believe the moon landing was a hoax.
X percent of people inside the 110-120 IQ range believe the moon landing was a hoax.

And so on.

Given a large enough sample size, I believe we would see a perfect linear correlation between IQ and opinions.

Although many idiots would dismiss the results,( i.e. someone who believes the moon landing was a hoax is likely to believe IQ tests are a hoax as well), I think in many cases it would motivate people to rethink their opinions.

No one wants to be part of the stupid team.

A number of years ago, I realized I was on the stupid team regarding the abortion issue. This motivated me to examine the issue closer. Was I missing something?

A similar, more easy study would be to ask for level of education (grade school, high school/GED, bachelor, postgraduate) before the opinion questions. These results would likely also show perfect linearity.

[teo123]

I realize this is a pipe dream, but I would love to see a few questions at the end of IQ tests that poll opinions on common controversies, such as:

Hey, listen, IQ tests are supposed to measure how many simple logical puzzles one can solve in a short amount of time. Ideally, everybody would be able to solve all the IQ test correctly if given enough time. So expecting IQ-es to be correlated with wisdom in any practical sense of the word is... kind of weird, don't we agree?

Is this earth flat?

But don't you think it takes some kind of "smartness" to come up with all those ad-hoc hypotheses that the Flat-Earthers come up with? I mean, some of those ad-hoc hypotheses seem pretty smart. Like the Bishop's Law (the idea that light when travelling vertically doesn't follow a straight line, but instead follows a curve described by some complicated mathematical formula involving trigonometric functions and integrals), all those attempts to go around special relativity (to explain away how the gravitational acceleration appears to differ from one place on the Earth to another)... That's not something an average person could come up with. I couldn't come up with that.

Was the moon landing a hoax?

Hey, listen, some moon landing denier arguments are dumb (the likes of "It's pointless to discuss whether or not a human being can get to the Moon, for the same reason it's pointless to discuss whether or not a human being can breathe under water."). Some are moderately smart (like the supposed photographic anomalies). But some seem very smart, like the one with the math supposedly showing that the Coriolis Effect from the rotation of the Earth would prevent a rocket from leaving the Earth. An average person is not capable of coming up with such arguments.

Does animal agriculture harm the environment?

I don't think that many people would deny that. I think that many people believe two things:
1. Animal agriculture can be improved significantly to harm the environment less. (A very questionable premise)
2. The possibility of improving a system justifies a participation in it. (Obviously false)
It sounds silly when we put it that way, but I think that is what many (if not most) people believe.

Should Covid vaccines be mandated?

Hey, listen, some arguments made by anti-vaxxers sound pretty smart. Like the experiments with p-values supposedly showing that Pfizer and Moderna somehow magically cause myocarditis in young people more often than COVID itself does (in around 3% of the population in that age group). Of course, accepting their conclusions requires rejecting basics of molecular biology, but you cannot say an average person is capable of coming up with something like that.

Do you think Donald Trump is a good president?

Jebus, I think that many people who vote for Trump don't actually believe he would be a good president, but they want to destroy America. They think that America is so bad that probably any alternative would be better. They are revolutionaries, rather than conservatives. Of course, revolutions almost never benefit the average person, but I don't think that a high IQ is what it takes to realize that.