Summary
Being very smart does not always mean being wise. Smart people can make big mistakes because they are good at justifying wrong beliefs. True wisdom is knowing your limits and being open to new ideas.
Highlights
id984155863
Popular belief (and hoards of Elon Musk fans on Twitter) holds that smart individuals - the geniuses we laud - should make fewer errors across all domains. If you have more processing power and superior reasoning abilities, surely you’ll arrive at correct conclusions more often than someone without those gifts. But this model treats the brain like a calculator that either works well or poorly, when it’s actually more like a lawyer: capable of arguing any position with varying degrees of skill. Give a mediocre lawyer a bad case, and there is a better-than-not likelihood they’ll lose. Give a brilliant lawyer a bad case, and they’ll construct an elaborate, internally consistent, superficially compelling argument for why they should win anyway. See: Boston Legal. Intelligence doesn’t merely help you find truth. It helps you construct persuasive narratives. And the person most easily persuaded by your narratives is yourself.
id984155983
Simply put: smart people, by virtue of being very fucking smart, are better at constructing post-hoc rationalizations for beliefs they hold for emotional or social reasons. Everyone does this to some extent. We form impressions and then search for evidence to support them. But intelligent people search more effectively. They find better evidence, or at least better-sounding evidence.
id984156311
Philip Tetlock’s research on expert political judgment found that the experts with the most impressive credentials and the strongest reputations for insight performed barely better than chance at predicting geopolitical events, and sometimes performed worse than simple algorithms. The experts who performed best tended to be what Tetlock called “foxes” rather than “hedgehogs,” borrowing from Archilochus’s ancient distinction. Hedgehogs know one big thing and apply it everywhere, while foxes know many small things and adapt flexibly. The hedgehogs were frequently the most intelligent and articulate members of the sample. They also consistently overestimated their own accuracy and failed to update their beliefs when predictions went wrong.