Approximating Intelligence 1: Monkey See, Monkey Do

Perhaps in your life you've experienced being on either end of a comment like:

"You haven't read 'Harry Potter'?!"/"You can't use chopsticks?!"/"You can't swim?!"/"You've never flown in a plane?!"/"You don't have a credit card?!" etc.

These incredulous statements tend to arise, I assert, because someone has overestimated the life-or-death importance in the activity/skillset in question. 

'Esteem' is a perennial curiosity to me, because I believe there are people who literally cannot imagine how one could survive a situation like showing up to school/work/party and discovering that everyone else has seen, read or eaten something that they have not and are presently discussing it. This post however is not about esteem, rather this post is about how over valued and over diagnosed understanding is.

So in testimony to my own stupidity, I realize I created an ambiguous title 'approximating intelligence' that I'm going to use, because I don't know what intelligence is. It's something. I don't know if I could define it. Something something pattern recognition, something something recalling and applying, something something predictive power.

But also, the subject of this post is a hueristic I label as 'Monkey See, Monkey Do.' and for me it is a puzzle piece, I suspect it may even be a corner piece, to getting a picture of what the fuck is going on in the world.

Setting monkeys aside. Let's start with bears. Specifically a bear that has made its presence known to two suddenly unhappy campers. As the old joke goes, one of the campers starts putting on his running shoes, and the other camper says 'you really think you can outrun a bear?' and the one in his running shoes says 'I don't have to outrun a bear, I only have to outrun you.'

This joke illustrates a situation where even a small advantage (running slightly faster) translates into a huge disparity of outcome (survivors guilt vs being mauled to death by a bear, or if you will: being able to run a split second faster predicts a difference in life-expectancy of 50 years).

My feeling, (please note, not my robust finding) is that intelligence is not one of these factors where a slight advantage in intelligence produces disproportionately large differences in outcomes.

This might be encapsulated by the saying 'if you're so smart, how come you ain't rich?' which in itself is an extraordinarily dumb thing to ask, as it demonstrates a lack of basic observation skills. At the same time, it isn't surprising that this saying exists given psychological phenomena like the illusion of superiority, the illusion of control and the just world hypothesis, among others.

To try and be clear, for example, I do not think that IQ (or 'G') is a synonym for intelligence, just a proxy. Probably the best proxy for intelligence psychometrics has to offer. My limited understanding is that IQ can explain about 20% of a person's career success, and that that is one of the best predictors we have. 

To try and put it in layman's terms, if someone is smart, and they work hard (the next best predictor is conscientiousness/industriousness) then it gives them maybe a 30% chance that their career will work out better than a colleague that starts working the same day who is dumb and lazy.

So just using IQ as a proxy measure of intelligence, and keeping the context to employee careers, yes, smart, hard working employees are the ones to bet on, but it isn't by any means a sure thing. We can tentatively conclude that firms are not efficient at promoting intelligent employees.

Bringing us to Monkeys. 

I recently listened to an Audiobook of Terry Pratchett's 'Men at Arms' a novel in the Discworld series that functions kind of like a detective novel, or police procedural. It has a good example of why advantages in intelligence don't translate into massive advantages in life. Leonard of Quirm invents a handheld firearm, something previously unknown to that world. In a world without guns, the first gun is a gamechanger and it took a genius to invent it. But when asked by his employer, Leonard admits that it wouldn't take a genius to replicate his gun, they could just copy his design.

Another example is 'Moneyball', I was listening to a recent episode of the Michael Shermer Show a podcast about skepticism, and I can't remember which one it was, because I've watched a bunch of them. But the host asked a question about the game theory of Moneyball, and the guest responded that that was why the Oakland Athletics were no longer competitive. They had an advantage when they first (and were the first) realized Major League Baseball completely mispriced its players, but now all the other clubs have been forced to imitate Oakland Athletics pricing model, and the market now reflects value again.

Intelligence might convey an advantage of 'insight' but 'Monkey See, Monkey Do' can mitigate the advantage of insight.

In other words, and in summary: You don't have to be intelligent, just recognize intelligence.

This saying 'Monkey See, Monkey Do' appears to be quite ancient, but I was first exposed to it as a 'life-hack' sitting on the carpet during story time at my primary school library (at least as far as my decaying recollection can place it, it could have been a book I borrowed from the library or my older brother and read at home.) I do not know the book, but it was in the same vein as a Morris Gleitzman book like 'Blabber Mouth', 'Sticky Beak' or 'Worry Warts'. I would be grateful to anybody who can scratch my itch and recall the story I'm referring to:

The protagonist was a young boy who was illiterate, not so young that illiteracy would be natural though. This boy couldn't read menus at fast food outlets, so he had to get around the ordering process while being unable to read he waited and listened for someone to order an approximation of what he wanted and then called out 'same again!' I can't remember anything else but this exposition at the beginning of the book, but it at least as a workable solution to a disability, made an impression on me. 

In my own case, in younger, less environmentally conscious years I journeyed through a number of major transport hubs. Around the world transport hubs are magnets for predatory business models that target uninformed tourists. I have been successfully scammed twice thanks to my own stupidity, but was fortunate to only lose inconsequential amounts of money and time. But the 'Monkey See, Monkey Do' is a tool I can employ to lower my risk of being scammed.

Basically follow the herd, marching confidently through the terminal in lockstep with people, presumably locals, who look like they know what they are doing until I am outside the perimeter of spruikers of unlicensed taxis, rooms to rent etc. This method often delivers me to an official cab rank, or bus stop, complementary shuttle service or connecting metro train line when signage isn't clear. One can use this heuristic to find restaurants, night life, locate a market or entrance to an attraction. Something called 'Zen Navigation' in the original BBC adaptation of Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, where you simply follow somebody who looks like they know where they are going.

I'm of an age where I can remember when the first season of 'Survivor' aired. In that first season, Rich was the eventual winner. He won because he formed a voting alliance. They met in private, discussed who they would vote off and then stuck to it. In the first season, literally none of the other contestants thought of this. I remember finding it painful to watch the other contestants come to the realization that other contestants were coordinating their votes. Everybody outside of the three in the voting alliance were turning up to tribal council and voting for who they individually felt deserved to go based on recent events, such as performance in the latest immunity challenge.

By season two, voting alliances were pretty much mandatory, and have remained so since, (although admittedly I haven't watched the most recent 214 seasons) to the point that they pretty much nullified the advantage Rich enjoyed.

Yeah, there's Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, the Google dudes, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos that translated an advantage in intelligence into stupendous wealth. But I suspect that's what that 20% explanatory power of IQ translates into plus the exception, rather than the rule of Intellectual Property (IP). If IQ were A) not a proxy but a synonym for intelligence and B) highly predictive of success, we could almost infer from the success of the various Silicone Valley Tech Billionaires that they would have very high IQ scores, the highest in fact.

Controlling for that though, I predict the real world outcome would be that the richest people in Tech do not possess the highest IQs, even within their own companies and that we would find individuals with equal IQs to billionaires, who work in laundromats. 

I'm going to consider a different billionaire now however, being Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Because he articulated a variation on Monkey See, Monkey Do, which I might think of as 'Monkey Do' without the necessity of 'Monkey See'. Taleb calls it 'The Green Lumber Fallacy' which is written up on Farnham st which tells me it is a 5 minute read.

Strictly speaking, the Green Lumber fallacy cautions us not to conflate good talkers with good doers. As such good 'doers' aka practitioners may actually possess knowledge that "expert" commentators don't. But my first impression was the observation that people do not need to understand, in order to do and do successfully.

Perhaps a good example is money. Do people know what money is? Contemporary to writing this, I'm living in a world where people are struggling to navigate both crypto-"currencies" and concepts like inflation. Yet most people can successfully navigate life, obtaining food, clothing, shelter and even leisure by generally selling their time and energy in exchange for an increasingly abstract convention.

Conservative Economist Thomas Sowell brought my attention to the recurring prank of 'Ban Dihydrogen Monoxide' where people frequently fail to understand that Di(two)hydrogen Mon(one)oxide(oxygen) is a synonym for H2O or 'water'. One of the more impressive applications of the prank was putting 'Caution! Contains Hydrogen' warning signs on a public fountain to prevent people from swimming in it. Which again, there's almost no necessity for understanding the chemical composition of water to successfully coexist with water, though yes, many people drown. 

All of this is just to lay out the idea that people can get very far in life without understanding how. I think this idea is what gives me such a distaste for successoligists, (people who study successful people as though anyone can reproduce that success).

So the benefits of intelligence are hard to hoard. We need it, why? because the environment changes, we may need intelligence as a kind of communal good to protect us from intelligence that is changing our environment - think of technological innovation followed by regulation. 

Then enters a historical event like a global pandemic. I feel an event like this (but not limited to, see also: economic downturns, wars, crop failures, wildfires etc.) is disruptive specifically of the status quo, of routines and this in turn washes out just how much of the population simply do not understand their own lives.

The threshold of understanding might be that if they turn up to work consistently enough, they will have pay deposited into their account but they may not understand that their pay is connected to the operation of the institution they work for. (Author Jeffrey J Fox in his 1998 book 'How to Become CEO' suggested having pay stubs printed with the reminder 'your wage is paid for by our customers') They understand that their bank card can draw down the balance of their bank account and this needs to be managed between paycheck to paycheck but they may not understand how the price of goods and services is determined. (I used to have a colleague that complained that the price of petrol goes up but they don't put our wages up to pay for it.) People might understand that they have a balance of days they are entitled to not show up for work, and that they can call on this along with their bank balance to take a holiday to Bali, or "Hipster Bali" (Japan) once a year for a couple of weeks, something they understand to make their jobs endurable but they may not understand that a vast web of agreements underpinned by a vast number of conditions being met facilitate their ability to move from country to country.

So borders close, offices close, whole industries experience a collapse in demand (travel agents and insurers in Australia) and others experience surges in demand (ICU hospital beds in New York, Milan etc.) leading to collapse.

Here we have been intimately connected to our ancestors, and there is I feel plenty of circumstantial evidence to bolster my assertion that many people can lead successful lives without understanding their own lives at all: Panic buying, Quackery, Covid orphans, and poor people withdrawing from superannuation to buy crap.

Evolution moves slowly, such that, if we travelled back 700 years we could transplant a 5 year old child of the Vijayanagra South India Empire into a Finnish or Norwegian public school and they would have every chance of becoming a Theoretical Physicist or Blockchain coder than the kids next to them.

We can get 'okay boomer' type illusions from observing our parents inability to keep pace with new technologies like the automobile, typing, email, touchscreens, wireless network printers, predictive text, q-codes etc. but this I feel is more a product of 'Monkey See, Monkey Do' over time.

We like our prehistoric-preagrarian ancestors live by finding a niche. We try to understand until we understand how to survive. Then we stop expending valuable calories on understanding things. 

And we know our ancestors must have survived without understanding. Appendicitis is likely to kill any person who cannot safely perform surgery. That's a very recent thing. I would have died age 10 if not for people understanding how to cut open my abdomen and remove an inflamed appendage without me dying from shock.

We are the descendants of people who found a supply of fresh water, and a fairly low risk way to obtain calories. People that historically were entirely at the mercy of: plagues, droughts, earthquakes, forest fires, floods, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Vikings, Rus, Mongols, Islam, Qin, Han, Japanese, Mayans, Mexica, Comanches, the French, the Dutch, the English, the Spanish etc. etc.

The key words being 'at the mercy of' because mercy exists, it's just that you are unlikely to have any agency over the situation. Contemporarily many, if not most vaccine-hesitant (though at this point is it really fair to characterize it as "hesitation") won't die from Covid, they are just at the mercy of Covid to an extent far greater than those with two or three doses of a safe and effective vaccine.

I contend, that a large number of people still basically live this way, and they can still live this way in 2021 because 'Monkey See, Monkey Do' permits one to accommodate all the inventions of intelligence.

I guess what goes wrong, is when Monkey See, Monkey Do steers you into a comfortable niche, and you forget that you got into your comfort zone by following others who looked like they knew what they were doing. 

Then something changes.

And you have no idea why your niche is now a very vulnerable wide open space with buzzards circling overhead.

But yeah, that's the first puzzle piece: understanding is not necessary to live a relatively successful life.