Evolution designed our brains with in-built self-deception mechanisms; it did not design those mechanisms to continue to operate optimally if the intelligence of the person concerned is artificially increased. It is therefore reasonable to expect that increasing intelligence will, to some extent, disrupt our in-built self-deception.
Not if the original function of (verbal) “intelligence” was to improve our ability to deceive… and I strongly suspect this to be the case. After all, it doesn’t take a ton of (verbal) intelligence to hunt and gather.
If we evolved ever more complex ways of lying, then we must also have evolved ever more complex ways of detecting lies. It is highly plausible that increasing intelligence will increase both of these functions.
If we evolved ever more complex ways of lying, then we must also have evolved ever more complex ways of detecting lies.
Good point. Of course, that mechanism is for detecting other people’s lies, and there is some evidence that it’s specific to ideas and/or people you already disagree with or are suspicious of… meaning that increased intelligence doesn’t necessarily relate.
One of the central themes in the book I’m working on is that brains are much better at convincing themselves they’ve thought things through, when in actuality no real thinking has taken place at all.
Looking for problems with something you already believe is a good example of that: nobody does it until they have a good enough reason to actually think it through, as opposed to assuming they already did it, or not even noticing what it is they believe in the first place.
“Lying” and “being wrong” are not the same. Lying is intentionally communicating a non-truth with the intent to deceive.
And intelligence doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with our capacity to detect lies. You’re simply assuming your conclusion in a different form. Again.
Higher intelligence implies a greater capacity to work out the logical consequences of assertions and thus potentially detect inconsistencies between two assertions or an assertion and an action.
It doesn’t imply that people will have the drive to look for such contradictions, or that such a detected contradiction will be interpreted properly, nor does it imply that it will be useful at detecting lies without logical contradictions.
It seems highly reasonable that it is true that people who are able to get higher scores on IQ tests are both harder to fool and are, on any given question, more likely to believe the correct answer (this second claim is supported by the correlation between IQ and school exams). If you claim to doubt this, I think you’re just being deliberately awkward.
I suggest you read more Feynman, then. Or James Randi.
School exams, particularly in our country, measure the ability to memorize and retrieve information presented formally. They have no obvious relationship to the ability to evaluate the validity of arguments or derive truth.
They have no obvious relationship to the ability to evaluate the validity of arguments or derive truth.
I suspect that you are going too far in expecting a someone who can get 140 on an IQ test to, on average, be just as easy to fool into believing some abstract falsehood as someone who got 60 on that same IQ test. By the way, what’s your IQ?
Not if the original function of (verbal) “intelligence” was to improve our ability to deceive… and I strongly suspect this to be the case. After all, it doesn’t take a ton of (verbal) intelligence to hunt and gather.
If we evolved ever more complex ways of lying, then we must also have evolved ever more complex ways of detecting lies. It is highly plausible that increasing intelligence will increase both of these functions.
Good point. Of course, that mechanism is for detecting other people’s lies, and there is some evidence that it’s specific to ideas and/or people you already disagree with or are suspicious of… meaning that increased intelligence doesn’t necessarily relate.
One of the central themes in the book I’m working on is that brains are much better at convincing themselves they’ve thought things through, when in actuality no real thinking has taken place at all.
Looking for problems with something you already believe is a good example of that: nobody does it until they have a good enough reason to actually think it through, as opposed to assuming they already did it, or not even noticing what it is they believe in the first place.
“Lying” and “being wrong” are not the same. Lying is intentionally communicating a non-truth with the intent to deceive.
And intelligence doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with our capacity to detect lies. You’re simply assuming your conclusion in a different form. Again.
Do you actually believe this?
Yep.
Higher intelligence implies a greater capacity to work out the logical consequences of assertions and thus potentially detect inconsistencies between two assertions or an assertion and an action.
It doesn’t imply that people will have the drive to look for such contradictions, or that such a detected contradiction will be interpreted properly, nor does it imply that it will be useful at detecting lies without logical contradictions.
It seems highly reasonable that it is true that people who are able to get higher scores on IQ tests are both harder to fool and are, on any given question, more likely to believe the correct answer (this second claim is supported by the correlation between IQ and school exams). If you claim to doubt this, I think you’re just being deliberately awkward.
I suggest you read more Feynman, then. Or James Randi.
School exams, particularly in our country, measure the ability to memorize and retrieve information presented formally. They have no obvious relationship to the ability to evaluate the validity of arguments or derive truth.
I suspect that you are going too far in expecting a someone who can get 140 on an IQ test to, on average, be just as easy to fool into believing some abstract falsehood as someone who got 60 on that same IQ test. By the way, what’s your IQ?
I don’t know, for a variety of reasons.