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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Why the high-IQ lack common sense

Friday, September 11th, 2009

Bruce Charlton explains why the high-IQ lack common sense:

In previous editorials I have written about the absent-minded and socially-inept ‘nutty professor’ stereotype in science, and the phenomenon of ‘psychological neoteny’ whereby intelligent modern people (including scientists) decline to grow-up and instead remain in a state of perpetual novelty-seeking adolescence. These can be seen as specific examples of the general phenomenon of ‘clever sillies’ whereby intelligent people with high levels of technical ability are seen (by the majority of the rest of the population) as having foolish ideas and behaviours outside the realm of their professional expertise. In short, it has often been observed that high IQ types are lacking in ‘common sense’ — and especially when it comes to dealing with other human beings.

General intelligence is not just a cognitive ability; it is also a cognitive disposition. So, the greater cognitive abilities of higher IQ tend also to be accompanied by a distinctive high IQ personality type including the trait of ‘Openness to experience’, ‘enlightened’ or progressive left-wing political values, and atheism.

Drawing on the ideas of Kanazawa, my suggested explanation for this association between intelligence and personality is that an 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.

I further suggest that this random silliness of the most intelligent people may be amplified to generate systematic wrongness when intellectuals are in addition ‘advertising’ their own high intelligence in the evolutionarily novel context of a modern IQ meritocracy. The cognitively stratified context of communicating almost exclusively with others of similar intelligence, generates opinions and behaviours among the highest IQ people which are not just lacking in common sense but perversely wrong. Hence the phenomenon of ‘political correctness’ (PC); whereby false and foolish ideas have come to dominate, and moralistically be enforced upon, the ruling elites of whole nations.

His closing note:

I should in all honesty point out that I recognize this phenomenon from the inside. In other words, I myself am a prime example of a ‘clever silly’; having spent much of adolescence and early adult life passively absorbing high-IQ-elite-approved, ingenious-but-daft ideas that later needed, painfully, to be dismantled. I have eventually been forced to acknowledge that when it comes to the psycho-social domain, the commonsense verdict of the majority of ordinary people throughout history is much more likely to be accurate than the latest fashionably brilliant insight of the ruling elite. So, this article has been written on the assumption, eminently challengeable, that although I have nearly always been wrong in the past — I now am right.

Posted in Bruce Charlton, Policy, Science | No Comments »

Replacing education with psychometrics

Wednesday, July 15th, 2009

Bruce Charlton recommends replacing education with psychometrics:

I myself am a prime example of the way in which ignorance of IQ leads to a distorted understanding of education (and many other matters). I have been writing on the subject of education — especially higher education, science and medical education — for about 20 years, but now believe that many of my earlier ideas were wrong for the simple reason that I did not know about IQ. Since discovering the basic facts about IQ, several of my convictions have undergone a U-turn. Just how radically my ideas were changed has been brought home by two recent books: Real Education by Charles Murray and Spent by Geoffrey Miller.

Since IQ and personality are substantially hereditary and rankings (although not absolute levels) are highly stable throughout a persons adult life, this implies that differential educational attainment within a society is mostly determined by heredity and therefore not by differences in educational experience. This implies that education is about selection more than enhancement, and educational qualifications mainly serve to ‘signal’ or quantify a person’s hereditary attributes. So education mostly functions as an extremely slow, inefficient and imprecise form of psychometric testing. It would therefore be easy to construct a modern educational system that was both more efficient and more effective than the current one.

I now advocate a substantial reduction in the average amount of formal education and the proportion of the population attending higher education institutions. At the age of about sixteen each person could leave school with a set of knowledge-based examination results demonstrating their level of competence in a core knowledge curriculum; and with usefully precise and valid psychometric measurements of their general intelligence and personality (especially their age ranked degree of Conscientiousness).

However, such change would result in a massive down-sizing of the educational system and this is a key underlying reason why IQ has become a taboo subject. Miller suggests that academics at the most expensive, elite, intelligence-screening universities tend to be sceptical of psychometric testing; precisely because they do not want to be undercut by cheaper, faster, more-reliable IQ and personality evaluations.

Arnold Kling isn’t hopeful:

I think that the probability that Charlton’s Caplan-esque views become widely accepted is about one in ten thousand. I would say there is a slightly higher chance, about five in ten thousand, that someday he will be imprisoned for his views.

Posted in Arnold Kling, Bruce Charlton, Economics, Education | No Comments »

Everyday Psychopharmacology

Friday, March 27th, 2009

Dennis Mangan shares some everyday psychopharmacology from Bruce Charlton’s paper:

For neuroticism, Charlton proposes the use of diphenhydramine (Benadryl), chlorpheniramine (various cough suppressants), and St. John’s wort, all available over the counter. It turns out that the SSRI class of antidepressants — Prozac and the like — were developed from antihistamines after it was noticed that the latter had an inhibiting effect on serotonin re-uptake.

For a state typified by “malaise”, Charlton suggests tricyclic antidepressants — these are prescription only — and NSAIDs such as aspirin or acetaminophen. Interestingly, the TCAs have potent analgesic effects, which Charlton suggests are the true cause of their antidepressant action; Charlton’s hypothesis of depression is that it is a condition in which the brain senses the body’s malaise. As for aspirin and the like, these drugs can cause increased intestinal permeability (“leaky gut”), which has recently been shown to be a factor in depression and chronic fatigue; increased translocation of bacterial antigens from the intestine contributing to or causing the inflammation characteristic of these illnesses. So there’s my contribution to this debate: personally I would be wary of NSAIDs for this purpose. Acetaminophen also causes a depletion of glutathione, which in fact is the cause of liver damage in cases of overdose (the antidote used is n-acetylcysteine); glutathione depletion has been shown to be common in patients with chronic fatigue, another reason to be wary of this drug.

For “demotivated depression”, Charlton suggests, absent the more powerful prescription-only energizers like methylphenidate (Ritalin) and amphetamines, the old standbys caffeine and nicotine. In an epidemiological study, two to three cups of coffee daily reduced the risk of suicide by about two-thirds, which would seem to make it a powerful antidepressant. Nicotine, when used in a form that does not involve smoking, is probably about as safe as caffeine. “Nicotine does not cause cancer, heart attacks or emphysema.”

For seasonal affective disorder (SAD), light therapy is the treatment of choice and easily implemented by the patient.

Posted in Bruce Charlton, Science | No Comments »

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