Intelligence as a personal attribute or as a way of being (a reflection on when intelligent people say stupid things)

After sharing this amusing/horrifying social media post,

Paul Campos offers this “preliminary typology” of stupidity:

Natural stupidity. This just means low cognitive ability in the most straightforward least mysterious way. What people usually mean by stupidity in other words.

Social stupidity. This is the sort of stupidity produced in non-naturally stupid, or not particularly stupid, individuals, by social effects of various kinds, aka the stupidity of crowds/conformity to the group. Being in a cult is an extreme example.

Intellectual stupidity/smart stupidity. Naomi Wolf is or at least was a much more intelligent than average person, plus she’s very invested in being a public intellectual, i.e. someone whose profession it is to be smart about things. She’s now incredibly stupid, but in a way that’s very clearly different than natural stupidity, and closely related to but perhaps still critically different from standard social stupidity?

I have no idea if Naomi Wolf was ever “more intelligent than the average person,” but that’s not the point of this post. I’m just using the above discussion as a starting-off point.

My take on this story is slightly different from that of Campos. I’ll give it in two parts.

1. The conspiracy theory semi-bluff

First, I don’t know Naomi Wolf, and I know next to nothing about her . . . I’m just thinking here that she might not really believe that there’s a conspiracy involving social media and the cursor on her computer screen. On the other hand, she’s not ruling it out either.

I’m guessing that, in promoting these ridiculous claims, Wolf is making what in poker is called a semi-bluff: mostly she doesn’t believe it, she’s just saying it as a kind of joke, she sees herself as a charming imp, demonstrating once again that the people on the other side have no sense of humor, etc etc . . . on the other hand, maybe there really is a conspiracy controlling her cursor! It’s the kidding-not-kidding thing.

Wolf’s post reminds me of when “libertarian paternalist” Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule was promoting discredited election-conspiracy theories. I doubt he really believed these theories, but he probably put a bit of effort into avoiding any evidence against them. It serves his comfort to be able to stay in a hazy state of ignorance about the topic, so he can continue to be a charming contrarian.

OK, here’s a less politically-charged analogy. A couple years ago we discussed the following post by political analyst Nate Silver:

The person who sent me that was kinda stunned that someone as smart and accomplished as Nate felt the need to include “almost” in his prediction.

I attributed this to Nate being inside an elite media bubble that had been infiltrated by UFO-space-aliens true believers. I get the impression that news media insiders trust each other more than they trust anyone on the outside. (And, yes, I’m a bit of a news media insider myself, but not in as deep as Nate, who deservedly is an insider given his generally excellent track record as analyst and pundit. Nate gives opinions on a lot of topical issues, and he makes some mistakes, notably when he said back in 2015 that Trump only had a 2% chance of winning the Republican nomination, even though Trump was leading the polls at the time, and when he said in 2002 that Eric Adams was a top-5 Democratic candidate for president, but as pundits go, he has impressive combination of thoughtfulness, boldness, and accuracy, so let’s give credit where due.)

But, another way of saying this is that Nate is being extremely open-minded about the possibility of UFOs as space aliens. I don’t think he’d be so open-minded about Wolf’s hypothesis that her social media post caused her computer’s cursor to go haywire, or “skeptic” Michael Shermer’s hypothesis that he had a haunted radio.

What’s going on? Nate’s hanging out in a bubble where space aliens are considered a legitimate hypothesis. Wolf is hanging out in a bubble where wacky political conspiracy theories are real. For that matter, Arthur Conan Doyle was a smart guy but he was faked out by exruciatingly-obviously-faked photos of fairies.

2. What is intelligence?

In his post, Campos characterizes Wolf as someone who once was “a much more intelligent than average person” but is “now incredibly stupid.” It’s hard for me to say. People can change, also a person can be intelligent in some settings but stupid in others.

What I’m thinking, though, is that intelligence is better characterized as a way of being, as well as an attribute of a person.

As a way of being, intelligence is about thinking things through, gathering and weighing evidence, and it involves concentration and a sort of focused thought. This relates to a reaction I expressed last year about chatbots, which is that a lot of my own writing and talking is chatbot-like, but sometimes I sit down and focus, and that feels different. On the other hand, if I’m being asked about an area on which I’m already I’m an expert, I can glide along chatbot-like and still give intelligent responses. In such settings, I would not say I’m exhibiting intelligent behavior, but I have a clear enough understanding of the area that an outsider might not notice—unless they know me well!

But what about intelligence as a personal attribute, in the sense that some people are clearly intelligent and others are blockheads? What I’d say is that the more intelligence-as-a-personal-attribute you have, the easier it is for you to behave intelligently. In the same way as, if you’re in good physical shape, it’s easier for you to focus on the sports field, but if you’re in bad shape, focusing in a sport takes more effort and you’re more likely to just give up.

There’s this interesting saying—“the moral obligation to be intelligent”—it seems to have come from a book from 1915 by John Erskine, a professor of English. The essay in question is not so interesting, but I like the idea that being intelligent is a choice, or even an obligation, rather than being an attribute.

It’s kind of like in a competitive team sport, where there’s a moral obligation to play effectively. Again, the better you are at the sport, the easier it is to be effective. There’s an interaction.

So, back to Naomi Wolf, Adrian Vermeule, and other smart/stupid people. If Wolf is/was an unusually intelligent person, that implies, in my formulation, that she had a high capability for acting intelligently. That is, a very intelligent person can act intelligently without much effort. But that doesn’t mean she has to act intelligently. She can be lazy and act stupidly—basically, she can not bother to “turn on her brain” or, as our teachers put it in elementary school, “put on her thinking cap”—or she can actively choose to be unintelligent, by avoiding confronting any of the basic logic that would cast doubt upon her claim about the cursor. Similarly with Vermeule and the election conspiracy theories.

So, that’s my contribution to the theory of intelligence—or, as Campos puts it in his glass-half-empty way, the theory of stupidity. I kind of this perspective of intelligence as a way of being as well as being an attribute that facilitates this way of being—it clears up some confusions I’ve had.

Maybe the hivemind can help here and point to the relevant passage from William James or Bill James or W. V. O. Quine (that’s an invitation for you to comment, Bob!) or C. S. Peirce that states the above more clearly. So sad that Keith O’Rourke is no longer here to add his thoughts or to just coauthor this post.

P.S. Speaking of successful and presumably intelligent people who say really dumb things, my favorite example is this graph, which is ridiculous on so many levels:

I think this is important, this idea of intelligence or stupidity as ways of being, rather than personal attributes.