What is a Worldview (WV)? Epistemology is field that deals with the study of human knowledge structures: what is knowledge, what is truth, how do we form knowledge, how do beliefs relate to knowledge and how do we form them, are all questions within its purview. There is a tremendous amount of frustration which has been voiced by our communities at Voat and Poal about the apparent resistance of the political Left to evidence (incidentally, evidence is another important philosophical question - what makes evidence any good, anyway?). Some of the answers have been better than others. Many treat the issue as merely following from IQ. I think this is wrong, and this answer causes you to miss the significance of what is truly in conflict here. The answer is that, not intelligence, but **worldviews** (WV) are what are currently at war. These are far more imposing things, and I think many people misunderstand what they actually are. Make no mistake, the sophisticated interrelationships of beliefs inside of a WV depends crucially upon IQ, however, high IQ individuals can have very different worldviews, and we ought to resist reducing the current culture war to a battle of raw intellect. It's far richer than that, and far more troublesome because of this. What this war of minds comes down to is not claims to some psychometric, but to the nature of *warrant* itself. Justification is something possessed by your beliefs. Warrant is something possessed by a person, with respect to their beliefs. A belief is justified, and people are warranted based on justified beliefs. Say that Roger believes that **P** and P is justified, then if **Q** is deducible from P, Roger's belief that Q is justified. We can also say that Roger has a warrant to possess the belief that Q. Ah, but what justifies P to begin with? It can only be another belief. There are two competing views over what 'builds' our knowledge structures, namely **coherentist** theories and **foundationalist** theories. A foundationalist says that our knowledge structures are built up like pyramids from a foundation that is something taken to be indubitable (we cannot reject the foundation). The coherentist says there is no foundation, but rather that our belief structures are self-justifying based on how coherently each belief in the network fits together. In other words, there is no indubitable belief - justification comes from the relationships between our beliefs. For the foundationalist, no belief can be justified which is not justified by the ground floor of beliefs. For the coherentist, a belief is justified by how well it fits into the entire network, i.e. does it destabilize just a few (or many) of the existing nodes? The situation is somewhere in between these theories. The justification of beliefs is based on coherence, but there are beliefs that act like 'foundations' by being connected as justifiers to more beliefs than others. See the image below, and imagine that every dot is a belief. https://files.catbox.moe/wet0tr.png The schema on the right is properly 'circular' because every belief justifies the one after it, but since it wraps around on itself, there is never one belief that acts as the authoritative justifier. In the schema on the left, we have a better picture of coherence. Now, our structures are rarely this perfect, where every belief is justifying every other belief. This would be something like perfect coherence, which most of us aren't. Importantly, you must recognize that there is only one point of intersection on this map that connects to every belief. In truth, that point would itself be a belief that justifies all of the six on the outside of the wheel. Like this: https://files.catbox.moe/yrfmgi.jpeg The strength of a belief becomes a function of how many other beliefs it justifies, or, you could think of this in terms of how many other beliefs depend upon this one for their mutual justification. It would likely amaze people how many of their beliefs are justified by authority, for example. The fact that the earth orbits the sun is not a matter of commonsense. Rather, it only seems like commonsense because of the worldview you have inherited. 99% of people do not justify that belief on the basis of empirical evidence or mathematical reasoning - rather, you accept this view on the justification from authority. There is a belief in authority that is acting as a 'foundation' for entire networks of your knowledge structure. So, even in this coherentist picture, there are beliefs that act legitimately foundational, such that if you were to remove them, whole networks of other beliefs would collapse in terms of their justification - and make no mistake, your brain/mind is in the business of justifying all of its thousands of beliefs in the most efficient (energy-sparing) way possible, making these 'core' beliefs critical to every person's day-to-day life. Just ask yourself how much of your knowledge structure comes form this YOU personally know, which you have unquestionably verified beyond the shadow of *all possible doubt*. It turns out to be quite little. So we have this dynamic kind of stability that exists to support the knowledge structure of the mind. There is wiggle room at the fringes, where the dots have the fewest connections to other dots. But there are very important dots that connect to virtually all other ones, and so the network of lines between all of them rely on these 'core' dots. To threaten the 'core' dot is to threaten the whole structure. Your moment-to-moment stress state, I mean your waking experience of life, depends a great deal on the stability of these networks. For example, after you're married as well as in the time leading up to your marriage, you are restructuring huge swaths of your WV. You come to believe a great many things about your spouse, and most of the beliefs you form about life after your marriage all rest on this 'core' belief that your spouse loves you, i.e. my life is such-and-such a way. What happens when you discover your spouse as committed adultery? Whole networks of beliefs are disrupted. When people say their 'worlds crumbled', they are not just being figurative. Our minds play a role in constituting our world, and when news like this hits us, we do actually become delocalized in the world. At bottom, all forms of stress are a result of these knowledge structures being damaged, destabilized, or totally wrecked. Thus, it is immensely stressful whenever we encounter things that threaten 'core' beliefs - those ones that connect so many others. Taking these out means destabilizing more of the structure - literally destabilizing *YOU*. Now: https://files.catbox.moe/yrfmgi.jpeg This schema represents something like *a theory*. The core justifier belief (big yellow dot) is axiomatic, and so the network of other dots plus the justifier dot becomes a closed entity: a theory. Your whole knowledge structure is made up of many, many theories, consisting of thousands of beliefs. But all theories are sitting inside of a meta-theory, often with some core epistemic value that dictates a Truth theory - why we ought to believe everything else. For most people, this is some form of authority. If it wasn't, we'd have some fatal circularity going on where we justified our whole meta-theory (knowledge structure). We all incur some basic kind of trust in an authority. Therefore, anything which threatens that basic core belief in whatever authority will threaten the entire structure. This becomes massively stressful, threatening to the entire WV. It represents no less than a breakdown of reality itself. This is why it is so often we have this frustrating experience of 'running into a wall' with people that have a different worldview, with a different authority underpinning its basic Trust. You show this person all kinds of *evidence*, but they merely reject it, or ignore it, sometimes seemingly failing to even process what you're saying. It's *not that they aren't cognitively processing it*, it's that it is somehow threatening to that core belief on which the rest of their reality is built. Instead of just being some of their WV being demolished (like when our love one betrays us), it's equivalent to taking out the lynch pin. So often we find ourselves arguing about authority, and that shouldn't surprise us. The wall so often consists in a person you are arguing with citing a particular authority, and you want to ask: "Why do you trust *them* or *that*?" The answer is because their whole WV is structured on it. They can't answer why, other than to reference that belief itself: "Because they're the authority". The reality is that **the authority of that belief is the true authority**, and they are avoiding catastrophic stress. If the difference between your core beliefs and someone else's is to posit a different kind of authority fundamentally, your WV's are not compatible, and they can never be. But this is what you are up against, and why some people seem to ignorantly stubborn. The key to realize is you also have a similar core belief in an authority, it's just different than theirs. ----- How does this relate to IQ? IQ describes two properties inside of these networks, as it relates to cognitive operations through the networks. IQ describes the process of 'drawing the lines' that relate the beliefs, but also for recognizing the patterns of existing theories and using them to structure the formation of all other theories. IQ is the operation that dictates the blueprints about how these inference patterns structure the networks (what shapes the theories take, etc.) The brain of a person with high IQ does not build its belief networks haphazardly. It's like an expert foreman. It establishes isomorphism (similar form) between different theories so that a remarkable structure begins to form in the mind. This helps a high-IQ person to relate seemingly disparate theories together. If you imagine a much larger map than the ones I've provided, with thousands and thousands of theories, the high IQ person can cognize across the map, connecting one theory all the way to the left with something all the way to the right, because their networks are based on sophisticated rules. Further, when a high-IQ person encounters something new, they quickly scan the existing network of beliefs for patterns in the connections that can apply to this new information. This translates to behaviors in the real world that are readily adapted to the new information, because the high-IQ individual has better cognitive rules/patterns. Importantly, IQ is relative. Low IQ has no meaning except in comparison to people with higher IQs. If everyone on earth had a 'low IQ', it would never register with anyone that this was the case. Instead, people with low IQs don't behave in the world like people with high IQs. This performance difference means that the high-IQ people tend to build real-world structures around them (institutions, ways of doing things, language and social games) that low-IQ people are worse at competing in. What is the effect? The low-IQ people have to rely on authority even more in order to learn what to do. Thus, their core beliefs in the prevailing authority will become even stronger, because they have to. Still, a high IQ person, if they are confined to a hierarchical system like an academic institution can wind up having theories that you find to be completely ignorant. If one of their core beliefs is in the authority of the academic institution, then all of their rules, maps and inference patterns will be formed (really powerfully, mind you) from the dogma within that institution. In this sense, high-IQ people (with certain other personality traits) can be weaponized by powers who are so inclined. You can also see the political angle behind mixing low and high-IQ individuals. This will always cause lower IQs to segregate into a group that depends on the prevailing authority more than the high-group does. Even if you took whites with mean IQs of 120 and put them into a space with some hypothetic alien race having the equivalent a mean equivalent of IQ 180, we'd suddenly have to start depending on some alien authority to even get along. ----- How do WV's change? There are many reasons for these different positions that I'm about to discuss, but I don't have the space to get into them here. Suffice it to say here that our WV's can change, but the magnitude and rate of that change is crucial. It is the case that a WV can become fixed and resist the majority of change (we see this in old age). But most of WV's are subject to some kind of remodeling. That remodeling can be classified with respect to how we get on in life, with how we are able to adapt to the world-at-large. Roughly, there is **adaptive remodeling** and **maladaptive remodeling**. Adaptive implies a rate of change that is slow enough, reasoned enough so as to be manageable and to facilitate mostly peaceful social relations with others who are also constantly slightly remodeling. Maladaptive remodeling involves destabilization of knowledge structures that is catastrophic to a person's life. On this side of things we get mental health problems, mental/nervous breakdowns, always commensurate with social problems and also with 'extremism'. Importantly, what is adaptive or maladaptive is always understood with respect to the existing world-order. See the following chart: https://files.catbox.moe/072h3q.jpeg From the image you can gather some important facts about how these things effect communication, deliberation, socializing and politics within a culture. Two different WV's can be made to get along through proper political systems (this just is what *politics is*), but only if they are currently localized at the same horizontal position. Thus, for many years liberals and conservatives who were relatively 'fixed' in their worldviews could be politically managed through a coherent dialectic - represented here by the orange line. Similarly the pink line is a less stable dialectic occurring between two WVs that are mutually changing together with roughly similar patterns for change. The red line depicts the violent relations between two maladaptive groups with different WVs. Finally, the yellow lines depict incoherent communication, demonstrating in their conjunction at the center 'X' conflict that there is no coherent negotiation/argument/debate/resolution between these groups. This would be embodied in something like the situation on social media, where the 'Boomer's (fixed position) comingle with younger, psychologically healthy people, and also with the extremes of adaptation in either of the two WVs. What is implied is that a solution is only possible when both WVs get 'on the same level'. We could all adapt at a fairly even pace, like in the middle. We could all be fixed. Or we could all be extremists. Every horizontal level contains the respective tools necessary for a solution to be had: whether its mutual recognition of disagreement with the need for political arbitration (fixed end), or war (extreme end). The trouble with ongoing chaos is the multi-generational and psychological segregation of people across levels and the manipulated conversations between all of them inside of inefficient, incoherent vistas for exchange to occur.