Why Smart People Believe Stupid Things

[Music] 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 2013 the Yale law professor Dan Kahan conducted experiments testing the effect of Intelligence on ideological bias in one study he scored people on intelligence using the cognitive reflection test a task to measure a person's reasoning ability he found that liberals and conservatives scored roughly

equally on average but the highest scoring individuals in both groups were the most likely to display political bias when assessing the truth of various political statements in a the study 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 such as tarb bur lodged to 2006 stanovich at Al 2012 and Joselyn and Haider marle 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 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 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 or fibs which the brain has come to excel at 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 Illusions 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 what while unintelligent people are more easily misled by other people intelligent people are more easily misled by themselves they're better at convincing themselves of things they want to believe rather than things that are actually true this is why intelligent people tend to have stronger ideological biases being better at reasoning makes them better at rationalizing this tendency is troublesome in individuals but in groups it can prove disastrous affecting the very structure and trajectory of society

for centuries Elite academic institutions like Oxford and Harvard have been training their students to win arguments but not to discern truth and in so doing they've created a class of people highly skilled at motivated reasoning the master debaters that emerge from these institutions go on to become tomorrow's Elites politicians entertainers and intellectuals master debaters are naturally drawn to areas where arguing well is more important than being correct law politics media and Academia and in these industries of pure Theory sheltered from reality they Ed their powerful rhetorical skills to convince each other of fibs the more

counterintuitive the better naturally their most virent arguments soon escape the lab spreading from individuals to departments to institutions to societies some of these arguments can now be found everywhere a prominent example is wokeism an identitarian ideology combining elements of conspiracy theory and moral Panic which became fashionable in Academia toward the end of the 20th century and finally spread to the mainstream with the Advent of smartphones and social media wokeism reduces the world down to simplistic oppressor victim relations in which people who are white straight slim or male are the oppressors while those who are non-white

LGBT fat or female are victims Woks typically reject claims of objectivity as a weapon created by straight white men to enforce the dominant CIS heteronormative patriarchal white supremacist worldview as such they believe that the purpose of scholarship is not to determine truth but to promote social justice or as they call it diversity equity and inclusion to this end they will often use their intelligence to persuade people of arguments that are logically unsound but which are perceived to contribute to a more Equitable world for inance instance in the late 1960s some master debaters decided that fat

people are oppressed in a world where slimness is the nor so they began to carve out a whole field in Academia known as fat studies to address this oppression by creating cunning but irrational arguments to normalize obesity ignoring Decades of medical research showing that being fat is a serious health risk fat studies Scholars argued that anti-at attitudes are health risks because they may cause obese people anxiety and stress since then these activist academics have developed even more convoluted rationalizations many now argue that wanting to fight obesity is white supremacy just as fat studies was created

to normalize obesity in the interests of social justice another academic field gender studies was created to normalize transgenderism and gender non-conformity through similarly dubious arguments one such argument that sex is a spectrum is often Justified on the basis that there's no single thing that distinguishes all men from all women such an abstract explanation is seductive but beneath the aure it's just an elaborate case of the univariant fallacy it's true that no single thing distinguishes all men from all women but no single thing distinguishes all cats from all monkeys either is this proof of a cat

monkey Spectrum even though fibs like sex is a spectrum and obesity is healthy are objectively false woke academics have made the mainstream through a combination of crafty arguments and idea laundering the practice of couching opinions in academic jargon and placing them in academic journals to disguise ideology as knowledge these kinds of Master debat beliefs now Prevail among cultural Elites including those who should know better such as biologists but they are rarer among the common people who lack the capacity for mental gymnastics required to justify such intricate delusions despite being irrational wokeism is nevertheless an intelligent

worldview it's intelligent but not rational because its goal is not objective truth or even social justice but social signaling and in pursuing this goal it's a powerful strategy people who engage in woke rituals such as telling obese people they're perfect just the way they are or encouraging kids to question their gender or calling for the defunding of the police signal to others that they're cultured and compassionate towards societies designated downtrodden their actions often end up hurting rather than helping those in need but they make some people feel good for a while and they increase their

own social status which explains why wokeism is most prevalent in Industries where status games and image are most important politics media Academia entertainment and advertising wokeism is what happens when identity protective cognition is allowed to run rampant through cultural institutions like Harvard and Hollywood but while wokeism is currently systemic in the West in the 1800s the dominant racial ideology in America really was white supremacy as a result the master debaters of that age often used their reasoning not to justify discrimination against whites but discrimination against blacks an example would be the American physician Samuel cartrite

a strong believer in slavery he used his learning to avoid the clear and simple realization that slaves who tried to escape didn't want to be slaves and instead diagnosed as suffering from a mental disorder he called Dr P Mania which could be remedied by whipping the devil out of them it's an explanation so idiotic only an intellectual could think of it much like the fictitious disorder that white people are diagnosed with today white fragility cartright's case shows that the problem of runaway rationalization is not just a disorder of today's woke intellectuals but of educated people

of any persuasion at any time and that includes you since you're watching a video about intelligence right now you're likely above average in intelligence which means that you whatever you believe should be extra vigilant against your intellect being commandeered by your animal impulses but how does one do that exactly how does an intelligent person avoid a disorder that prays specifically on intelligence the standard rationalist path is to try to avoid delusion by learning about cognitive biases and logical fallacies but this can be counterproductive research suggests that teaching people about misinformation often just causes them to

dismiss facts they don't like as misinformation while teaching them logic often results in them applying that logic selectively to justify whatever they want to believe such outcomes make sense if knowledge and reasoning are the tools by which intelligent people fool themselves then giving them more knowledge in reasoning only makes them better at fooling themselves I've been writing about irrationality since 2017 and in that time I've noticed a disturbing pattern whenever I post of a cognitive bias or logical y my replies are soon invaded by leftists claiming it explains rtist beliefs and by rightists claiming it

explains leftist beliefs in no cases will someone claim it explains their own beliefs I'm likely guilty of this too it feels effortless to diagnose others with biases and fallacies but excruciatingly hard to diagnose oneself as the famed decision theorist Daniel caraman quipped I've studied cognitive biases my whole life and I'm no better at avoiding them this is not to say that educ ation is futile learning can help to limit motivated reasoning but only if it's accompanied by a deeper kind of development that of one's character motivated reasoning occurs when we place our intelligence and learning

into the service of irrational goals the root of the problem is therefore not our intelligence or learning but our goals most goals of thinking are not to reach objective truth but to justify what we wish to believe there is only one thing that can motivate us to put our intellig into the service of objective truth and that is curiosity it was curiosity that was found by kahan's research to be the strongest countermeasure against bias but how do we make ourselves curious is it even possible good news if you're watching this you're probably quite curious already

but there's something you can do to supercharge your curiosity enter the Curiosity Zone basically curiosity is the desire to fill gaps in knowledge and as such curiosity occurs not when you know nothing about something but when you know a bit about it so learn a little about as much as you can and this will create itches that will spare you to learn even more curiosity is essential to directing your intellect toward objective truth but it's not all you need you must also have humility this is because the source of our strongest biases is our ego

we often base our selfworth on being intelligent and being right and this makes us not want to admit when we get things wrong or to change our mind and so in order to protect our chosen identity we stay wrong if you define yourself worth by your ability to reason if you cling to the identity of a master debater then admitting to being wrong will hurt you and you'll do all you can to avoid it which will stop you learning so instead of defining Yourself by your ability to reason Define Yourself by your willingness to learn

then admitting you're wrong instead of feeling like an attack will become an opportunity for growth anyone who's sure they're humble is probably not so I can't say whether I've succeeded in becoming humble but I can say that I always try to be humble and well there's little difference between trying to be humble and actually being so for me trying to be humble entails the constant interrogation of my own motives could my most cherished belief be a fib why do I really believe what I believe what are the reasons beside reason could I have my self-questioning

makes me agonize over every word I write but in the long term my hesitancy gives me confidence for by being careful about what I think I develop trust in my thoughts humility and curiosity then are what we most need to find Truth by seeking one we also seek the other being curious makes us humble because it shows us how little we know and in turn being humble makes us curious because it helps us acknowledge that we need to know more in in the end rationality is not about intelligence but about character without the right personal

qualities more education won't make you a master of your biases it'll only make you a better servant of them so be open to the possibility that you may be wrong and always be willing to change your mind especially if you're smart by being humble and curious you may not win many arguments but it won't matter for even losing arguments will become a victory that moves you toward the far grander prize of Truth thanks for tuning into this episode of after skool if you found this subject interesting and want more consider checking out my other writings

at gender. substack.com the link is in the [Music] description