Why are smart people so stupid about politics? There's a good reason.

If you a smart person (a reader of this Substack, for example!) you may have noticed a bizarre phenomenon about people. Often there is a huge gap between a person’s intelligence (as reflected in IQ or just their competence at work or play) and the vapid idiocy they display when discussing politics or economics or history.

Why is that? Why is a person’s day-to-day IQ usually so much higher than their “political” IQ?

Well, there’s an obvious reason for that. It’s that the intelligence a person displays in their normal life actually matters. Political beliefs or historical facts or economic understanding… don’t. At least not immediately so. These latter things are more “recreational beliefs”.

When working at your job or playing the guitar or navigating a city, you’re acting in the real world. You receive immediate feedback on what you think and what you do. This allows you to correct errors and get better at a task. You get smarter about it. Your “observed IQ” (if that’s a thing) rises the more you do a thing.

Political beliefs aren’t attached to the real world in such a direct way. They’re much more abstract. Being “smart” about crossing a busy street has direct, immediate, real-world impacts in a way that being “smart” about the causes of WWI or the meaning of the Laffer curve or the virtues of political decentralization doesn’t.

That’s why your friend who is a super smart and capable heart surgeon who can also juggle and tell hilarious jokes can also be found saying things about politics that are border-line idiotic.

Feedback matters.

And it has to be meaningful feedback too. When you tell your doctor friend he’s saying dumb things based on lies and logical fallacies, it has much less impact on his mental “course-correction” circuits than if he drops the juggling pin or his patient dies on the table.

You are just noise. The real world provides feedback.

So, what can be done about this problem? After all, it’s not that correctly understanding history, economics, and political philosophy is unimportant. In a deep way, these things are among the most important things. If we get these wrong, we can’t have heart surgeons or leisure time in which to juggle or learn to play the guitar.

So, how do we align things so that people’s “political IQ” isn’t so much lower than their actual IQ?

The solution isn’t to get everybody to study these things as much as weirdos like me (and probably you). The solution is to rebuild our institutions and our culture such that “normies” absorb these truths almost by osmosis.

That’s what church used to do. It’s what families used to do. It’s what universities used to do. It’s what your employer and even your friends used to do. Even if you’re just studying science or business or musical theater, if the culture promotes healthy political norms, it’ll be “in the air you breathe”.

Right now, what normies are absorbing via osmosis is poisonous.

And I have no quick answers as to how to fix the problem. Maybe we use government force to make everybody read this Substack every day?

Lol. Nah.

Naturally,

Adam