Monday, July 12, 2021

The IYI

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, "The Intellectual Yet Idiot"

What we have been seeing worldwide, from India to the UK to the US, is the rebellion against the inner circle of no-skin-in-the-game policymaking “clerks” and journalists-insiders, that class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts with some Ivy league, Oxford-Cambridge, or similar label-driven education who are telling the rest of us 1) what to do, 2) what to eat, 3) how to speak, 4) how to think… and 5) who to vote for.

But the problem is the one-eyed following the blind: these self-described members of the “intelligentsia” can’t find a coconut in Coconut Island, meaning they aren’t intelligent enough to define intelligence hence fall into circularities — but their main skill is capacity to pass exams written by people like them. With psychology papers replicating less than 40%, dietary advice reversing after 30 years of fatphobia, macroeconomic analysis working worse than astrology, the appointment of Bernanke who was less than clueless of the risks, and pharmaceutical trials replicating at best only 1/3 of the time, people are perfectly entitled to rely on their own ancestral instinct and listen to their grandmothers (or Montaigne and such filtered classical knowledge) with a better track record than these policymaking goons.

Indeed one can see that these academico-bureaucrats who feel entitled to run our lives aren’t even rigorous, whether in medical statistics or policymaking. They can’t tell science from scientism — in fact in their image-oriented minds scientism looks more scientific than real science. (For instance it is trivial to show the following: much of what the Cass-Sunstein-Richard Thaler types — those who want to “nudge” us into some behavior — much of what they would classify as “rational” or “irrational” (or some such categories indicating deviation from a desired or prescribed protocol) comes from their misunderstanding of probability theory and cosmetic use of first-order models.) They are also prone to mistake the ensemble for the linear aggregation of its components as we saw in the chapter extending the minority rule.

The Intellectual Yet Idiot is a production of modernity hence has been accelerating since the mid twentieth century, to reach its local supremum today, along with the broad category of people without skin-in-the-game who have been invading many walks of life. Why? Simply, in most countries, the government’s role is between five and ten times what it was a century ago (expressed in percentage of GDP). The IYI seems ubiquitous in our lives but is still a small minority and is rarely seen outside specialized outlets, think tanks, the media, and universities — most people have proper jobs and there are not many openings for the IYI.

Beware the semi-erudite who thinks he is an erudite. He fails to naturally detect sophistry.

The IYI pathologizes others for doing things he doesn’t understand without ever realizing it is his understanding that may be limited. He thinks people should act according to their best interests and he knows their interests, particularly if they are “red necks” or English non-crisp-vowel class who voted for Brexit. When plebeians do something that makes sense to them, but not to him, the IYI uses the term “uneducated”. What we generally call participation in the political process, he calls by two distinct designations: “democracy” when it fits the IYI, and “populism” when the plebeians dare voting in a way that contradicts his preferences. While rich people believe in one tax dollar one vote, more humanistic ones in one man one vote, Monsanto in one lobbyist one vote, the IYI believes in one Ivy League degree one-vote, with some equivalence for foreign elite schools and PhDs as these are needed in the club.

More socially, the IYI subscribes to The New Yorker. He never curses on twitter. He speaks of “equality of races” and “economic equality” but never went out drinking with a minority cab driver (again, no real skin in the game as the concept is foreign to the IYI). Those in the U.K. have been taken for a ride by Tony Blair. The modern IYI has attended more than one TEDx talks in person or watched more than two TED talks on Youtube. Not only did he vote for Hillary Monsanto-Malmaison because she seems electable and some such circular reasoning, but holds that anyone who doesn’t do so is mentally ill.

The IYI has a copy of the first hardback edition of The Black Swan on his shelves, but mistakes absence of evidence for evidence of absence. He believes that GMOs are “science”, that the “technology” is not different from conventional breeding as a result of his readiness to confuse science with scientism.

Typically, the IYI get the first order logic right, but not second-order (or higher) effects making him totally incompetent in complex domains. In the comfort of his suburban home with 2-car garage, he advocated the “removal” of Gadhafi because he was “a dictator”, not realizing that removals have consequences (recall that he has no skin in the game and doesn’t pay for results).

The IYI has been wrong, historically, on Stalinism, Maoism, GMOs, Iraq, Libya, Syria, lobotomies, urban planning, low carbohydrate diets, gym machines, behaviorism, transfats, freudianism, portfolio theory, linear regression, Gaussianism, Salafism, dynamic stochastic equilibrium modeling, housing projects, selfish gene, election forecasting models, Bernie Madoff (pre-blowup) and p-values. But he is convinced that his current position is right.

The IYI is member of a club to get traveling privileges; if social scientist he uses statistics without knowing how they are derived (like Steven Pinker and psycholophasters in general); when in the UK, he goes to literary festivals; he drinks red wine with steak (never white); he used to believe that fat was harmful and has now completely reversed; he takes statins because his doctor told him to do so; he fails to understand ergodicity and when explained to him, he forgets about it soon later; he doesn’t use Yiddish words even when talking business; he studies grammar before speaking a language; he has a cousin who worked with someone who knows the Queen; he has never read Frederic Dard, Libanius Antiochus, Michael Oakeshot, John Gray, Amianus Marcellinus, Ibn Battuta, Saadiah Gaon, or Joseph De Maistre; he has never gotten drunk with Russians; he never drank to the point when one starts breaking glasses (or, preferably, chairs); he doesn’t even know the difference between Hecate and Hecuba (which in Brooklynese is “can’t tell sh**t from shinola”); he doesn’t know that there is no difference between “pseudointellectual” and “intellectual” in the absence of skin in the game; has mentioned quantum mechanics at least twice in the past five years in conversations that had nothing to do with physics.

He knows at any point in time what his words or actions are doing to his reputation.

But a much easier marker: he doesn’t even deadlift.

The Blind and the Very Blind

Let’s suspend the satirical for a minute.

IYIs fail to distinguish between the letter and the spirit of things. They are so blinded by verbalistic notions such as science, education, democracy, racism, equality, evidence, rationality and similar buzzwords that they can be easily taken for a ride. They can thus cause monstrous iatrogenics[1] without even feeling a shade of a guilt, because they are convinced that they mean well and that they can be thus justified to ignore the deep effect on reality. You would laugh at the doctor who nearly kills his patient yet argues about the effectiveness of his efforts because he lowered the latter’s cholesterol, missing that a metric that correlates to health is not quite health –it took a long time for medicine to convince its practitioners that health was what they needed to work on, not the exercise of what they thought was “science”, hence doing nothing was quite often preferable (via negativa). But yet, in a different domain, say foreign policy, a neo-con who doesn’t realize he has this mental defect would never feel any guilt for blowing up a country such as Libya, Iraq, or Syria, for the sake of “democracy”. I’ve tried to explain via negativa to a neocon: it was like trying to describe colors to someone born blind.

IYIs can be feel satisfied giving their money to a group aimed at “saving the children” who will spend most of it making powerpoint presentation and organizing conferences on how to save the children and completely miss the inconsistency.

Likewise an IYI routinely fails to make a distinction between an institution (say formal university setting and credentialization) and what its true aim is (knowledge, rigor in reasoning) –I’ve even seen a French academic arguing against a mathematician who had great (and useful) contributions because the former “didn’t go to a good school” when he was eighteen or so.

The propensity to this mental disability may be shared by all humans, and it has to be an ingrained defect, except that it disappears under skin in the game.

[1] Harm done by the healer.
Postscript

From the reactions to this piece, I discovered that the IYI has difficulty, when reading, in differentiating between the satirical and the literal.

PostPostcript

The IYI thinks this criticism of IYIs means “everybody is an idiot”, not realizing that their group represents, as we said, a tiny minority — but they don’t like their sense of entitlement to be challenged and although they treat the rest of humans as inferiors, they don’t like it when the waterhose is turned to the opposite direction (what the French call arroseur arrosé). (For instance, Richard Thaler, partner of the dangerous GMO advocate Übernudger Cass Sunstein, interpreted this piece as saying that “there are not many non-idiots not called Taleb”, not realizing that people like him are < 1% or even .1% of the population.)

Post-Post Postscript

(Written after the surprise election of 2016; the chapter above was written several months prior to the event). The election of Trump was so absurd to them and didn’t fit their worldview by such a large margin that they failed to find instructions in their textbook on how to react. It was exactly as on Candid Camera, imagine the characteristic look on someone’s face after they pull a trick on him, and the person is at a loss about how to react.

Or, more interestingly, imagine the looks and reaction of someone who thought he was happily married making an unscheduled return home and hears his wife squealing in bed with a (huge) doorman.

Pretty much everything forecasters, subforecasters, superforecasters, political “scientists”, psychologists, intellectuals, campaigners, “consultants”, big data scientists, everything they know was instantly shown to be a hoax. So my mischievous dream of putting a rat inside someone’s shirt (as expressed in The Black Swan) suddenly came true.

Note: this piece can be reproduced, translated, and published by anyone under the condition that it is in its entirety and mentions that it is extracted from Skin in the Game.

Publications banned from republishing my work without explicit written permission: Huffington Post
 (all languages).

29 comments:

  1. "...their main skill is capacity to pass exams written by people like them". So how can Black people do well on tests that were written to be biased in favor of the "class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts"? Is the "class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts" made up primarily of African Americans? I thought this was the group that infantalized Black people? "Paternalistic" is right in the derogatory title for the group.

    ReplyDelete
  2. btw - Have you ever worked in the Public sector? My experience with it is that they impose professional standards on the Private Sector, but seldoM on themselves? Why do you suppose that is?

    ReplyDelete
  3. PS - ...and its' not due to the awareness of when "not to impose the rules" to better achieve an outcome. It's to save them the effort because they "can".

    ReplyDelete
  4. "You tell me. It's your group".

    It isn't. btw, I asked you about YOUR assertion that racial bias was removed from IQ tests. First you said they weren't biased, now you say they are. HOW would I know the reason for your flip-flop? Your prior assertion wasn't convenient to the narrative presented in the article you cut and pasted? Still, I'm not sure how both can be true. Why I asked YOU.

    ReplyDelete
  5. The testing services "test the tests" and remove questions that demographic groups miss disproportionally.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Are the tests biased towards highly intelligent people? Yes, THAT is what they test for.

    ReplyDelete
  7. So people in the supposed "Intellectual Yet Idiot" class are actually intelligent and not idiots? aka you disagree with the article you cut and pasted? You should have said that. The logical assumption would be that you posted it because you agree with it.

    ReplyDelete
  8. They're both.

    And as I've said before, there's a huge gap between wisdom and intelligence. You apparently are unable to perceive a difference...

    So you now think that the IQ test makers are intelligent? I thought that you thought that they were idiots and that intelligence was unmeasurable?

    Perhaps intelligence isn't the be all and all all of "superiority" as you imagine it to be after all.

    ReplyDelete
  9. An IQ test measures how well you will do on an IQ test. 🤣

    ReplyDelete
  10. Yes they do. And IQ tests correlate highly with demonstrated intelligence.

    ReplyDelete
  11. [Re the ability of an IQ test to accurately measure intelligence] Despite the hype, the relevance, usefulness, and legitimacy of the IQ test is still hotly debated among educators, social scientists, and hard scientists.

    [Re Charles Murray assertions that IQ is inherited] Critiques of such hereditarian hypotheses – arguments that genetics can powerfully explain human character traits and even human social and political problems – cite a lack of evidence and weak statistical analyses. This critique continues today, with many researchers resistant to and alarmed by research that is still being conducted on race and IQ.

    [Re the Minus assertion that racial bias has been removed from IQ tests] According to some researchers, the "cultural specificity" of intelligence makes IQ tests biased towards the environments in which they were developed – namely white, Western society. This makes them potentially problematic in culturally diverse settings. The application of the same test among different communities would fail to recognise the different cultural values that shape what each community values as intelligent behaviour.

    [source] The IQ test wars: why screening for intelligence is still so controversial. October 10, 2017 12.00pm EDT. Updated February 1, 2018 9.32am EST.

    ReplyDelete
  12. According to some researchers, the "cultural specificity" of intelligence makes IQ tests biased towards the environments in which they were developed – namely white,

    Fine. Go live in a hut, burn wood and revert to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle if you want "that" to represent a "cultural intelligence" which requires no testing. I doubt if you'll have much use for an internet connection (that requires intelligence to "culturally develop").

    ReplyDelete
  13. ps - Buck v Bell was made irrelevant w/Roe v. Wade. Who needs eugenic "theories" when you can just allow "practitioners" like Margaret Sanger to help "self-regulate" your problems for you.

    ReplyDelete
  14. 5/27/14 The U.S. Supreme Court has struck down a law used by Florida and other states that set a strict cut-off, based on IQ test scores, to determine eligibility for the death penalty.

    In the wake of the court's earlier ruling that the states may not execute the "mentally retarded," Florida determined that the dividing line would be an IQ of 70.

    The defendant in the case at the center of Tuesday's ruling, a convicted murderer named Freddie Lee Hall, had an IQ of 71 — so the state said he could be put to death.

    But the high court, in a 5-4 decision along ideological lines, said such a line is too rigid.


    Apparently Liberals believe that IQ tests can only be used to save lives...

    ReplyDelete
  15. Meanwhile in my culture that regards "burping" as an indicator of high intelligence...

    ReplyDelete
  16. Justice Anthony Kennedy, who wrote the court's opinion, said the experts who design, give and interpret IQ tests say they reveal only a range — that a person's IQ may be five points above or below the score.

    That means Hall could actually have an IQ of between 66 and 76. For that reason, the court held, he must be allowed to present evidence of his intellectual disability, including deficits in functioning over his lifetime.

    "The death penalty is the gravest sentence our society may impose. Persons facing that most severe sanction must has a fair opportunity to show that the Constitution prohibits their execution," Kennedy wrote.


    I wonder why no one objected to the IQ test on the basis of its' cultural relevance.... BWAH!

    ReplyDelete
  17. Unfortunately, our current government is too far left liberal pussy to round up and execute the January 6th insurrectionists. In fact, one of them was given house arrest because while attacking the Capitol he is on video claiming he is attacking the White House - his defense literally is he was too stupid to know where he was at. It's like he was robbing a bank and got a pass for claiming he thought he was knocking over a Burger King or raped an 8 year old and claimed he thought he was teaching ballet.

    Hell no we don't want to live in a country where stupid criminals are given special treatment.

    ReplyDelete
  18. "Capitol LARPers deserve death." "Portland protests mostly peaceful." News at 11.

    ReplyDelete
  19. btw - According to SCotUS, if your IQ is under 70 you can't be given the Death Penalty.

    ReplyDelete
  20. Oof. That would make all but a negligible fraction of Trump supporters safe from the hangman....

    ReplyDelete
  21. Then anyone who professes a fear of an actual "insurrection" by them must be equally intellectually impaired.

    ReplyDelete
  22. No fear of anything except the potential tragedy of not recording their deaths on video to enjoy over and over with popcorn.

    ReplyDelete
  23. ...kinda like the George Floyd video, w/o the fomo....

    ReplyDelete
  24. It'll probably be more like a drone strike that gets ruled a "tragic trailer park propane tank explosion" leaving only a charred Confederate flag behind.

    ReplyDelete
  25. If the insurrectionists had been smart they'd have realized Joe Biden was the legitimate winner of the election. Fearing violence committed in the name of stupidity isn't also stupidity. It's smart. The low IQ predisent Dotard Donald has a large following of stupids eager to commit violence on his behalf.

    ReplyDelete
  26. The insurrectionists were going to overthrow the government to put the existing president in office? That would have accomplished....?

    ReplyDelete
  27. Ask self-confessed Russian intelligence asset Michael Flynn what he hoped to accomplish with his idea to declare martial law...

    ReplyDelete