In prior posts I’ve mentioned how much I’d like to see political polls that are limited to the smart, well-informed people. I have to confess, I thought I was stating a universal truth along the lines of “it’s better to have good health than poor health.” It seemed to me that being smart and well-informed was almost the same thing as being wise. Who doesn’t want the benefit of wisdom to inform their choices?
I was surprised at how many of my readers rushed to support the high quality of decisions made by stupid, uninformed people who are guided by superstition.
Some people accused me of being an elitist trying to assign a higher value to my own smarty-pants decisions. That’s a perfectly reasonable assumption, and I would have made it myself if I were in your Birkenstocks. But the truth is that I want to know the opinions of people who are both smarter and more informed than me. Why would I limit the quality of my advice to people who don’t know any more than I do?
Imagine choosing a doctor on that criterion. “Well, I’d like a brain surgeon who’s about as smart as I am and knows as much about brains as I do, and NO more.”
Still, I pride myself on being able to consider the merits of all points of view no matter how silly they seem on the surface. I asked myself this: If I were the lawyer representing the superstitious simpleton segment of the country, how would I argue that their opinions should be given the same weight as the people who are smart and well-informed? I took it as a challenge.
First I suppose I would point out how many great decisions have been made by dumb guys (Reagan) and crappy decisions made by smart guys (Carter). I’d hope you accepted my anecdotes as evidence and didn’t ask me for a chart showing the relative number of bad decisions made by morons versus geniuses. I’d tell you to go get your own data. And I’d hope you wouldn’t ask me how the Soviet Union would have lasted much longer regardless of who was President of the United States. That’s “changing the subject.”
I’d also refer to military studies done years ago where researchers compared the performances of small groups that had different compositions of intelligence. They found that the groups with the highest percentage of bright people performed the worst. Apparently all the smart people insisted they had the best ideas and nothing got done. The best performing groups were the ones where there was one smart person and the rest of the group deferred to him. Therefore, I would argue, too much intelligence ruins everything.
I’d hope you didn’t ask me to specify the source of that study because it’s something I heard 20 years ago and I might be remembering the conclusions backwards. I’d also hope to God you didn’t ask me to explain how that military small-group example is a good analogy to political opinion polls.
My best argument is the one that hurts me the most. For that you need some background. After college, I got my first job as a bank teller in the San Francisco financial district. My typical customers were titans of industry. They seemed pretty smart. I wondered how smart I was compared to them. Sure, I earned excellent grades in my tiny high school and small college, but how would I stack up in the real world? Was I smart enough to become a titan of industry?
I decided to take an I.Q. test administered by Mensa, the organization of geniuses. If you score in the top 2% of people who take that same test, you get to call yourself a “genius” and optionally join the group. I squeaked in and immediately joined so I could hang out with the other geniuses and do genius things. I even volunteered to host some meetings at my apartment.
Then, the horror.
It turns out that the people who join Mensa and attend meetings are, on average, not successful titans of industry. They are instead – and I say this with great affection – huge losers. I was making $735 per month and I was like frickin’ Goldfinger in this crowd. We had a guy who was some sort of poet who hoped to one day start “writing some of them down.” We had people who were literally too smart to hold a job. The rest of the group dressed too much like street people to ever get past security for a job interview. And everyone was always available for meetings on weekend nights.
But the members were, as advertised, geniuses. Mensa meetings are the strangest experience. No one ever has to explain anything twice. That’s a bigger deal than you might think. Your typical day is full of moments where you ask for a cup of coffee and someone hands you a bag of nails. You don’t realize how much time you spend re-explaining things until you no longer need to. Mensa is very cool that way.
However, my Mensa experience served as a warning about trusting the judgments of people who might know how to, for example, make a helicopter from objects found lying around the house, but can’t manage their own lives. Is it possible that good ol’ common sense and traditional values are a better foundation for important life decisions, including politics?
We know that I.Q. correlates with income, but is that because smart people make better decisions or because of discrimination against people who have less education? Is voting more like brain surgery, where intelligence and knowledge obviously help, or more about judging character, where I.Q. might not be a significant factor?
Okay, that’s my best attempt at showing both sides of the issue. But I still want to know the opinions of people who are smarter than me and know more about the issues than I do. Ballot propositions, for example, have little to do with character. Maybe we could track the opinions of smart, well-informed people for a few election cycles and see how they do. That seems worth knowing.
Alternately, we can keep voting for the guy with the best hair while waiting for the Rapture. That might work too.