Smart Dummies

 2419 years ago Socrates was sentenced to death officially for impiety and corrupting youth (with philosophy), but really because he annoyed people by proving they were talking nonsense when they thought they were smart. According to his own account, as related by Plato, the priestess at Delphi had called Socrates the wisest man in Athens. Socrates held no such opinion of himself so he interviewed statesmen, craftsmen, poets, and other persons of skill and intelligence in order to prove the oracle wrong. Instead, he found that everyone he interviewed, though unquestionably competent in their particular fields, believed their competence extended far beyond their fields including into matters of ethics, meaning, and political policy. He found it easy to get them to contradict themselves and show they didn’t know what they were talking about. He decided the meaning of the oracle was that he was wise for at least recognizing the limits of his own knowledge and wisdom.
 
Most of us know that brains and wisdom are not well correlated. There no fool like a smart fool. In his book The Intelligence Trap: Why Smart People Make Dumb Mistakes, David Robson uses an automotive simile. Higher intelligence is like having more horsepower under the hood of your car; it doesn’t make you a better driver. If you’re a bad driver, more horsepower just makes you more dangerous on the road. The trouble is that few people self-identify as bad drivers, metaphorically or otherwise. (In the US 99% of drivers think they are above average!) In order to avoid tweaking current ideological noses, for a social policy example let’s return to Plato with a revisit to The Republic. Only someone as brilliant as Plato could imagine and argue persuasively in favor of such a proto-fascist hellhole.

 
Though I.Q., a measure of abstract and analytical thinking, is broadly associated with academic and career success, the correlation isn’t anywhere near as tight as one might expect. Psychologist Robert Sternberg has had better predictive success by measuring three abilities: analytical (bare I.Q.), creative, and practical. Yet people who score well on some mix of these, however successful career-wise, are as apt to make terrible life choices in other ways as the rest of us. They are as apt as well to hold bizarre beliefs and to think non-analytically outside of their narrow specialties (sometimes even there). The percentage of people who believe in the general gamut of paranormal, for example, from ghosts to astrology to clairvoyance actually rises with education. Consider Nobel prizewinning chemist Kary Mullis and his… let’s call them nonmainstream views on alien abduction and on the (according to him) non-HIV cause of AIDS. As Michael Shermer also has written, intelligent people are better at rationalizing evidence that contradicts their views, and so cling all the harder to beliefs in fairies or spiritualism or transdimensional lizards or the Illuminati conspiracy or what-have-you.
 
Most intelligence traps are more mundane than those, but all the more consequential for that. They come in many forms. One is to see things excessively in terms of your own specialty. The German for someone like this is Fachidiot, which is a concise way of conveying the longer but expressive English adage, “To a man with a hammer everything looks like a nail.” Another is for genuinely competent people to be overconfident in their competence. The results can be tragic. Some 80,000 people per year in the US die due to misdiagnosis by generally capable physicians. In 2004 self-confidence by FBI experts in their own fingerprint analysis capabilities led to the arrest and trial of Brandon Mayfield for the Madrid bombings. The FBI identified his fingerprint on a bag found at the scene, and FBI fingerprint experts couldn’t imagine being wrong. They were wrong. Charges were dropped when the Spanish National Police (whose doubts about the FBI’s identification had been ignored) arrested the real perpetrator whose fingerprint actually was a match. (Mayfield won $2 million in damages.)
 
Robson gives a lengthy list of other failings that are as or more common among the gifted as among average folk. They include blind spots, anchoring, confirmation bias, sunk cost bias, groupthink, motivated reasoning, mindlessness, meta-forgetfulness and more.
 
Thinking analytically requires attention and effort and most of us prefer to rely on intuition when we think we can get away with it. Most people including Ivy League students get this wrong for example: Jack is looking at Anne but Anne is looking at George. Jack is married but George is not. Is a married person looking at an unmarried person? Yes, No, or Cannot Be Determined?
 
Most people say Cannot Be Determined which is the intuitive answer because Anne’s status is unknown, but the correct answer is Yes. (Anne is either married or not; if not, Jack is looking at her; if so, she is looking at George.)
 
The good news is that we can train ourselves to think better (including with regard to propaganda and misinformation), and Robson discusses the methods. The hard part is having the intellectual humility to do it. As in AA, one must first admit to having the problem.
 
 

Phil Ochs - Pretty Smart on My Part