Power as a bad funnel and on the intellectual excuses of conservatives

Power is at the end of a bad funnel

1. The following reflections are by no means new to me, they’re wholly derivative, but I’ve never seen them spelt out in one place, or in quite these terms.

2. There’s a certain kind of person who’s smart but comically bad at understanding the world, as shown, e.g., by constant highly confident and obviously wrong predictions about what will happen that don’t eventuate. What I am talking about here is not mystical or intangible. You could operationalise it concretely as being bad at predicting events, for example, on a site like Manifold or Polymarket.

3. Often, or at least in the most visible cases of a smart person who fails to understand, overconfidence is a big factor in, or at least very visibly accompanies, the failure.

4. Smart people without deeper insight often do well for themselves because “smart and full of confidence” can be a winning formula even without a deeper understanding of the levers and gears of the world. Although a rich understanding of how things work is needed to govern and structure society and participate well in discussions about governing and structuring society, it can be surprisingly irrelevant to business or career success.

5. This does a lot of harm to our society for clear reasons.

6. But worse, the way our society distributes power means that many of these guys become prominent. Utility is often thought to be logarithmic in income, but power is closer to linear in income [not truly linear, but closer]. This means that, from the point of view of your own personal satisfaction, if offered: 100% chance of 1 million dollars or 5% chance of 200 million dollars, you should take the million.

7. But the kind of person we’re profiling will often go for the 200 million- for example, because they lack the insight to see that it’s not a sure thing, or because, in their lack of understanding, they really do think they would be 200x happier with 200 million.

8. Which means these people are disproportionately common among the ultra-wealthy, who often took enormous risks, foolish from the point of view of their own welfare. But the ultra-wealthy are the ultra-powerful! Hence, there is a selection effect for foolish behaviour among the wealthy.

9. Similar observations probably apply to extreme political success as well as financial success.

10. Cumulatively, this suggests our elite: A) Are selected for the wrong approach to risk- because you often have to makeke very foolish choices to become very rich or powerful and B) Often lack the mental faculties that would lead to a deeper understanding of how things work and events proceed, not just cleverness, because deeper understanding plays a much smaller role in personal success than the role it plays in governing a commonwealth for the benefit of all.

On the intellectual excuses of conservatives

Conservatives collectively just aren’t that bright. Don’t take my word for it, read Confas and Haninia- a conservative and a former conservative intellectual, respectively.

Rather than the deficit per se, I wanted to talk about the various evasive manoeuvres conservatives use to cope with the fact that, as a movement, they lack intellectual firepower.

This has changed and reversed throughout history- sometimes conservatives are on average brighter than leftists, and sometimes vice versa. For leftists, it would be no big deal if they were less knowledgeable or educated on average- when one aims to represent the oppressed, this may be a consequence, or to quote St Paul with a similar sentiment on early Christian communities:

"Brothers and sisters, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong.”

For conservatives, though, who claim to represent the best and brightest real talent aching to improve the world, being behind in intellect or learnedness is a scandal. Hence, they’ve developed various strategies to cope.

You’re just midwits. Real genius is attracted to us!

There’s a popular myth among conservatives captured by the “midwits” meme- essentially that, yes, dumb people are more likely to be conservatives, but the REALLY smart people are also likely to be conservative.

If anything, the opposite appears to be true in the General Social Survey. There’s a bump in liberals at the least-intelligent part of the scale, but they far and away dominate the most intelligent part of the scale. Conservatives are more middle of the road.

The conservative median is 6, the liberal median is 7.

Two footnotes:

*Note that scores towards the lower end of the range are quite rare, so the graph should be interpreted in light of that.

**Obviously, all this is contingent on the hugely contestable assumption that wordsum is a measure of intelligence, but in the possibly limited sense of being a measure of IQ, which is clearly the sense intended by the midwit meme, wordsum is a good measure and tracks IQ quite strongly.

You might control the useless humanities, but we’re the STEMLords!

Another popular argument is that while liberals may control the humanities, Republicans dominate STEM. Bollocks, of people making political donations, 78% of those in science and maths donate Democratic. Even in Engineering, we have 71% Democratic donors and 29% Republicans. Source.

I’m reading older stuff, you probably haven’t heard of it!

Another argument is that while liberals may be reading modern trash and gender studies or whatever, conservatives are reading the truly foundational works- Aristotle, Aquinas, that sort of thing.

The first thing to note about this is that there are almost zero great philosophers and intellectuals who didn’t deeply engage with the intellectual output of their day. Plenty rejected the output of their day, but very few ignored it. Also, this line of defence is completely incompatible with the “I care about STEM, not the humanities”.

The biggest issue, though, is that there’s just very little evidence of any such mastery. Certainly, classical scholars and students are overwhelmingly on the left, but to take the conservative argument at its maximum, we’ll assume they’re referring exclusively to autodidacticism. It is difficult to prove that the conservative movement isn’t full of budding Aristotelians, but the evidence just isn’t there.

It’s anecdotal, but read this Twitter thread full of conservatives claiming that Legal Philosophy is a made-up modern concept {C.f. Plato The Laws} and trying to look erudite for a sense of how badly many of these would be autodidactic narcissist classicists are out of their depth.

We’re being unfairly driven out by university gatekeepers!

Another line of defence is that conservatives would like to engage deeply with intellectual matters, but cannot because cruel liberal gatekeepers prevent them from accessing universities. The downfall of this argument is STEM. You can go through a whole Physics PhD without stating a political opinion. Nevertheless, among university faculty at national liberal arts colleges, 86% of physicists vote Democrat, 95% of biologists vote Democrat, and 84% of Chemists vote Democrat. See here.