Ok—what I mean is that the reason historical events work out one way and not another rarely, if ever, is described or explained in terms of the intelligence and cleverness of those whose actions shape those events. So for example, the murder of Duke Ferdinand that led to the First World War is not (even partially) explained by the fact he was rather dumb to act the way he did, but by the political tensions of the time and his careless arrogance. The apparent intellect of most such historical figures and how smart they are rarely seems to be getting attention, even though it is certain that it plays a decisive role in the quality of their decisions.
The way Brexit negotiations are going may very well be caused by a form of stupidity on behalf of the UK negotiators, which causes them to miscalculate the risks, defer proper preparation and fail to have an adequate long term view. Or by foolishly putting the demands of short term populist needs first.
Not to mention that the very fact the country voted for Brexit in the first place is not exactly the result of geniuses at work; even if you accept that a significant part of the UK (lower class) population has objectively suffered due to globalization and they had a sincere axe to grind, doing so by voting in favor of Brexit is hardly going to solve their issues, certainly not in a planned and cleverly designed fashion.
Another thing that is worth mentioning in this context is the apparent fact that the intelligence (IQ) of world leaders seems to be a very closely guarded state secret. This would seem to be most suggestive circumstantial evidence that it is generally believed to be of critical importance in negotiations with other states and parties. The only group of (ex...) leaders I know of whose IQ has been measured were the Nazi’s at the Neurenberg trials; and I would venture a guess this was mostly done while grappling for explanations for how such a seemingly civilized and “decent” nation could commit the atrocities they are still famous for.
It’s a bit like writing a book about car performance and covering aerodynamics, suspension and the interiors at length, but only briefly mentioning the engine inside.
EDIT—And by “national intelligence” I mean the undescribed but definitely “present” intellectual capacity of a set of actors from a given nation that history has “chosen” to play a decisive role in what ever events are about to unfold. So for example when nuclear weapons became a thing and we had to find ways to deal with them, the foresight and wisdom of the leaders tasked with securing them and deciding when to use them was a of existential importance. Yet, in history books you will not read about how these problems were intellectually discussed, what kind of rational calculations, convictions and reasons were held by those who made these critical choices and decisions.
In the treatment of historical events it seems to be assumed that, all things considered, every nation is as smart as any other; I am yet to read a story with a sentence along the lines of “the delegation from country Y were clearly intellectually inferior to the skilled diplomats from country X and it is for this reason that the treaty was so beneficial for nation X”. That nation Y was scared of the armies of nation X, sure. That the economy of nation Y was in tatters and they had no way of financing the steps required to be on an equal footing with nation X—also. But that nation Y unfortunately was dumber because they didn’t quite value a good educational system, or that the king promoted his dim nephew to key negotiator despite him barely being able to tie his shoelaces… not so much. Yet it must be the case this has more often than not played an instrumental role.
Ok—what I mean is that the reason historical events work out one way and not another rarely, if ever, is described or explained in terms of the intelligence and cleverness of those whose actions shape those events.
I think I understand the heart of your question better now.
The reason historical events are not explained in terms of intelligence is because attributing historical decisions to the actors’ intelligence (or cleverness, stupidity, etc.) usually does not explain anything.
Suppose Agent Johnny English does stupid things. We want to know why Johnny English did these stupid things. You could say “because Johnny English is stupid”. How do we know Johnny English is stupid? Because Johnny English did stupid things. This is circular reasoning.
This feels unsatisfying to me and I’m not fully sure why.
If we want to know why Johnny English does things with his left hand, we could say “because he’s left-handed”. But we know he’s left-handed because he does things with his left hand. That seems just as circular, but still basically fine as an answer? More broadly we’d say “look, some people just favor their left hand. We don’t know exactly why, but there’s a fraction of the population who tends to do things with their left hand, even when it causes them to smear ink or makes scissors less efficient. We call these people left-handed.”
So when we say “Johnny English does things with his left hand because he’s left-handed”… it’s arguably more definition than explanation, but it does also have predictive power. It points at a pattern that lets us say “okay, Johnny English will probably use his left hand in this situation too, and if we try to make him use his right instead he probably won’t do a very good job”.
Handedness is a discrete phenomenon with two peaks. 90% of people are right-handed, 10% are left-handed and the cross-dominant population is small. “Right-handed verses left-handed” is a natural bucket because there is a trough between them on the handedness histogram.
Intelligence, on the other hand, exhibits a bell curve with a single peak. There is no trough on which to draw a dividing line between “smart” and “stupid”. The bucket is arbitrary instead of natural.
The English words “smart” and “stupid” are vague. They do not point to a numerical location on the bell curve. We could draw the line between smart and stupid at an IQ of 70, 100 or 145. If we draw the line at x then the theory has almost no explanatory power. You cannot say “Johnny English does stupid things because he is stupid” when you draw the dividing line at x because a person with an IQ of x−1 does almost exactly as many stupid things as a person with an IQ of x+1. (The observed difference in stupidity between individuals of IQ x−1 and x+1 is swamped by noise.)
Could we rephrase HumaneAutomaton’s question in terms of a continuous distribution instead of a binary distinction?
Yes, but it would cost a lot of entropy.
Suppose Johnny English did things with a stupidity level such that his posterior expected IQ is 85. It could be that Johnny English has an IQ of 85. It could be that Johnny English has an IQ of 65 and got lucky. It could be that Johnny English has ah IQ of 105 and got unlucky.
Under the best of circumstances it takes much more information to nail down Johnny English’s precise intelligence level than to deduce his handedness. History is not the best of circumstances. We have scarce data, deal with confounding unknowns and must counteract historiographic bias.
Handedness is different from IQ in two ways, both related to the continuous-discrete distinction.
It takes more information to deduce precise IQ than precise handedness and we usually don’t have that information for historical figures.
IQ predicts specific behavior with less precision than how well handedness predicts behavior. Context is more important for judging intelligence than for judging handedness.
To put it in terms of Occam’s razor, continuous distributions have many buckets. Hypotheses with many are more complex than theories with few buckets. IQ has more buckets than handedness.
Did the intelligence of individuals influence historical events? Yes. Can we isolate the signal? Generally, no.
Technically, saying that someone has high or low IQ is not a “mysterious answer”. You could measure it.
But you cannot measure the IQ of individuals or populations who died centuries ago.
Or, hypothetically… an archaeological research could find out that e.g. textbooks for 6 years old children in Carthage contained problems that 8 years old solved in Rome, plus some more evidence of this type, from which we might conclude that Carthagians were smarter as a whole, which would explain why Hannibal Barca was smarter than his opponents.
But without this extra information, the intelligence hypothesis reduces to a circular argument: “He won because he was smarter.” “What is your evidence he was smarter?” “He won, duh.”
The way Brexit negotiations are going may very well be caused by a form of stupidity on behalf of the UK negotiators, which causes them to miscalculate the risks, defer proper preparation and fail to have an adequate long term view.
While it’s a possible theory that they negotiate the way they do because of low intelligence, I don’t think you provided good reason to believe that this is what’s going on over there.
Lord Frost has a First-Class degree from Oxford. I would also expect Dommic Cummings and many people he hired to be on average of higher IQ then a lot of the European burocrats at the negotiating table as Cummings was willing to hire unconvential people who are geniuses in a way that other burocracies don’t.
This would seem to be most suggestive circumstantial evidence that it is generally believed to be of critical importance in negotiations with other states and parties.
Most political decisions are made because of domestic politics and not international politics.
Ah Mr. Cummings… he may actually be literally too clever for his own good… his disdain for “the plebs” is all too readily on display ;) You should take a look at his wonderful ideas about data privacy. And yes, having followed Brexit both online and “in person” I am fairly familiar with all sides of the argument. My “default position” in matters of mass-made choices and decisions is that I never assume that a great many people are, in fact, dumb, even if it may be really tempting to think so. Their actions always have some logic, even if faulty/biased/etc. and it is there where the lack of reasoning occurs. We are here on a blog dedicated in no small part to exactly this problem :)
However—Brexit is a fairly difficult case: Anyone who voted in favor of it could not have done so for objective reasons. This is because there actually was no coherent plan what so ever to base ones choices on. Vague (and proven misleading) claims, appeals to national sovereignty (without concordant elaboration what exactly this sovereignty would make possible) etc. - a vote for Brexit came as close as one can come to a vote for the Unknown. Unless you’re in a concentration camp, this is hardly ever the most rational choice.
And—smart as they may be on paper, to take the Have Your Cake And Eat It Too-position that it is even remotely possible to have a better deal with the EU while no longer a member is surely a galaxy-size fail of miscalculation, hubris, or both. I realize that a big part of the EU-UK negotiations are actually a complex game of chicken, but the very fact this “type” of game was chosen instead of a more cooperative approach is in itself fairly ignorant.
Though it may be helpful in this context to define “intelligence” more precisely; is it “raw computing power” or “adeptness at achieving ones’ desired outcomes”...? While obviously related, those two things are most certainly not the same. Me personally being rather at the pragmatic/utilitarian end of the spectrum, think more in terms of the latter :)
And yes, having followed Brexit both online and “in person” I am fairly familiar with all sides of the argument.
The idea that you are familiar with all sides of the argument because you are aware of all arguments that were made publically seems ignorant.
It’s important to distinguish someone having different goals from someone with intelligence. Cummings believes that deregulation is the way to economic growth and the point of leaving the EU was to be able to deregulated and not be bound by EU legislation such as the privacy regulation.
a vote for Brexit came as close as one can come to a vote for the Unknown. Unless you’re in a concentration camp, this is hardly ever the most rational choice.
If you want substantial positive change, then you need to decide for the unknown. Accepting dealing with the unknown was a foundation for a lot of human progress before the Great Stagnation and trying to regulate it out of existence had a cost.
It’s not a trivial analysis about whether or not that’s a good choice.
Though it may be helpful in this context to define “intelligence” more precisely; is it “raw computing power” or “adeptness at achieving ones’ desired outcomes”...?
A lot of desired outcomes of political actors are not known to you. If you look at Dominic Cummings he managed to get a lot of political power for running the leave campaign.
Having a no deal result means that there’s more room for new policies to be created which might be desirable for Cummings et al.
Cummings might well have overplayed his hand and go down because he angered enough people and didn’t took the COVID-19 rules seriously enough.
Well—this chain could go on ad infinitum.. all I was trying to say is:
- I am really trying to understand why people voted for Brexit and want to find answers that do not boil down to “they were ignorant/dumb/racists”, however tempting it might be; - The job of politicians is to serve the interests of the country they serve. If they have other reasons for pursuing certain policies they are being corrupt; - If you are going to advocate voting for “Unknown” then you better have a very good idea of what you want instead, how you will bring it about and how it will materially help your constituents in ways that are tangible and can be measured;
I am not claiming to know everything the UK government and its people think, though if you follow your logic to only moderate extremes any discussion of complex policies is fundamentally pointless guesswork. That isn’t necessarily false, mind you… compared to the average person, I’d assess my own knowledge of Brexit somewhere above the median for a non-UK resident, and probably below someone who actually lives there everyday. On the other hand, it is easier for me to be dispassionate as I don’t have a dog in that race :)
I am not claiming to know everything the UK government and its people think, though if you follow your logic to only moderate extremes any discussion of complex policies is fundamentally pointless guesswork.
You are making arguments that depend on the conclusion that you who what they think. As long as you understand that you don’t know what they think you can’t access their intelligence by looking at those decisions.
If you are going to advocate voting for “Unknown” then you better have a very good idea of what you want instead
Allowing more economic growth through deregulation and more rational laws is an idea that was articulated and one that they are working on. It’s not very specific but specific 4-year plans don’t work that well.
Telling the public about how you get the more rational laws by hiring superforcasters and building those seeing rooms is more specific but not the level of argument that the public is easily going to digest.
Seems to me that the relation to your original question “why don’t we attribute historial events to the intelligence of their actors” is that by this logic, historians of the future might conclude that Dominic Cummings was retarded. (Assuming the records of his writing would be lost.) If this logic doesn’t work reliably now, it was probably not more reliable in the past.
“raw computing power” or “adeptness at achieving ones’ desired outcomes”
If you go for the second one, then you’re essentially suggesting that sometimes we should explain a person’s success (failure) in terms of their innate tendency to succeed (fail). This sounds like a mysterious explanation. It’s like saying that sleeping medicine works because it has a dormitive potency.
I’m not saying the second definition is never useful, just not in this context.
I am not sure if I follow :) For starters, what is an “innate tendency to succeed”...? How is that even a thing? One might have a set of personal attributes that, given a bunch of challenges, might prove to be beneficial in increasing chances of getting what you want.. like charisma or being especially adept at detecting what people actually need, or when they are lying… but it would be a bit… irrational… to call that a innate tendency...? I mean I know there’s plenty of people who would do that (and in so doing, make into a reputation that then becomes feared and actually helps in being victorious when dealing with those who are aware of said reputation...) but it is still an irrational human construct.
Judging the intelligence of an actor based on his or her incidence of goal attainment seems to me a very pragmatic and unbiased way of ascribing overall success and understanding of the challenges in the situations being faced.
Also, in various places you seem to be moving back and forth between explaining events in terms of how smart a decision was, vs how smart a person was. These are different (though of course related).
Ok—what I mean is that the reason historical events work out one way and not another rarely, if ever, is described or explained in terms of the intelligence and cleverness of those whose actions shape those events. So for example, the murder of Duke Ferdinand that led to the First World War is not (even partially) explained by the fact he was rather dumb to act the way he did, but by the political tensions of the time and his careless arrogance. The apparent intellect of most such historical figures and how smart they are rarely seems to be getting attention, even though it is certain that it plays a decisive role in the quality of their decisions.
The way Brexit negotiations are going may very well be caused by a form of stupidity on behalf of the UK negotiators, which causes them to miscalculate the risks, defer proper preparation and fail to have an adequate long term view. Or by foolishly putting the demands of short term populist needs first.
Not to mention that the very fact the country voted for Brexit in the first place is not exactly the result of geniuses at work; even if you accept that a significant part of the UK (lower class) population has objectively suffered due to globalization and they had a sincere axe to grind, doing so by voting in favor of Brexit is hardly going to solve their issues, certainly not in a planned and cleverly designed fashion.
Another thing that is worth mentioning in this context is the apparent fact that the intelligence (IQ) of world leaders seems to be a very closely guarded state secret. This would seem to be most suggestive circumstantial evidence that it is generally believed to be of critical importance in negotiations with other states and parties. The only group of (ex...) leaders I know of whose IQ has been measured were the Nazi’s at the Neurenberg trials; and I would venture a guess this was mostly done while grappling for explanations for how such a seemingly civilized and “decent” nation could commit the atrocities they are still famous for.
It’s a bit like writing a book about car performance and covering aerodynamics, suspension and the interiors at length, but only briefly mentioning the engine inside.
EDIT—And by “national intelligence” I mean the undescribed but definitely “present” intellectual capacity of a set of actors from a given nation that history has “chosen” to play a decisive role in what ever events are about to unfold. So for example when nuclear weapons became a thing and we had to find ways to deal with them, the foresight and wisdom of the leaders tasked with securing them and deciding when to use them was a of existential importance. Yet, in history books you will not read about how these problems were intellectually discussed, what kind of rational calculations, convictions and reasons were held by those who made these critical choices and decisions.
In the treatment of historical events it seems to be assumed that, all things considered, every nation is as smart as any other; I am yet to read a story with a sentence along the lines of “the delegation from country Y were clearly intellectually inferior to the skilled diplomats from country X and it is for this reason that the treaty was so beneficial for nation X”. That nation Y was scared of the armies of nation X, sure. That the economy of nation Y was in tatters and they had no way of financing the steps required to be on an equal footing with nation X—also. But that nation Y unfortunately was dumber because they didn’t quite value a good educational system, or that the king promoted his dim nephew to key negotiator despite him barely being able to tie his shoelaces… not so much. Yet it must be the case this has more often than not played an instrumental role.
I think I understand the heart of your question better now.
The reason historical events are not explained in terms of intelligence is because attributing historical decisions to the actors’ intelligence (or cleverness, stupidity, etc.) usually does not explain anything.
Suppose Agent Johnny English does stupid things. We want to know why Johnny English did these stupid things. You could say “because Johnny English is stupid”. How do we know Johnny English is stupid? Because Johnny English did stupid things. This is circular reasoning.
This feels unsatisfying to me and I’m not fully sure why.
If we want to know why Johnny English does things with his left hand, we could say “because he’s left-handed”. But we know he’s left-handed because he does things with his left hand. That seems just as circular, but still basically fine as an answer? More broadly we’d say “look, some people just favor their left hand. We don’t know exactly why, but there’s a fraction of the population who tends to do things with their left hand, even when it causes them to smear ink or makes scissors less efficient. We call these people left-handed.”
So when we say “Johnny English does things with his left hand because he’s left-handed”… it’s arguably more definition than explanation, but it does also have predictive power. It points at a pattern that lets us say “okay, Johnny English will probably use his left hand in this situation too, and if we try to make him use his right instead he probably won’t do a very good job”.
Handedness is a discrete phenomenon with two peaks. 90% of people are right-handed, 10% are left-handed and the cross-dominant population is small. “Right-handed verses left-handed” is a natural bucket because there is a trough between them on the handedness histogram.
Intelligence, on the other hand, exhibits a bell curve with a single peak. There is no trough on which to draw a dividing line between “smart” and “stupid”. The bucket is arbitrary instead of natural.
The English words “smart” and “stupid” are vague. They do not point to a numerical location on the bell curve. We could draw the line between smart and stupid at an IQ of 70, 100 or 145. If we draw the line at x then the theory has almost no explanatory power. You cannot say “Johnny English does stupid things because he is stupid” when you draw the dividing line at x because a person with an IQ of x−1 does almost exactly as many stupid things as a person with an IQ of x+1. (The observed difference in stupidity between individuals of IQ x−1 and x+1 is swamped by noise.)
Could we rephrase HumaneAutomaton’s question in terms of a continuous distribution instead of a binary distinction?
Yes, but it would cost a lot of entropy.
Suppose Johnny English did things with a stupidity level such that his posterior expected IQ is 85. It could be that Johnny English has an IQ of 85. It could be that Johnny English has an IQ of 65 and got lucky. It could be that Johnny English has ah IQ of 105 and got unlucky.
Under the best of circumstances it takes much more information to nail down Johnny English’s precise intelligence level than to deduce his handedness. History is not the best of circumstances. We have scarce data, deal with confounding unknowns and must counteract historiographic bias.
Handedness is different from IQ in two ways, both related to the continuous-discrete distinction.
It takes more information to deduce precise IQ than precise handedness and we usually don’t have that information for historical figures.
IQ predicts specific behavior with less precision than how well handedness predicts behavior. Context is more important for judging intelligence than for judging handedness.
To put it in terms of Occam’s razor, continuous distributions have many buckets. Hypotheses with many are more complex than theories with few buckets. IQ has more buckets than handedness.
Did the intelligence of individuals influence historical events? Yes. Can we isolate the signal? Generally, no.
Thou shall not speak of scissors! Apparatus of the devil that be!
.. yes, I am left-handed :P
Technically, saying that someone has high or low IQ is not a “mysterious answer”. You could measure it.
But you cannot measure the IQ of individuals or populations who died centuries ago.
Or, hypothetically… an archaeological research could find out that e.g. textbooks for 6 years old children in Carthage contained problems that 8 years old solved in Rome, plus some more evidence of this type, from which we might conclude that Carthagians were smarter as a whole, which would explain why Hannibal Barca was smarter than his opponents.
But without this extra information, the intelligence hypothesis reduces to a circular argument: “He won because he was smarter.” “What is your evidence he was smarter?” “He won, duh.”
Yes. Another example would be the Habsburg Jaw.
While it’s a possible theory that they negotiate the way they do because of low intelligence, I don’t think you provided good reason to believe that this is what’s going on over there.
Lord Frost has a First-Class degree from Oxford. I would also expect Dommic Cummings and many people he hired to be on average of higher IQ then a lot of the European burocrats at the negotiating table as Cummings was willing to hire unconvential people who are geniuses in a way that other burocracies don’t.
Most political decisions are made because of domestic politics and not international politics.
Ah Mr. Cummings… he may actually be literally too clever for his own good… his disdain for “the plebs” is all too readily on display ;) You should take a look at his wonderful ideas about data privacy. And yes, having followed Brexit both online and “in person” I am fairly familiar with all sides of the argument. My “default position” in matters of mass-made choices and decisions is that I never assume that a great many people are, in fact, dumb, even if it may be really tempting to think so. Their actions always have some logic, even if faulty/biased/etc. and it is there where the lack of reasoning occurs. We are here on a blog dedicated in no small part to exactly this problem :)
However—Brexit is a fairly difficult case: Anyone who voted in favor of it could not have done so for objective reasons. This is because there actually was no coherent plan what so ever to base ones choices on. Vague (and proven misleading) claims, appeals to national sovereignty (without concordant elaboration what exactly this sovereignty would make possible) etc. - a vote for Brexit came as close as one can come to a vote for the Unknown. Unless you’re in a concentration camp, this is hardly ever the most rational choice.
And—smart as they may be on paper, to take the Have Your Cake And Eat It Too-position that it is even remotely possible to have a better deal with the EU while no longer a member is surely a galaxy-size fail of miscalculation, hubris, or both. I realize that a big part of the EU-UK negotiations are actually a complex game of chicken, but the very fact this “type” of game was chosen instead of a more cooperative approach is in itself fairly ignorant.
Though it may be helpful in this context to define “intelligence” more precisely; is it “raw computing power” or “adeptness at achieving ones’ desired outcomes”...? While obviously related, those two things are most certainly not the same. Me personally being rather at the pragmatic/utilitarian end of the spectrum, think more in terms of the latter :)
The idea that you are familiar with all sides of the argument because you are aware of all arguments that were made publically seems ignorant.
It’s important to distinguish someone having different goals from someone with intelligence. Cummings believes that deregulation is the way to economic growth and the point of leaving the EU was to be able to deregulated and not be bound by EU legislation such as the privacy regulation.
If you want substantial positive change, then you need to decide for the unknown. Accepting dealing with the unknown was a foundation for a lot of human progress before the Great Stagnation and trying to regulate it out of existence had a cost.
It’s not a trivial analysis about whether or not that’s a good choice.
A lot of desired outcomes of political actors are not known to you. If you look at Dominic Cummings he managed to get a lot of political power for running the leave campaign.
Having a no deal result means that there’s more room for new policies to be created which might be desirable for Cummings et al.
Cummings might well have overplayed his hand and go down because he angered enough people and didn’t took the COVID-19 rules seriously enough.
Well—this chain could go on ad infinitum.. all I was trying to say is:
- I am really trying to understand why people voted for Brexit and want to find answers that do not boil down to “they were ignorant/dumb/racists”, however tempting it might be;
- The job of politicians is to serve the interests of the country they serve. If they have other reasons for pursuing certain policies they are being corrupt;
- If you are going to advocate voting for “Unknown” then you better have a very good idea of what you want instead, how you will bring it about and how it will materially help your constituents in ways that are tangible and can be measured;
I am not claiming to know everything the UK government and its people think, though if you follow your logic to only moderate extremes any discussion of complex policies is fundamentally pointless guesswork. That isn’t necessarily false, mind you… compared to the average person, I’d assess my own knowledge of Brexit somewhere above the median for a non-UK resident, and probably below someone who actually lives there everyday. On the other hand, it is easier for me to be dispassionate as I don’t have a dog in that race :)
You are making arguments that depend on the conclusion that you who what they think. As long as you understand that you don’t know what they think you can’t access their intelligence by looking at those decisions.
Allowing more economic growth through deregulation and more rational laws is an idea that was articulated and one that they are working on. It’s not very specific but specific 4-year plans don’t work that well.
Telling the public about how you get the more rational laws by hiring superforcasters and building those seeing rooms is more specific but not the level of argument that the public is easily going to digest.
Seems to me that the relation to your original question “why don’t we attribute historial events to the intelligence of their actors” is that by this logic, historians of the future might conclude that Dominic Cummings was retarded. (Assuming the records of his writing would be lost.) If this logic doesn’t work reliably now, it was probably not more reliable in the past.
If you go for the second one, then you’re essentially suggesting that sometimes we should explain a person’s success (failure) in terms of their innate tendency to succeed (fail). This sounds like a mysterious explanation. It’s like saying that sleeping medicine works because it has a dormitive potency.
I’m not saying the second definition is never useful, just not in this context.
I am not sure if I follow :) For starters, what is an “innate tendency to succeed”...? How is that even a thing? One might have a set of personal attributes that, given a bunch of challenges, might prove to be beneficial in increasing chances of getting what you want.. like charisma or being especially adept at detecting what people actually need, or when they are lying… but it would be a bit… irrational… to call that a innate tendency...? I mean I know there’s plenty of people who would do that (and in so doing, make into a reputation that then becomes feared and actually helps in being victorious when dealing with those who are aware of said reputation...) but it is still an irrational human construct.
Judging the intelligence of an actor based on his or her incidence of goal attainment seems to me a very pragmatic and unbiased way of ascribing overall success and understanding of the challenges in the situations being faced.
Also, in various places you seem to be moving back and forth between explaining events in terms of how smart a decision was, vs how smart a person was. These are different (though of course related).