Smart people are especially prone to stupid mistakes
By Cory Doctorow at 5:44 pm Wednesday, Jun 13
Jonah Lehrer takes to The New Yorker to discuss Thinking, Fast and Slow, the latest book from Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist who's won the Nobel prize in economics. Lehrer discusses Kahneman's contention that smart people are no less prone to cognitive bias than anyone else, but are prone to believing that they are immune to error. Kahneman himself admits that he makes systematic cognitive errors all the time, even though he's devoted his career to studying them.
This has particularly grim implications for a society that thinks it is a meritocracy but is really an oligarchy, because the competitively educated people at the top believe (incorrectly) that they don't need to have their intuitions reviewed by lesser mortals.
What explains this result? One provocative hypothesis is that the bias blind spot arises because of a mismatch between how we evaluate others and how we evaluate ourselves. When considering the irrational choices of a stranger, for instance, we are forced to rely on behavioral information; we see their biases from the outside, which allows us to glimpse their systematic thinking errors. However, when assessing our own bad choices, we tend to engage in elaborate introspection. We scrutinize our motivations and search for relevant reasons; we lament our mistakes to therapists and ruminate on the beliefs that led us astray.
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http://boingboing.net/2012/06/13/smart-people-are-especially-pr.html
Kalidurga
(14,177 posts)Seriously I have had people tell me I am pretty smart, but some of the boneheaded things I have done makes me wonder....
Gregorian
(23,867 posts)And you can add something to this phenomenon which makes it far more insidious. Power. We have a society, almost an entire world, of people who now have more power at their disposal than is healthy. We have taken the absolutely brilliant concepts of the greatest minds who ever lived, like Archimedes and Newton, and not only used them to create better lives for ourselves, but to destroy. This, to me, is the ultimate irony. How we have taken and used the greatest thoughts, and abused them. I've always said that we were the specie that didn't know when to stop. I see this as using something good in a way that is actually counterproductive and harmful. What better example can one find than our use of the internal combustion engine. We are literally choking our own source of sustenance through the use of something that once improved our lives. It's a cognizant blind spot on a global scale.
Response to n2doc (Original post)
AverageJoe90 This message was self-deleted by its author.
lastlib
(23,393 posts)...I get outsmarted by inanimate objects all the time.....
Igel
(35,393 posts)Short novel from the 1920s. He has two "heroes". One is fashionable and efficient, productive and positivist. The other is never as well dressed, inefficient, not so productive, and more squishy in his thinking.
Near the beginning of the novel Olesha has his narrator say that objects like the first hero, but that objects don't like the second every-man hero.
Then you have to look at policy implications.
We'll focus on having a small cadre of experts decide about a corporation's actions.
They'll focus on having a small cadre of experts decide on government actions.
The first is Love Canal.
The second is kudzu.
Decentralization and going slow is good. Often the idiots have as much wisdom--just less knowledge--as the expert. ("Wise" is a word that's pretty much relegated to folk narratives these days, judged archaic, or quasi 3rd-world cultures. I use the smart/intelligent/wise distinction actively in class. Confuses the hell out of the high school students.)