An article by Nassim Nicholas Taleb about the fallacy of IQ testing got me thinking of the way we measure intelligence, and perhaps more importantly, stupidity. What do those terms even mean? Can we come up with a useful heuristic for determining where people fit? And even if we can, do we need to? How do we manage our decisions with regards to spotting and dealing with the stupid and the smart?
My wife was relating to an engineer coworker the time- and energy-wasting process of trying to get computer illiterate clients to enter into a simple screenshare so she could help them with their issues. Invariably, they find creative ways to make something that should take a minute or two last for half an hour, wasting valuable time. The engineer was flabbergasted. Surely there must be some way they could streamline this—post a tutorial, automate it, something. My wife’s response: “You can’t streamline stupid.”
It seems like there’s no shortage of wise old sayings to this effect. Change “streamline” to “fix” and you’ve got a common one for a less tech-savvy age. Or my personal favorite: every time you think you’ve made something foolproof, someone, somewhere, invents a better fool. Before I dive in to what we’re actually trying to do when we attempt to streamline stupid, it’ll be helpful to define what stupid means.
I don’t care about the dictionary definition. I’m looking for something quick, memorable, and easily applied to any action. It turns out there is a very funny essay floating around the internet called The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity that half-seriously groups people into four categories: Helpless, Intelligent, Bandit, and Stupid. To Taleb’s dismay, it’s written by an economist. Don’t let that discourage you. There are a lot of statements and assumptions he makes that I disagree with, or just can’t find evidence to support, but his basic thesis and the four types of intelligence actually make for a very robust starting point. According to the author, Carlo M. Cipolla:
If Tom takes an action and suffers a loss while producing a gain to Dick, Tom’s mark will fall in field H: Tom acted helplessly. If Tom takes an action by which he makes a gain while yielding a gain also to Dick, Tom’s mark will fall in area I: Tom acted intelligently. If Tom takes an action by which he makes a gain causing Dick a loss, Tom’s mark will fall in area B: Tom acted as a bandit. Stupidity is related to area S and to all positions on axis Y below point O. As the Third Basic Law explicitly clarifies:
A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.
That gives us a nice 4×4 grid, into which we can place any action based on two questions: 1) does it harm the perpetrator? 2) does it harm others? I like when maps correspond well-enough to other maps. Cross-referencibility makes what is essentially a metaphor with limitations more robust. It turns out this fits nicely with a definition of rationality that Taleb himself puts forth in his book, Skin in the Game (though I can’t recall who it originated from). For a word that gets tossed around quite a bit to defend any number of questionable positions, it’s remarkably hard to find a rigorous definition of rationality that applies to all situations. The best, maybe the only defensible one, is that something rational is something that survives (or contributes to the survival of the individual who employs it). How rational can your idea be if it kills you? Truth, logical proof, evidence-schmevidence. If a superstition prevents you from getting killed, there is rationality to it, even if it can’t be literally supported. It doesn’t matter why it worked, only that it worked.
So in Cipolla’s grid, we can see that an intelligent person demonstrates rationality—that is, his actions* have a net-positive impact on the survival of he and his friends. The stupid person’s actions have a net-negative impact on survival.
*I am purposely differing from Cipolla by looking at actions, not people. He argues that people can act according to different types, but inherently average to a single type, which is in their nature. Here, he shows his economics background. Averages don’t matter. One supremely stupid act can get you and a lot of others killed. He fails to consider the tails. It doesn’t matter if, on average, you mostly act intelligently when you are no longer around. Therefore, I am limiting “stupid” and the other labels to actions, though I agree that all people spend time acting in all four ways, and may tend to prefer one.
The other two types require another divergence on my part. While the grid is convenient for classifying, in reality, they don’t exist on the same plane. Cipolla is also confusing logical types. On the first order, we have Helpless, which is harmful to self, and Bandit, which is beneficial to self. That’s it. Which makes the terms sound a bit unpleasant. Hey, wait a minute! I’m either helpless, or a bandit? Yeah, at least until you consider second-order consequences. The effect on others is what makes one truly stupid or intelligent.
It might be easier to think of Helpless as “First-Order Stupid.” If the harm is extended to others, Cipolla calls that “stupid” and I call it…I don’t know. More stupider? Bandit is “First-Order Intelligent,” helping the self. Intelligent people extend the help to the second order. Stupid and Intelligent are immediately more interesting, and it’s obvious that you can extend them across even more orders. I’ll stick to the second one as much as I can for clarity.
A few cases that beg clarity occur to me.
1) Can the same action be intelligent on one level, and stupid on the next?
If it seems intelligent on the first level, benefits the actor, but harms the group, it would be a bandit action, which I would call first-order stupid. It harms him later. In a case where the action never ever comes back to haunt the bandit, it only harms a particular group of which he is not a member, and he gets away with it, it’s just banditry, never becoming full-blown stupid of the second order. For that to happen, he must not be a member of the group he harms in any way. For example, harming a member of a rival gang. Of course, we could argue that he is a member of the same community, and the effects are still felt, so banditry is always stupid on a higher level.
2) If I do something that benefits me, but unbeknownst, harms others, am I bandit or stupid?
Stupid, even if it doesn’t harm me, because I failed to account for second-order consequences.
3) If a hero sacrifices his life for the lives of others, is he helpless, since he harmed himself but helped the group, i.e. first-order stupid?
No. In this exception, he is intelligent and quite generous. No one sacrifices themselves if they can accomplish the thing for a cheaper price. Presumably, his life was the cheapest option, and not doing so would have harmed the group, so it would have harmed him as well.
Cipolla suggests a stupid person generally stymies the actions of the intelligent in unpredictable ways. He states:
Our daily life is mostly made of cases in which we lose money and/or time and/or energy and/or appetite, cheerfulness and good health because of the improbable action of some preposterous creature who has nothing to gain and indeed gains nothing from causing us embarrassment, difficulties or harm. Nobody knows, understands or can possibly explain why that preposterous creature does what he does. In fact there is no explanation – or better there is only one explanation: the person in question is stupid.
There’s a logical hole here. Just because you’re stymied by a stupid person doesn’t mean that you, too, are not stupid. I’m positive stupid people do this to one another all the time, and fail to see the logic in one another’s actions. Besides, a stupid person who is skillfully shut down by an intelligent person might also fail to see why the intelligent one acted that way or how it helped him, because being an idiot, those things aren’t readily apparent. We can’t judge whether or not an action is stupid or intelligent based on whether it causes us grief. It’s even difficult to tell who it harms.
It’s often difficult to spot stupidity or intelligence in the moment. That’s because there is a time component. Actions either improve or worsen the survivability of the individual and the group. Death rarely strikes instantly. Instead, fragility mounts and there is an eventual payoff. The more orders of magnitude it crosses, the longer it takes. I think the fundamental mistake of the stupid is a failure to relate the related, or a tendency to relate the unrelated, and often, confusing logical types. For example: the rat snake is not poisonous. The rat snake is a snake, so snakes must not be poisonous. The rattle snake is also a snake, so let me pick up him and give him a kiss. The mistake here is extrapolating from the member of the category to the category, then back from that to the member, a confusion of orders of magnitude. Animals in the same species can be compared to one another, but not to the species itself. An example of a failure to relate the related would be: Diamondback rattlesnake #1 is poisonous, but that doesn’t mean that Diamondback rattlesnake #2 is also poisonous. Let me pick up #2. But at the end of the day, none of these failures or confusions are stupid unless they harm the individual and the group. Survival is the determining factor, not logic.
The Value of Idiots
Before I ask myself if we can streamline/fix/fool stupid, I have to wonder if it’s even a good idea, assuming that it’s possible. Stupid is harmful by definition, but might stupid actions play an essential role in our survival? Humans have been around for quite a while. If having a large number of stupid people running around was a bad thing, why are we still here? Granted, our species isn’t even a tick of the second hand compared to some. Maybe we just haven’t had enough time for all those stupid actions to trickle up to the species level and cost us permanently.
If, as Cipolla suggests, it’s the lot of the intelligent to be tried time and again by the stupid, that’s not the worst situation. First, they have to prove their actions are intelligent by creating a survival advantage over time. By responding creatively to challenges. Stupid people provide those challenges. They force the intelligent to become more productive. More efficient. They force them to learn, and to reveal themselves so that they might gain trust and influence.
On a much deeper level, what I’m calling stupid is just the expression of a critical component of natural selection. Evolution is divergent. That means, rather than funneling from a wide range of options to a single perfect one (convergence), it actually works by trying out a lot of different options. Most die. The ones that best fit the challenges of the environment thrive, then the process is repeated. We can think of “stupid” as phenotypes that simply didn’t fit very well. Ideas that, in retrospect, didn’t work out. But they had to exist. The only other alternative would be to hope that the species as a homogenous whole knew exactly the perfect way to express itself both now and for all future changes. If it only has a single expression, any worthy challenge would cause extinction. There need to be options at all times—a lot of them. What looks like a bunch of stupid animals dying is the intelligence of the species to diversify its efforts so that it is antifragile to change.
So an individual who takes a sufficiently stupid action, like trying to pet the lions, dies, while another more cautious one survives to reproduce. Historically, stupid actions get the actor eliminated from the gene pool, which for the species, is information. OK, let’s not try that again. The problem in our modern context is that we’ve made it hard for those who act stupidly to completely eliminate themselves. In some cases, they seem to be rewarded on a personal level, while the fragility they would have created for themselves is passed up one order, to the local group. The title of Taleb’s Skin in the Game refers to having something personal and consequential to lose if you make a bad choice. The absence of it is never truly an absence. Like matter, it cannot be created or destroyed, only moved around. Sometimes, it’s the group who decides to protect individuals at its own expense by disallowing stupid actors from harming themselves, so they can stick around to harm others. For example, someone who wishes to ride a bike without a helmet can only hurt themselves. But voting in a helmet law potentially allows them to survive a stupid decision in order to make another costlier one later, perhaps causing a crash where a motorist swerves to avoid their reckless turn and hits a pole. On the other hand, a law requiring bike lights at night makes sense, because it protects others from a collision that could harm more than just the cyclist (the helmet has no effect on the number of collisions, only the consequences).
Already, our effort to find a way to streamline stupid is in serious doubt, because evolution requires it for the survival of the species. It’s hardwired in, because if it weren’t, some catastrophic change would have killed us already. One thing I’m unsure about is whether the percentage of stupid actions is constant, like Cipolla says, underbalanced or overbalanced by the creativity and influence of intelligent ones, or whether it rises and declines in cycles as civilizations rise and fall. Since I’m considering actions rather than people, and stupid actions can fall anywhere along a wide range of magnitudes, my guess is that in the creative rising period, stupid actions tend to have consequences at low levels, usually personal or familial. Intelligent actions are thus able to meet challenges and build up momentum. A personally creative act is shared with a small group, a larger one, and eventually, you have civilization. Once stupid actions begin to transfer risk to higher and higher orders, the fragility is great enough that something starts it on its crumble.
In terms of the survival of a civilization, or a species, the stupidity or intelligence of an action really hinges on the order of magnitude it is allowed to affect. The one concession that Taleb gave the pro-IQ crowd was that the test is very good at predicting the low end of the intelligence spectrum and their future performance (the high end fails to correlate to real world performance). In other words, a low IQ score identifies people of special needs. Traditionally, terms like “stupid” or “idiot” have been used to describe these folks. Personally, I think this concession was generous. While the IQ test does predict who has special mental needs, it fails to spot the truly stupid. Left to their own devices, a person with special needs would likely make decisions that ended up removing themselves from the gene pool, but it’s unlikely that they would acquire the power or influence to harm more than just the self. Someone who only harms themselves is Helpless in Cipolla’s grid. The truly stupid must also harm others, preferably lots of them. Besides, few people identified as mentally handicapped are tossed out with a wave and a “good luck.” More often, someone cares for them and helps prevent them from harming anyone, including themselves. They simply don’t have the opportunity to be stupid. For that, you need influence.
Intellectual Bandits
This is where a few different types of apparent Bandits come in. I say apparent, because they only help themselves and harm others at first glance, in the first order. In fact, they are the truly stupid. Taleb terms one class of them the Intellectual-Yet-Idiot (IYI). These are the naive bureaucrats and academics who make policies and circulate ideas that end up harming the larger population, while themselves escaping the consequences. At first. The reason these people are actually stupid and not just bandits is that they lack skin in the game at the first order. The risks they create are allowed to trickle up from the community, to at least the state and perhaps even the species and beyond in some cases. While they may not directly harm themselves or ever see the inside of a courtroom, it would be ludicrous to argue that a member who harms the group of which he is a member does himself no harm. Even if he seems to live in comfort and die peacefully in old age, I don’t think that just because a person avoids the justice system and isn’t around when their disasters come due for the rest of us means they’ve avoided harm. Only the obvious harm we’d like to see them suffer.
In a perfectly fair system, the higher you go and the more influence you wield, the greater and more immediate the consequences should be if your actions cause harm. We can forgive a personal error, but whoever runs the company that decided to contaminate the water table by dumping waste would receive a swift penalty commensurate with the extent of their harm, which is a nice way of saying death, and the dissolution of the company. Sounds extreme? Even your garden variety murderer usually only harms one other person. It’ll never happen of course, but from an evolutionary standpoint, the health of the system relies on the poor choices being eliminated before they can eliminate the rest of the species, so a balance between the rewards and consequences of risk is an important feedback.
Along the lines of that pipe dream, I’ve often been stuck in snarling traffic for ages, eventually to pass by a minor wreck blocking two lanes of a three-lane interstate. Wouldn’t it be nice if penalties were proportional to harm? A fender bender that people are too lazy to push to the side, which causes significant delays for literally thousands of people, not to mention brings in a small army of first responders, ought to be treated differently from the same accident on a quiet street on a Sunday morning, which is quickly moved out of the travel lanes. A small fine for the guilty party in the latter, and maybe a year-long suspension of the license for the former. There’s no incentive to be more careful in the interstate situation (other than not dying in a high speed crash), nor is the driver removed even temporarily from doing it again as soon as their car is back from the body shop.
Streamlining Stupid?
But enough of my daydreams. Why can’t you streamline stupid? As mentioned, it’s built in from an evolutionary standpoint for a very good reason. We need stupid. So what are we really talking about in the original question? Probably limiting the choices of stupid people so they have fewer opportunities to make ones that cost others. In fact, I can probably think of dozens of trivial examples in which that does work. Lots of graphical menus on screens are designed to both make the options obvious, and limit the potential for people to get lost or screw up. For the most part, it’s successful, though if you’ve ever watched an old person try to work the debit card reader at the grocery store, you know there’s only so much the engineers can do to make the process foolproof. And in general, we don’t let people who we obviously identify as poor decision makers have a say in big decisions that affect lots of others.
Actually removing people’s ability to make their own choices is a bit of an ethical dilemma. This is predicated on the assumption that whoever is removing the choices is very intelligent, which we can’t always know right away. It seems like a slippery slope to a place where some policymaker is identifying “stupid” on their own terms and removing their personal freedoms, whether or not their identification and removal processes are sound. Besides, we need those mistakes. Learning occurs by trial and error, making a connection, then a revision, and another trial.
What’s needed isn’t removal of choices, it’s more immediate feedback (negative consequences) for poor ones. Errors remain at the same order of magnitude and are not passed on to a group larger than the one which made the choice. Education might best be viewed as a series of graduated challenges with skin in the game. The stupid would either remove themselves from the gene pool, or at least get stuck a level from which they couldn’t advance to a point where their influential mistakes harmed others. An intelligent person would make mistakes as well, but fewer and fewer as time goes on, and they would always be low-cost, easily recovered. Crucially, even the most intelligent individual just isn’t equipped to understand second-third-fourth-order consequences that happen at very high orders of magnitude. In other words, the best and brightest individuals are ultimately going to make a terrible, consequential choice when it affects something large and too complex to understand, such as a country, or a biosphere. A fine argument for a multitude of small, diverse, independent pockets of self-governance whose mistakes are locally contained and whose successes can be emulated by others once enough time has passed to show them harmless.
Stupid people keep our species healthy and adaptable, but only if the stupid are allowed to suffer their own unhealthy consequences on behalf of everyone else. We’ll never be rid of them, nor do I want to be. On a personal level, the challenge for one who hopes to demonstrate intelligence requires no fancy book-learnin’. It is simply this: make sure the person who suffers first and greatest for my actions when they don’t work out, is me.