Given our world’s current obsession with “artificial intelligence” I’ve been thinking a lot about the natural kind. And what I’ve concluded is nicely summarized in a book, above all in its title: You’re Not That Great (but neither is anyone else).
You’re Not That Great’s author urges us to stop worrying about what innate qualities we have or don’t have, or how much more or less we have than others, and focus only on pursuing improvement from where we are at the moment.
If there is something to “being smart,” then the safest assumption is that I’m probably average. So, yeah, maybe I’m not that great. It’s a tough message, but a liberating one. Accepting that fact is a superpower that I’ve found to be far more practical than any notion of intelligence. It’s allowed me to search much more effectively for truth, beauty, and sound financial decisions.
Part of why our new chatbot friends attract so much of our attention, so many fears and hopes, is that we’ve wrapped so much of our sense of self into the idea of intelligence. We tell ourselves stories about who we are in terms of our intellectual capabilities: Intelligence is what separates us from animals. We spend the better part of childhood striving to achieve grades that attempt to divide us into the smart, the stupid, and the drab mediocre. As organizations, we want to outsmart our competitors. You can’t understand today’s global political discourse without a resentment of “elites,” and we all know that we’re not talking about elite athletes at the Olympics. Nor about the world’s best forklift operators.
We’re obsessed with intelligence, constantly judging others and judging ourselves in reference to a vague scale of smartness. But how many of us have clue about what it means to be objectively brilliant or clueless?
There are many different definitions of intelligence. There’s a proliferation of types of intelligence. I know a successful business lawyer who can’t tell left from right, and a molecular biologist who’s lousy at personal finance. There seems to be some – but not universal – agreement about whether the different types of intelligence tend to appear together in the same people. There’s controversy about how to measure each type of intelligence and whether they can be measured at all. There’s controversy about intelligence’s causes and how an untold number of factors on the nature and nurture side contribute to it.
Those controversies and complexities alone suggest that worrying about an intelligence scale – and where you or anyone else measures up to it – is a colossal waste of time.
But supposing there were some kind of “general intelligence” that aggregated all the different ways we try to solve the problems the world throws at us. And suppose we could define a score that would allow us to compare each other, such that the statements like “Jill is smarter than Phil” are meaningful. Until such a (horrific) time comes that everyone’s general intelligence gets rigorously tested and displayed publicly, judging whether Jill is, in fact, smarter than Phil based on available evidence will be a matter of expertise. Of skill. Something you could be bad at and get better at.
Like any skill, judging other people’s intelligence is probably something subject to the Dunning-Kruger-Effect: Most people will significantly overestimate their ability to judge intelligence.
In that case, there are several principles that help guide me about how I think about myself, other people, and the world:
- Absent evidence, my first assumption is that I am average on that smartness scale.
- Because I’m always going to pay more attention to evidence that suggests I’m above average-smart, and unconsciously repress evidence that I’m below the average (a form of Confirmation Bias), I will stick by principle 1 even in the face of evidence.
- Thanks to the Dunning-Kruger-Effect, most people are going to overestimate their skills in judging other peoples’ smartness… and their own.
It’s not that there is no such thing (or really, things) as intelligence. It’s that there are structural reasons we’re going to misjudge ourselves and others. People who worry about smartness will overestimate their ability to judge how smart other people are and systematically overestimate their own intelligence. Both factors will lead them to make poor judgments, especially when their judgments about other peoples’ intelligence contribute to their decision-making, say in evaluating the quality of information or analysis provided by someone: “Phil’s a sharp tack: His analysis of the cost structure of our product must be sound.”
The overconfident will make mistakes whether or not they score higher than you do on some kind of objective smartness scale.
In combination, these three principles suggest a generalized strategy for making your way through the world, and contributing positively to it while avoiding some big pitfalls:
- Stop worrying about how smart you are. Or anyone else.
- Observe carefully what people who do worry about smartness say or do:
- Second-guess their judgments; they’re vulnerable to the combined impact of Confirmation Bias and the Dunning-Kruger-Effect.
- Never become economically overexposed to the consequences of their judgments (that’s important when choosing employment and investment opportunities).
- Look for opportunities to create value for everyone by identifying the mistakes of the overconfident.
- Keep at it: Be willing to second-guess, but follow through and look for new answers.
“But aren’t you just saying that you’re smarter than the overconfident if you can identify their mistakes and fix them?” Not really. Identifying errors doesn’t require deep insights. It mostly requires the willingness to ask “What if X were wrong?” and the diligence to pursue that question. You can do that at your own pace. You can find people to help you.
If “intelligence” means anything, it’s the ability to discover what’s knowable about the world. If the world is a readable book, and you think you’ve found an undiscovered chapter, you’re probably mistaken. Chances are someone else will have got there before you. Many people will have. You’re more likely to find a unique new way to contribute to the world by questioning the assumptions of the overconfident.
The Ruminathans 