What Makes an Idiot?

Speaker A: 00:00:00

Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering podcast produced by me, Fraser McGruer, for Aleph Insights. In this series of podcasts, we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm here with Peter Coghill and Nick Hare of Aleph Insights, and this week we're talking about why there are still idiots.

Speaker B: 00:00:27

Um, who should I go to? Peter.

Speaker C: 00:00:30

Peter, yes. Peter's the biggest idiot. Right, go to Peter. Right, so not that we're calling, not that we're calling this gentleman an idiot, but the story just happened to make me think. I think we're about to call someone an idiot. We're strongly inferring that he's an idiot, that we think he's an idiot, but we're not actually calling him an idiot. So, in the news, was it last week, I think, there was a congressional hearing in the United States that was with the U.S. Forestry Service, and it was touching on subjects like climate change. And Republican Senator, is he a senator? Is he, or is he a? He's a, he is a. Congressman. Congressman, yeah. Yeah, so Republican Congressman Louie Gormert, Gormert. Go-mare? Go-mare. Go-mare. Yeah, great name. Followed the idea, well, is there any way we could change the orbit of the moon to, could the, yeah, could the U.S. Forestry Service look into changing the orbit of the moon to somehow avert climate change? Now, he's not wrong in the sense that the moon and, indeed, the orbit of the earth around the sun have a profound effect on the climate. They do. But, and altering them probably would make, yeah, if we could do so in such a controlled way, may, it may, may, may have a positive effect on climate change. But notwithstanding the fact that the moon is bloody massive, right? It's quite big, isn't it? And would take quite a lot of energy and technology in order to affect any change on it whatsoever. Yeah, so that's just a step away from

Speaker A: 00:02:13

a give me a big enough fulcrum, but yeah, go on, sorry Peter, yeah. Yeah, so, not wanting to

Speaker C: 00:02:20

call him an idiot for this story, just sort of prompted in my mind, well, how do people who have such a fundamental lack of understanding about the world, why do they still exist? You know, why is sort of evolution or our own kind of cultural preferences weaned them out of existence? And indeed, yeah, why, you know, this guy's a congressman, right? Exactly, that's the second part, yeah. Yeah, not only do they still around, but they thrive and they get to senior positions in politics and business and everything else. So, what was up with that? I mean, you know, given that, you know, you are, if you picked a random person on the street and said, do you think we should try and move the moon to combat climate change? They'd probably go, you're, you're totally barking mad.

Speaker B: 00:03:12

I'm not as optimistic as you, Peter. I think a lot of people might say, yeah, we'll give it a go.

Speaker C: 00:03:16

Okay, fair enough. But yeah, so, but why is it that in our, what we think, what we like to think is our societies are, you know, the American, the Western European and American societies are, across the world are largely sort of meritocratic. And, you know, we generally try to find the best and the brightest to lead us and to, you know, be in charge of us. Why, why, why can, how can this? Yeah, yeah, I don't even, right.

Speaker A: 00:03:50

Yeah, this is a tricky one, isn't it? Yeah.

Speaker C: 00:03:54

Is there really, I suppose, is there some evolutionary purpose for idiots that we've overlooked, that we're overlooking? Or is there some driver that means that they still exist? And that, you know, why?

Speaker B: 00:04:08

Well, I just, I think I want to say something about this. Okay. It, the range of intelligence among humans is very low compared to the level of intelligence among humans, right? So this guy can still probably drive a car and pick things up. Yeah. Humans are, the stupidest human is phenomenally intelligent compared to an ant, or even, you know, a chimpanzee. So let's not, the evolution has already weeded out. You know, selected for intelligence. So let's not, you know, this guy might look a bit stupid with some of his beliefs compared to, I dare say, even the likes of you, Fraser, but, but he, but he's still very intelligent compared to a block of wood. So, you know, let's get this in perspective. I was interested in whether or not, so now look, and I'm going to apologise now for you, but the trouble is that measuring whether someone's an idiot isn't very easy, right? It's not really a kind of accepted metric for it. You don't need to define it, right? Well, so I have looked at some studies, but they are about IQ. Now that is very different. Not saying that low IQ equals, you know, you being an idiot, right? I'm not saying that. Very different things. But it is measurable, right? And it's measurable in its meaningful IQ. So we can sort of ask the question of, well, is Peter right? Does IQ, does your general level of intelligence correlate with, you know, outcomes? Is it negatively correlated? Are stupid people more likely to get up, you know, and the evidence is, okay, so broadly that it actually does correlate with all kinds of beneficial life outcomes. So, you know, there's a very strong correlation between IQ and academic achievement. If you look at the intelligence of practitioners in different fields, prestige of those fields, as perceived by people, correlates with the average intelligence of practitioners. It correlates a bit with job performance. It correlates with income, but not that significantly. But it also affects your probability of dropping out of school, becoming dependent on welfare, having accidents, even your probability of falling into criminality. I mean, Peter's perception aside, in general, intelligence is correlated with better outcomes in life. Okay, so intelligence works in that regard. So I just thought it was worth mentioning. But then, even within those, any of those fields, within any kind of outcome, you're going to find extreme, you're going to find a lot of variance. So, you know, looking at the profession with the highest average IQ of practitioners is medicine. So, you know, MDs, that kind of thing. The profession with the lowest average IQ is janitors, right, on average. Now, but the lowest IQ among the medics that were measured in this study is lower than the highest IQ among the janitors. So there is more, you know, variance within than there is between, basically. So there we are, just throwing that out there. So the point is, yes, you can find, on average, the doctors are going to be, you know, smarter, cleverer, or however you want to say it. But you're still going to find some very intelligent janitors and some not particularly intelligent doctors. What do you think of that? Interesting points. Not sure what to do with those. Well, I suppose what I'm saying is not the be all and end all intelligence. It's important. Clearly.

Speaker A: 00:08:11

Maybe there's also, I don't want to fixate too much on the example we gave. I think it's interesting that he's a politician.

Speaker B: 00:08:18

Yeah, and then I think we need to cover that issue.

Speaker A: 00:08:21

Let's call this for a moment, being stupid. What this guy said, right? Let's call it that for a moment. How much of a hindrance? How important is that? So for example, you know, maybe he's an amazing communicator. He's great. And maybe he's got lots of charisma.

Speaker B: 00:08:36

Well, he might know loads about economics for all.

Speaker A: 00:08:38

Yeah, he might be great at balancing the budget.

Speaker C: 00:08:40

Well, I was going to mention, I mean, it's a literary example, so it's fictional. But Sherlock Holmes, I don't know if this is from the original book, but it's definitely in the modern TV series with Benedict Cumberbatch. He was surprised to find out when told that the earth was round, it was a sphere. Or some other very fundamental thing that everybody kind of knows. And Watson and other characters were making the fun out of him. But his excuse was, well, it wouldn't make any difference to anything I do, whether it's flat or round. I still know lots of other stuff about loads of other things.

Speaker B: 00:09:20

It's interesting, actually, that Conan Doyle changed his description of Sherlock Holmes as the books went on. In the first book, which I think is Study in Scarlet, it says that he's completely ignorant about physics and astronomy and that kind of stuff. But later on, he becomes a bit more superhuman. I think he becomes slightly more streamlined into a bit of a character of a guy who just basically knows everything about everything. Possibly because it was judged to feel a bit implausible that you could get through life with such knowledge gaps. And I don't think I haven't found a study looking at this, but it feels to me that yes, it's possible that you might have someone who is very astute in forming judgments about cars or construction or forestry and to have an infantile understanding of astronomy. I just think it's a bit unlikely because I think, based on the studies that have been done, that these things do all correlate with one another. The same sorts of skills that you would use to form beliefs about one field, if you're good at doing that, ought to lead you to forming true or plausible beliefs about other fields.

Speaker C: 00:10:48

Yeah, and if you take the forestry person, assuming they're a top-notch forester, they'll have pondered, well, the trees are being held down by gravity, so how does gravity work? And their models for how their little forestry world works are the same fundamental models that govern the things in astronomy. So if they've paused to wonder how gravity works, even for a minute, you realize that a disc earth doesn't make any sense.

Speaker B: 00:11:16

Yeah, and we're hypothesizing what might be going through the head of a forestry expert here, but where does a tree come from? If they've wondered that, they might discover that a tree was made of carbon, which had been largely captured from the air, and then realize that there's such a thing as conservation of mass and that more mass equals harder to move. And the moon is not, I know it looks small, but that's because it's far away, and it's actually quite massive and would require a large amount of energy.

Speaker C: 00:11:48

In the same way that trees look far away. It looks small when they're far away. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker B: 00:11:52

You could extrapolate from there. So yeah, I am not, I know it's sometimes used as a defense of people who have silly beliefs in one area that, you know, well, they, but they're really, really good at something else. I'm not sure I'm buying it. I'm not, I would be, I'm surprised, I would be surprised if that was true. Because, you know, as I said, the skills that you're using to acquire beliefs are common between subject areas.

Speaker A: 00:12:18

Listen, yeah, it occurred to me, which is that, again, people who are not the most intelligent and, you know, how do we measure that? What does that mean? Etc. Fine. But one of the things that often makes them not so intelligent is they don't realize that they're not very intelligent.

Speaker C: 00:12:35

Good old Dunning-Kruger effect. Yeah.

Speaker A: 00:12:37

Yeah. I wonder how clever this guy thinks he is, you know, with the moon ideas, Louis, and if he now looks back at that and goes, Oh my God, what was I thinking? Or does he go, yeah, of course, well, let's make it happen. You know, that kind of can-do spirit. But also, do they, you know, I think we're actually sort of being a bit sneery about this. And I think, you know, I think you two, you know, you're clever guys, right? It's very easy to look around and sort of see stupidity. So what's my question? My question is, well, what are those people? What do the idiots think of you? I don't know. Presuming you're, you know, you're in a separate, you're partitioned off from them. What do they think of you? And do they just think you're really bad at football? Why can't, why are you so bad at football? Why can't you, you know, why can't you pick up girls in a better way? I mean, are these, are these themselves idiotic questions?

Speaker B: 00:13:34

So the fact that a variation exists in intelligence, right? The fact that it isn't fatal to have low IQ shows you that, you know, there is, there must be a survival tolerance and that, you know, low IQ can be compensated for by other things, you know, as you say, by ability to play football or, you know, physical strength or lots of other things that are actually, that are actually important. You know, it's not, it's not the most important thing in the world. If it was, we would all have, you know, been selected for. Look, it's a bit like, you know, human height does not vary very much, right? It's not, you don't generally get people who are sort of a foot tall and people who are 30 foot tall, which suggests that there is actually, that there is quite a significant advantage to being more or less exactly the height we are because it, we've been selected for that, you know, and that, but the fact that you, there is variation also tells you that there are, there are going to be some advantages to being at either end of that spectrum. You know, I mean, are we getting close?

Speaker A: 00:14:39

Are we closer than we would imagine to that podcast episode we did on Opposites, right? Where we think stupid and clever, they're opposites, but actually they're just on a scale. And yeah, we're really, it's actually relatively clever.

Speaker B: 00:14:51

Yeah. Incredibly clever versus actually just really surprisingly clever and, and we're ranking them. But actually, if we were to think about the absolute level of cleverness, that variation is tiny.

Speaker A: 00:15:04

And also, yeah, I mean, someone's stupid and someone clever, they're very much closer to each other than a plank of wood, right? I mean, that sort of thing.

Speaker B: 00:15:13

Well, there are some people I went to university with, I feel like the conversation would be better with a plank of wood. No, I think there are, I think, but I think this leads us on to, are there, what are those potential advantages, right? And I think there are some, there are some advantages. Let's, let's, first of all, now the evidence is a bit mixed. But when it comes to abstract beliefs, I'm talking about beliefs about stuff you know about, like, you know, your house and your kids and that kind of stuff, or your job, right? But abstract political beliefs, like believing that, you know, what we ought to do about homelessness or something. There is, there is very mixed evidence, not particularly good evidence that clever people are likely to form true or false beliefs than less intelligent people. You know, there is some evidence that IQ correlates with centrism. There's also evidence that IQ correlates, or having a very high IQ correlates with having extreme political views, which speculates to why that might be. But there's also, there's been studies which show that intelligent people find it easier to, to marshal, marshal evidence in support of something they believe, whether it's right or wrong, and are therefore less likely to be challenged by new information. So contradictory information is, is easier for intelligent people to explain away. So intelligent people are actually less likely to be persuaded by evidence.

Speaker C: 00:16:55

More likely to be crystallized in their beliefs. Yeah.

Speaker B: 00:16:59

And then I think there's other things you talked about the Dunning-Kruger effect, which is really quite popular. It's been, I mean, I've seen it on the internet a lot in the last few years. I don't know if that was correlated with any political events happening in the US, but the, so this is the phenomenon for anyone who doesn't know that if you are, if you know very little about something, the tendency is for you to greatly overestimate your level of ability at it. And as you learn more or become more able at that skill or learn more about that field, you learn that you actually are much worse at it than you thought you were. Right. So you sort of realize how little you know, and you get more accurate assessing how relatively good you are. And then when you get really, really good at something, you gradually become actually also very good at appraising how good you are relative to, you know, all the accomplishments on that field. The upshot is that people who think they're really good at something are either really good at it or really terrible at it. So now, why aren't the people who are terrible being screened out? Well, I think this is where, you know, there's an information asymmetry problem that you can't always tell. And this is particularly key when it comes to politics, which is about persuasion and confidence to some extent. People believe confident people. We don't. People's expressed level of confidence is we treat it as evidence that they're right. OK, so that together, you take Dunning-Kruger effect and this confidence issue tells you that, well, you're in any population of people who seem very plausible and seem expert is probably going to consist of people who really are and people who just think they are and are blowing their own trumpet. So so I think in that regard, you know, there is a there is a benefit to being an income pooper because you probably don't. You probably go around telling everyone that, you know, know, know everything about it. Yeah, because I'm more likely to succeed than someone who knows a bit about it.

Speaker C: 00:19:11

I suspect I've got no evidence for this, but I just posit the idea that if you're if you're extremely intelligent and you're sort of well-educated, so you know lots of stuff as well, I would have I would imagine that that the sort of in the the internal dialogue that you have with yourself about any given action is more is likely to make you less risk averse. And there's definitely advantage in in risk taking in in in not just in evolutionary terms, but also in in in in in some fields. And politics is one you you the successful politicians often go out on a limb on a particular popular manifesto and get traction on that. And then, you know, I'm thinking of the Nigel Farage, right? So most successful politician of the 20th century, 21st century. He got that one thing done. They get banging on about. Yeah, and that's a big political risk, right?

Speaker B: 00:20:16

But I think I think I want to put some flesh on that a bit. Just sort of this is I think an issue of survivorship bias, right? Which is that let's let's assume that high variance risks are worse on average, like you probably rather take a small, more certain gain than a take a high variance risk in general. Avoiding risk is often the sensible thing to do because you don't want to run the risk of ruin. You know, so let's say that smarter people take fewer risks, as Peter says. Well, you're going to find that the ranks of the extreme losers and the ranks of the extreme winners are going to be filled with the people who weren't smart enough to avoid those risks. So, you know, in other words, the sensible thing to do is not to play the lottery. We know that every pound you spend on the lottery, you're losing 50p. But lottery winners are all going to be drawn from the ranks of people who don't know that and think playing the lottery is a sensible thing to do. And I guess that's the same with, you know, the sensible thing to do is not to flunk out of school and start a rock band. We all know that. But, you know, the successful rock stars are the ones who did that. So I think this is a key issue we're not seeing. On the spectrum of human success,

Speaker C: 00:21:41

the bright people are all in the middle and then the stupid people are at the extremes.

Speaker B: 00:21:45

Yeah. So, I mean, I think, you know, you probably can't you're not going to get and you can't have an intelligent Donald Trump because an intelligent Donald Trump wouldn't have done that in the first place. They wouldn't try to run for president. They said they would say, well, that probably won't work. I'll go and, you know, I'll go and set up a business

Speaker A: 00:22:02

selling planks or something. Yeah. Look, just going a couple of points back and then there's something I want to wind up on, which is, I mean, maybe we've kind of covered it there, but it's, you know, about leadership as well, right? Where there we all are sitting in the trench about to go over the top and you go to your captain, whatever, go, is this going to be all right? Well, you know, Germany's got this sort of long industrial heritage and they're very disciplined and I give us about a three in five chance or something like that. But, you know, you're quite weak. No, you want to. Let's go get them. We're going to win. That's kind of what you want. Right. I've got a question. Unless there's anything you want to give us a nod if there's anything else. No. OK, so question. What's the most idiotic thing that you have ever said or done or

Speaker B: 00:22:52

thought? I mean, there's a litany of them. It's just a matter of trying to think of a kind of

Speaker C: 00:22:58

good one. Well, I've got one. It's not very exciting, but it was sort of mortifyingly embarrassing at the time. Brilliant. That's what we want. So this was relatively early on in my career and to protect me a bit, I won't say which job it was, but I was given a task to pick up some work that somebody had was struggling with and really drop the ball on. And not again. Nick, not again. Yeah. So basically I was writing a report and we were trying to collate some evidence about this. In this report, there are various sort of statements and assumptions that had been made, but the author hadn't recorded or hadn't backed up any of these statements with any kind of evidence, which was a problem in this organisation, because the whole point of this report was to provide an evidence catalogue for why we were making these recommendations. So anyway, I was given this task to pick this task up and I was given a small team of people to work with. Unbeknownst to me, one of those people was actually the original author of the paper. And so they were already slightly set back because they were being kind of overridden by somebody. And my approach was incredibly ill thought out. So I sort of basically at every turn, I was picking holes in this paper, but in a very unsympathetic way.

Speaker B: 00:24:37

It's almost inconceivable that Peter should behave like that.

Speaker C: 00:24:41

So I was basically just being incredibly rude about somebody's work that was inadequate, but I should have handled it much differently. And had I twigged the fact that this person was in the team, I would have handled it much more differently. And when they came to me and said, oh, by the way, you're being very rude about this thing I've done, I was utterly mortified. I didn't realise until that point, I thought it was somebody else. So if you're going to be rude,

Speaker A: 00:25:09

check that they're not in the room. Precisely the same thing happened in one of my favourite books, Lucky Jim. Anyway, Nick, I'm really struggling to think of, I know I've done lots

Speaker B: 00:25:23

of stupid things, but I can't, I don't think, I'm not sure any of them are newsworthy.

Speaker A: 00:25:27

t, I said, I think it's about: 1000

Speaker B: 00:26:54

Yeah, I don't think it's hard, really hard to come up with a good answer. I suspect that I've blotted out some of the most embarrassing things I've done.

Speaker C: 00:27:05

I think there are there's sort of you have neurological machinery, which deliberately makes you forget bad things that you've done to paint yourself in a more positive light, so that you're not held down. So you probably assimilate lessons. But the cause is sort of erased from your memory so that you don't ever dwell on it. I think that's a kind of an important part of health. The only way to stay sane. Yeah. Because you've read that you sort of continually sort of ruminate on these errors you've made not make any progress.

Speaker A: 00:27:35

Quite. And actually, two things. And this brings us back around nicely, because one, if we were if I was asking that same question now about what's the most stupid thing you've ever seen someone do, or heard, we'd have loads of examples, right? But also, if we had Mr. Louie Gomer on here, and we said, What's the most stupid thing you've ever said? He probably wouldn't say this. I mean, he said, Well, I had good reasons for thinking that or no is actually if you think about I don't know, some sort of justification, maybe. I don't know. Yeah, I mean, to be fair to him,

Speaker B: 00:28:02

to make a general point, a lot often visionaries, you know, people who are way ahead of their time are laughed at, you know, when they they're treated with ridicule. And often expert consensus will turn out to be wrong. And we don't know that in 100 years time, we might not be flinging the moon around to try and fix, you know, climate change. I don't know. I mean, yeah, look at

Speaker A: 00:28:27

Jesus, when he said, Look, I can walk on water. Hey, no one believed him. And also when he said, I'm going to turn this water into wine. And, you know, and lo and behold, he did. Yeah, so this guy's a bit like Jesus is what is maybe what you're saying. Yeah. Right. Let's, let's stop for thought there. Yeah. We'll wrap up there. As always, thanks for listening. If you've got any thoughts or suggestions for topics, you can email us at podcast at alephinsights.com. We'd love to hear from you. Also, if you've enjoyed the podcast, Nick, what should you do? Don't be stupid. Like and subscribe. Absolutely. Absolutely. Thanks, as always. I'm Fraser McGruer. We've been here with Peter Coghill and Nick Hare of Aleph Insights. Until next time. Goodbye.