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 trea

tment 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 objecti

ve 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 adop

tion 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 make

s 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 politic

ians  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 c

an 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 vic

tims 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 Equ

itable 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 n

o  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 world

view 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 th

e  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 likel

y 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 a

t 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 su

ch 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 b

ecome 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 ab

out 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