Intelligent People Excel at Fooling Themselves

This is an excellent 15-min video by After Sokol. Psychologist have found that highly intelligent people are great at fooling themselves, especially when they form tribes.

Here is an excerpt from the video:

Kahan and a team of researchers found that test subjects who scored highest in numeracy were better able to objectively evaluate statistical data when told it related to a skin rash treatment, but when the same data was presented as relating to a polarizing subject, gun control, those who scored highest on numeracy actually exhibited the greatest bias. The correlation between intelligence and ideological bias is robust, having been found in many other studies … These studies found stronger biases in clever people on both sides of the aisle.

And since such biases are mutually contradictory, they can't be a result of greater understanding. So what is it about intelligent people that makes them so prone to bias? To understand we must consider what intelligence actually is. In AI research, there's a concept called the orthogonality thesis. This is the idea that an intelligent agent can't just be intelligent, it must be intelligent at something because intelligence is nothing more than the effectiveness with which an agent pursues a goal. Rationality is intelligence in pursuit of objective truth. But intelligence can be used to pursue any number of other goals. And since the means by which the goal is selected is distinct from the means by which the goal is pursued. The intelligence with which an agent pursues its goal is no guarantee that the goal itself is intelligent.

As a case in point, human intelligence evolved less as a tool for pursuing objective truth than as a tool for pursuing personal well being, tribal belonging, social status, and sex. And this often required the adoption of what I call fashionably irrational beliefs and fibs which the brain has come to accept that. Since we're a social species, it is intelligent for us to convince ourselves of irrational beliefs if holding those beliefs increases our status and well being. Dan Kahan calls this behavior, identity protective cognition, or IPC, by engaging in IPC people bind their intelligence to the service of evolutionary impulses, leveraging their logic and learning not to correct delusions, but to justify them. Or, as the novelist Saul Bellow put it a great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep. What this means is that while unintelligent people are more easily misled by other people, intelligent people are more easily misled by themselves.

See also, the work of Dan Sperber, discussed here.

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The Main Function of Formidable Human Brains is Not Truth-Seeking: The Defense of Claudine Gay’s Plagiarism

Notice how Greg Lukianoff distinguishes between the free speech issues and the plagiarism issues in which "smart" people at Harvard, pundits and media are using their formidable intellectual training to generate endless streams of bullshit.

I agree completely with Lukianoff who offers several valuable resources for reforming financially-bloated ideology-permeated elite colleges.

Excerpt:

Once Gay resigned, we then saw people like Nikole Hannah-Jones, Ibram X. Kendi, and others (including the Associated Press, with its coverage being mocked for its original headline, “Harvard president’s resignation highlights new conservative weapon against colleges: plagiarism”), pointing the finger at racism and right-wing animus rather than on the real problem: Harvard itself, and our institutions of higher learning as a whole.

In my and Rikki Schlott’s book “The Canceling of the American Mind,” we outline a fourth “Great Untruth” (adding to the first three Jonathan Haidt and I described in “The Coddling of the American Mind”) which is that “bad people only have bad opinions.” This is the foundational assumption of what we call the Perfect Rhetorical Fortress, the method by which cancelers on the political Left shut down arguments. By declaring someone a “conservative,” a “right winger,” — or, if you REALLY want them to be ignored, “far right,” “fascist,” or, my new favorite, “Neo-confederate” — whether they actually are conservative or not, they are also declaring that they are evil and therefore incapable of being correct. This form of non-argumentation, which I have dubbed “fasco-casting”, along with the political Right’s Efficient Rhetorical Fortress tactics (which similarly use labels like “liberal” and “woke” to automatically dismiss counterarguments) is a near-ubiquitous anti-intellectual habit these days.

Research has demonstrated that the brain is not primarily a truth-seeking organ. It can seek truth, but that is much more likely to happen in specialized environments where enlightenment principles prevail, for instance the type of environment where disciplined scientists and engineers work together to create things that really work in the real world.

Out in the wild, the real world, where most of us spend most of our time, brains are mostly used as PR departments, generating "reasons" for doing what we want to do based on our emotions.  Lukianoff offers several resources for exploring this counter-intuitive finding:

The biggest problem with smart people is that they’re incredibly good at using their prefrontal cortices to rationalize what they want to believe in the first place. This is a well-documented phenomenon, and one you can observe yourself right now. Are you inclined to agree with me here? If so, you’re already forming rationalizations about why I’m correct. If you’re inclined to disagree, you’re reading this with an eye for poking holes in everything I’m saying.

But it is a serious problem, summarized well by another Substack, The Prism:

“The correlation between intelligence and ideological bias is robust, having been found in many other studies, such as Taber & Lodge (2006), Stanovich et al. (2012), and Joslyn & Haider-Markel (2014). These studies found stronger biases in clever people on both sides of the aisle, and since such biases are mutually contradictory, they can’t be a result of greater understanding…

Since we’re a social species, it is intelligent for us to convince ourselves of irrational beliefs if holding those beliefs increases our status and well-being. Dan Kahan calls this behavior “identity-protective cognition” (IPC).

By engaging in IPC, people bind their intelligence to the service of evolutionary impulses, leveraging their logic and learning not to correct delusions but to justify them. Or as the novelist Saul Bellow put it, “a great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.”

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About Intellectual Humility

Tribal affiliation is the biggest threat to intellectual humility. It is insidious--we join tribes emotionally and organically--there is not official signup form, so we don't even know that we joined. Once we join, the confirmation bias takes over, making us hubristic and even willing to fight for things we didn't choose to believe.

The solution is to disengage, to step out of one's tribe. That is extremely difficult once we get used to the comfy confines, the smiles and encouragement of our comrades, the non-stop warmth of that feeling that of belonging, the feeling that one is always at home. Once we are comfy, we turn off any thoughts that maybe we don't belong. We are completely credulous regarding tribal dogma. Stockholm Syndrome takes over. We become our own prisoners, setting up electrified fences to cordon off any improper or impure thoughts. The only hope for most people is that external tragedy resulting from the dogma comes crashing in, resulting in depression, nihilism and scales falling from our eyes. This might offer us a more-or-less blank slate on which to rebuild, a chance to build one's own belief system based on intellectual humility: curiosity, skepticism and evidence. More likely, it merely sends one on a shopping trip to join the next most attractive tribe.

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Substitution as a Lazy Narrative-Preserving Technique (Using Gays Against Groomers as an Example)

What are the policy positions of Gays Against Groomers? Many people won’t know because corporate media on the left (I checked the NYT and WaPo) refuse to mention the organization. I recently asked someone who considers herself to be on the political left. She cringed and responded by saying that it sounds like a Republican or conservative group and that there is no grooming going on in America’s schools.

That seems like an answer to the question, but it isn’t. What just happened is subtle, but it is critically important. The person I was talking to completely failed to answer my question. Her answer illustrates Daniel Kahneman’s principle of “substitution,” which he discussed at length in Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011).

[W]hen faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution.

(p. 12).

In my experience, this is a go-to technique in the culture war conversations. Quite often, when people are asked factual questions about a person or organization they don’t like (or they assume they don’t like), they will substitute an easy question for the more difficult question of detailing the facts. The substituted easy question will often be something like “Do you like this person/organization,” even though that was clearly not the question asked. As Kahneman describes, the new simple question will be unconsciously inserted. With the new simple question substituted in, the answer is also simple. In culture war discussions, it often takes the form of an ad hominem attack. Consider this example:

Q: “What are the policy position of [a particular person/group]?”

This is a factual question that should either be “I don’t know” or it should be a listing of the policy positions of the person/group. If the is about an organization and the answer is anything other than “I don’t know,” it should fairly track the “About Us” page of the website the person or organization.

However, the hard question is often unconsciously brushed to the side and a new easy question is inserted. In my example, if the person thinks they don’t like the person or organization, they could be expected to substitute in a new simple question like this:

“Do you like [the person or group] and what detrimental things can your emotionally generate (e.g., what deplorable person/affiliation/ad hominem label can you reflexively pull out) to express your emotions?”

For people politically on the Left, the answer will often be something like: “That [person/group] is like Hitler, Republicans, Satan, etc.

On this topic of Substitution, here is another excerpt from Kahneman book (p. 101):

The idea of substitution came up early in my work with Amos [Tversky], and it was the core of what became the heuristics and biases approach. We asked ourselves how people manage to make judgments of probability without knowing precisely what probability is. We concluded that people must somehow simplify that impossible task, and we set out to find how they do it. Our answer was that when called upon to judge probability, people actually judge something else and believe they have judged probability. System 1 often makes this move when faced with difficult target questions, if the an¬swer to a related and easier heuristic question comes readily to mind.
Consider the questions listed in the left-hand column of Table 1.

These are difficult questions, and before you can produce a reasoned answer to any of them you must deal with other difficult issues. What is the meaning of happiness? What are the likely political developments in the next six months? What are the standard sentences for other financial crimes? How strong is the competition that the candidate faces? What other environmental or other causes should be considered? Dealing with these questions seriously is completely impractical. But you are not limited to perfectly reasoned answers to questions. There is a heuristic alternative to careful reasoning, which sometimes works fairly well and sometimes leads to serious errors.

[More . . . ]

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New Study Regarding Tribalism in Politics

New study by Bernstein, Zambrotta, Martin, & Micalizzi on political tribalism. Disturbing and not surprising to anyone who has eyes and ears. Title is: "Tribalism in American Politics: Are Partisans Guilty of Double-Standards?"

Here is the discussion section:

Across experiments, we found strong evidence for the existence of political tribalism and the application of double-standards. In Study 1, we found that tribalism occurs for the perceived legitimacy of hypothetical election outcomes. When asked whether Donald Trump or Joe Biden would be the legitimate president under three different scenarios, Republicans viewed Trump as more legitimate than Biden while Democrats viewed Biden as more legitimate than Trump. Similarly, in Study 2 Part 1, Republicans supported identical presidential policies and actions more under Donald Trump than Barack Obama while Democrats supported identical policies and actions more under Barack Obama than Donald Trump.

A noteworthy element this study is that each item was, in fact, true under both Presidents, which highlights the study’s real-world importance and is an important contribution over prior experiments. In Study 2 Part 2, we showed that Republicans viewed identical statements attributed to Bill Clinton as more bigoted than those attributed to Donald Trump while Democrats viewed the statements as more bigoted when attributed to Trump instead of Clinton. Further, Republicans viewed a statement advocating colorblindness to be generally not racist when attributed to either Dr. Martin Luther King (MLK) or Donald Trump (though racism scores were slightly higher in the latter condition); Democrats also viewed the statement as low in racism when attributed to MLK, but the racism score increased drastically when attributed to Trump. Taken together, these studies suggest that tribalism permeates many aspects of political life and discourse. Policy agreement differs according to the person enacting the policy. Perceptions of racism and xenophobia depend on the person who utters the statement. Alarmingly, even the perceived legitimacy of elections is dependent upon the winner; that is, people assign different standards for election legitimacy depending upon whether their preferred candidate wins or loses. Moreover, some of these effects are rarely seen in the social or cognitive sciences (e.g., Fs>250 when sample size <150), which suggests that tribalism plays a large role, at least in certain contexts.

Our main interest was in documenting if bias exists among each side of the political aisle. However, the study does invite us to ask which side exhibits greater tribal bias . . . To the degree that our results can help weigh in on this question, there was some indication that bias is higher among Democrats, which we call “left-leaning asymmetry”

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