Sacrificing Cunning

Tuesday, October 20th, 2009

Arnold Kling cites Dan Klein’s Resorting to Statism to Find Meaning, which tries to explain three different political dispositions — progressive, conservative, and libertarian — and summarizes the conservative view:

The role of the state, in the conservative view, is to enforce norms and laws that have a prior origin. For religious conservatives, that origin is divine. In theory, a secular conservative could find the roots of those norms in tradition, or cultural evolution.

Tradition is usually the best guide, because, while clever innovations can improve on tradition, they generally don’t. That’s what makes open-minded intellectuals into Bruce Charlton’s clever sillies:

[A]n increasing relative level of IQ brings with it a tendency differentially to over-use general intelligence in problem-solving, and to over-ride those instinctive and spontaneous forms of evolved behaviour which could be termed common sense. Preferential use of abstract analysis is often useful when dealing with the many evolutionary novelties to be found in modernizing societies; but is not usually useful for dealing with social and psychological problems for which humans have evolved ‘domain-specific’ adaptive behaviours. And since evolved common sense usually produces the right answers in the social domain; this implies that, when it comes to solving social problems, the most intelligent people are more likely than those of average intelligence to have novel but silly ideas, and therefore to believe and behave maladaptively.

One commenter added his thoughts — which Kling saw as a proposal for Robin Hanson to do fieldwork:

The real reason people with high IQs lack common sense is neurological. You can’t be cerebral without sacrificing cunning. It takes real live brain matter to support each. Unless you’ve got a second brain hidden somewhere, you can’t get around this tradeoff. The extreme form of this can be seen in the autistic brain. While autism is just a behavioral profile at present, the brains of high-functioning autistic people have been studied enough to reveal a pattern of early abnormal overgrowth in areas implicated in the things autistic people do well: art, music, mathematics, etc. The price they pay is a corresponding undergrowth of the white matter linking the neocortex to the rest of the brain. (There are other abnormalities as well.) The neocortex is responsible for executive function, working memory, and generalization, among other things. Generalization is how we acquire biases. Autistic people are bad at this. That means they lack prejudice, which is what we call the biases we don’t like. The ones we like, we call common sense. If you want to get some idea of what the world would look like if we overcame bias, go to a group home for autistic adults.

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