“Who’s for more sprouts?”: thoughts on intelligence

by liberal japonicus

Rich people don’t wear coats, we were told. Their shoes only ever touch carpet, as they move seamlessly from their cars to their jets to their buildings. Also, crucially, they don’t duck (when getting out of helicopters).

In the first season, I wrote an episode set around Thanksgiving. The rich consultant really went to town on me. I had written a line for Logan’s wife, Marcia, announcing that lunch was ready. But rich people don’t make food-related announcements, apparently. They don’t even know where their kitchens are and they definitely don’t say “Who’s for more sprouts?”, while spooning them on to people’s plates.

This is a bit of a 5 rail bankshot of a post, but the above 2 paragraphs, from a Grauniad article about the writers of the TV series Succession, popped up in my head when, in the comments, there was discussion of Johnson's intelligence. The answer to the question "Is Johnson intelligent?" is really 'who cares?' This is because regardless of his intelligence, it is clear that he doesn't have the slightest scintilla of empathy, thoughtfulness, consideration of anyone outside of himself. I won't belabor this point, though here is James O'Brian's rant if that floats your boat.

But back to intelligence. We get into this interesting problem with intelligence, we feel like we have to give it its due, and it is virtually impossible to simply ignore it. We also feel we have to acknowledge intelligence when it pops up. (I'm thinking of Joe Klein's description of Trump's 'feral intelligence') I don't want to dismiss intelligence, it's nice to have, and we have some intelligent folks here. But I'm coming to the view that we put too much stock in it, especially when there are people that have no empathy or understanding of others. The Grauniad article anecdote was about how to write dialogue for the kind of rich people who inhabit that TV series, and what is depressing is that it was the actual observations by the "rich consultant" for the show, not a one off on a particular loathsome specimen, but the way that rich people lived. Imagine being raised in an environment where the idea that you might offer to dish up some food for someone sitting next too you is something that is not going o happen. How must that impact on a person's 'intelligence'. Yet we have to somehow note that someone who is a total piece of shit has some intelligence.

We talked about how what we often measure as intelligence is really a very narrowly focussed ability. One reason why people have been falling out over ChatGPT and other LLM is that it 'sounds smart'. So maybe what is needed is not some way to better measure intelligence but to stop treating it as the be-all, end-all. Discuss.

Comments

[wj]

Intelligence is a tool, nothing more. Certainly it is a very useful tool. And there are some things that simply cannot be done without it. But what it is not is a virtue.

That said, someone who is intelligent has no excuse when they make certain kinds of mistakes. Mistakes which, in someone less intelligent, could be shrugged off with "Well, he doesn't know any better."

Similarly, money is a tool not a virtue. At the low end, it's a critically necessary tool. As you move up the wealth scale, it move from critical to important to nice-to-have. And at the top end, the only real use is signaling: saying to people who have no clue what you do, how well, or why it's important, "See, I must be important because I have all this money." Color me underwhelmed when I encounter someone who feels the need to bolster his ego that way.

[ral]

lj, thanks for opening this conversation. I am a TPM subscriber and I read it daily. Yesterday in the Morning Memo TPM included a link to Governor J.B. Pritzker's commencement address [alas, Twitter].

I commend it to your attention.

[Girl from the North Country]

it is clear that he doesn't have the slightest scintilla of empathy, thoughtfulness, consideration of anyone outside of himself

Yes, that is completely clear.

That said, someone who is intelligent has no excuse when they make certain kinds of mistakes. Mistakes which, in someone less intelligent, could be shrugged off with "Well, he doesn't know any better."

When intelligent people make certain kinds of "mistakes", the fact of their intelligence entitles one to say "they do this, despite the clearly foreseeable consequences of their actions, in general and to other people". Very unintelligent people (and granted the difficulty of how one assesses intelligence) can at least be excused from this particular judgement.

[Girl from the North Country]

That's a good clip, ral, thank you.

[liberal japonicus]

Ral, thanks for the Pritzer commencement speech. It's good and worthwhile, though there is an interesting rhetorical idea in there, that kindness is, in some way, intelligence. Pritzer says that not being cruel is an indicator of evolution, which is indicative of better things. I would like that to be true and I would make the same argument of diversity, which makes a society better able to deal with problems in the same way that evolution helps species better deal with changed environments, but seeing the state of the world currently, I may just be fooling myself.

There was an episode of Love, Death and Robots called Swarm which was based on a short story by Bruce Sterling that is here which might be interesting in relation to this.

There is also Vonnegut's novel Galapagos, which makes a similar argument, definitely a bit more arch than Sterling's short story.

[hairshirthedonist]

Intelligence is like height. It's has its advantages, but it doesn't make you a good person (or even a good basketball player, all my itself). And being too tall can be frustrating, like the world wasn't made for people like you.

You might even be looked upon as a bit of a freak.

[ral]

I have been very lucky in my life and I am most grateful for having been born into a family that taught me at an early age to value kindness.

Yes, people have to be held responsible for their own actions, but how much blame can we assign to intelligent people who are cruel? Intelligence does not necessarily lead to self-reflection. Intelligence can be a trap for the mind. It can be easy to proceed logically from flawed assumptions to a disastrous conclusion.

[glad to chat with you folks, signing off for now]

[GftNC]

The incomparable Marina Hyde, further to the BoJo situation. My bolded words make it (at least slightly) relevant to this thread:

It’s not that his implosion could have been predicted; it’s that it was. That’s the thing with fatal flaws – you know at the start how it’s going to end. For all Johnson’s splashy manoeuvrings, the focus now must be on the Tory MPs who should have known this. Right up to this present moment, Johnson didn’t just lie – he lied about the lies he had told, and he lied about the lies that he had not yet told, but had every intention of telling. Having explicitly denigrated the terms “witch hunt” and “kangaroo court” to the committee, these were precisely the phrases he deployed when he didn’t like the way it was going.

Johnson can dish it out, but never take it. He himself ended the careers of those who didn’t suck up to him, without a second of remorse. He expelled 21 Conservative MPs for the crime of opposing him on a no-deal Brexit, including two former chancellors and his hero Winston Churchill’s grandson. Those who refused to return to his heel were barred from standing in the next election – not for lying to parliament, but for telling it the truth about the danger of crashing out of the EU without a deal. This week, his supporters threatened to deselect MPs who voted for the report on Monday.

Yet having banked their aggression, Johnson has now called them off, telling them not to vote against the report after all. Sorry, but that sort of get-out shouldn’t do. Tory MPs need to stop running and face up to what their party enabled, and at least make some profoundly belated attempt to acknowledge that and do the right thing. The parliamentary Conservative party in the majority showed appalling judgment on Johnson, despite mountains of indications it would turn out badly. It failed to understand not simply the vital flaws in Johnson’s criminally overhyped “oven-ready deal”, but human character itself. People don’t change – they just become more exaggerated versions of themselves in one way or another, and anyone who couldn’t see that Boris Johnson would end up behaving like Boris Johnson to the vast detriment of the country and its democratic institutions is too stupid and naive to be in politics. Monday is the time for Conservative MPs to turn up and find some backbone and self-respect – and if they still can’t, to accept that they, too, are in the wrong job.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/16/tory-mps-boris-johnson-partygate-report

[novakant]

Intelligence is a tool, nothing more.

Indeed.

Whenever people go on too much about (their) intelligence, I am tempted to shout:

"Why don't you go off and cure cancer then, end poverty or make peace in the Middle East or do something else that's useful".

[nous]

I teach about 150 students every year. Most all of them are intelligent, though many can be quite thick, or have difficulty adapting to new information, or have a narrow range of applications for their intellectual abilities. I'd trade any number of them for a student of somewhat lesser intellect, but greater curiosity.

Tangentially related - someone on one of my FB groups linked to a piece by Cormac McCarthy (RIP) this week where he pondered the power of dreams and the unconscious and the origin of language. https://web.archive.org/web/20170421071206/http://nautil.us/issue/47/consciousness/the-kekul-problem">http://nautil.us/issue/47/consciousness/the-kekul-problem">https://web.archive.org/web/20170421071206/http://nautil.us/issue/47/consciousness/the-kekul-problem

It's an interesting bit of speculation, but a bit breezy for my tastes where the "unconscious" is concerned, which had me doing research into current scholarship on dreams and the nature of consciousness. One piece in particular that struck me as productive was the Overfitted Brain Hypothesis (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666389921000647), which holds that "the OBH conceptualizes dreams as a form of purposefully corrupted input, likely derived from noise injected into the hierarchical structure of the brain, causing feedback to generate warped or “corrupted” sensory input. The overall evolved purpose of this stochastic activity is to prevent overfitting." In other words, we dream so that we do not get too stuck in what we have already experienced and retain more ability to respond flexibly in novel circumstances.

Which is pretty much the same thing that I say about the function of science fiction as a genre in my writing classes. We cannot change the world if we cannot envision ways in which the world could be otherwise.

The last piece that brings this all together for me is another quotation from Einstein that I found while verifying his oft-repeated bit about imagination and knowledge:

I believe, indeed, that overemphasis on the purely intellectual attitude, often directed solely to the practical and factual, in our education, has led directly to the impairment of ethical values. I am not thinking so much of the dangers with which technical progress has directly confronted mankind, as of the stifling of mutual human considerations by a "matter-of-fact" habit of thought which has come to lie like a killing frost upon human relations. ... The frightful dilemma of the political world situation has much to do with this sin of omission on the part of our civilization. Without "ethical culture," there is no salvation for humanity.

I think intellect, pulled forward by curiosity, and steered by ethics, is the way to a better future. BoJo and his like are too myopically focused on their own pathetic appetites to reach this.

[CharlesWT]

Tangental to science fiction and the future, I've been watching the first season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds because it's available for free with ads on YouTube. It's watchable but I get the impression that the creators are trying to retrofit a 1960s conception of the future into the present. They seem to struggle with making it interesting while staying within the bounds of the universe created by Gene Roddenberry.

[Michael Cain]

"Why don't you go off and cure cancer then, end poverty or make peace in the Middle East or do something else that's useful".

Ambition (or more accurately, lack of same) and risk tolerance matter. Consider curing cancer. Just to get in a position to make that feasible requires years of poverty to get the PhD, then do the post-doc stuff, then work your way up in an organization or company to get to the point where you can write the grant proposals or choose the staff research directions.

Speaking from my own experience of regularly hearing people say, "You could make three times what the company pays you as a consultant. You have a half-dozen ideas that you could build a start-up around," my answer was always honest -- I lack the ambition and risk tolerance to do those things. Over the course of my tech career, a lot of potential doors were closed to me because I lacked the ambition to put up with the academic bullsh*t to get a PhD.

[Cheez Whiz]

Typing "definition of intelligence" into Mr. Google leads down some interesting ratholes, in the way you can expand the core "collection, processing, and retention of information" (from the Latin intellegere) into how and why you do that, which is included in most definitions, from hospitals, dictionaries, psychologists, and others. The moral and practical uses of intelligence seem more important than the thing itself. A narcissist sociopath could be intelligent indeed, but if he talks like some mook from Queens and brags on tape about how many laws he breaks people tend to focus more on the application of intelligence than the thing itself. In conclusion, intelligence is a land of contrasts.

[Pro Bono]

I teach about 150 students every year. Most all of them are intelligent...

I teach a stochastic finance course to a much smaller number of students. Intelligence is most of what they need. Different subjects are different.

The subject we're talking about is governance. Absolutely, intelligence is important - to make good decisions a president or prime minister has to understand a lot of complex things quickly.

One of the problems with democracy is that getting people to vote for you requires a quite different skillset. Either one has to seem to be likeable - Johnson, Obama, Dubya - or one has to appeal to a desire in enough of the electorate for a strongman or strongwoman - Trump, Thatcher. Intelligence can help cultivate either of these personas, but it can come naturally to unintelligent people too.