Bright people reverse-engineer themselves into faulty assumptions

From The Clock Ticks by Glenn Harlan Reynolds.  The subheading is Doomsday or future heaven? Who knows?

Back when I was in law school in the Reagan era, my girlfriend was worried because the “Doomsday Clock” had been advanced. When I pointed out that it was just the opinion of some people at a magazine she was dumbfounded. She was plenty smart — her IQ was like 165, she became a big-deal tax lawyer later — but she had never considered that there was no objective, quantifiable component to this famous metric.  And of course there isn’t. 

I think this phenomena is relatively common but rarely remarked upon.  There is an odd asymmetry to the Bell Curve of Capability (i.e. IQ, knowledge, experience, skills, values, behaviors, motivation, capabilities.)  As you move along the curve, people at different positions of the curve have differing challenges understanding the world view of those a standard deviation above or below them.  

As an example, those low on the bell curve trying to understand the worldview of those a standard deviation above them often simply do not have the crystalized knowledge to comprehend it.  They end up with a simplistic Cargo Cult comprehension where statistical correlation is what creates reality.  

And note, that even reasonably smart and experienced people, when dealing with complex systems, can exhibit Cargo Cult mentalities.  Just as the Melanesians in the Pacific associated airplanes and ships with miraculous prosperity, the same thinking was demonstrated in the Bush and Obama administrations when the naive assumption was disastrously embedded in policy that if the government could get more people to buy middle class housing, those people would lead more middle class lives of prosperity.  They misinterpreted the complex system and inverted causation.  A complex web of values and behaviors create the productivity to purchase homes.  It is not the purchase of homes which create the complex web of values and behaviors which drive productivity.  

Reynolds is pointing out an example from the right of the Bell Curve of Capability.  An example of a very bright and capable person's misunderstanding of something farther to the left of her and where her error is a product of her assuming that those a couple of SDs to the left of her have the same capabilities and motivations as she.  She reverse engineers an interpretation of their actions based on her own worldview. 

Those towards to the right end of the Bell Curve of Capability, gifted as they are with the IQ, knowledge, experience, skills, values, behaviors, motivation, and capabilities which favor higher productivity and therefore greater prosperity, have challenges comprehending those a standard deviation or more below them.

In this particular instance, a very intelligent woman with later demonstrated extreme competence, at Yale University Law School.  She did what many people far on the right of the curve do.  They interpret actions and behaviors to the left of theirs based on their own world view which tends to be abstract, conceptual, mathematical, logical, rigorous, etc.  If someone, especially a presumed professional, is representing something to be true and is communicating it via an empirical measurement, then it must be real and rigorous.  

If someone displays a report card (or doomsday clock), it is assumed to be some rigorous representation of a complex reality.  Because that is what people 2-3 standard deviations above the norm do.  They try and comprehend and measure a complex world where multiple interlocking systems prone to power laws, end up interconnecting with one another and evolving at different and difficult to predict rates.  When you represent something numerically, you know the representation is both fragile and highly contingent.

It often does not occur to them that the representation, as with the Dooms Day Clock, is simply made up.  That there is no there there.  It can be a dismaying discovery.  

Once you notice those worldview mismatches, you begin to see them with some frequency.  Most conflicts arise, I might argue, not because of a clash of cultures (which is another word for worldview) but because of mismatches of worldview within a culture based on the Bell Curve of Capability.

People at the bottom have a tendency to view the good fortune of those far to the right of the curve as arising from good luck.  And of course luck plays its contingent role.

Those on the far right tend to view those on the far left of the Bell Curve of Capability as being morally inadequate (lazy, evil, bad) because they take actions incomprehensible to the ordered mind.  And of course lazy, evil, bad actions play their contingent role as well.

And most on the right learn, just as did Reynolds' long-ago girlfriend, that representations originating from the left of the Bell Curve of Capability are frequently not the product of rigor and intellect and empiricism.  They are the product of low capability people using rhetoric to create circumstances beneficial to them.  

It might not be wrong to argue that most of the daily news is bad representations of reality conjured by those advocating for their own self-interests and with no commitment to or obligation to reality and truth.  

It is a disappointing lesson but that does not make it less true.