Why Smart People Believe Stupid Things.

[Karl12]

Thought there was a great video right here about 'delusion' and the fact that 'smart' people are just as liable to be affected by it as 'stupid' ones.

Genuinely thought provoking stuff.




• Academic studies on ideological bias get brought up as well as 'fashionably irrational beliefs' (FIBs) and palpable 'woke' absurdities.

What causes Delusion? The prevailing view is that people adopt false beliefs because they’re too stupid or ignorant to grasp the truth. But just as often, the opposite is true: many delusions prey not on dim minds but on bright ones. And this has serious implications for education, society, and you personally.

In this video in collaboration with Gurwinder, we explore the reasons why intelligent people believe irrational things and what can be done to avoid the allure of delusion.

It's a pretty short watch and gets better towards the end so would appreciate any comments on it (for or against).

[Maxmars]

Thought there was a great video right here about 'delusion' and the fact that 'smart' people are just as liable to be affected by it as 'stupid' ones.

Genuinely thought provoking stuff.

• Academic studies on ideological bias get brought up as well as 'fashionably irrational beliefs' (FIBs) and palpable 'woke' absurdities.



It's a pretty short watch and gets better towards the end so would appreciate any comments on it (for or against).

OK, because you always submit such thought-provoking material, I am compelled to expose my opinion...

My first observation, sequentially speaking, is about the "Orthogonality thesis" which seems to me to be the product of reducing reason to a mathematical function... namely, humans acting as a 'differential' evaluator of presumed facts.  Like a machine, our minds 'calculate' what seem evident from the set of facts or data we adopt as relevant to judgment.  But, I have to point out, that humans are intuitive (not calculating) and not restricted to proscribed logical models of interpretation. 

I think humans feel truth as a response to harmony and predictability, not the resolution of formulae, as a machine's focused restrictions would necessarily demand.

The author embarks on a diatribe about the nature and function of truth as it pertains to human endeavor.  Immediately highlighting the 'personal goal' aspect of the existence of truth... in other words, if it suits a human, a human will 'believe' certain truths, and mangle other truth, irrespective of objective reality.  So in this conceptualization, humans are not reliable as a source of actual truth, only its effect to themselves introspectively.

The author's inspiration comes from a particular perspective imposed by a thinker who casts a difficult aspersion on human cognitive behavior. 

It takes the form of embedding an irrefutable aspect of humans seeking truth.  He states that humans will believe whatever suits them in terms of validating or elevating their social position, their acceptance within a community.  Proposing that this 'causes' the adoption of 'popular' or 'en vogue' precepts or biases... and that the more intelligent the human is, the more robustly they can 'justify or support' their chosen socially-expressed thought path or belief.  In other words, the better rationalizer is necessarily the more intelligent person... even if they are wrong.  Being right or wrong is not determined by intelligence.

But consider those who have attempted to promote a truth that no one believed... there are many examples... and now consider the likelihood that someone promoting a truth that no one will accept is damning their social position... is that "self-destructive?"  (Or, for example, was Galileo just a narcissist looking for attention?)

He segues into the 'training' that most people undergo... directly in many case, but subliminally in others, that as long as you can argue well... you don't 'have' to be right.  Citing law, politics, and "media" as prime examples... but I have to point out again, that in all those examples, it is almost never the case that "all" facts are disclosed or included in an arguments' end result... only the subset offered for consideration.

In the perfect world of "theory" we might be inclined to assume that all things are equal... that all data is known, and that everyone receives and understands the information equally well... but here at DI and other places, we can see that is hardly ever the case.

I don't want to give the impression that I reject the author and his words... in fact, many of them are sound observations, and useful for any person to consider carefully, assuming they are keen to discover and learn about their own judgments... But at least to me, it all boils down to what the person doing the thinking a) wants, and b) is willing to let go of.

In the act of acknowledging that 'what I believe' can be skewed by 'what I want' and cemented by 'what I won't let go of' it is important to understand that 'classic' reasoning is not the whole picture when it comes to bias.  That intelligence, to myself, is only one aspect of 'belief;' and not it's totality, as it is in most persuasive 'social' reality.

The question of the video is "Why do smart people believe stupid things?"  But this video doesn't really explain why... only how. 

If we were to isolate the examples the author includes towards the explanation of his ideas, we might be inclined to say "He thinks this or that is stupid." but that would be premature and perhaps prejudicial, yet the opportunity to characterize the work is there nevertheless.

Bias is as bias does.  Intelligence alone cannot destroy it.  It takes heart; which ironically is what might have caused the bias in the first place.


Thanks for bringing this up... I love many of these 'After Skool' videos generally...  They are almost always worth the time it takes to experience them.
   

[UltraBudgie]

As well as the clique-conformity and standard high school outflock-bullying, there is an academic habit that is enrobed in higher education: deconstructionism. This is sophomorically practised as "everything is wrong and the opposite!" Move fast and break things. Disrupt. To make your mark on the system, you must undermine the old foundations. Build anew from the ashes. Academia moves forward at the rate that the entrenched old guard dies.

At a point, this practice becomes an ideology unto itself. I believe that can be seen in current third-wave sociology movements.

[Byrd]

Curiosity is a wonderful thing.  Did you look at the video and are you determined to be more curious?


Did you wonder why The Bad Guys (academics, People With Wrong Ideas) are frequently drawn with blue clothing instead of neutral colors, like yellow, purple, orange, green?  If those images were recolored, would it make a difference in the subtext? 

What about the Bell Curve of "curiosity" -- does the Bell Curve automatically remind you of IQ distribution?  Is there actually a "Bell Curve" of curiosity?  It seems ("level of perceived knowledge") to suggest that the higher the IQ and education, the less curious a person is.

But doesn't that then imply that Einstein wasn't curious about anything and that his education (got his PhD at an early age) destroyed his curiosity and his ability to think outside the box (their education was far more rigorous and rigid than ours, by the way)  Should we then conclude that Richard Feynman (I know people who knew him -- this was the highly acclaimed physicist who demonstrated to the world how the O-rings in Challenger shattered and caused the space shuttle to explode) had no curiosity and that his education left him hopelessly box-bound within the confines of his narrow knowledge?

Is intelligence and education the same as "great ability to debate", as they suggest?  If you sharpen your debating skills to a very high level, will you become a Nickola Tesla-like figure?  Or turn into Neil DeGrasse Tyson?  Or a Heisenberg?  Or DaVinci?  Euler?  Ramanujan?  Newton? Bach?  Benjamin Franklin?

How solid is evidence like an article from a tabloid?  In my experience, tabloids DO tend to go "out of the box" in the direction of "Gordon Ramsay Sex Dwarf Eaten By Badger (real tabloid headline, folks: https://imgur.com/a/gordon-ramsay-dwarf-...er-r3Arr4E) but I tend to discount heavily articles on science from many news sources. 

Curiosity.... an interesting thing.  Were you curious about the information shown?

Did any of you look up the papers that were briefly shown?

I did.  

So how about the "The Racist Roots of Fighting Obesity" one?  Did you look at the second line, or did your eyes miss it -- "Prescribing weight loss to Black women ignores barriers to their health"  (Scientific American) It talks about how often people get diagnosed as "fat" and the rest of their problems are trivialized.  ("your diabetes will go away if you lose weight" ... lots of people with Type I diabetes get told that (Type I is genetic and one of the results of untreated Type I is... obesity.) ...and it's a VERY complex situation where the insulin that keeps them alive may be contributing to obesity)

Were they curious enough to read the paper themselves and understand the background or did they simply read the headline?

How about the article on The Fat Acceptance Movement which is on a site for eating disorders?  

Did they read the history or did they simply pick it as a great headline to make a point (while ignoring the rest of the article)?

Did you wonder why they conflated sex (xx, x, xxy, xyy, xy, xxyy etc (details, details...) which is NOT a spectrum) with the social construct of gender (a "woman" is not someone that you've strapped to a table for genetic and physical examinations but rather a legal adult who is presenting as female within the context of their society.  A "girl" is not a "woman".  But the age at which someone presenting as female is considered a woman varies wildly across the world (12 in some areas to 18 in others)? 

We are shown a picture of a cat and two people and a monkey ... are they suggesting that people socially identified as men/boys/males are as genetically different from women/females/girls as cats and monkeys?)

Don't they know the difference?  



Curiosity is an interesting thing... but there's excellent curiosity and unthinking curiosity... think of it as the difference between being curious about light sockets and investigating them by sticking a finger in them -- as opposed to being curious about them and sticking a voltmeter in them.

How's your curiosity?

[UltraBudgie]

Curiosity is a wonderful thing.

Not sure if that all was addressed to me, someone upthread, or how much was rhetorical, but rather than further deconstruct the academic practice of curiosity or go over a long laundry list of specific points and observations (some of which probably should have their own threads), I'll narrow in on this one thing for now:

Is curiosity a wonderful thing? In my experience, there's two types: a yearning to fill in the blank spots on the map, exploration, moving beyond what is known, finding the larger paradigm, if there is one. Driven by imagination. And then, curiosity of detail, finding the exact mechanism, image, or description of a particular thing. Wonderful? Yes, there is a sense of wonder with childlike curiosity. But when the scope of the undiscovered world narrows, with age and experience, these two types of curiosity can become frustration and tedium.

Fortunately reality is larger than the worldly. There is very little I am widely curious about regarding the material, anymore. However my sense of wonder has greatly increased since I have move beyond that. I am now curious about different things.

I guess that seems stupid.




PS: If you haven't read it, I recommend Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!. He could fix radios with his mind!

[Byrd]

Not sure if that all was addressed to me, someone upthread, or how much was rhetorical, but rather than further deconstruct the academic practice of curiosity or go over a long laundry list of specific points and observations (some of which probably should have their own threads), I'll narrow in on this one thing for now:

Is curiosity a wonderful thing? In my experience, there's two types: a yearning to fill in the blank spots on the map, exploration, moving beyond what is known, finding the larger paradigm, if there is one. Driven by imagination. And then, curiosity of detail, finding the exact mechanism, image, or description of a particular thing. Wonderful? Yes, there is a sense of wonder with childlike curiosity. But when the scope of the undiscovered world narrows, with age and experience, these two types of curiosity can become frustration and tedium.

Fortunately reality is larger than the worldly. There is very little I am widely curious about regarding the material, anymore. However my sense of wonder has greatly increased since I have move beyond that. I am now curious about different things.

I guess that seems stupid.




PS: If you haven't read it, I recommend Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!. He could fix radios with his mind!

Nah.  Just an observation on the video.  But I wonder if you equal curiosity with information seeking.  To me, there's a bunch of different types of information seeking.  Curiosity is simply a question.  Information seeking is a process.


But this is how my brain works -- Theodore Sturgeon's "ask the next question" (many here may not know this one https://christopher-mckitterick.com/Stur...geon-Q.htm)

I ask a lot of "next questions" but the process can vary wildly depending on what I'm after.




And yes, Feynman was amazing!

[xpert11]

The following is my attempt at this topic. I ask the reader to use the example below in the context of the source material.

Donald Rumsfeld was devoid of intellectual curiosity with devasting historical outcomes. For instance, he dismissed the Fall of Saigon (1975) as something that happened.

During the Reagan admin, Rumsfeld concluded that American troops weren't suitable for peacekeeping roles. In the Middle East, U.S. troops presented a too great a target for terrorists. So, peacekeeping duties are best left to Kiwi and Fijian forces. 

In his mind, those two matters sat alongside regime change in Iraq (2003) without any issue. Rumsfeld is an example of someone with the means and wares to get elected to Congress and serve in the Ford and Bush cabinets. But he didn't have the tools to make informed decisions or form sound advice to the president. 

Did Rumsfeld employ build-in contradictions to justify his various stances?
Unlike the supporters of imperial racism/the British Empire, who relied upon illogical conclusions to support their stances, Rumsfeld's thought process never advanced that far. 
(The British ruling India demonstrates those contradictions perfectly, but that is another topic).

Was Rumsfeld the village idiot who served as Secretary of Defence twice? I argue that he was smart enough to occupy and manipulate a seat of power. However, he lacked the curiosity and insights to connect the dots. If one follows this reasoning, Rumsfeld represents an inherently dangerous character.

More on Rumsfeld:

[UltraBudgie]

Donald Rumsfeld was devoid of intellectual curiosity with devasting historical outcomes.

Master of snowflakes, pawn of the blizzard. Rumsfeld was an interesting contradiction. Fervently energetic, the ultimate detail-oriented man. Step by step watching his shoes walk the path of power. Princeton, Georgetown, Navy, Congress, Department of Defence:

About the 2001-06 Snowflakes

When I returned to the Pentagon in 2001, I continued writing the short memos that had been nicknamed “snowflakes” some years ago. They quickly became a system of communication with the many employees of DoD, as I would initiate a topic with a short memo to the relevant person, who would in turn provide research, background, or a course of action as necessary. In the digital age it was much easier to keep the originals on file so I could track their progress. They quickly grew in number from mere flurries to a veritable blizzard.

The term “snowflake” covers a range of communications, from notes to myself on topics I found interesting, to extended instructions to my associates, to simple requests for a haircut. There was no set template; some are several pages and some just a few words. They were all conceived individually and I had never considered them as a set until I started work on the memoir. I then found that when reviewed together, they give a remarkable sense of the variety of topics that are confronted by a secretary of defense.

https://www.theblackvault.com/documentar...ollection/

In a way, he was deeply curious, about every issue, every item that came into his scope. Every "known unknown". The archive of his snowflakes can be browsed here: https://www.theblackvault.com/documentar...ollection/

Q: Could I follow up, Mr. Secretary, on what you just said, please? In regard to Iraq weapons of mass destruction and terrorists, is there any evidence to indicate that Iraq has attempted to or is willing to supply terrorists with weapons of mass destruction? Because there are reports that there is no evidence of a direct link between Baghdad and some of these terrorist organizations.

Rumsfeld: Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- the ones we don't know we don't know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones.

And so people who have the omniscience that they can say with high certainty that something has not happened or is not being tried, have capabilities that are -- what was the word you used, Pam, earlier?

Q: Free associate? (laughs)

Rumsfeld: Yeah. They can -- (chuckles) -- they can do things I can't do. (laughter)

https://web.archive.org/web/201604062357...iptID=2636

"They can do things I can't do." He did not concern himself with such unknowns, only the known and controllable mechanisms that interfaced with them. A user.

As a White House aide around that time noted to Ron Suskind, regarding the attitude of the executive leadership:

The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' [...] 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do'.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community

An actor on stage, not the author or audience. Rumsfeld didn't write the play, perhaps he didn't even care about the plot, only evoking the moment. Snowflake by snowflake. Study the snowflakes! That'll keep you busy.

Intellectually curious? Yes. Curious about history? Not so much, it seems. If so, stunningly compartmentalized. Just a man doing his job. The kind of compartmentalization that fuels the banality of evil.


Edit to summarize: Great call xpert11! Rumsfeld: a smart person who doesn't believe stupid things. Very very carefully and well.

[Byrd]

Master of snowflakes, pawn of the blizzard. Rumsfeld was an interesting contradiction. Fervently energetic, the ultimate detail-oriented man. Step by step watching his shoes walk the path of power. Princeton, Georgetown, Navy, Congress, Department of Defence:


In a way, he was deeply curious, about every issue, every item that came into his scope. Every "known unknown". The archive of his snowflakes can be browsed here: https://www.theblackvault.com/documentar...ollection/
....

Edit to summarize: Great call xpert11! Rumsfeld: a smart person who doesn't believe stupid things. Very very carefully and well.

Budgie, you asked the very question I wanted to... "how good was his data?"  If it's from biased sources then the answers are directed in one way.  And yes, I believe that his own culture set him up for a heavy bias (experience of WWII and Hitler).

Overcoming cultural bias is difficult.  Steering a nation that's heavily culturally biased using a department is very difficult.

Interesting discussion.  I'll have to read some of the snowflake linked material.

[Maxmars]

Only because of my anal nature to enforce topic consistency...

Rumsfeld... in terms of "Smart people believing stupid things" how does this apply?

What is "stupid" idea that he believed?  In what way was he so intelligent as to merit special significance to the contrast?

(I offer a concession to make this meaningful to me as a member... my own position is that he was following a script - probably not of his own design - he 'represented' an agenda... one that I have never heard authoritatively defined.  Like most who are put in such positions, he was highly competent to do so.  My agreement or rejection of his positions and utterances is irrelevant.)

Let's try to bring this back to "stupid ideas" embraced by intelligent people.