Status Updates From The Intelligence Trap: Why ...

Reminder: an expert in whatever area might be incredibly ignorant in any other. Worse yet, sometimes they are irrational in their own area of expertise. Being an expert of any kind, it seems, does not exclude people from having a bias blind spot.

I suppose, in summary, intelligent people may be (and mostly are) irrational because:

• They may lack creative and practical intelligence.
• They may be biased and prone to "dysrationalia".
• They may use their intelligence to dismiss evidence contradicting their views.

Also: being irrational might be a consequence of our nature as social animals. Strengthening our group requires persuasion, not reason.

2) Emotional need creates belief, and highly intelligent people have more tools to defend those beliefs. In other words: the stronger their brains, the stronger their mental gymnastics also get.

Biases and heuristics are difficult to escape. It's difficult to tear down belief systems when they have become part of someone's personality.

This explains a lot. It basically answers a question I'd been asking for a while: how can somebody so bright believe such bullshit? Turns out:

1) Rationality is a separate type of cognitive process from other variants of intelligence, e.g. being analytically, pragmatically or numerically intelligent is not exactly related to rationality.

And...

To nobody's surprise, early intelligence measurements failed to consider material reality (wild disregard for ethnicity and income levels), and was massively biased; also unsurprisingly, it didn't consider at all aspects of intelligence that weren't logical-analytical.

Sadly, these IQ tests are still used today. 🫩