Smart eller dum
1 februari 2020 | Ingen har kommenterat än
Jag har aldrig varit så imponerad av det mesta ”Dunning-Kruger-effekten”. Det förefaller mig vara oerhört trivialt: är man korkad förstår man inte att man är korkad.
Mycket väsentligare är hur smarta personer också är dumma. Det, i sin tur, har två komponenter.
För det första, ju smartare man är, desto mer övertygad blir man om att man inte kan ha fel. Vad som kallades ”professorsfnatt” i Uppsala en gång i tiden.
För det andra, smarta personer kan processa en modell av värden snabbare. Men om modellen är fel, blir kraschen bara värre. Ian Welsh har ett bra resonemang:
Being really smart, but being a bad thinker, just gets you to the wrong place faster. Worse, it makes you more certain you are correct.
Think Larry Summers. IQ around 170, people who know him say he’s brilliant, and he’s been wrong about almost everything that mattered. (..)
To revisit a prior analogy, processing power, or IQ, is the power of a motorcycle’s engine. Actual ability to think well is the skill of the rider. If you’re going down a freeway with no other vehicles, the only thing which matters is the power of the engine.
But if you’re going off-road, through twisty paths, with other vehicles all around, the skill of the rider becomes paramount. Without a skilled driver, all a good engine is going to do is make you crash sooner and worse (possibly taking other people with you.)
[Dick] Cheney was a smart person applying a number of world models. His model of how the bureaucracy and the US government worked worked with each other and how to in-fight and how to control a bureaucracy (government, or the contractors surrounding government) was brilliant and correct. His model of how the world outside that government-industrial complex worked was, well, almost completely wrong.
So he pushed to invade Iraq as part of a project to invade and remake the Middle East and it blew up in his face, because his larger context economic, political, and military models were all wrong.
This doesn’t mean he wasn’t brilliant. It doesn’t mean he didn’t have a lot of processing power. But in practice, in the world beyond his world, he was an absolute moron and everything he touched (that didn’t involve power in the Government-Industrial complex) blew up.
How Smart Stupid People Fuck Up The World (26 nov 2019)
Kategori: Kunskap, kognition, kommunikation
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