
American society increasingly mistakes intelligence for human worth (2016) - dan_matthews_50
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/07/the-war-on-stupid-people/485618/?single_page=true
======
ardit33
1\. The author is unfortunately misguided. It is not the society, but
market/economics of today that value intelligence more than anything else,
mainly because it is directly correlated with economic output.
(conscientiousness being the other major factor).

2\. On the other hand, Sport teams value speed, strength and agility, eye
coordination, height, etc... . basically physical prowess. You can't blame
them, nobody is willing to pay to watch a bunch of average out of shape people
playing a sport, but they are willing to see peak performance.

3\. Same with music, film/movie, and theatre, we are naturally want to see
great performances, art, and/or beautiful things.

#2 and #3 have been historically more important than #1, and now number #1
(intelligence), is becoming more important due to its economic output and not
because society started valuing it more.

\-- Seems like it was written by a luddite, with no concept of economy output.
It like someone from 1910 saying: "We should ban automation in farming and
tractors and other machinery should be banned, as where all these farmers will
find jobs"...

"We must stop glorifying intelligence and treating our society as a playground
for the smart minority. We should instead begin shaping our economy, our
schools, even our culture with an eye to the abilities and needs of the
majority, and to the full range of human capacity. The government could, for
example, provide incentives to companies that resist automation, thereby
preserving jobs for the less brainy. It could also discourage hiring practices
that arbitrarily and counterproductively weed out the less-well-IQ’ed. This
might even redound to employers’ benefit: Whatever advantages high
intelligence confers on employees, it doesn’t necessarily make for more
effective, better employees. "

~~~
lrajlich
You're (mostly) missing the point. This is, more or less, the point...

"Yes, some careers do require smarts. But even as high intelligence is
increasingly treated as a job prerequisite, evidence suggests that it is not
the unalloyed advantage it’s assumed to be."

When I was young I tended to equate academic performance & raw smarts with
success, but as I've gotten older I've notice that long term success is less
correlated with raw intelligence and more with disposition: charisma, grit,
and emotional intelligence.

In some ways, in the current academic system, being extremely smart is almost
like being able to cheat. You can skip the studying, take a test that others
will struggle with, and still ace it. Real life is less like that and more of
a slog where having a high IQ gives you a 20% advantage instead of a 150%
advantage (these numbers are obviously pulled out of thin air).

~~~
mlthoughts2018
> but as I've gotten older I've notice that long term success is less
> correlated with raw intelligence and more with disposition: charisma, grit,
> and emotional intelligence.

Actually I think long term success is mostly about luck and starting
privilege, especially when you use a globally relevant scale of success.

Charisma, grit, emotional intelligence, work ethic, perseverance, positive
attitude, etc. ... these are mostly just feel-good concepts we emphasize so we
can try to retrospectively claim that our success “is earned” and we “deserve”
it and it’s due to our volition and agency.

But really, many lazy, ignorant, myopic, prejudiced and negative trolls are
super successful. And many tough, persistent, high-character, talented people
are poor & suffering. The difference is mostly luck.

~~~
xupybd
Luck plays a huge role. But it’s something you can do nothing about. However
you can work on your character. Competing against everyone else will oftern
result in you finding someone else that’s done better. This is of no use.
Compete against your self. Be better than you were. Then it doesn’t matter how
lucky or privileged the next guy is.

~~~
mlthoughts2018
Sure, but the discussion seems to be more about how to _attribute_ success
outcomes to various factors that might have predicted it.

Another way to say it might be that if you want to do a regression of some
success metric on a bunch of factors, such as positive attitude or charisma or
whether your first name is “John” or what country you were born in, the
R-squared of such a model is likely crap — most of the outcome is random even
after controlling for volitional factors we think should matter (another way
to say this: it’s mostly luck), and factors with large, significant effect
sizes might have no volitional aspect (e.g. was born in America).

This is not normative. It says nothing about what you _should_ do. Rather it’s
descriptive. What factors correlate with success, and does their correlation
result in a meaningful explanation of the variation of outcomes we see?

~~~
xupybd
Very true, sorry I was a bit caught up on the original articles focus on
valuing certain attributes.

------
sk1pper
Let's not conflate human worth with value to society. I hope we can all agree
that all human lives are of equal worth. We all have different strengths and
weaknesses though, and some of us will have strengths that align more closely
with what society needs.

We're lucky enough to live in a society that's (more or less) set up so that
people are rewarded proportionally to how much they can contribute to everyone
else. Of course it's not perfect, and of course there are assholes and
corruption, but in context of history, it's the best deal we've ever had, IMO.

No, we shouldn't put down people who aren't very smart. We should help them.
But I think we need to take a step back before we start saying that the
(rough) meritocracy we have set up is some kind of dystopia. Can anyone
actually provide a better alternative?

~~~
casefields
All lives are not of equal worth. If that were the case the president wouldn't
have a phalanx of Secret Service protecting him at all times.

~~~
some_account
They are of equal worth in a spiritual sense. Society doesn't put the same
value on them but that's because of economy and the economic output their life
generate for society. Value is subjective to who you think puts value to
something. If there is a God, he doesn't care about economy. :)

~~~
ThrowawayR2
> _If there is a God, he doesn 't care about economy._

If there is a God (or equivalent deity), he would be worth infinitely more
than any other sapient being, thus disproving that all sapient beings are of
equal worth even in a spiritual sense.

------
rayiner
> People who’d swerve off a cliff rather than use a pejorative for race,
> religion, physical appearance, or disability are all too happy to drop the
> s‑bomb: Indeed, degrading others for being “stupid” has become nearly
> automatic in all forms of disagreement.

Indeed, people will flip out if you say something negative about people at the
lower extreme of the intelligence bell curve, but saying things about people a
little higher up (but below the median) is fair game. It's completely
nonsensical.

~~~
Zarath
I think the perception is that those with a genetic disorder that causes
mental handicaps cannot help it, whereas everyone else is on a level playing
field and therefore are at fault for doing something stupid.

~~~
kolbe
That may be the perception, but it's pretty ridiculous to think that
perception is consistent with reality. Minds only think what they've been
trained to think, and those inputs vary widely across humanity.

~~~
whatshisface
> _Minds only think what they 've been trained to think_

That's a pretty forward statement about how every brain works. Who comes up
with the training? Clearly new ideas must arise _somewhere_ , and where they
do intelligence gets involved.

~~~
kolbe
>Who comes up with the training?

That's beside the point. So long as it's not a fully-informed individual
(which I assume you were not alluding to), then we should no more cast blame
on their ignorance than we should someone who is genetically incapable of
understanding. What we call intelligent or stupid is little more than the
capability of the brain to process information (usually genetically
determined) and the information presented to it. The individual is pretty hard
to blame for any of that.

------
ponderatul
I've been on the side that's for automation, for technology, for progress. But
I think it's getting way out of hand, way too fast.

Those who are smart have their own biases, and shortsightedness. Because
you're smart, you tend to dwell in the complex and complicated stuff. And you
think you see all the interactions that happen there. But owing to the number
of variables around, there are bound to be some unforeseen second or third
order effects that you couldn't account for. Things like, building something
for a purpose and society deciding it can be used for something else.

Now I don't know if automation will have these types of effects. But I at
least am humble enough to recognise that it could, and that the effects could
be devastating. And judging by the speed at which the big companies want to
get rid of these manual processes, it doesn't seem they think too much about
how this would affect the struggling class.

------
excalibur
> We must stop glorifying intelligence and treating our society as a
> playground for the smart minority.

Fixed.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidency_of_Donald_Trump](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidency_of_Donald_Trump)

------
albertTJames
American society increasingly mistakes business worth for human worth.

~~~
mi100hael
Until I can pay the bills with a surplus of "human worth," I'm going to keep
hiring in a way that maximizes business worth.

------
matte_black
I see this a lot on Tinder of all places. Lots of women identifying as
"sapiosexuals" who claim to only care about intelligence.

Whatever happened to just being attracted to a good and kind person?

~~~
cryoshon
as a "sapiosexual" under this definition, i find it very hard to believe
anyone of that orientation would turn to tinder to look for kindred spirits.

~~~
excalibur
You don't need to be intelligent to be sapiosexual, just like you don't need
to be wealthy to be a gold digger.

~~~
Viliam1234
As a first approximation, you don't need wealth to recognize that someone else
is wealthy, but you need to be intelligent to recognize that someone else is
intelligent.

A poor person understands that thousand dollars is more than ten dollars, and
million dollars is more that thousand dollars. A poor person can recognize an
expensive car; for a sufficiently poor person even the fact that someone owns
a car already suggests certain level of wealth. Of course there are ways to
make yourself appear more wealthy than you are -- the car may be rented, and
you may actually be deep in debt -- and there are "invisible" forms of wealth
-- no one knows how much you own in stocks or bitcoins -- but when you observe
people, there is some correlation between how rich they are and how they live,
and you don't need to be rich yourself to see the difference.

On the other hand, levels of intelligence that are above you seem pretty much
the same. Not just intelligence, but also education, etc. If you know
absolutely nothing about quantum physics, you may listen to Stephen Hawking
and Deepak Chopra, and have no idea which one of them is right. Under specific
experimental conditions you may be able to compare levels of intelligence
above you, otherwise IQ tests would be impossible to construct for people
smarter than the average psychologist -- a person who can solve puzzles 100
times faster than me is probably smarter than a person who can solve puzzles
"only" 10 times faster than me -- but in normal life, when you meet two highly
intelligent people in different circumstances, when they have different
professions and different hobbies, it is difficult to compare them.

I guess what I am trying to say is that a person with IQ 100 and a person with
IQ 150 can both be sapiosexual, but it will make the latter much more choosy.
In other words, you cannot be a _choosy_ sapiosexual unless you are
intelligent yourself. (A person attracted to 50% of population probably would
not label themselves as "sapiosexual", if all they mean is pretty much that
they are not attracted to retarded people.)

~~~
nopinsight
I largely agree with much of your comment.

However, I think it is possible for a less intelligent person to identify the
most intelligent among 2-3 disagreeing smarter people if all of them is
rational and accepts solid evidence/results of thought experiments AND the
most intelligent is good at articulating his/her rationale for having a
belief.

With this method, the perceiver must have a pretty high threshold of
intelligence and rationality themselves in order to identify good reasoning
and detect issues with bad reasoning/biases though.

Another method is looking at the results of several predictions in different
domains. Assuming roughly equal initial expertise and data, the more
intelligent should get more predictions right.

The latter method only requires knowledge/intuition of basic statistics.

------
minikites
This quote caused me to re-evaluate a lot of my thinking when I first read it
some time ago:

"I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s
brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and
died in cotton fields and sweatshops."

-Stephen Jay Gould

------
beebmam
Meritocracy doesn't seem like too bad of an idea at face value. It's far more
fair than inherited wealth or class to base a society upon. Yet meritocracy
does have some serious problems, as described in this article (and plenty of
other places).

But it's a false dichotomy that these two are the only options.

Egalitarianism is an option that the left strongly advocates for. And I
believe it to be the only real moral option in the future.

There's some talk about SAT scores here and how they relate to intelligence,
and it reminded me of a truly interesting article I read the other day. It
presents the idea that perhaps we shouldn't be ranking college applicants by
SAT or any other factor at all for determining whether to admit them. Instead,
admit qualified (TM) people based on a blind lottery:
[https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/03/admit-
everybody](https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/03/admit-everybody)

~~~
scrumper
Can you expand a bit on Egalitarianism? What is it precisely?

~~~
x2f10
>Egalitarianism: the doctrine that all people are equal and deserve equal
rights and opportunities.

~~~
weber111
I think the sense in which GP is using the word is substantially stronger than
that--or, maybe, it depends on what you mean by "rights" and "opportunities".

(You could probably find people who think it's egalitarian to have generous
state-funded child care and uniformly high-quality primary and secondary
school, but competitive university entrance exams, for instance.)

------
Ancalagon
There's a dead comment by u/draw_down below that brings up another good point
(and I don't entirely understand why it was killed in the first place):
increasingly the APPEARANCE of intelligence is mistaken for human value, not
necessarily actual intelligence itself.

~~~
facetube
This is a fantastic point.

------
smallgovt
I think a lot of commenters here correctly point out the fallacies in the
author's practical suggestions while missing the core thesis: American society
increasingly mistakes intelligence for human worth.

To paraphrase in simple terms: More and more people value intelligence and
this is a bad trend.

To evaluate this thesis, I think it's important to first define what a 'value'
is.

To me, values are the measuring sticks by which people quantify success in
life. Whether or not we realize it, we constantly measure our actions against
our values, and how we 'measure up' determines our self-worth.

So, what makes something a 'bad' value?

That's a hard question to answer in completion, but I think that one of the
'bad' characteristics is if the value is outside of your control.

It's bad to value something outside your control because it's impossible to
effect change against it to make yourself feel good about yourself.

Instead, I'd rather value HOW I act. Did I make my best effort towards
accomplishing my goals? Did I learn something today? Did I help someone?

These are things that are entirely in my control and will lead to higher
fulfillment.

If I measure myself based on intelligence, the days when I'm in a meeting
completely surrounded by people smarter than me, I'm going to feel pretty damn
shitty.

Would you feel worse about yourself if you woke up tomorrow and lost 30 IQ
points?

------
tomc1985
But unlike race, sex, or many other dividers, IQ is something everyone is
empowered to do something about.

------
alkonaut
In a peculiar plot twist, it turns out a humans net worth is occasionally
mistaken for intelligence too.

------
mythrwy
What exactly does "worth" mean in this context?

If it's an abstract idea of right to life, liberty and the pursuit of
happiness and the idea that an existence should be respected, then yes, all
persons are of worth.

But if "worth" is meant in terms of the capacity of an individual to increase
my (or your or company X's) share of goods and services than manifestly all
people are not of equal worth. This isn't society discriminating, it's
reality. And intelligence is only one (albeit important) component of this.

"Worth" in an economic sense isn't fixed. People can (and do) make themselves
worth more. But probably they do it less if they are raised with an idea that
worth doesn't have anything to do with effort.

------
everyone
I dunno, ye've elevated one of the less mentally gifted people to be ye're
supreme leader.

------
sulam
Bicycles of the mind are amazing for producing mental leverage. That leverage
amplifies the benefit you can gain from intellectual capacity, and the result
is that intellectual differences between people which once were minor become
vast. Or to use another, more martial analogy, technology is a sword for your
mind. In medieval combat, a small difference in strength or agility or
training could mean the difference between survival (and wealth) and an early
grave. Today it's the difference between life in the 1% and minimum wage.

------
cabalamat
> help[ing] the unintelligent become intelligent ... is a marvelous goal, and
> decades of research have shown that it’s achievable through two approaches:
> dramatically reducing poverty, and getting young children who are at risk of
> poor academic performance into intensive early-education programs.

I suspect that causing children to be born with more genes that correlate with
high intelligence would be a lot more successful, and cheaper to do.

~~~
Viliam1234
Probably the cheapest thing (per IQ point per child) is to remove lead from
the environment, and feed the kids something healthy (doesn't have to be too
expensive) or just educate their parents about what is proper food. This would
allow the kids to reach their genetic potential.

Reducing poverty kinds correlates with this, but it depends on how exactly the
money is spent. A relatively rich person can still feed their child junk food.

(I am suspicious about the claim about early-educational programs. I mean,
better educational results are a nice thing, but it is not the same as
intelligence.)

------
xivzgrev
This article really articulated something I've felt for a long time when it
mentioned how many people would rather drive off a cliff than use a racial
slur but will happily call someone stupid.

I plan to reduce my own usage of the "s" word. Reason being is that
intelligence is largely dicatated by genes and the environment you grew up in,
neither of which you have control over.

------
11thEarlOfMar
"Those who consider themselves bright openly mock others for being less so."

Would like to see support for this claim.

~~~
TangoTrotFox
The article also makes the claim that _" [less brainy individuals are] less
likely to be oblivious of their own biases and flaws."_ That is literally the
Dunning-Kruger Effect [1] which is one psychological study which has been
successfully replicated over and over and over. Well not literally. It
actually found the exact _opposite_ of what the article claims.

[1] -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect)

------
jackconnor
"Increasingly mistakes"? In the article they correlate intelligence with
wealth and success, so where's the mistake? I'm not saying that we should or
should not value intelligence, just that this article undermines its own
premise almost instantaneously.

------
burntrelish1273
Youth, beauty, looking rich and being a celebrity are celebrated far more.
Intelligence is only pertinent to education and academics whom passive-
aggressively call people stupid whom aren't gifted or more. In fact, large
swaths of America are vociferously anti-intellectual: GWB, Trump; sports:
Nascar, American football, etc. and Hollywood.

------
TangoTrotFox
This article reads a bit too much like Brave New World. The article suggests
to, literally, _"...provide incentives to companies that resist automation,
thereby preserving jobs for the less brainy."_ Preventing technological
progress to ensure that we can have the "less brainy" spend their time
carrying out tasks that are completely pointless? But it's okay, we can make
sure they have plenty of soma - so they never concern themselves with their
life's work being completely and absolutely pointless. Or does the author just
assume they'd be too dumb to ever consider that? The problem with trying to be
so overtly embracing is that it often reveals one's prejudices ever more
clearly through implicit consideration of what is said.

I completely agree with the article that the decreasing relevance of
individuals who are not all that bright is going to be an increasing problem.
And this problem is confounded by really awful demographic issues. Fertility
rate is strongly positively connected to low education, low income, and high
religiosity. But at the same time trying to reshape society to embrace slower
individuals is going to just result in an even greater stratification of
society. We're already economically stratified with some implicit intellectual
stratification. This would make the shift from implicit quite explicit as
those who value intelligence would end up separating themselves even more
overtly from the 'new and improved' society that has been, in the words of the
article, reshaped _" with an eye to the abilities and needs of the majority"._

I also find the constant social science efforts to link "low" educational
spending to decreased academic performance to be very questionable. At least
by PISA scores many of the countries now outperforming us academically spend
substantially less on education than we do. For instance Vietnam is now ahead
of the US in math and science. In fact, they're 8th in the world in science.
Their purchasing power parity GDP/capita is $6,925 ($2,305 nominal) and a
total of 6.6% of that goes to education. That's $450/capita, parity
compensated. In the US we spend 5.6% of $61,687 per capita which is
$3455/capita - north of 700% greater than Vietnam's spending, parity adjusted.
And even if you just take it in terms of poverty itself, the average income in
Vietnam is around $1,800 a year - that's about $5,400 parity adjusted. Poverty
is widespread in Vietnam. So is academic excellence. You can't just spend your
way to people valuing and embracing education.

\- [1] Convenient listing of the 2015 PISA results

\- [2] List of nations by percent of GDP spent on education, one click away
from conversion to parity adjusted $/capita

\- [1] - [http://www.businessinsider.com/pisa-worldwide-ranking-of-
mat...](http://www.businessinsider.com/pisa-worldwide-ranking-of-math-science-
reading-skills-2016-12)

\- [2] -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_spending_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_spending_on_education_%28%25_of_GDP%29)

~~~
Amezarak
> Preventing technological progress to ensure that we can have the "less
> brainy" spend their time carrying out tasks that are completely pointless?

Why is technological progress ipso fact good? I'm becoming increasingly
convinced unguided technological progress is, rather, a terrible plague, and
that some "progress" should be stopped altogether if we want our children to
have any chance at a happy future.

~~~
TangoTrotFox
The one major difference between humanity today and humanity of thousands of
years ago is technology. Eras are dictated by technology. And this applies all
the way to very recent events. We can really only look back on the world wars
of not all that long with bemusement. It seems so surreal that we could have
wars of such a scale that 3% of the world's population would be killed. And
the reason these wars, which were becoming ever more violent, stopped was
technology. Nuclear weapons made all out war between developed nations a thing
of the past as the weapons were so brutally effective that they ensure there
can never be a winner in any war, only losers.

And going back further in history issues would be things such as starvation,
dying from exposure to the elements, dying from basic sickness including run
of the mill fevers or basic infections. Today our issues seem laughably petty
by contrast. One concern effectively coming down to _" I don't like that I
only have a tv, air conditioning, internet access, a car, ready access to
food, electronic toys of various sorts, ... but somebody else has even more!"_

And most importantly - you don't have to participate in all technology. In
spite of my evangelizing technological progress above all, my phone is still
an old brick (actually they're quite small now - and the batteries last for a
couple of weeks at a time) 'dumbphone.' And my kids certainly will be raised
Steve Jobsesque, which is to say no mobile devices or other such toys for
them. I completely agree not all technological progress is good, and so you're
free to step aside from it. Taken to extremes the Amish have turned away from
nearly all technological progress and still flourish, at least so much as they
can.

With most of our wages today we could purchase large homesteads in 'flyover
country' and get back to basics. And I find that extremely appealing and plan
to do just that, though not in America. Although 'basics' in my view will
include autonomous gardens, autonomous feeders, autonomous mowers, solar
energy, and of course gotta have that juicy internet access. Life is what you
make of it. And technology is the toolset that you get to draw your choices
from.

------
kolpa
"increasingly" ? Was there a time when unintelligent people were more
protected, and less exploited by private interests ("caveat emptor" and con
artists and snake-oil sellers) and government (institutionalization, eugenics,
propaganga)?

~~~
sevensor
The article quotes an accountant from the 1950s:

> hiring decisions were “based on a candidate having a critical skill or two
> and on soft factors such as eagerness, appearance, family background, and
> physical characteristics.”

To me, this looks like the 1950s accountant preferred to hire WASPs.
(Especially the last three items.) Now that we've mostly agreed this kind of
thing is bad, what we're left with is critical skills and eagerness. So
intelligence becomes a bigger factor in hiring decisions because the other
factors were pretty terrible.

~~~
scrumper
Minor nit: It quotes an _account_ from the '50s, not an accountant.

~~~
sevensor
Ha! That's what I get for making a hasty response after skimming. Well,
accountants or otherwise, I stand by my assessment.

~~~
scrumper
In fairness in the '50s as a man your choices were ad exec, sales rep, auto
mechanic, lawyer, accountant, or serviceman. There were no other jobs at all.

------
draw_down
It's also not real intelligence but rather a certain appearance of
intelligence. Not saying "y'all" and things like that.

~~~
cabaalis
I never quite understood why "y'all" is singled out as being said by "dumb"
people. I've said it my entire life, as well as everyone I know. It's a word.
It conveys an idea from the person who says it to the listener to hears it,
just like every other utterance since the beginning of time. The only reason I
can think of people having a negative opinion of it is some form of audible
elitism.

~~~
eigenstuff
Same! I think it also has a lot to do with people looking down on Southerners
and stereotyping us as being uneducated/backwards/ignorant.

------
Andre_Wanglin
What else is there?

~~~
majos
Kindness, perseverance, tolerance, humor, conscientiousness, generosity,
empathy, . . .

~~~
Andre_Wanglin
And are these attributes more prevalent among the bright or the dim?

