Approximating Intelligence: The Termite and the Architect

It takes some skill to be an architect. You have to be in possession of some degree of intelligence to construct a timber framed house that might withstand the elements for a century or two. 

This is the juice, the sweet center of this post: It is wrong to conclude that something that takes intelligence to construct, requires intelligence = or > to destroy. Termites can destroy a house built with great skill by an architect. That doesn't make the termites intelligent.

Imagine you are booked in for spinal surgery later this week. I'm not a doctor, but imagine you had the exchange with your surgery where they told you to remove the bad shit from your spine, they are going to drill in with sophisticated robot arms but there's a small chance they could paralyse you. They reassure you they are a pro, they've never had the procedure go wrong, "trust them". So you sign the form.

Then you are at a dinner party and the subject of your surgery comes up and one of the guests says 'check this out it's hilarious!' and they whip out their phone and load up a youtube video called 'surgeons final exam MUST WATCH' and play it.

What follows is 40 minutes of a verbal examination where a surgeon is asked questions like:

Q 'A 65 year old woman is being seen by her primary care physician for work up of osteoporosis. When she is found to have elevated calcium. Her pth level is well above normal, her doctor sends her to you. What's your first course of action?'

The answers follow a distinct pattern:

A:'I do the best thing, because I'm the best surgeon, everyone says so. I cure that broad so fast her head starts spinning. She is going to feel so terrific she's gonna wish she was ill. She'll feel like superman. You won't believe it.'

And there's five more minutes of this back and forth exchange where the examiner A) asks a detailed technical question, which is followed by a B) boastful content-less answer.

It must be a hoax, we couldn't possibly be living in a world where a surgeon can obtain their qualification just by answering every question with 'trust me, I know the answer.' rather than, you know, answering the fucking question that was asked.

To live in such a world, where some moron could bluff their way into being a licensed surgeon would be horrifying. Especially when you'd just signed a form saying you understand that your spine might get severed.

Fortunately, we don't live in a world where someone can 'trust me' into becoming a licensed surgeon. But we absolutely live in a world where someone can 'trust me' into nuclear launch codes.

Here enters the fetishization of 'Intelligence' and something surprising to me about the Trump presidency, was that the same behaviour manifested among people that like me had lived through the Bush presidency. 

I'm not talking about cynical mouthpieces for an administration characterizing immoral behaviour like not paying taxes as 'genius' but the psychological defensive behaviour of taking off the table that someone that walks like an idiot, talks like an idiot and looks like an idiot, may in fact be an idiot.

Instead what is proposed is something like this:

1. It is impossible to win both a party primary election and then a presidential election through sheer bluff and bluster.

2. Somebody bluffed their way through a party primary and wins a presidential election.

3. Therefore, it's just an act, they are a secret genius disguising themselves as an idiot.

Now it's time for termites. It is time for architects. It is time for a reality bomb:

Conmen exist. "Cons" are viable.

Fun fact, 'Conman' is short for 'Confidence man'. Okay maybe not that fun.

How do "cons" work? Are they smart or stupid? If you have any bank notes on you, maybe pull one out and have a look at it. It's going to be made of paper or plastic, or some combination of the two. It might have some metallic ribbon running through the middle of it, but I'm going to guess my audience mainly deal with Australia's plastic money or US Bills or Euro notes that are similar to Australian ones.

It probably has a serial number, a hologram, a transparent section, maybe repeated small print and incredibly detailed pattern design making up images.

All security features to prevent counterfeiting. Experts work on this, I'm confident there's more or less a perpetual arms race, now crossing over into block-chain and digital currencies to prevent counterfeiting.

But ultimately, a bank note is something you hand over to a person. A person that possibly handles hundreds of notes a day. And basically, that person at some point is going to stop scrutinizing all those security features. 

Maybe in your country or in your travels you've noticed that anything worth more than $5USD will get held up to a light by cashiers, or marked with counterfeit detecting pen on rubbed with some paper to see if the ink smudges. 

Even then though, there's a blind detection process that a counterfeiter just has to beat, or replicate near enough. If it passes these tests, cashiers aren't going to run the serial numbers or even notice that the serial number isn't missing.

And we don't even need to go that far, some cashiers short change us. They forget the amount of money handed to them, or misremember it while giving change. Less often do we customers short change cashiers. 

So you know, you can go read "Social Engineering" or watch early Derren Brown series "Mind Control", what I am asserting is that we are vulnerable to cons because the world is complicated and we rely largely on heuristics, not secure systems.

Like if I was smuggled illegally into the Netherlands and was walking around Amsterdam, how would the local police know I was not supposed to be there? My accent? What if they just see me walking along the canal not speaking? What about all the Australians there that sound like me and have perfectly legitimate reasons to be there?

For immigration we rely on certain catchments, like in Japan every hotel wants to take your passport and make copies of it and your visa. Any police can ask to see your gaijin card, other countries the only time the document system comes up might be at international ports.

Citizenship is easy and it isn't ironclad. There's no analogous system for intelligence. Intelligence is still, mostly a subjective determination, in the eye of the beholder.

Matt Hayden's Debut Run Score

If you have been esteemed as intelligent, you may have had an experience similar to this. You've been playing pub trivia, or trivial pursuit or something, and somebody remarks 'You didn't know Matt Hayden scored 149 runs in his maiden first-class innings? Look everybody I'm smarter than x.'

This person, not to rob them of their moment of pub-trivia glory, has mistaken knowledge for intelligence - at the least. I put it to you, if you can't differentiate between knowledge of trivia, or a memorization of inert facts, and intelligence, then you won't know the difference between intelligent and stupid.

For the record, I don't have a definition of intelligence. I don't know *precisely* what it is, I could defer that some IQ test is the most reliable measure of 'g' or 'general intelligence' but I am not confident, as such that that is synonymous with intelligence.

But I certainly would not confuse the winner of a foot race with the 'smartest' of the field of athletes. Until proved there was some way for intelligence to game a footrace. And maybe, at one point in history there was, like figuring out starting on all fours rather than flat footed, but that opportunity to somewhat outsmart a footrace has gone.

I don't know if there are people and pundits that think Trump is a genius and Hillary is a dumb-dumb. Probably, following a 'stupid is as stupid does'.

But a democratic election is not an IQ test, or even approaches an intelligence test. 

For example, often socialist policies are poo-pooed with "I don't know how they are going to pay for [universal healthcare/student debt forgiveness/universal basic income/decarbonization etc.]" formally an 'argument from personal incredulity'. And people persuade themselves to vote on such an argument.

Voters don't understand how inflation happens, why wages stagnate and the difference between government and household expenditure (austerity). 

As such, we can say a general election is as much a test of intelligence as it is a test of intuition or a test of stupidity.

Sooner or later, counterfeit bills will be detected by some kind of machine. At some point, an undocumented illegal immigrant might be forced to use a service that determines their citizenship. We don't have any systems to screen political candidates for stupidity, narcissism.

What is happening in a general election, is like if I said I had a million dollars, and we determined if my wealth was real based on a polling of maybe thousands of experts and millions of non-experts, where expert and non-expert votes count the same.

The Narcissism Pretzel

We are probably living through a time, where this needs to be figured out, and someone is trying to figure it out. Narcissists and psychopaths tend to be good at climbing corporate ladders. It may be the most egregious failings of a 'science of recruiting' that is still pretty much in the dark ages.

Shareholders do not want narcissists and psychopaths to be their CEOs, MDs and Chairmen because narcissists do not perform. They are self serving. 

But how do you screen for narcissists? 

First problem, is the diagnosis isn't a precise science. Second problem, currently you aren't supposed to diagnose anybody that you aren't treating. Third problem, in the long history of expert witnesses in court cases we often see that experts for the defence and prosecution produce the diagnoses that tend to work best for the side that hired them.

Forth problem, with something like political office, is how do you prevent such a screen from being weaponized? Psychology has a long dark history of being used to silence political opponents.

To be able to screen for narcissism in a safe, secure, impartial and reliable way - like blind orchestral auditions - would be a monumental change. Like it wouldn't eliminate Trump and Trump-like characters. It would likely mean just about every politician you can think of would never have been in contention, at least recently. It likely wouldn't have been Trump-Biden, Trump-Clinton, Obama-Romney...maybe McCain-Somebody, probably not Bush-Kerry, Bush-Gore, Clinton-Dole or Clinton-Bush Snr.

I probably at this point need to point out, I'm talking about screening for Narcissism, not Intelligence now.

But the point is, I don't know how to screen for narcissism in an election without taking power from the people.

But people voting in a narcissist is people surrendering their own power. And not voting as a 'protest' vote just hands power to narcissists also.

These are limitations of democracy that probably - go back to Socrates. The old letting people vote for a doctor that says 'eat your vegatables' or an ice cream vendor that says 'ice cream for breakfast!'

Conclusion

Concluding that a termite must be clever, and worth following anywhere because it eats a timber frame and the building gets condemned, is stupid, stupid and dangerous. People are impressed, it seems, by victories more so than character.

Very dangerous, is that when architects inspect the ruin and suggest 'we need some kind of chemical treatment to prevent termites from eating this frame.' People say 'yeah well the house fell down so what the fuck do you know?'

When conmen beat a system, they have proved the system is flawed, not that they are a viable alternative to that system.

And in much the same way I don't have a definition of 'stupid' either. When I evaluate someone as relatively intelligent, its almost always on some intuitive basis. "almost always"..? I don't have any other means by which to assess intelligence, that then... was a pretty stupid thing of me to say.

All this is to the point that by-and-large I just. don't. fucking. care. I don't care much about intelligence. 

The past two years, correction, six years, have provided an abundance of data that through the process of induction: that I and dare I say we shouldn't care much about intelligence. 

The cream doesn't rise to the top. If you're so smart, why aren't you rich? etc.

It's for me, a very destabilizing idea which brings a temptation to shore up my perception of the world by assuming that we should care about intelligence.*

*by 'care' here I mean like people 'care' about beauty.