Intelligence Showboating 🧠

🎵 The song for this post is Corazón / Death By Disco, by TOKiMONSTA 🎵

In a group chat, Saurya shared an article on "high IQ groups" like Mensa (and why they frequently fail), which got me thinking about intelligence. I think it's important to have shared context when using language with someone: if I'm talking about horses, it really matters that we both have an idea of what a "horse" is. But "intelligence" has giant skew to how different people understand it, and I in particular make a lot of subtle distinctions between it, related words, and how much importance we place on it. I thought I'd sketch them out.

(title comes in homage to an article I wrote 7 (!!) years ago, on shitty cultural "tells" that a software engineer is trying to win status and seem better than they are)

Cleverness vs. Intelligence vs. Wisdom vs. "Smart" vs. Knowledgeable vs. Curious

What most people call "intelligence," I call "cleverness." Cleverness is the use of your brain to do tricks, and here's the important part, toward tactical ends, independent of reaching or communicating a truth. If you want to get a certain outcome, a person can use cleverness to make it happen. If they want a different outcome, they'll apply cleverness a different way. To quote Groucho Marx: "I have principles. And if you don't like these, I have others!"

My favorite example is the late Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia. Consensus is that he's very smart, but I prefer to use "clever" for how he operated. He could spin words effectively to argue anything. You'll find very little rhyme or reason about his feelings on the law based on his rulings: sometimes, he was a Constitutional originalist, ignoring what modern societies knew to be true and pretending he was back in the late 1700's. Other times, he'd argue using points using case law from the 2000's. But however he ruled, you always knew what he ruled: whatever benefited Republicans. Whether this was something he did consciously or not isn't important, the idea is: rather than have a consistent version of law (what I would call "smart," since it's based in some principle or seeking some truth), he was an eloquent user of "cleverness tricks" to get what he wanted. Most people took him at his word because each of his rulings were extremely well-crafted, and people call that smart, but I stop short.

Beware clever people! They can rationalize anything!

I use the word Intelligence in the Dungeons & Dragons way: someone who's got a big collection of facts, a capacity to collect more, and the ability to make connections between those facts. In D&D, your intelligence score feeds how many languages you know, how well you can solve puzzles, how much history you can cite. Whether the facts are useful is a completely independent variable.

Intelligence differs from Wisdom, which is your ability to understand deep or spiritual truths in or about life, outside the purview of "having facts." So a character with the following combinations will have these properties:

• High Intelligence, High Wisdom: Person knows a lot of facts, but also can listen empathetically and has self-awareness. Has "book smarts" and "street smarts."

• High Intelligence, Low Wisdom: That man or woman who's really good at Math or escape rooms, but is easily swindled by online scams, or says "I'm a really good dancer" and dances like Elaine from Seinfeld.

• Low Intelligence, High Wisdom: person always says the most prescient thing in a conversation, even if it's in simple language. They know when someone's lying, even if they don't know the subject matter that person is even talking about.

• Low Intelligence, Low Wisdom: if they have any charisma, it's by being a sweet golden retriever. They say words wrong and often misjudge a situation, but it's kind of adorable when they do it.

My favorite example of "high intelligence score" would be Ken Jennings. I happen to like him for a million reasons and think he's probably also got a high Wisdom score, but he was the biggest winner of Jeopardy the game's ever produced. He might not be immediately flashy with all of tricks like the other examples I'll list here, but you can't deny the man knows a lot, about a lot of things.

Another example of "looks like Smart to a lot of people, but isn't" is what I call "debate brain." This is people who learned a lot about how to argue but often lose the plot of whatever they're arguing, but to outside observers, it's good enough to just watch them perform. You meet these people a lot in law school.

The strongest example of this is Ben Shapiro, who's been making content for decades. The best dissection of his game, demonstrating its utter stupidity, comes from this article, which I can't recommend enough. The tl;dr is that, like someone doing Three-card monte, he's all about misdirection and speed. "Debate brain" differs from cleverness in that you normally don't even need to be that clever to play "debate." Scalia had to write articles that could be read deeply by very intelligent people and witstand scrutiny; Ben's shit rarely makes sense if you stop and think about it for a second, but he knows (and relies on the fact that) most won't do that. From the article:

Having surveyed Shapiro's work, and pointed out the various ways in which he is not terribly logical, not terribly consistent, and not terribly well-informed (in addition to being not terribly humane), it is worth asking why so many people think of him as a "principled" and "brilliant" dismantler of arguments. The answer, it seems to me, is largely that Shapiro is a very confident person who speaks quickly. If he weren't either of these things, he wouldn't seem nearly as intelligent. Because he doesn't care about whether he's right, but about whether he destroys you, he uses a few effective lawyerly tricks: insist that there's "no evidence whatsoever" something is true, demand the other side produce such evidence, and when they stammer "Buh-buh-buh" for two seconds, quickly interrupt with "See? What did I tell you? No evidence." Or, just pluck some random numbers from a study, even if they're totally false or misleading, e.g. "40% of transgender people commit suicide and the risk doesn't go down if they are treated better," which was nonsense but sounded good. Cross-examine people with aggressive questions that confuse them: Are you a moose? I said: are you a moose? No? I didn't think so. I rest my case. Use shifting burdens of proof: demand a wealth of statistical evidence before you will admit that black people face any unique hardships, but respond to every criticism of the Israeli government by calling the speaker a "proven" and "undeniable" anti-Semite. Disregard all facts that contradict your case, but insist constantly that the other side despises facts and can't handle the truth. Call your opponents "nasty," "evil," "brainless" "jackasses." All of these techniques work very well, and with them, you, too, can soon be Owning and Destroying your political opponents on camera. (I would probably lose a debate with Ben Shapiro quite badly, as my instinct in public conversations is to try to listen to people.)

A lot of people think he's some kind of intellectual, because he's got a collection of rhetorical tricks (different than cleverness tricks like Scalia! and both of these are different from having access to facts!).

Which leads to another distinction I see people making...

Fast Brain vs. Good Brain

There is so much conflation of "fast brain" with "good brain." But it's not true! Just because your brain works fast, does not mean it works well!

I see this a lot because most people in my profession, college major, and life, are not neurotypical. I've been precocious my whole life, and dedicated vast sums of time and money in my life trying to manage a fast brain that frequently feels unpleasant.

As for why many people think Fast Brain means Smart: most intelligence assessment (college exams, standardized tests) are timed. Most classroom settings ask kids to raise their hands and you can see who raised it first. We perform our conversations in real-time, so you can see people "putting it together" or crafting a response, and some will be faster.

But this is like saying "the best runner" is determined from observing how fast they can sprint 30 meters. This can tell you who can sprint well. But much of life is a marathon, or a 5k, or even just a hike but across difficult terrain or low-oxygen environments. Similarly, the places we use our brains, or have to be creative, are extremely varied. It's very tempting to believe fast thinkers are good thinkers, but like the Ben example above, there's no guarantee that what they're saying makes a whole lot of sense.

Most people with fast brains also struggle to sit with a subject long enough to get deep in it. There was a really funny phenomenon in the crypto world late in the last decade: its leaders hated reading books, and they seemed to think you were smarter if you didn't do it. Here's a favorite quote by Sam Bankman-Fried, absolute legend in the "dumb guy who convinced other dumb people he was a singular genius" game:

"Oh, yeah?" says SBF. "I would never read a book." [...] "I'm very skeptical of books. I don't want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that," explains SBF. "I think, if you wrote a book, you fucked up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post."

also Vitalik Buterin, the inventor of Ethereum:

Question for people who argue that reading long-form books is virtuous or even necessary:

Are podcasts an acceptable substitute? If not, why not, and what even is the difference between a podcast and an audiobook?

(I frequently listen to both)

Now, look: many people write too damn much. Many books (especially in the business section of airport bookstores) have ideas padded with fluff to get to "book size" and sell more. But many subjects in life require you to read a lot, and that's all there is to it. You can't make a baby in less than 9 months, and you can't understand a complicated topic without ingesting a ton of information (or having experience with it) and mulling over it. You might get a quick dopamine hit from reading a summary but a summary is not the knowledge; it's literally a summary.

(someone please tell this to users of chatbots, please)

This one hits personally, because many people in my life are perfectly intelligent, but lived most of their lives believing they were stupid just because they weren't fast. And I've been surrounded by people who were fast, and they let that convince themselves that they had anything meaningful to say.

Haughty and overwrought talk

Last set of people I'll write up who get branded as "smart," but I don't give them that: people who overwrite, use haughty language, act aloof while prefacing everything they say with "clearly"... things that, again, that aren't about reaching a real truth (because the arguments are usually incoherent anyway) but about presenting "class" or intelligence through form.

There's an old joke that Trump is "an idiot's idea of what a rich person would live like." Steak every day!! Everything is covered in gold!! I live in a giant tower!!! Everyone has to wear a suit!! It's all about presentation and gaudy excess, but the realities of living and having resources mean most people don't want that life. It's a childlike idea of being Powerful and Rich, and he wears it like a costume.

There's a class of intellectual who's the same about what they think "smart" looks like, usually someone who's writing "good essays" according to what many of us thought that looked like in High School. Thesaurus language. Presenting authoritative confidence in what you say. Avoiding fun or colorful language. Self-importance.

Then there's tropes of laziness: the royal "we," implying agreement with a reader who never explicitly agreed. Referencing pop culture ideas of subject matter the person doesn't know anything about, or wasn't alive for ("we used to believe...", followed by a very simple treatment of the subject that's ahistorical. e.g. considering the Spartans as badasses, when they actually weren't anything special. If anything, they were losers you don't want to emulate). These are both big Malcolm Gladwell tropes.

While this section describes most political commentators of all stripes, I experience it most with "American conservative intelligensia," a dying breed, since its become clear they don't have a constituency: actual smart people can see through these tricks pretty well, hate the positions they take, and Republican voters/funders realized they can achieve their goals with angry, anti-intellectual maniacs. But there's so many of them:

• Bret Stephens (writes really boring, almost like he thinks that's what Good Writing is. Besides his legendary pettiness and odious positions, I just can't make it through his wretched columns because they're just too boring).

• Newt Gingrich, who loved to say "clearly..." before every claim; doesn't argue the claims with facts or arguments.

• William F. Buckley. Watching that James Baldwin debate... why can't he talk normal? Besides the affect of his voice, most of his writing is, again, confident and aloof, while his actual arguments are shallow.

• Thomas Chatterton Williams. His writing sucks in the ways described above, and his arguments are frequently nonsensical. But I think he gets work because his name is like an LLM tried to come up "pretentious intellectual," and he can claim Black heritage while pushing Black culture down.

The example that was most clear to me on this is Kevin Williamson. He got a job offer for The Atlantic on being a conservative who wrote in complete sentences, but they never did read enough of his work to see that he argued, sincerely and in many places, that women should be hanged for abortion. Like the Shapiro piece above, there are catalogues of his cruel, dipshit views, but the reason he was able to get on for so long was because his claims are always wrapped in Polite, Overwrought Language.

There's so much more to this

I'll stop writing for now because this is long enough, maybe I write a companion piece later (I have notes on "why are people obsessed with intelligence anyway?" and the limits of intelligence). But please: consider that "smart," "clever," "intelligent," "wise," and other related concepts aren't strictly interchangeable. You don't have to use my categories or taxonimies, but I find it useful to avoid getting fooled by cruel jerks.