Very Smart and Very Wrong

There’s a long-standing tradition in politics of deeming the guy at the top “stupid” if you don’t like his politics. George W. Bush is arguably the most famous of our recent presidents to suffer such slings and arrows, but if you Google “(fillintheblank) is stupid memes,” you’ll find examples no matter which presidential name you insert.

There’s been a fair bit of “Obama is Stupid” rhetoric coming from the Right nowadays, attached to foreign policy, terrorism, economics, and just about every other policy area. The word “stupid,” though, is both incorrect and wrong. And, no, “incorrect and wrong” is not redundant.

I don’t think Obama is stupid. I believe that he is extremely smart. No one becomes President without being extremely smart. There are simply too many obstacles in the way, too much competition, especially early on before one’s name becomes widely known, to contemplate that a dummy, even a charismatic one, could rise to that level. Obviously, the same applies to every previous president. I won’t delve into who’s smarter than who here – that’s not really relevant. To call him, or any President, “stupid” ignores common sense and the evidence in front of our eyes. Using the word “stupid” is incorrect.

It’s also wrong, and not because they’re not stupid. It’s because “stupid” isn’t the problem. Instead of presuming that someone is stupid because his decisions and policies are wrong, we should simply recognize that one can be wrong despite being smart.

There is a phenomenon called the Dunning-Kruger Effect, which speaks of tendencies and biases in both smart and not-smart people that skew their perceptions away from reality. While not a direct explanation for very smart and very wrong, it points out that self-awareness should not be presumed in either smart or stupid people. Herein lies the problem and herein lies the reason that people falsely conflate bad ideas with innate stupidity.

When one is smart but lacks self-awareness and the humility to accept that one doesn’t know everything, when one thinks that one’s smarts impart wisdom and infallibility, then what’s left is “I’m the smartest person in the room” arrogance and condescension. That walls out critical thinking, it walls out alternate ideas, it walls out the notion that one might be wrong about something. Once you’ve decided everyone around you is your “lesser,” you’ve locked out the reality that you don’t know everything.

Theres also the cognitive bias that we are all susceptible to. And, yes, that includes your humble narrator. Its existence and our susceptibility does not obviate any arguments we might choose to make, it just warns us and those with whom we discourse to do our best to remain aware of its pitfalls. A few days ago, I wrote an article that referenced the television series True Detective and this quote:

You attach assumptions to a piece of evidence, you start to bend the narrative to support it, prejudice yourself.

We all have an inclination to this, to a greater or lesser degree. Our way out of this is to be aware of the tendency and embrace the possibility that we are wrong in our current belief sets. Of course, we should also not err too far in the other direction, i.e. presuming that one little bit of rebuttal wipes out years worth of factual accretion and logical conclusions, but keeping an open mind, especially when new information comes available, is how we keep our arguments honest.

Smart people aren’t necessarily able to maintain self-awareness better than stupid people, a conclusion supported both by the aforementioned Dunning-Kruger Effect, by theories such as those that correlate higher IQ to increased probability of drug use, and by the observation that smart people tend to be more susceptible to scammers and con artists.

The realm of politics adds an extra dimension to the very smart and very wrong concept. Not only are politicians elected as much or more for their ideological leanings than for their policy prescriptions (which subordinates results to tribalism), admissions of error or changes of position are often highly perilous (think John Kerry), and thus there tends to be more reward for being ideological in the face of contrary evidence than for being correct.

Stepping outside of politics for just a moment, consider the geocentric view of the solar system. Scientists of that era, came up with incredibly elaborate explanations for how the planets moved. It took quite a bit of intelligence to do so. Those explanations were, of course, totally wrong, because they were built on a false foundation. Again, very smart and very wrong.

Some time ago I reviewed a similar supposition that emanated from the Right: that Obama was acting out of malice and with the goal of destroying the America that we know. I applied a variant of Hanlon’s Razor to that assertion, modifying it to read:

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.

Incompetence and stupidity are markedly different things. A neurosurgeon may be able to do incredible things to your spinal cord, but he may be utterly unable to rewire a light switch. His lack of ability in the latter situation does not speak of any sort of stupidity, just a lack of knowledge and skill in that particular area. Can he learn? Of course. But, in order to learn, he first has to acknowledge his ignorance.

Therein lies what I believe to be the problem with so many who are very smart and very wrong. When they anchor themselves to false foundations (in the case of our President, perhaps statism or multiculturalism), smarts/intelligence won’t show him the truth. And, sometimes, very smart people can convince themselves of very wrong things.

“Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.” ― George Orwell