Crackpots #21: Of Musks and Men (Patreon)

There’s been a lot of hubbub lately on the subject of “intelligence,” whether in humans or machines. Intelligence seems like a simple concept; we can intuitively grasp that some mental tasks are more difficult than others, and some people demonstrate better ability than others to perform the difficult ones. But there’s a lot that gets smuggled in or elided in this casual usage. And what people think about intelligence can profoundly shape the way society is structured. So what is intelligence? Can we measure it? Are there different types? Is Elon Musk intelligent? Are you? Am I? Questions abound.

It seems widely agreed-upon by those who study intelligence that it comes in different forms. “G factor” is the label some have given to what might be casually referred to as “general intelligence.” The idea is that while there are many discrete categories of cognitive ability, and a person can be stronger in some than others, a person’s abilities in different domains seem to be correlated. This general mental acuity is what intelligence tests purport to quantify.

Elon Musk’s public image, like that of many other tech moguls, rests on the idea of him as a singular genius. He’s Tony Stark, a brilliant philanthropist engineer, solving the problems of humanity and ushering in a better, shinier future. His fans see him as perceptive, analytical, and broadly competent:

His detractors see him as an addled conman, taking credit for the efforts of his more-intelligent or harder-working colleagues and employees.

In a recent essay, Nate Silver examines the question of Elon’s intelligence. He concludes that Musk is highly intelligent overall, while having significant deficits in certain domains. I find this fascinating not just as it relates to Musk, but also because he is representative of a type that’s prevalent in and around Silicon Valley, and the tech industry now so influential in shaping society. Plus, being a person of tech experience, I used to work with and around a lot of people like this.

Silver cites a few examples in support of Elon’s putatively above-average intelligence. The most laughable one is the frequency with which Elon tweets, which is according to Silver proof that he has very high mental bandwidth and excels at multitasking. If tweeting at all hours of the day were proof of a powerful intellect, a lot of mentally ill people who I follow ought to be receiving genius grants. This is an especially absurd claim when you consider the content of Elon’s tweets — at the time of this writing, his three most recent tweets are as follows:

“Wow”

😳

💯

These are all quote tweets, communicating littler other than agreement with someone else, and they seem representative of his output in general. It’s difficult to find a tweet from Elon that expresses a complete, self-contained thought of any kind. I’m sure that you, dear reader, need little convincing here, but these are not crystalline nuggets of wisdom bursting forth from the fast-paced psyche of a supergenius, but at best the lazy engagement-baiting of an ineloquent social media addict.

Silver’s most solidly defensible assertion in Elon’s favor is that Elon possesses a high degree of “instrumental rationality,” which essentially means that he’s good at achieving his goals. He’s made a lot of money, run a bunch of companies, and gotten his hands on state power. I think that this quality is often at the core, if it doesn’t make up the entirety, of what people are thinking about when they attribute high intelligence to public figures like Elon. These people are wealthy, successful, and powerful because they’re smart, and society rightly rewards intelligence and ingenuity, or so the thinking goes. It’s easy to see why the ruling class would prefer for this idea to be widely accepted.

It probably goes without saying that I don’t think this idea stands up to scrutiny. The cliche of the genius innovator who reshapes the world in his image on the strength of his intellect exists in tension with another cliche: the bedraggled supergenius, destined to be penniless and unknown, his immense mental prowess rendering him unable to function within the expectations of society. My reaction to the idea that accomplishment is demonstrative of intelligence is perhaps best expressed by a line from the film The Tao of Steve (2000):

“Doing stuff is overrated. Like Hitler, he did a lot. But don't we all wish he would’ve just stayed home and gotten stoned?”

The logic that success naturally follows from intelligence is also inherent to The Bell Curve, a landmark tome for the modern race scientist, and espoused by the “human biodiversity” (read: eugenics) movement now popular on the online right. They believe that disparities in life outcomes are best explained by differences in intelligence, rather than e.g. by the operation of social forces, oppression, or material inequalities.

Along similar lines, I recently encountered some techie types on Twitter referring to what they called “The Sort.” It’s a metaphor that casts various social institutions, like schooling and corporate ladders, as one giant sorting algorithm, testing each person’s aptitude and sorting them where they naturally belong. It takes the idea of meritocracy, a distasteful term due to being redolent of the humanities, and grants it respectability via a technical veneer. The tweet where I encountered this usage, which I can’t locate now, was in response to an assertion that book clubs and reading groups used to be much more common than today, even among farmers and blue-collar workers. The reply posited that the reason this doesn’t happen anymore is because The Sort has become so efficient; hardly anyone with the intellectual capacity for a reading group would be in today’s working class because they’ve all been sorted into more financially rewarding and intellectually stimulating work, as is proper.

I imagine most of us would agree that modern liberal democracies are more meritocratic than, say, feudalism, and that the US is more functionally meritocratic now than during the Jim Crow era. But I think most left-wingers would find these Sort-faithful to be fairly panglossian in their assessment of just how well the machinery is functioning. Stephen Jay Gould, author of The Mismeasure of Man, was a critic of IQ as a meaningful measurement, arguing that “general intelligence” is a mirage. He wrote:

“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops."

But despite its unfortunate associations, conceiving of intelligence as a quantifiable trait is a difficult habit to kick; and all else aside, I think it’s often useful for an individual to develop an awareness of their own intellectual advantages and disadvantages. Noticing these patterns in myself has been valuable to me; I’ve been able to pursue the things I’m good at, and develop strategies to better handle myself in domains where I tend to struggle.

There’s a running internet joke about the ability to mentally rotate shapes, describing people who can do this well as “shapecels,” ostensibly superior to “wordcels.” These types of tasks are common on IQ tests — or so I’m led to believe, having never actually taken one. I’ve long ago made peace with the fact that I’m not good at this type of spatial reasoning. I remember being a kid and having a hard time learning how to tie knots: I’d follow the first couple of steps and then just get lost. I’d lose track of where the ends were going, or how to mentally map the actions of the instructor or diagram onto the string in my hands. I also get lost very easily when navigating through the world. My mom used to make fun of me for regularly losing my way in our local mall as a kid, although I think malls are in general very easy places to get lost in, which makes that a poor example for her conclusion. 

With time, though, I've become better able to cope with challenges like this. I’ve developed both the patience to slow down, and the persistence to keep trying. This persistence recently led to me learning to tie a bowtie, which I was very proud of. When I’m writing code related to geometric transformations, as in e.g. image manipulation — something I’ve been doing a fair amount of lately — I’ve learned to step back from the code and draw a diagram when I start to feel overwhelmed, rather than continuing to bang my head against a problem I’m struggling to visualize. This produces a lot of insane-looking notebook pages, but has also saved me a lot of frustration.

So I’m not good at rotating shapes in my mind. But I excel at other things. I tend to have a facility with language, which I view as a common thread between speaking, writing, programming, and music. I’m good at self-directing and teaching myself new skills. And above all, I’m good at the things that really matter: laughing, chilling, and hanging out.

Until next time,

Yung Chomsky