Tuesday, November 2, 2010

this article explains a lot. i need to turn my common sense on

If Liberals Are More Intelligent

 than Conservatives, Why Are 

Liberals So Stupid?


Who are “clever sillies”?
While it is consistent with the prediction


 of the Hypothesis
the conclusion in my


 previous post that liberals are on
average more intelligent than
conservatives may not resonate with
most people’s daily observations and
experiences.  If they are more
intelligent, why are liberals – especially those
in Hollywood and academia –
so much more likely than conservatives
to say and do stupid things and hold incredulous 
beliefs and ideas that stretch
credibility?
Bruce G. Charlton, Professor of Theoretical Medicine
at the University of Buckingham and Editor in
Chief of Medical Hypotheses, may have an explanation.
  In his editorial in the December 2009 issue of
 Medical Hypotheses, Charlton suggests that liberals
 and other int
elligent people may be “clever sillies,”
who incorrectly apply abstract logical reasoning
to social and interpersonal domains.  As I explain
 in an earlier post, general intelligence –
the ability to think and reason –
 likely evolved as a domain-specific evolved psychological
mechanism to solve evolutionarily novel problems,
whereas, for all evolutionarily familiar problems,
there are other dedicated evolved psychological
mechanisms.  Everyone – intelligent or not –
 is evolutionarily equipped with the ability
to solve such evolutionarily familiar problems
 in the social and interpersonal domains as
 mating, parenting, social exchange, and personal
 relationships, with the other evolved
psychological mechanisms. 
Charlton suggests that the totality of all
the other evolved psychological mechanisms
 (except for general intelligence) represents
what we normally call “common sense.”
 Everyone has common sense. 
Intelligent people, however, have a tendency
to overapply their analytical and
logical reasoning abilities derived from their
 general intelligence incorrectly to such
evolutionarily familiar domains and as a result
 get things wrong.  In other words, liberals
 and other intelligent
people lack common sense, because their
 general intelligence overrides it.  They think
 in situations where they are supposed to feel
In evolutionarily familiar domains such as
interpersonal relationships, feeling
 usually leads to correct solutions whereas thinking does not.




I personally dislike Charlton’s term “clever sillies”
 – I don’t like the British usage of both words:
  “clever” and “silly.”  But otherwise I completely agree
 with his analysis substantively.  As Charlton points out,
 common sense is eminently evolutionarily familiar. 
Our ancestors could not have survived
a single day in their hostile environment full of predators
 and enemies if they did not possess functional
common sense.  That’s why it has become integral
 part of evolved human nature in the form of evolved
 psychological mechanisms in the social and
interpersonal domains.  Because common sense is
evolutionarily familiar and thus natural, the Hypothesis
would predict that more intelligent people may be
 less likely to resort to it.  They may be more likely to
resort to evolutionarily
novel, non-common sensical, stupid ideas to solve
problems in the evolutionarily familiar domains.
This, incidentally, is the reason I never use words like
 “smart” and “clever” as synonyms for “intelligent.” 
Similarly, I never use words like “dumb” and “stupid”
 as synonyms for “unintelligent.”  “Intelligent” has a
specific scientific meaning – possessing higher levels
 of general intelligence – whereas “smart” and “stupid”
 have more to do with common sense than intelligence.
 From my perspective, more intelligent people like
 liberals are more likely to be “stupid” (lacking common sense),
 whereas less intelligent people like conservatives
 are more likely to be “smart.”
Once again, Matt Stone and Trey Parker –
 the co-creators of South Park– get it perfectly.
 In the
episode “Go God Go XII,” the Wise One
(the elderly leader of atheist otters) says,
with reference to Richard Dawkins:
“Perhaps the Great Dawkins wasn’t so wise.


 Oh, he was intelligent, but some of the


most intelligent otters that I’ve ever known


were completely lacking in common sense.”

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