As a result, there was much talk of the notion of ‘high-end’
and ‘low-end decoupling’, an idea I’d not encountered before. A high-end
decoupler has a mental habit of considering a concept or proposition in
isolation from its context, as an intellectual exercise, and surrounding that
discussion with verbal disclaimers to make it clear, at least to other high-end
decouplers, that any wider considerations are being put to one side. Low-end
decouplers find it hard to examine an idea apart from its context and often
react very badly to such examinations of controversial ideas. I am not
convinced this entirely explains what happened to Mr Sabitsky.
In one of the original comments on Dominic Cummings’s famous
blog which gave rise to all this fuss, Mr Sabitsky talks about the
heritability of intelligence, and potentially of other characteristics such
as compassion, things which genetic fiddling might encourage: the production of
better humans. It’s no surprise that he concludes that it’s more realistic to
manipulate intelligence because it is easier to measure than those other
faculties – no surprise, because people who perform well in IQ tests always end
up saying this.
Easy to measure, but less easy to predict. For instance, I
know that I am not in the top echelon of intelligence: my mind works slowly and
in a fragmented fashion, and I know plenty of people who are cleverer than me.
I don’t believe I am stupid, although I can be very dim about some things; I
take comfort in my one-time academic successes rather like an old soldier’s campaign
medals, and like those they only bear a remote relationship to who I am now. I
describe myself as being in the upper ranks of the second-rate. But I am the
first person in my family to have any academic qualifications at all; had my
ancestors taken the IQ test, would they have scored highly? Is it simply that
they never had the chance, or are there other factors at play? Am I a mutant in
my lineage?
The real problem is the use of intelligence, however
measured, as the most important index of a person’s worth. I wonder when this
started? Human society used to privilege other virtues. I’m put in mind of Song
no.92 of the Carmina Burana, usually called ‘The Dispute of Phyllis and Flora’,
or something of the sort, in which two medieval ladies debate whose boyfriend
is the most worthwhile: Phyllis’s is a knight and Flora’s a clergyman (how
naughty). Back and forth they reason, until they agree to submit the judgement
to the court of Cupid whose assembled nymphs eventually conclude ‘By virtue of
their learning and the customs they inherit/ We declare the love of clerics
worthier of merit’. This poem is one of a category of medieval lyrics around
the same theme and, as David Parrett, the author of the Penguin Classics selection of
the Carmina writes, ‘that the clerics always win [is a bit of] a foregone
conclusion in view of their obvious authorship’. In this and similar works, medieval
clergy were a class based in education and learning, arguing for their
precedence over the military virtues. In the modern world, however, eugenic
fantasies, rather than those of courtly romance, form the nerd’s revenge.
I suspect we privilege intellect because of the
progressivist vision of human history we’ve developed since the Reformation, or
the Enlightenment at the very least. We have come to associate human progress
with technological advance and scientific understanding, and see these as
driven by the application of intellect; and even though we find brainy people
often baffling and comic – or worrying – we cannot help but enthrone
intelligence as the most important of human characteristics because of the
advantages it brings us all; as opposed to, say, courage or kindness, which are
admirable but don’t move the world forward, or so it seems.
The truth is that as very few people fortuitously combine in their single persons
the necessary virtues to greater-than-average degrees, we need all sorts of
human beings in a society. Even sociopaths sometimes have a use. Predicting
what sorts of human beings we might need and in what proportions at particular
times would require a level of superforecasting hard to envisage.
Excellent, thoughtful post. Thank you.
ReplyDeleteAll the Sabitsky and Cummings shenanigans have got me wondering about the unease we collectively have around beings of superior intelligence. Perhaps we worry about being outsmarted by them. Or maybe we can never be sure as to whether they are really intelligent, or just delusional or confidence tricksters. There is something slightly risible about a "superforecaster" who didn't foresee the consequences of his public utterances. It reminds us of the old joke about the fortune-tellers' conference which was cancelled due to unforeseen circumstances.
I suppose the proof of the pudding is in the eating. If Cummings solves the problems he predicts he can solve, I will trust him thus far. But I suspect he may well take refuge in amorphous promises, and thereby claim credit for things that would have gone well anyway...
All the business about superforecasting is interesting. In the studies which Andrew Sabitsky took part in, the process involved not only making predictions but expressing your confidence in your predictions as a percentage, so you'd get points for being wrong but anticipating that you might be wrong. So far, intelligence on its own doesn't seem to make you that much more likely to be right about a complex process, and as you say there are always ways of interpreting events which serve your viewpoint. So we may be able to trace what effect leaving the European Union will have had on particular *aspects* of British life, but we'll never be able to make a judgement as to whether 'Brexit was a success' or not.
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