 I used to be self-conscious about how stupid I looked with giant ears hanging off the sides of my head, but I feel like I grew into them, and with a little bit of gray in my beard, I think I'm finally starting to look wise beyond my ears. When I was five years old, my kindergarten class went on a field trip to the local fire station, where a couple good-natured firefighters showed us around, talked a little about their equipment and their work, and then took an hour to patiently answer every question a group of 30 kids could come up with. Uncle Josh put his hand up, waited patiently while they talked about how fire hydrants work and how hard it was to drive the truck, and when they finally called on him, he excitedly asked, why is it that we can still see the moon, even though it's daytime right now? Shame is a fantastic memory amplifier, so I'll probably have a crystal clear recollection of the perplexed looks and Bermude's laughter that followed until the day I die. Firefighters can be expected to hold expertise in all sorts of things, like how to carry an injured person, how to break down doors with an axe, or slide down one of those nifty poles, but why would anyone but an enthusiastic and slightly confused five-year-old expect them to answer questions about the moon? The same could be asked of many who look for advice from individuals with impressive credentials in unrelated fields. The Reddit AMA for Jeopardy champion Ken Jennings included questions on everything, from unions to cannabis legalization, to whether society has become over-specialized. Bill Gates, a man who gained fame and incredible wealth as the CEO of a software company, is treated as an important consultant in matters of pandemic policy, free speech on social media platforms, food shortages, and climate change. Every word that Albert Einstein has ever said about any subject, and many that he didn't say but are falsely attributed to him, have been turned into image macros and shared over and over on social media, as though his achievements in physics make his thoughts about politics or happiness valuable. Of course, anyone's allowed to have an opinion about anything, but the importance many assign to these opinions carries an unstated implication that sounds a little silly if you say it out loud. Being a successful Jeopardy champion, or CEO, or physicist, Marx a person is having special universal insight, a privileged way of looking at the world that makes their thoughts on any arbitrary subject, epidemiology, politics, theology, ethics, or whatever, more likely to be interesting or perceptive or correct. Appeals to false authority certainly aren't restricted to intellectual pursuits, like people trust Gwyneth Paltrow's deranged advice in matters of health, but there does seem to be a tendency to elevate the opinions of those who have achieved some success in disciplines thought of as being four smart people. If you're an accountant, even a very successful accountant, nobody's going to pay much attention to your thoughts about marriage, but if you're a famous inventor, they might. Not only is it arguably unproductive to ask scientists and entrepreneurs for advice well outside their domains of expertise, it might be counterproductive. In his 2019 book The Intelligence Trap, pop-sci author David Robson cites several studies in psychology and neuroscience that drive a wedge between the notions of intelligence and wisdom. Anyone who's played Dungeons and Dragons is probably familiar with the distinction, but Robson argues that we expect physicists and tech CEOs to have special insight in other domains because we wrongly assume that they go together. He asserts that, contrary to that notion, there are good reasons to suspect that highly intelligent people are vulnerable to specific deficits in the wisdom department, that in certain contexts, having a lot of mental horsepower might make you especially prone to overshooting reasonable positions and ending up somewhere on the far side of bonkers. For example, the book describes a phenomenon called Nobel disease or Nobelitis. Observed among Nobel laureates who, after receiving one of the most prestigious awards for scientific achievement and discovery, go off the deep end. Nico Tinbergen awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine for his work in animal behavior, evangelized unfounded and disproven theories and treatments for autism. Luc Montagnier, who won the award for his discovery of HIV, also fell down an autism crank rabbit hole, as well as advancing a theory that bacterial DNA emits radio waves that create homeopathic effects in water molecules. Linus Pauling, the famed discoverer of vitamin C and two-time Nobel champion, argued vehemently that megadoses of the vitamin could cure anything from schizophrenia to cancer and gave himself kidney disease by taking it daily at 120 times the recommended amount. Robson argues that this pattern of wackadoodle laureates isn't some weird coincidence, but characteristic of a general trend among people who become convinced of their own intellectual superiority. If you drink the cultural Kool-Aid about intelligence implying wisdom, once you've won the preeminent smarty smart smarter word for smart people, that little nagging voice in the back of your head that rings its hands about being wrong starts to fade into the background. After all, everything you believe is definitionally what a Nobel laureate would believe, and Nobel laureates are smart cookies. Why doubt any of it? Robson cites a number of other findings that seem to highlight how being smart need not be accompanied by any special capacity for being sensible, and sometimes quite the opposite. People who score very high on intelligence tests don't seem to have any serious advantage over the general population when evaluated for things like framing effects or anchoring bias. They're only slightly less likely to experience certain negative life outcomes, like getting sunburned or missing a flight. They're actually more likely to reach their credit limit, more likely to fall for gamblers or sunk cost fallacies, and, as we've noted in previous episodes, more likely to minimize or ignore scientific evidence that conflicts with their political beliefs. Even if we were to sidestep Robson's numerous withering critiques of IQ as a measure for raw intelligence, a sci-fi scenario where you could swallow a pill and gain four EIQ points starts to look less like a miracle and more like a trade-off. Would you be willing to accept some additional horsepower for abstract reasoning? If it meant you were just as vulnerable to some of the most common failures in reasoning, as well as an increased risk of disappearing up your own butt never to be seen again, Robson suggests that intelligence is actually pretty far down the list of relevant traits when it comes to making good choices and getting good results out of life. He claims the real magic sauce is to be found in the emerging field of evidence-based wisdom, investigations of the psychological basis for virtues like self-knowledge, ability to navigate uncertainty, social intelligence, capacity for seeing things from multiple perspectives, all those things that would get you a high insight check bonus in D&D. Now, novel psychological research, especially about a phenomenon as ephemeral and complex as wisdom, ought to raise a few dozen red flags with regard to how real these results are, whether they're actually measuring what they purport to measure. But even as a preliminary sketch of the landscape, there's certainly enough there to give one pause and wonder whether the researchers looking into this stuff might be onto something. Wande Brune de Bruin and her research team developed an adult decision-making competence, or ADMC index, a score based on a battery of just seven questions that measures susceptibility to things like the sunk cost fallacy and calibration of confidence in general knowledge. They found that this score was predictive of numerous positive or negative life outcomes from contracting STDs to getting kicked out of bars, almost three times more predictive than IQ. Igor Grossman's 2013 study found that people who approached dear abbey type social dilemmas with more nuance, considering others' points of view, weighing all possible outcomes and looking for potential compromises, were less likely to suffer from depression, enjoyed more satisfying social relationships and overall life satisfaction, and had lower rates of all-cause mortality over five years than people who could only boast greater intelligence, processing speed, or working memory. Antonio Demasio in his influential somatic marker hypothesis studies found that a person's ability to attend to their body's physiological responses, literally their gut feelings, played a significant role in their capacity to identify and execute winning strategies amidst uncertainty. There seems to be some unconscious processing that can get ahead of our conscious reasoning in unpredictable situations, and if it's paid due attention, can net better outcomes than waiting around for the analytical mind to catch up. Again, several grains of salt regarding these findings, but simply trying to measure decision-making faculties that aren't reducible to abstract reasoning puzzles is an unfortunately novel enterprise. There's a famous joke about a man who's lost his keys after nightfall and keeps searching for them under the same streetlight because that's where he can see. A great deal of psychology research has been poured into easily-quantified sorts of intelligence, skills and faculties that could be fully characterized by plonking someone down in front of a test booklet and timing how long it takes them to finish. Unfortunately, Robson's collection of evidence seems to suggest that, although we've spent a great deal of effort searching under this particular streetlight, the results that we're actually interested in, making good decisions and reasoning correctly, aren't to be found here that intelligence, at least the kinds that we've been measuring, is, at best, a weak defense against wrong-handed thinking, and at worse, an Achilles heel in the wrong situations. It also appears that the cognitive skills that best predict good decision-making and desirable life outcomes can be developed independently of intelligence. You don't have to be a mega-brain genius to cultivate virtues like intellectual humility or counterfactual thinking. In that light, when looking to prominent figures to give us advice or thoughtful takes about a wide range of topics, rather than seeking out the opinions of folks who have been successful in a single field that calls for a lot of brainpower, maybe we should prioritize the opinions of those who show shrewd judgment and a capacity for careful, nuanced reasoning. People who look for multiple interpretations of the information that's available to them and pay special attention to what's still unknown, without deferring necessary action simply because they don't have a complete picture. What I'm trying to say here is, if you're looking for information about astronomy, ask an astronomer. If you're looking for measured wisdom and insight, a firefighter might not be the worst choice. Do you think Robson's narrative of the intelligence trap rings true? Do you think the pace of modern media and social media might play into it in corrosive ways? Please, leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Thank you very much for watching. Don't forget to subscribe while I share and don't stop dunking.