"Intelligence is a Weapon, Not a Virtue" · 4:19pm Mar 3rd, 2023
You ever have a conversation with someone, and they just say a sentence that wakes you up? It feels like having a bucket of water thrown at your face, and you’re like, fuck, that’s it.
“Intelligence is a weapon, not a virtue” hit me like that. I can’t even remember what the conversation was about, it was months ago now, but I’ve been thinking about that line ever since.
See, there’s this thing Orson Welles talked about, ‘Shuteyes’. He tried to do cold reading for a day, knowing he was a fraud for doing it, and by the end of the day he started to wonder if he genuinely had psychic powers - and that’s when he shut down the experiment, hard. Shuteye is the name for it, psychic scammers who start buying what they’re selling.
He spent all day getting positive reinforcement from the people he was scamming that he was good at it, that he was right. He only got that positive reinforcement because he was intelligent and charismatic enough to be that good at the forgery, which gave him the evidence that started to convince him. Instead of intelligence protecting him from the consequences of the act, it was the very thing that made it so dangerous.
I read a book on con artistry years later, and its author made an incredible point; You don’t actually avoid intelligent marks. They’re the ones most likely to go for your act - out of spite, contrarianism, whatever. And there was a follow-up too: The most intelligent people are the most capable of self-deception. They’ll come up with better reasons they weren’t tricked than you ever could, and they’ll argue against anyone trying to convince them they were scammed too well to be talked out of it.
And that’s the thing, isn’t it?
Intelligence is a weapon. The pen isn’t ‘mightier than’ the sword - it is a sword, just of a different kind.
I think that’s valuable in its own way. There’s a value to being armed - to being able to defend yourself and others. But if you just think of intelligence as a virtue, that’s not how you’re going to contextualize wielding it. It means you’re going to think of any advantage it gives you as proof of the goodness of your position.
The problem is that believing a weapon has a moral character justifies its use.
If you think of intelligence as a virtue then any beat down you do with it is justified by winning. The smarter person’s got to be backing the smarter side, right? There’s an obvious tautology there.
But I mention the con-artistry book for a reason. Because it was a book about teaching con-artistry, for fun and profit. And one of the big justifications of con-artists is that, well… You’re not hurting anyone more than they’re letting themselves be hurt. They’re suckers. You’re only going to make as much from the act as you earn, from being that much smarter, that much more silver tongued. Basically, being able to do it is the whole justification for doing it. The moral character of the weapon justifies its use, even for obviously immoral ends.
I think this is something that’s lost in a lot of arguments about ‘finance bros’ and ‘crypto bros’. Even in all the criticisms, the moral character of the weapon is still recognized - that is, these guys can’t really be all that smart, because they’re morally compromised. Or, it’s why they’ll inevitably fail.
Nah. A lot of them really are that smart, that well-educated. It’s because of that they’re able to get into such morally compromised positions, and lose as much as they do. They used to call the heads of Enron “The smartest guys in the room”, and that’s what the best documentary made about them is called because of it. Does the fact they were fraudsters whose company collapsed make them less smart?
Absolutely not. We just live in a world where Enron’s something really smart people can think is a good idea. That’s not something fixed with more education. If those guys had been smarter, they’d have just run a better scam that ran longer, did more damage. LIke Bernie Madoff did, for instance.
This isn’t just about who benefits from seeing intelligence as a virtue, though, it’s about who that belief victimizes. I think a lot of this ends up being the appeal of those shitty debate guy videos from a while back, the stuff Crowder and Ben Shapiro used to run. The ability to use education, eloquence and intelligence to win a debate ends up proving the moral character of the debate - else you couldn’t win that way, right? So, losing a debate is immoral.
That ends up as the justification for ignoring people for how they present themselves, and this ends up seeing emotional arguments as disregarded from the outset. There’s a danger in valuing reason as entirely above emotion - ignoring an empathetic person in favour of a more intelligent one is something done all the time, even in situations where the emotional logic is more important.
Also, obviously, it’s a lot easier to make an unemotional argument from a position of relative power and comfort. It’s a lot easier to dismiss arguments made in anger when you’ve got less to be mad about.
And there it is, right?
There’s a special kind of risk of brain rot that comes with the whole thing: Defend enough points often enough, and you stop associating negative feedback as a sign that you’re wrong. It just becomes your default expectation for saying stuff, stuff you might end up being right about. And if you’re actually smart, you’re going to be wanting to put forth a lot of opinions, and if you’re actually smart you’re going to be really good at defending those opinions, even when you’re wrong. Daniel Kahneman observes that analysts grow more confident in their abilities based on how many takes they make, regardless of how many they end up right or wrong about.
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness.
That’s why it’s so useful to think of it as a weapon, I think. It’s too good at letting you win fights you need to lose. It’s too good at protecting you from criticism you really should be listening to.
And if you’re going to be swinging weapons at people, then it’s no substitute for real virtues. They’re the only things that’ll make sure you’re defending the right ideas, the right positions, the right people. It’s how you’ll know when it’s better to just put the damn weapon down, in fact.
It’s the problem with stuff like kindness, humility, temperance and patience. Way less sexy. You don’t get to beat up on other people with them, and there’s no fun in that.
But like, I think of all the problems I still have in my life, and I don’t think ‘being smarter’ would solve any of them. Everything good I have right now has come from figuring those other things out, instead.
A mightier kind. You with a sword can only kill the guy in front of you. You with a pen can kill millions. That's always how I frame that quote, and it's even more obvious here.
I was considered a smart kid. In hindsight it's clear that neither the being smart nor the being considered smart did me any good whatsoever. Being smart doesn't necessarily mean that you're right about something. But it might mean that you're really good at convincing yourself of things that aren't true.
(Cue the social media age, and a boatload of memes about the Gifted Child-to-Neurotic Adult-pipeline.)
Pretty strong worded argument why a person should read more and have polarized interests in life
And that is acute observation! As a person prone to debate, I've felled into this trap more then once.
I think I got better.
All in all, knowing few persons who dabbled into something shady, can relate to it all.
That's a wonderful way of putting it. I'm prone to the whole World of Cardboard version of it myself - intelligence gives you /power/, and wield it heedlessly and you will break things.
And that means you have the gift of being powerful, and the curse of existing in a world that requires you to hold that power back, constantly, less you break something.
Having to walk softly all the time is tiring. It makes me feel resentful, a lot, because I've worked to develop that empathy, to learn just how much I can let out with any given person.
Being the adult in the room most of the time sucks. Being an actual leader sucks, a shitton of the time. But...taking that responsibility lets you make things better.
But I would propose one different view : Intellect can be forged into a weapon, yes. And we have a society that does just that.
But like any forged thing, you can melt it down and reforge it into something anew. And molding it into a tool doesn't stop you from using it as a weapon again - a shovel can still easily crack skulls - but it's a little harder to do so, takes a little more deliberate effort, and meanwhile there are tons of things that need a shovel. And best of all, it doesn't have to be just a shovel, it can be forged into an intellectual multitool containing an array of things you can bring out as needed.
Anyways, I've noticed the melody of your writing changing, especially in the last 6 months or so, and...
The you I knew years ago constantly wielded intellect as a weapon. I was honestly afraid of you, because I'd had that weapon turned on me when I stumbled for one reason or another.
But I see you reforging it into your own toolset in real time, and that is really cool to witness.
This is wrong, though? Like, why should I accept this framing on their part? They've fucked up and made a mistake here.
I reject this logic in its entirety, I think. Having a virtue doesn't automatically justify you do anything with it. It's considered virtuous to live a healthy lifestyle and keep yourself in shape to the greatest extent you're able... but that wouldn't mean "hey, I'm healthy and strong, so that justifies using my health and strength to prey on the sick and weak, because my virtue trumps their lack of it."
Someone who thinks their intelligence justifies preying on those with a lack of it possesses a virtue, but they also possess a giant vice in the form of, you know, their grotesque sociopathy.
I feel like you keep conflating "virtue" and "moral correctness." Those aren't the same things. You keep makin the implicit argument that seems to me to be something like "if intelligence is a virtue, than being intelligent makes you more moral than those who are not, and that's clearly wrong and bad, so we can't conceive of intelligence as a virtue" and if so, I think I reject that logic chain.
I have literally never seen this argument, not once, not ever. I have only ever seen (and made) the argument "these guys can't be all that smart because they're doing things that are manifestly dumb as hell, their arguments are transparently idiotic, their ideology is suspect, and ultimately, all this isn't going to make them rich like they want to be; it's going to make them broke, and possibly also send them to prison."
Their moral calumny is a completely separate issue. There are in fact crypto bros who are not at all morally compromised; they genuinely do believe in a brave new world of distributed, transparent finance for ideologically reasons that, while often questionable, aren't necessarily vile, and conduct their trading in moral and ethical way. That's a separate issue from whether or not getting into crypto is dumb, tho.
Er, yes? By definition it does?
If you do crimes that putatively less smart people can look at and go "of course you ended up in prison, its a miracle you didn't earlier" then by definition you have done some stupendously dumb shit. Enron's crimes weren't smart. They aren't even smart by the definition of "smart criminals don't get caught," which I find facile; plenty of smart criminals have been caught. They're just straight dumb. Enron's dudes were smart in many other ways but not when it came to their criming.
A lot of this post seems like it wants to veer into the ancient "is intelligence the same as wisdom?" debate. To which my answer has always been "if you aren't wise, you aren't that smart."
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I definitely do, deliberately. Agree they're not the same thing, but I think there's definite overlap in how most people understand them. And if you disagree with that, then I can see most of this falling apart for you. But I mean it in both senses - I was explicitly raised to see intelligence as the only moral compass worth keeping, and I know that's not a unique mindset. Last time I attended an economics conference I'd go so far as to call it the default, there.
Still, though, think this is worth replying to - because I agree that wisdom is a factor in smart, but I want to value considering more deliberate cultivation of morality here, not just better thinking. If the point of this is to target technocrats, then advocating for wisdom isn't attacking the tree at the root.
Which is to say - If wisdom is folded into the smarts umbrella, and then I'm advocating for wisdom, then there's no coherent call to action here, right?
Like the reason I framed the Enron stuff as I did is because if you go by failure, then someone's not questioning their wisdom until there's an obvious point of failure. There's no prophylactic to take. Likewise, if you write these people off because they failed, then there's nothing to interrogate about intelligence absolutely failing to prevent making mistakes like that. Enron being dumb in their criming doesn't undo that they were very intelligent people doing the dumb thing. Or at least able to convincingly pass as that for years.
It was a problem better solved by those people not being assholes. Wisdom doesn't prevent that.
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Sure, but... those people are wrong. Or ignorant. In neither case should their framing be accepted, I think.
You're not wrong. I've seen this and I find it, well... grotesque. Intelligence is a virtue, but its a virtue without any particular moral component, in the same way that living cleanly is a virtue but doesn't have a moral component. Extolling it as not only a moral component but THE moral compass, the only one worth keeping, is so incredibly wrong I'd consider it immoral in and of itself.
Oh, sure, but if that's your angle I feel like you're sort of slipping up on this sideways; rather than approaching obliquely through a discussion of intelligence whether or not it is a virtue, you're better off with a straightforward call of "we need to encourage each other not to be assholes on the personal level, and on the structural level we need to try our best to build systems to find and stop assholery before it can cause too much damage when people are assholes anyway."
And then from there make an argument that one of the core components about assholery is confusing your intelligence with moral superiority.
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I think we mostly agree here, just, working out how to put it... I think I'm trying to say things I suspect you feel are so obvious they're not worth saying? And I'm considering who those things aren't obvious to, in what I'm saying.
Some people simply believe that intelligence equals moral correctness equals virtue.
Many of the most vile and evil people in history were above average intelligent. Some insanely smart.
Intelligence is a double edged sword that can only be wielded properly in the presence of actual virtues, but it seems like a common theme that past a certain point it is used as a defensible substitute for those instead.
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I'd argue they are distinctly different. I have met wise people who were Not Smart, and I know plenty of smart idiots. Intelligence asks 'What, where, when, and how?' all the time, but it's Wisdom that asks shit like 'Why?' and 'Is this a good idea?' and like...
You can be really smart - aka capable of grasping new info quite fast - but still quite foolish and unwise, in that you mistake that intelligence for knowledge. Having capacity doesn't mean you've trained that capacity.
Indeed. Much like how athleticism or other talents can be used for good or ill.
There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.”
—George Orwell
Enron was a special example where the US justice system rewarded the guilty and punished the innocent, ignoring the massive fraud and focusing the full force of the law on defendants who made minor paperwork errors on a small project that actually made money. Licensed to Lie by Sidney Powell puts the facts out quite well in that regard.
Success breeds arrogance and contempt for all other positions. The worst offenders in Enron *made money* and therefore must have been doing something right even when later they were found to be cooking the books hard. Andrew Weissmann made his marks in the DOJ by getting several massive wins even though later they were thrown out 9-0 at the Supreme Court.
Hit the library. Read the book along with this one. Anything that Weissmann touches turns to slime.
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Reminds me. There's a case in the supreme court at the moment about how much websites are liable for positions held by users, and how legally exposed moderators are. The law being debated was penned in response to Jordan Belfort - the Wolf of Wallstreet guy - successfully suing an internet service for libel for hosting people accurately describing the fraud his company was doing, won millions. And people got really mad about that.
Reading Harry Markopolos perspective of the Bernie Madoff case isn't much better. Ditto the only guy going to jail over the LIBOR collusion being the whistleblower. Bloody messes, the lot of them.
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I would...be very skeptical of anything created by Sidney Powell given the last 3 years. Perhaps Licensed to Lie is an actually useful book, but given the actions of its author I simply cannot ever see anything she pens with any amount of credibility.
Okay but I spent fifteen years cultivating the aesthetics of intelligence and if I can't use it to be better than other people on the internet when what even was the point?
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Tricking people into giving you a salary with a second comma in it, and then never having to explain what you actually do because they assume they wouldn't understand if you told them.
I've loved and read a lot of your stuff numbers, but this, of all of it, has probably been the most impactful for me.
Is there a way to like the post that is not a story? Because I want to like this very much.
Oh boy let's pull out all the people who think they're smart on the internet...
I accept the idea that intelligence is not something that makes you morally good - it's a tool you can use to achieve your ends that may or may not be moral - but I don't think that it's ever a double edged sword. Being smarter and behaving rationally makes you better able to achieve your goals, should you be able to identify what you want. If I see a counterargument that explains why a method is bad for trying to accomplish something, I should accept that feedback and pivot to a method that is more effective. Having someone point out that your moral framework is inconsistent is also easier to integrate and adjust to. However, having values that conflict with another person a priori (ex. I choose to value human experience assuming people's perspectives are equal by default) is not something that can be resolved via debate. I've necessarily assumed something by choice and my logic is built on top of that decision, which is where the chain of reasoning stops.
In short: being smart is not virtuous in itself, but more smart is always more useful.
Reading this reminded me of a Wisecrack video called Why are Smart People so Dumb. If you posit that intelligence is a weapon, this video says intelligence is a lucrative product.
Its main points were that:
I think the video is pretty good, it's definitely more thorough and complex than I make it out to be! I omitted some points for the sake of brevity like how... complex topics are overly simplified within those spaces to be more easily digestible to the audience.
It's only 20 minutes long if you wanna check it out! Thanks for this thoughtful piece!
Be correct in the face of negative feedback often enough and stronger negative feedback becomes a signal that you have a better idea than usual. As they said on the esteemed Richard and Mortimer, “Your boos mean nothing, for I have seen what makes you cheer.”
It doesn’t help that pretty much all online arguments are zero-stakes discussions of (occasionally) important topics. Even if you’re provably wrong, just continue on to spite the others in the chatroom. Nothing changes in the real world either way.
A parallel trap for the intelligent is an inability to develop a strong work ethic. Have enough teachers threaten that next year will be a major struggle if you don’t get your act together, and you’ll soon learn that what they have to say may apply to the average student, but their admonishments are irrelevant to you (until one day it’s not). /r/aftergifted has rare stories of this type (rare because its usual genre of post is by people who were never gifted in the first place flatlining in middle school after being in the elementary school gifted program).
Back when I was a kid there used to be these little potted histories of WWI and WWII called the Ballentine War Books Series. They were well-written, meticulously researched, copiously illustrated with many obscure period photographs, and printed as cheap paperbacks so everyone could afford them. But the most important thing about them is that they quoted, and sometimes were written by, people who had lived through the events they described.
The most depressing one was
m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51HZxJo9WPL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg
Because here was a a guy who had it all: overcame polio and poverty to take a PhD in the Humanities (Philology, as it turns out, which makes his subsequent duel with J.R.R. Tolkien all the more fraught), rose to Reichsminister fur Propaganda, the highest of heights in a movement that intended nothing less than to remake all of Western culture...
..and was totally evil, and a servant for evil, and is worth creating a soul for him and a hell, too, so his can live in it.
Dig: he had everything postwar secular culture said you needed to be good. And he was none of it.
How, then? How does Good survive?
Think
Neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices
Are fathered by our heroism. Virtues
Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes.
These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree.
Or maybe Lewis:
Nearly they stood who fall.
Themselves, when they look back,
See always in the track
One torturing spot where all
By a possible quick swerve
Of will yet unenslaved–
By the infinitesimal twitching of a nerve–
Might have been saved.
Nearly they fell who stand.
These with cold after-fear
Look back and note how near
They grazed the Siren’s land,
Wondering to think that fate,
By threads so spidery-fine,
The choice of ways so small, the event so great,
Should thus entwine.
How do we keep from turning into monsters? Only this: be on guard. For when Evil's most profound attentions come, they will not be easy to refuse.
EDIT:
Ohai my sister's a CPA and used to work for Enron. She got out a year before all the shit went down. Because, as she said, "I was finding nine-figure errors in the balance sheets while they were in the boardroom arguing over what color the "E" on the next shares certificate should be."
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"It could have been me, had I just <action>" is I think the root of why I try to practice empathy for all.
And yet, at the same time...you go "But it wasn't me, I chose differently, and I keep choosing differently"
And reconciling the two of those contradictory impulses is hard and uncomfortable and I don't see how it could be any other way. You keep the humility of knowing you could easily have fallen, but you also don't just excuse those who fell without demanding some form of change, I think.
It's a really good point
That's part of why I loved Cozy Glow as a villain. the Mane 6 weaponized friendship and defeated foe after foe, so of course someone would finally try to master friendship and use it against them in turn. There's no such thing as a one-sided sword, after all.
I'd be happier if it were phrased as "Intelligence is a tool, not a virtue." Weapons do have a sort of moral character because they are primarily designed to do harm, but tools can be used to destroy or to create. This may seem like pure semantics, but I think it really is an important distinction.
I don't think wisdom has any more inherent "goodness" than intelligence, either. Wisdom is just more accurate predictive modeling built up by intelligence and knowledge gained through experience. That makes it a great tool for making decisions that improve one's life and environment, which we usually consider "good", but employed by a person without compassion or empathy, it can be a powerful tool for manipulation. A wise old snake* can still have an enjoyable life while causing other people misery.
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*Apologies to actual snakes.
So as it turns out, being intelligent actually makes life harder because the brain has a bigger capacity for rationalising behaviours away.
You ever looked at a guy who achieved something great and think "That guy is so dumb, how in the world did he manage it?"
And the answer is right there! Being stupid makes getting somewhere with stuff easier. The brain is a lazy organ, it will come up with reasons not to expend energy, so if you're just going about stuff without thinking about how much effort something will take, it's easy to get started with things. Try it out for yourself the next time you're struggling with something. Just be stupid about it.
Anybody busy defending their opinion is far more egotistical then intelligent, because they'd recognize that arguing that their opinion is correct is not a very good use of their time.
"Thinking is a good servant, but a bad master."
This is the quote that got me thinking about how I was using my intelligence in all other areas of my life to the detriment of other skills. Because, again, the brain is a lazy organ and takes shortcuts. For example, if I was in a social situation, I would think about what is appropriate instead of feeling it out. Same sort of thing with being empathic, I could think about how a person's situation sucks and it would feel bad, but I couldn't emphasize with the person directly, maybe that sounds a bit weird.
So if you're like me, you definitely struggled a lot to grow as a person. So godspeed on that journey and the good fight.