Tip-Off #113 - Judgment and Intelligence
“What is keeping us from seeing each other, and how do we get it (the hell) out of our way?”― Monica Guzmán, communication consultant.
Tribalism, groupthink, and herd behavior undermine the traditional notion of "collective wisdom," which is already labeled Eurocentric. "Common sense" has become an oxymoron; sense is not common. Fragmentation and polarization are the order of the day. "What we have in common is more important than what divides us" is still an excellent idea, but also hot air in a climate of doubt and distrust.
And yet, as one wit put it, "things in life are not as great as they used to be, and there's nothing wrong with dissenting." Progress has always been a two-edged sword, beginning with agriculture through the printing press, industrialization, the scientific revolution, and modern medicine.
We worry about the growing dominance of AI, forgetting that the invention of the printing press was as much a threat as a blessing. It revolutionized not only what we know but how we know it, making books and literature more accessible and promoting literacy while popularizing hate speech, religious intolerance, and conspiracy theories. Fake news has a pedigree.
We can confuse "intelligence" with "judgment" — a fact painfully known to spouses of intellectuals. Many people of high general intelligence have notoriously poor judgment. Forecasting and probability theorists have perfected what is known as the "wisdom of crowds" theory: while the collective intelligence of a large group is low, the collective judgment of a large group is relatively high—higher than the individual judgments of the most intelligent persons within the group. Repeated testing involving group identification and math I can't describe firsthand ("combinatorics"?) considers the critical variables of prior opinion and peer pressure.
With AI, massive databases make it smarter than ever, and more than ever, it needs sound judgment. Rigging algorithms, called maximizing choice or consumer convenience, is an industry standard — it’s also groupthink. (A machine learning algorithm walks into a bar. The bartender asks, "What would you like to drink?" The algorithm replies, "What's everyone else having?")
Crowds bring together individuals with different perspectives, experiences, and knowledge bases, which can lead to more creative and comprehensive solutions than any algorithm could generate.
Many now question the future of democracy. But when democracy does not work or works poorly, it is not principally because of charismatic charlatans or because the intelligence of the "mass" is low, voters are morally obtuse, or the elites are corrupt. It’s because, in times as nervous and uncertain as ours, us-versus-them conflict takes over. This conflict is rarely about what it seems to be about. It has an understory, which is the most interesting part. Why do we believe and act as we do? There is always at least one thing we haven’t known, something that could lead us to say, maybe not “I agree” or even “I understand,” but “I never knew” or “I never thought of it that way.”
The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to give them a sense of free thinking while established interests are reinforced by the limits put on the range of debate. Founding Father John Adams, although known for his aristocratic sympathies, believed that elites, covered by status, and thinking of things their way, advance their own interests. Whereas others feared the tyranny of one (monarchy), or the tyranny of many (the majority), John Adams feared the tyranny of “the few”: the capacity of an elite to manipulate public opinion and compromise effective representation. [*]
While decisions democracies make fall short of collective wisdom, the decision to make them democratically does not: it’s a wise choice in itself. Judgment can be intelligent.
Notes and reading
“What is keeping us from seeing each other. . .” - Monica Guzman, I Never Thought of It That Way: How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times (2022).
"wisdom of crowds" theory grew from Francis Galton's work. Galton (1822-1911), a cousin of Charles Darwin, was a pioneering figure in the development of modern statistics. After a century of study and debate, scholars cite the appreciatively critical viewpoint of “Revisiting Francis Galton's Forecasting Competition” by Kenneth F. Wallis (University of Warwick UK, world-leading in econometrics), published by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics in August 2014, JSTOR.
[*] John Adams - Letter to Thomas Jefferson (November 15, 1813). "You suppose a difference of Opinion between you and me on this Subject of Aristocracy. I can find none." Also, Fear of the Few: John Adams and the Power Elite” - Luke Mayville (January 15, 2015), 23rd Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association. (Both online, JSTOR)
"While decisions that democracies make..." - from James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds (2005). - Surowiecki was a columnist at The New Yorker and now lectures at Yale.
Additional
“The U.S. currently has no pro-democracy movement” - the left needs to build a “bigger, better movement” to beat Trump. Anand Giridharadas, MSNBC “Morning Joe,” December 7, 2023 (YouTube).
"The Democratic Party must forge a new political center based on class, not identity" - Sohrab Ahmari, The New Statesman (January 2024). Ahmari, conservative editor of the new Compact magazine, praises progressive Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy. Ahmari says, "The right is doing a better job tapping into ordinary people's anxieties. What launched Sen. Murphy's 'journey' on these issues was a deep reading of the New Right, most notably the Catholic political theorist Patrick Deneen (Notre Dame)." - See Deneen's Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future (2023) and his earlier work Why Liberalism Failed' (2018). The latter was praised by President Obama. He included it on his 2018 list of favorite books and mentioned it in a Facebook post on June 16, 2018. While he does not agree with most of the author's conclusions, he found the book thought-provoking. He acknowledged that it offers compelling insights into the loss of meaning and community that many in the West experience, issues that liberal democracies ignore at their peril.)