High Status and Stupidity: Why?
Michael Vassar once suggested: "Status makes people effectively stupid, as it makes it harder for them to update their public positions without feeling that they are losing face."
To the extent that status does, in fact, make people stupid, this is a rather important phenomenon for a society like ours in which practically all decisions and beliefs pass through the hands of very-high-status individuals (a high "cognitive Gini coefficient").
Does status actually make people stupid? It's hard to say because I haven't tracked many careers over time. I do have a definite and strong impression, with respect to many high-status individuals, that it would have been a lot easier to have an intelligent conversation with them, if I'd approached them before they made it big. But where does that impression come from, since I haven't actually tracked them over time? (Fundamental question of rationality: What do you think you know and how do you think you know it?) My best guess for why my brain seems to believe this: I know it's possible to have intelligent conversations with smart grad students, and I get the strong impression that high-status people used to be those grad students, but now it's much harder to have intelligent conversations with them than with smart grad students.
Hypotheses:
- Vassar's hypothesis: Higher status increases the amount of face you lose when you change your mind, or increases the cost of losing face.
- The open-mindedness needed to consider interesting new ideas is (was) only an evolutionary advantage for low-status individuals seeking a good idea to ride to high status. Once high status is achieved, new ideas are high-risk gambles with less relative payoff - the optimal strategy is to be mainstream. I think Robin Hanson had a post about this but I can't recall the title.
- Intelligence as such is a high-cost feature which is no longer necessary once status is achieved. We can call this the Llinas Hypothesis.
- High-status individuals were intelligent when they were young; the observed disparity is due solely to the standard declines of aging.
Sufficiently Advanced Sanity
Reply to: Shalmanese's Third Law
From an unpublished story confronting Vinge's Law, written in 2004, as abstracted a bit:
"If you met someone who was substantially saner than yourself, how would you know?"
"The obvious mistake that sounds like deep wisdom is claiming that sanity looks like insanity to the insane. I would expect to discover sanity that struck me as wonderfully and surprisingly sane, sanity that shocked me but that I could verify on deeper examination, sanity that sounded wrong but that I could not actually prove to be wrong, and sanity that seemed completely bizarre."
"Like a history of 20th-century science, presented to a scientist from 1900. Much of the future history would sound insane, and easy to argue against. It would take a careful mind to realize none of it was more inconsistent with present knowledge than the scientific history of the 19th century with the knowledge of 1800. Someone who wished to dismiss the whole affair as crackpot would find a thousand excuses ready to hand, plenty of statements that sounded obviously wrong. Yet no crackpot could possibly fake the parts that were obviously right. That is what it is like to meet someone saner. They are not infallible, are not future histories of anything. But no one could counterfeit the wonderfully and surprisingly sane parts; they would need to be that sane themselves."
Spot the Bayesian problem, anyone? It's obvious to me today, but not to the me of 2004. Eliezer2004 would have seen the structure of the Bayesian problem the moment I pointed it out to him, but he might not have assigned it the same importance I would without a lot of other background.
Any sufficiently advanced wisdom is indistinguishable from bullshit
In the grand tradition of sequences, I'm going to jot this down real quick because it's required for the next argument I'm going to make.
Shalmanese's 3rd law is "Any sufficiently advanced wisdom is indistinguishable from bullshit". Shalmanese's first law is "As the length of any discussion involving the metric system approaches infinity, the likelihood approaches 1 of there being a reference to The Simpsons episode about 40 rods to the hogshead" so judge it by the company it keeps.
Imagine you got to travel back in time to meet yourself from 10 years ago and impart as much wisdom as possible on your past-self in 6 hours. You're bound by the Time Enforcement Committee not to reveal that you are the future-self of your past-self and it never occurs to your past-self that this ugly thing in front of them could ever be you. As far as the past-self is concerned, it's just a moderately interesting person they're having a conversation with.
There would be 3 broad sets that your discussions would fall in: Beliefs that you both mutually agree on, Beliefs that you are able to convince your past-self through reason and Beliefs which make the past-self regard your future-self as being actively stupid for holding. It's this third category which I'm going to term Advanced Wisdom.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)