It sounds like you are conflating two different things: the intelligence of a population and the intelligence of a ruler. The intelligence of individual commanders absolutely does matter and has been written about for a long time. Hannibal Barca is famous for consistently outsmarting the Romans. The Battle of Cannae in particular is famous as a case study in one commander outsmarting another.
As for populations, the intelligence of any population (with some exceptions) suffers a regression to the mean, which refers to how large populations are less exceptional than small populations. An individual commander can be much smarter than another commander, but nation-sized populations tend to vary little on traits like intelligence due to the Law of Large Numbers. Differences between populations’ intelligence is swamped by other factors like leadership and industrialization, which do vary between nations.
Until recently, national success has been attributed to the superiority (including that of intelligence) of one population over another. These arguments have been followed by genocide and other atrocities so consistently that the whole argument has become tainted by association.
Hmm. Let me elaborate a little bit on the reasons for me asking in the first place :) I have been pondering for some time the whole idea of the common notion that history has a tendency to repeat itself and/or that people seem to have… a measure of difficulty learning from previously made mistakes. I’ve been doing this due to a sense that “we” are slowly forgetting and in a weird way “discounting” the… attitudes acquired after the many atrocities in WW2 (duly linked to by you); my 13 year old daughter for instance needs some convincing to understand that a Jew in 1930′s Europe couldn’t “just go somewhere else” and be done with it. The last generation that could tell us the story of what happened is pretty much gone, and at any rate, not many people seem particularly keen on listening to their stories anyhow.
It would seem to me that discussing historical events not so much in terms of good or evil but instead in terms of clever or dumb may be a more instructive way to explain the error of certain ideas and movements, with what I suspect would be more effective and enduring ways to prevent such errors being made another time. So - for example, talking about the Gulag in terms of Stalin being a paranoid maniac might not be as useful as elaborating on the rational reasons why such decisions were pretty stupid and greatly hindered the Soviet Union from becoming as great as it could have been if these acts had not been committed. Needless to say Stalin was a paranoid maniac—but by focusing on that as the (only) cause, you potentially leave the door open to others doing something similar while believing they could do so without being crazy; far less people would be inclined to repeat behavior that is universally described as mostly dumb, IMHO. It would be, I think, more useful to talk about how thousands of the people he killed were in fact quite smart and would have made for great scientists and army commanders. How the atmosphere of fear stifled independent thought and scared everyone into de-facto “losing” (or “hiding”) 5 IQ points on average.
TL;DR—basically, narrating the history as a set of intelligent or not so intelligent events and actions I think is more likely to prevent a repeat than describing them in terms of good or evil or even weak or powerful. Even though both malevolence and power are actual factors :)
I think that describing the various aberrations produced by human politics as dumb feels as a moral faux paux for anyone who’s not in the “rationality crowd”. Here, being dumb (not in the sense of realising and admitting of having been dumb to do better) is basically a mortal sin, serious enough to kill an idea once and for all.
Going by normal social norms, that something was dumb is just a… slight addendum to the fact that it was evil. You are supposed to hate and feel revulsed by the Soviet purges and the concentration camps because they were evil and wrong, if you started discussing the effectiveness, people could thing that’s the main problem you had with those ideas and that you would have approved them if they “worked”, so talking about how dumb it was at length feels like you were lowering yourself at their level, actually examining the idea to see if it was really wrong, which is seen as less moral than just feeling immediate horror and revulsion. Sometime an author or a historian would use the “dumb” argument as a way to plant one more nail in the coffin, but the speech usually goes like “it was evil, aberrant, immoral, monstrous, and it didn’t even succeeded in its objective.
I think that moral judgements are also more effective at keeping the populace away from dumb evil ideas than judgements on the intelligence of the ideas. If it’s WRONG you can’t do it ever, if it’s just dumb why, you could of course find any idiotic way to “improve” it, or reasons why it wasn’t really dumb, or why this time it wouldn’t be dumb...
If we turn to the larger classes of political mistakes, I think that usually the historian tries to stick to the facts. Competence is more easily measured than intelligence, if you look at someone’s actions. You have to be exceptionally smart to be noticed as such through the lenses of history, because you’d usually just leave behind actions that denoted a competent ruler/general or an incompetent ruler/general, and would be judged as such. You’d need to do exceptionally well in a lot of fields before an historian would feel legitimised to write a “personal judgement” on your intelligence.
As a last thought: people seem to care a lot less than they should about being intelligent, the dumb heroes who just does what’s right or charges straight forward or does whatever regularly outperforms the intelligent secondary character/comic relief/villain in most fictions.
People are also a lot less worried that they should about themselves possibly being dumb, everyone seems to think that THEY would just think as they always do in any situation, why, how could those silly germans fall for Hitler’s words while I know Hitler was wrong, clearly it would have been obvious to me that he was evil if I lived back then, and I don’t need to wonder if I’m acting like them in any way whatsoever, since I’m not seeing any Hitler or nazis in front of me.
Even when people get proof that they are being dumb in some way, they likely react turning it in a badge of honour, I’m “sticking to my guns”, maybe I’m not as smart as that pansy egghead but at least I know how to spit and so on and on.
So in general it seems that the large majority of the population doesn’t really believe that trying to be dumb or intelligent has anything to do with being right or wrong on anything, or even with being effective.
Edit: I hope this was useful and apologise for the unnecessary ranting, I wrote this being in a rather bad place.
It would seem to me that discussing historical events not so much in terms of good or evil…
Yes. “Good” is a generic superlative. Generic words lead to vagueness. Vagueness leads to bullshit.
…but instead in terms of clever or dumb…
No. Replacing “good and evil” with “smart and stupid” replaces one generic superlative with an alternative generic superlative. The king is dead; long live the king.
…narrating the history as a set of intelligent or not so intelligent events and actions I think is more likely to prevent a repeat…Even though both malevolence and power are actual factors
“Narrating history as a set of intelligent or not so intelligent events and actions” is either true or it is untrue.
If it is true then truth is sufficient reason to use this frame. There is no need to appeal to epistemic rationality via “mistakes” and “a repeat”.
If it is untrue then untruth is sufficient reason to reject this frame. The categorical imperative outweighs the uncertain utilitarian possibility that misleading others about history will help them better learn from history.
The regression to the mean point assumes that all humans are drawn from the same intelligence distribution. From a beliefs as maps perspective, that claim requires evidence. For one thing, we know that malnutrition and childhood trauma have an effect on intelligence. The childhood trauma effect in the US has been measured at .5 standard deviations. If you consider how likely an Afghan is to experience stress and trauma in childhood, that alone gets you to a meaningful IQ difference between Afghans and their neighbor’s.
The trauma and malnutrition affect on intelligence would be important historically (since high rates of violence were much more common pre-Hobbes).
Malnutrition has a significant effect on intelligence. That childhood trauma could have an effect on intelligence of 0.5 standard deviations (7.5 IQ points) sounds plausible.
I am not claiming that populations do not differ in intelligence. (To the contrary, I think the phenomenon is fascinating.) I claim that, for the purposes of victory in recorded wars, the intelligence differential between populations is insignificant next to the intelligence differential between leadership groups.
This question concerns the application of intelligence to war. In the specific case of Afghanistan, I find it implausible that the stress and trauma of growing up in a warzone is bad preparation for war.
It sounds like you are conflating two different things: the intelligence of a population and the intelligence of a ruler. The intelligence of individual commanders absolutely does matter and has been written about for a long time. Hannibal Barca is famous for consistently outsmarting the Romans. The Battle of Cannae in particular is famous as a case study in one commander outsmarting another.
As for populations, the intelligence of any population (with some exceptions) suffers a regression to the mean, which refers to how large populations are less exceptional than small populations. An individual commander can be much smarter than another commander, but nation-sized populations tend to vary little on traits like intelligence due to the Law of Large Numbers. Differences between populations’ intelligence is swamped by other factors like leadership and industrialization, which do vary between nations.
Until recently, national success has been attributed to the superiority (including that of intelligence) of one population over another. These arguments have been followed by genocide and other atrocities so consistently that the whole argument has become tainted by association.
Hmm. Let me elaborate a little bit on the reasons for me asking in the first place :) I have been pondering for some time the whole idea of the common notion that history has a tendency to repeat itself and/or that people seem to have… a measure of difficulty learning from previously made mistakes. I’ve been doing this due to a sense that “we” are slowly forgetting and in a weird way “discounting” the… attitudes acquired after the many atrocities in WW2 (duly linked to by you); my 13 year old daughter for instance needs some convincing to understand that a Jew in 1930′s Europe couldn’t “just go somewhere else” and be done with it. The last generation that could tell us the story of what happened is pretty much gone, and at any rate, not many people seem particularly keen on listening to their stories anyhow.
It would seem to me that discussing historical events not so much in terms of good or evil but instead in terms of clever or dumb may be a more instructive way to explain the error of certain ideas and movements, with what I suspect would be more effective and enduring ways to prevent such errors being made another time. So - for example, talking about the Gulag in terms of Stalin being a paranoid maniac might not be as useful as elaborating on the rational reasons why such decisions were pretty stupid and greatly hindered the Soviet Union from becoming as great as it could have been if these acts had not been committed. Needless to say Stalin was a paranoid maniac—but by focusing on that as the (only) cause, you potentially leave the door open to others doing something similar while believing they could do so without being crazy; far less people would be inclined to repeat behavior that is universally described as mostly dumb, IMHO. It would be, I think, more useful to talk about how thousands of the people he killed were in fact quite smart and would have made for great scientists and army commanders. How the atmosphere of fear stifled independent thought and scared everyone into de-facto “losing” (or “hiding”) 5 IQ points on average.
TL;DR—basically, narrating the history as a set of intelligent or not so intelligent events and actions I think is more likely to prevent a repeat than describing them in terms of good or evil or even weak or powerful. Even though both malevolence and power are actual factors :)
I think that describing the various aberrations produced by human politics as dumb feels as a moral faux paux for anyone who’s not in the “rationality crowd”. Here, being dumb (not in the sense of realising and admitting of having been dumb to do better) is basically a mortal sin, serious enough to kill an idea once and for all.
Going by normal social norms, that something was dumb is just a… slight addendum to the fact that it was evil. You are supposed to hate and feel revulsed by the Soviet purges and the concentration camps because they were evil and wrong, if you started discussing the effectiveness, people could thing that’s the main problem you had with those ideas and that you would have approved them if they “worked”, so talking about how dumb it was at length feels like you were lowering yourself at their level, actually examining the idea to see if it was really wrong, which is seen as less moral than just feeling immediate horror and revulsion. Sometime an author or a historian would use the “dumb” argument as a way to plant one more nail in the coffin, but the speech usually goes like “it was evil, aberrant, immoral, monstrous, and it didn’t even succeeded in its objective.
I think that moral judgements are also more effective at keeping the populace away from dumb evil ideas than judgements on the intelligence of the ideas. If it’s WRONG you can’t do it ever, if it’s just dumb why, you could of course find any idiotic way to “improve” it, or reasons why it wasn’t really dumb, or why this time it wouldn’t be dumb...
If we turn to the larger classes of political mistakes, I think that usually the historian tries to stick to the facts. Competence is more easily measured than intelligence, if you look at someone’s actions. You have to be exceptionally smart to be noticed as such through the lenses of history, because you’d usually just leave behind actions that denoted a competent ruler/general or an incompetent ruler/general, and would be judged as such. You’d need to do exceptionally well in a lot of fields before an historian would feel legitimised to write a “personal judgement” on your intelligence.
As a last thought: people seem to care a lot less than they should about being intelligent, the dumb heroes who just does what’s right or charges straight forward or does whatever regularly outperforms the intelligent secondary character/comic relief/villain in most fictions.
People are also a lot less worried that they should about themselves possibly being dumb, everyone seems to think that THEY would just think as they always do in any situation, why, how could those silly germans fall for Hitler’s words while I know Hitler was wrong, clearly it would have been obvious to me that he was evil if I lived back then, and I don’t need to wonder if I’m acting like them in any way whatsoever, since I’m not seeing any Hitler or nazis in front of me.
Even when people get proof that they are being dumb in some way, they likely react turning it in a badge of honour, I’m “sticking to my guns”, maybe I’m not as smart as that pansy egghead but at least I know how to spit and so on and on.
So in general it seems that the large majority of the population doesn’t really believe that trying to be dumb or intelligent has anything to do with being right or wrong on anything, or even with being effective.
Edit: I hope this was useful and apologise for the unnecessary ranting, I wrote this being in a rather bad place.
Yes. “Good” is a generic superlative. Generic words lead to vagueness. Vagueness leads to bullshit.
No. Replacing “good and evil” with “smart and stupid” replaces one generic superlative with an alternative generic superlative. The king is dead; long live the king.
“Narrating history as a set of intelligent or not so intelligent events and actions” is either true or it is untrue.
If it is true then truth is sufficient reason to use this frame. There is no need to appeal to epistemic rationality via “mistakes” and “a repeat”.
If it is untrue then untruth is sufficient reason to reject this frame. The categorical imperative outweighs the uncertain utilitarian possibility that misleading others about history will help them better learn from history.
The regression to the mean point assumes that all humans are drawn from the same intelligence distribution. From a beliefs as maps perspective, that claim requires evidence. For one thing, we know that malnutrition and childhood trauma have an effect on intelligence. The childhood trauma effect in the US has been measured at .5 standard deviations. If you consider how likely an Afghan is to experience stress and trauma in childhood, that alone gets you to a meaningful IQ difference between Afghans and their neighbor’s.
The trauma and malnutrition affect on intelligence would be important historically (since high rates of violence were much more common pre-Hobbes).
Malnutrition has a significant effect on intelligence. That childhood trauma could have an effect on intelligence of 0.5 standard deviations (7.5 IQ points) sounds plausible.
I am not claiming that populations do not differ in intelligence. (To the contrary, I think the phenomenon is fascinating.) I claim that, for the purposes of victory in recorded wars, the intelligence differential between populations is insignificant next to the intelligence differential between leadership groups.
This question concerns the application of intelligence to war. In the specific case of Afghanistan, I find it implausible that the stress and trauma of growing up in a warzone is bad preparation for war.