As always with studies like these, there's the question of applicability of the measures to the hypothesis.
Is the measure of cognitive ability relevant to the claim made in the paper? That is to say, is the measure of cognitive ability ("g" in the paper[0]) actually a good measure of abilities and relevant to long-term financial optimism?
Are both these variables conditional on a third hidden variable? This isn't thoroughly addressed in the paper, the authors choose a series of variables "which are thought to be in principle unaffected by cognitive ability" but even there show that optimism is dependent on e.g. age (Measures -> Control Variables), and additionally mention that "g" is also dependent on age (Measures -> Cognitive Ability).
A high p-value doesn't necessarily indicate that the two variables are causally related, just correlated—and there are plenty of highly correlated datasets that are definitely not causal[1].
It's important to try to disentangle the claims from the data supporting them. The claim that people with lower cognitive ability are more (recklessly) optimistic about their futures seems like it would make sense at least from a
social-Darwinist perspective, but it's exactly those claims that seem reasonable that we should examine more closely. Confirmation bias is a powerful set of blinders.
Is the measure of cognitive ability relevant to the claim made in the paper? That is to say, is the measure of cognitive ability ("g" in the paper[0]) actually a good measure of abilities and relevant to long-term financial optimism?
Are both these variables conditional on a third hidden variable? This isn't thoroughly addressed in the paper, the authors choose a series of variables "which are thought to be in principle unaffected by cognitive ability" but even there show that optimism is dependent on e.g. age (Measures -> Control Variables), and additionally mention that "g" is also dependent on age (Measures -> Cognitive Ability).
A high p-value doesn't necessarily indicate that the two variables are causally related, just correlated—and there are plenty of highly correlated datasets that are definitely not causal[1].
It's important to try to disentangle the claims from the data supporting them. The claim that people with lower cognitive ability are more (recklessly) optimistic about their futures seems like it would make sense at least from a social-Darwinist perspective, but it's exactly those claims that seem reasonable that we should examine more closely. Confirmation bias is a powerful set of blinders.
[0] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/01461672231209400 [1] https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations