How Smart Stupid People Fuck Up the World

Just remember:

The one thing the very rich are very, very, good at is lying and deception. That is how they get to be that rich in the first place.

KT Chong, and class war is how the rich keep their wealth.

Keynes, who was supposedly a pretty good investor, said markets could stay irrational longer than he could stay solvent. And another investor, Warren Buffett said in the run up to the 2008 meltdown that he no longer understood the markets.

If you were around at the time, Ian was very good in the run up to this same crisis. So for that matter was I. Where I went wrong was that I couldn’t believe that the Fed would go the limit to bail out the bad actors by juicing asset prices.

“Being really smart, but being a bad thinker, just gets you to the wrong place faster” pretty much says it all. I also liked, “Further our education system trains smart people to be authority worshiping idiots.”

I think it explains a lot about Larry Summers to remember that he had two uncles, Paul Samuelson and Kenneth Arrow, who won the sorta Nobel Prize in economics. In addition to the repeal of Glass-Steagall, Summers also pushed the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 which deregulated derivatives, both of which turned a really bad mortgage crisis into something that could take out the whole financial system. Summers set up a program through Harvard to help turn Russia into the corrupt oligarchical kleptocracy it became. He then was President of Harvard, had lots of scandals, got the Harvard Trust to invest in ways that would cost it billions, and eventually resigned. Summers is the quintessential Establishment type that no matter how badly he f*cked up has always managed to fail upward or land somewhere really, really comfortable.

One of my longest running complaints [caveat: as a Mad Scientist and ahh… ~lapsed~ PhD candidate] about the interesting times we live in – no doubt aired here a time or two – is our tendency to treated doctors: medical doctors, juris doctors (lawyers), dentists… as paradigms of wisdom. No doubt pillars of their profession, none-the-less rote memorization, not unlike car mechanics and computer geeks. Very little room for ‘outside the box’.

One of my problems with regarding Larry Summers and Dick Cheney as smart is that they remind me of the local honchos in a small town sitting around the country club bar after a round of golf agreeing on how to solve all the nation’s problems if the people in Washington just had any sense. The owner of the car dealership, the manager of the bank, the real estate king, and their buddies are convinced of their own brilliance. The people surrounding them think they’re smart, too. I assume it has to do with how financially successful they are in the small town pond. But I couldn’t get over it back in 2000. Bush and all the people surrounding him (the “grown-ups”) were indistinguishable from the guys pontificating in the 19th hole.

I suspect that the people who report how smart these guys are are themselves inhabitants of a limited experiential range that constitutes a small town mentality.

A lot of these “smart” people just came from well-off families who paid for top-notch education throughout their lives. As with most rich people who are well-educated and put some effort into getting good grades in school, they are book-smart, articulate, well-read, and can pass tests, but they are sheltered, ignorant, and stupid in every other aspect of life. I know plenty of these people. Got straight-A’s, high SAT scores, got into an Ivy league, and are adept at making money, but they fail at life. They can’t carry a conversation, aren’t interesting, can’t date, have horrible ideas that lean more conservative and libertarian than most of the public want to believe.

@ Ian

LOL I see my guess about M. Chong’s meaning was what was WRONG!!!

I relied on my feeling that he was thinking that Cheney’s monetary motivations were easier to see and understand than Summers’.

Silver lining–goes to show how very easy it is to misunderstand what is in someone else’s head at any given moment.

In this case, it was just about a tease, but how often do we see the people around us doing the same thing, i.e., not being uncertain enough when there are multiple plausible scenarios worth considering, about matters that are deadly serious? Ability to admit error as soon as you recognize such is so important.

My bad, carry on. 🙂

The problem with many smart people, however defined, is that they have three problems: they think everyone is as smart as they are, they believe no one is as smart as they are, and they get wrong about what is which.

Example of the first (from a talk by Larry Summers): before the last recession, he was convinced that since monetary and fiscal policy were loosened, that all would be fine. He had me convinced – for two days. Then I asked myself “If I were reasonably bright, what would I invest in?” The answer was real estate. I knew that was a bad call. Lesson: if everyone did the smart thing John Maynard Keynes would have worried about “animal spirits.”

Example Two: once everything started to got to hell, people double down. Rather than say “I was wrong.” Lesson: people would rather throw money away than admit to being wrong. Go visit a mall.

Example Three: Our President wants more pollution, largely because fossil fuels were the great investment of the past. Lesson: the past has the money, but we don’t live there.

I enjoyed this article and and it goes with my observations in my 60 plus years. Most people do small stupid things and smart (IQ) people do big stupid things. When oil was raging over 100 dollars a hedge fund I was associated with had a huge short Canadian dollar position. I didn’t know about this and found out after the loss was taken. Everyone who made this position were MBAs from top schools. I explained they needed a kid from Brooklyn on their team who barely finished high school who would explain that (at the time) how do you short a currency whose major export is oil. Smart IQ doesn’t mean you have common sense and street smarts. If you do you become a billionaire.

You sort-of exempted Engineering from your list of areas where the models are wrong. It doesn’t get a pass. All engineering models are approximations too.

The major difference between engineering, when practiced correctly, is good engineers build prototypes to test their models. They then modify their models to be consistent with the test results before building the final unit(s).

Bad engineers, often driven by cost/schedule/non-engineering reasons, go straight to the final units. That’s the source of failures, more often than not.

Critical thinking was eliminated from most US educational endeavours starting in the mid/late 1960s and accelerating after the 1980s. The impetus for doing away with teaching or even knowing what critical thinking is was the public prominence of the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley in 1964. That led, inevitably, to the world-wide student revolt that in many cases was driven by critical thinkers (as well as firebrands.)

Dovetailing with the Civil Rights Movement rooted in ideals of social justice and the counterculture movement rooted in ideals of liberation and community, those in authority panicked. The insight of the first Reagan administration in California (c. 1967) was that the problem was education. Students were learning the wrong things, such as history, civics, critical thinking, arts and so forth. All that needed to be squeezed out of public education at the very least, ideally expelled from all education. How to do it was the question.

The answer they implemented was Administration. Overloading (and overlording) public education with administrators and administrative goals — some of which appeared to reflect the goals of the rebels in the streets — proved a very effective way to curtail undesirable educational activities. It worked like a charm, and it still does. The lessons learned have been applied widely ever since.

Recently I became aware of a class being taught at a nearby college called “Critical Thinking,” something most of the students had never in their lives been exposed to. They had no idea how to approach this topic, but worse, perhaps, was that what was being taught were specific matters students were expected to be critical of rather than means and methods of engaging in the process of thinking critically about knowledge and the world around them. The class in essence was a means of further polarizing an already deeply divided community.

I doubt anyone learned to think critically in that class, but they did learn approved matters to criticize, so there is that!

So much of what goes wrong in our world is due to the inability of those in authority to think critically. Perhaps they never did, or if they ever did, they’ve forgotten. Power and corruption rule. No sense of public interest or duty. Those who say or believe the right things rise like scum to the top.

Those who ask questions? Well, you know the answer, don’t you?

Off Topic: “Assad gassed his own people” in Douma hoax is falling apart. That means that the Democrat fixers will want to do all in their power to keep Tulsi Gabbard off the stage of the next Democratic debate.

“Tucker Carlson does the unthinkable: Reports on OPCW hoax that almost pushed world to war”
@ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5lND2WV-tI

I once worked for a “world class” engineering place where the smart stupid Dear Leader got fired for chasing ass (at least officially). Not to be outdone, his replacement then proceeded to get fired for doing the exact same thing. Of course people at that level cannot be “fired” but must be per$uaded to vacate their desks. So it wasn’t a complete tragedy for them.

About Mr. Summers, all of this of course assumes that he was one of the more ethical smart stupids, using his semi-disciplined mental horsepower to rationalize teh stupid, and wasn’t being influenced by any lobby persuasions. We see so much of the latter these days.

Of course, opinions for hire like Summers are going to continue to deny that they are sellouts and they somehow weren’t even aware that the possibility of a housing/market/economic crash existed. What’s the alternative: to admit they are brains for hire which would destroy their marketing power and usefulness to the elites with the added bonus of being known as a fraud to the public?

No, they’ll hunker down and deny it all. It’s worked out well for themselves so far.

The Clintonites are well aware that they are at fault for their meal ticket’s loss to Trump. That’s why they fight so hard to try to conceal and deflect the fault.

Z

education has entered Scholasticism again, at this point.

we are not teaching people to reason. not even when i was going. we are teaching people to copy. from “certified” authorities.

even, and especially in academia. you have to reason forth from all of the previous examples and not contradict them. if you think you have found something that contradicts them, they will go even worse on you, and you won’t be published/tenured/etc.

i always say that i never want to sit in on a speech, discussion or talk where everyone in room is constantly nodding their heads in agreement. it means we are all going down the road to hell. the part which fails is something none of us is considering, or have all decided to view a “certain” way.

one needs contrarians, and people who find flaws and figures out how to rectify them. our desire to fall in with the herd doesn’t help us to know that there is a cliff over the horizon, nor a wolf behind those trees.

one thing that my upbringing taught me is that anyone that has enough power to be above you is a potential wolf, regardless of how polite they are or how well rationalized their reasoning process is. when push comes to shove, whether they are right or not has almost nothing to do with it. it is that they have control.

I agree with the idea ‘stupid smart people’ being dangerous as a result of social construction of success, individual value, and social benefit. Lemonhead67 makes this mistake: money as the measure of all success when wealth is contingent on family connections, social status and inherited riches, more than rare skill or special insight. I suspect he believes Mozart and Van Gogh deserved pauper’s burials and the contempt of their larger society. This primary misconception is rooted in CONservative political myths: society exists as result of individual efforts, or even Thatcher’s shallow, arrogant contempt, ‘Society doesn’t exist.’ This attitude makes it easy for the 1% to exploit society. Make no mistake the 1% do not create or build, they are bandits pillaging valuable organizations until they collapse (downsizing, pollution, Global Financial Crisis, excessive militarism and police control, financial wealth creation).

The obvious solution to misguided, selfish, arrogant intelligence is team work. Team work and community cooperation are the secret sauce that makes a smart person the valuable person.

Team work multiplies the power of intelligence with experiences of the many. Insights come from anyone, anywhere, sometimes with just a casual aside. Shining more lights, from many angles, on a problem removes shadows of ignorance. Team work makes overgeneralizing from individual, singular success much harder. Implementation is much improved as team resources always exceed that of any individual. Less than arrogant intelligence can recognize these resources and avoid ‘god complex’ failures. Make no mistake, every activity in a mass society civilization depends on team work. No civilization has existed without a team sport exemplifying individual excellence and self-sacrifice that depends on team support extending to the broad community.

Community cooperation adds further resources in scale and kind as other intelligences are brought to bear. Misguided attempts can be adjusted to suit community goals. Prejudices can be judged and overturned to meet challenges.
Otherwise, the intelligent are just basement cranks, or suffer from the ‘Cassandra Effect’: correct, but ignored or derided.

Re Cheney, Summers, our privileged and elites in general, if they believed in what they were doing, there is a presumption that they were acting in good faith, only wrong or mistaken. This is categorically untrue. I often use the example of the SS officer engaged in mass killings. It is immaterial what he believed. He was acting in bad faith. There are two points here. First, this is not arbitrary. It’s commonsense. There needs to be some minimum bar which we hold ourselves and all others too as well. Second, the higher the level of power or responsibility, the higher that bar becomes. So Cheney, Summers, our privileged and elites, act in bad faith. It is not about what they think they know, about what they believe, it is about what they should have known and how they should have acted, given their status in our society and that they are members of that society. By not holding them to account, we encourage them and their successors to act with impunity.

https://xkcd.com/2234/

The rich smart people tend to remain rich. There first in line for the bail-out party. Some of them have large tracts of land, if you know what I mean, but all of them have friends who do.

Did Summers advocate for financial deregulation because he “believed in it” ideologically, or did he adopt the ideology because doing so made him useful to the powerful and therefore powerful?

I see Summers as deeply ambitious and using his smarts to get himself cast in powerful roles. In those roles, he has arguably not acted very responsibly, at least as far as the general welfare is concerned. If he has an identifiable ideological belief to guide him, I would say he believes in corruption, which is to say that he believes apparently in the predator-prey model of political economy and that the predators should be given a modicum of scope to innovate because in some vague way predation drives the economy dynamically forward. Believing in corruption is, in addition to being an intellectual belief or ideology of sorts, also convenient and instrumentally useful to the pursuit of his personal ambitions as it allows him to use his smarts to make himself politically useful to the predator class.

Among famous economists, Summers contrasts strongly with the figure of James Galbraith, who also benefited in his career from his family legacy, but who has chosen to be idealistic and to speak out against corruption.

@ 450.org

I don’t agree with a lot of what you post, but I do think your paragraph above about the essential nature of mental modelling is on target, and would just extend that POV to include the issue of having to use words which are themselves imperfect models of the thoughts they are meant to convey. I think communication would be greatly improved if people were more aware of the power and limitations of linguistics. Or used such awareness with more good faith, seeing the manipulations of others as being only as unacceptable as the ones they themselves know how and apparently like to use.

@ Ian

Sorry, but count me among those who find you too generous in appraising folks like Summers and Cheney. Since Reagan ‘viralized’ the “I wasn’t being evil, just stupid’ defense, I have great suspicion for those who achieve great wealth and power by virtue of their supposed stupidity, a defense that never gets raised until after they get caught.

Others have well addressed the Summers side, let me address the Cheney side. And I won’t even touch the part that is about his ability to profit from a war on the ground in the Middle East that he sought openly in the plans for such an invasion that were formalized in the 1997 Project for a New American Century (PNAC). As a trader, it has always amazed me that nobody at the time ever mentioned the obvious fact that any military action on the ground in the ME was inevitably going to massively increase the price of oil world-wide, due to increased risk to production and distribution from ME sources; the 1990 invasion showed that dynamic quite clearly. However, oil is priced on a world-wide basis, which means that even our domestic producers, who ran ZERO increased risk from ground fighting in the ME, would experience windfall profits from a ground fight in Iraq, despite having no increased risk or costs of production. Thus, domestic producers and their investors were guaranteed a bonanza windfall immediately, regardless of how the war actually turned out.

Gee, I wish I could have ever been in a position to profit from such ‘stupidity.’

When we allow such folks to tout their ‘genius’ on the way up, but self-excuse when they get caught on the basis that they were not such geniuses after all, perhaps the minimum sanction should be that they forfeit all the money they made by ‘mistake’?

Or would that be too mean?

Don’t we need to get more real about the function of punishment in controlling bad behavior?

I don’t recall the exact quote, but it is something about the impossibility of making someone understand something when his wealth or position of power utterly depends upon his complete inability to understand it.

Intelligence or wisdom does not enter into that issue, only survival is at stake in such a case.

I’ll just make one more point, and then start enjoying the holiday as I hope all here will also enjoy it.

Our minds do a great job of evaluating data, but they do need us to expose them to the data. I used to be a fiery progressive, uncomfortably so according to the other progressives; Obama helped open my eyes.

Now, I often ask overt Trump haters where they get their info from, and they can usually list a slew of sources, proudly, but they are all left-wing sources. I ask, “Ever go to any right-wing sources?” and they look at me like I am crazy for asking. They seem confirmed in that belief when I point out that their favorite sources don’t seem to ever include competent rebuttal voices anymore.

Reagan abolished the Fairness Doctrine in 1984. The message: Buy the media, control the minds with propaganda. And that is what happened. Lawyers and modern liars use similar tactics, in that they leave out the facts that undermine their own positions. In court, that’s OK, because another licensed pro is right there to tell the judge what was left out, and vice versa.

But in public dialogue, if no adversarial voice is present, the liars-by-omission win every time.

So, let me tout Tucker Carlson for a moment. My gorge rises whenever I hear Hannity or Limbaugh’s voices, can’t turn them off fast enough, and used to be same with Carlson, but he has grown up, and he always has an opposing voice to debate him, unlike CNN or MSNBC, for example.

I check other sources as well, but I mention Tucker because right now he is among the best available, IMO (not on abortion, drugs, or some other things!) in terms of fair discussion, and we could all use more of that.

Specifically I recommend viewing his mid-show segment from last night, November 27, where he discusses lying in a very perceptive way, with good and compelling video illustrations.

Getting good data from varied sources is the best way to get smart results.

Have a great holiday, everyone. I am thankful for Ian and this forum he provides for thoughtful discussions. Too rare, so even more precious.

““It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

Upton Sinclair

Now, I often ask overt Trump haters where they get their info from…

I’m not a Trump hater (I won’t give him that energy) but I do find him deplorable and loathsome. He disgusts me as a pedophile disgusts me.

Either way, I get my info from Trump from his Twitter account and watching 5 minutes of his rallies until I become nauseous. Trump doesn’t hide who and what he is. There’s no need for left-leaning sources. Trump is his own criticism for all to see. He’s the guy who comes to a party and shits in the middle of the room. What’s hilarious, and tragic and f*cked up, is watching smart stupid people defend that. People like you. Check your reality some more because you obviously didn’t check it thoroughly enough when it comes to Trump.

Trump is getting right wingers to reconsider the true source of the Chinese economic miracle, which seems a good thing. And Trump is also getting right wingers to question the wisdom of any more incredibly expensive military incursions into Islamic lands.

Of course that may not be saying much. Had Hillary publicly turned Republican and slammed her former party, most right wingers would’ve worshiped her every bit as blindly as they do Trump.

Trumps supplicants would make him king if there was a Jerusalem temple in the deal. And oligarchs just want more freedom to do as they please, especially freedom from consequences. But Trump may be getting some of the supplicants think, for once. Not that they matter. Most potential voters are the young, female, working class and minority.

dc, I think you’re projecting. Frustrated Bernies made up a small percentage of Trump voters. I’m speaking of the many highly tribalized evangelicals who I know personally, who believe that Trump is some kind of miracle from God. They are his unwavering base. And they are hardly populist in any sort of working class way. Clinton and Obama are socialists to them.

IMHO, Trump has been extremely effective in using childish smears and binary argumentation against his opponents. I’ve known for a long time that taking the high road or debating from lofty ivory towers means very little for today’s working class voter. They don’t care and just want change. I find it interesting (and disconcerting) that Trumpian strategies are so effective.

I would like to offer an alternative hypothesis.

We have abundant unimpeachable evidence for the (ordinary) stupid things that come out of Larry THE BRILLIANT\’s (henceforth, LTB) mouth.

What exactly is the evidence for his brilliance?

We should keep in mind here that LTB has been in a position to steal an endless quantity of new ideas with impunity from the grad students at his mercy during his career. So within his discipline, this needs to be a high bar. So let\’s be generous.

What innovations or dynamism did LTB bring to the organizations he led, such that they noticibly over-performed under his tenure?

What contribution to public life has LTB made, that would warrant a public statue, or even the humble gratitude of the rest of us?

I spent my the majority of my working life among senior tenured academics at a major research university. About fifteen years after I started, my boss was awarded a Nobel Prize.

I have met legions of the brilliant. Please allow me to inform you, that there is no such thing.

In my entire life I have also met a tiny, tiny number of genuine smart people, people who really do seem to be able to learn new things faster than the rest of us.
None of the ones I am sure of were academics, and almost the only thing they all had in common was that not a single one of them tried to tell me how smart they were.

Academics are a special case when it comes to \”brilliance\”. Pretending to be smarter than you really are is actually a part of their professional training. There are two things you learn from that 10,000-page-a-week reading list; that there is no greater taboo than admitting ignorance, and how to fake every visual and rhetorical cue associated with comprehension.

Since I worked in IT, this was a real problem for me. My Nobelist would look me dead in the eye, and nod gravely while I explained something, and I would believe. Even though I knew at the same time intellectually, they had not a clue.

Ironically, within their profession, academics are simply the most gullible, credulous group I have ever seen. If you have a Ph. D., you can basically say anything outside the listeners\’ expertise, and you don\’t even have to make a case.

When someone volunteers that they speak five languages, it is a good idea to wonder \”how well?\” but a better question is \”so what?\”.

We do not have an explanation for sleep. We cannot directly diagnose an injured mind, nor heal one when we do. That is the state of our current understanding of the mind. But we can tell you within a decimal point how good a mind you have? Really?

The concept \”intelligence\” is an embarrassment as a scientific concept, but a stunning success as tool for legitimation of elite status. It is fundamentally rotten.

Albert Einstein was born with enough brain damage that it significantly delayed his development as a child. In most accounts this is either ignored or actually made to sound like a superpower.
I think it\’s a lot more likely that If he had been born with a fully functional brain, it wouldn\’t have taken him ten years from the special theory to the general theory. Still, a \”mentally retarded person\” figured out relativity.

There are no brilliant people. There are only brilliant ideas, and anyone, anyone at all can have them.

@ somecomputerguy

Interesting comment, and I think I agree with most of it.

But let me highlight the part I think you left out, a part nobody ever seems to consider worthy of mention. Ignorance is a taboo if admitted among the academics, true enough, but superior intelligence is actually what is treated as a taboo among the general populace, which makes most truly superior minds into very lonely, one might even say alienated, entities.

Think for a moment about what it might be like for a truly superior intellect to have to be always surrounded by inferior minds. Jews have historically been hated for supposed superior intelligence, hell, they used to kill black folks for learning to read. I keep hearing about book-smart kids getting bullied in schools. Follow that thought path a ways.

There’s a fear that comes from being perceived as smarter, and also a despair that one can’t share one’s best thoughts with those not equipped to even understand what is meant, nor can one expect those around him to be able to teach him anything new or useful in areas that he already excels in.

Yet almost all people the gifted meet will act as though THEY are the smartest person in any room. Worse, the gifted may be viewed as weird or even slow because the don’t parrot the same conventional wisdoms as others. How do you think that would make the truly
gifted feel, to have that as the norm in their daily experience?

I think that is a real problem for the holders of truly superior intellects, that maybe deserves as much attention as we currently give to those who seek gender re-assignment, for example. They may, in fact, be the last victim class to be recognized, due to these factors. Food for thought?

But let me say, at the same time, that most high-performance minds seem to have only a few areas where they are so outstanding, and they can and will be foolish in areas they have not actively studied enough to know the relevant background facts. Especially when it comes to emotional issues. Superior information processing, pattern recognition, memory, fact analysis, and inferential thinking seem to me to be the key elements to be found in truly gifted minds. That in no way guarantees wisdom in all areas.