Intelligent people say the dumbest things

[RoamingToaster]

I know there's a saying about how intelligent people are good are rationalising things and so that's how they can fall for silly beliefs, cults or scams, but when it involves trans issues it's never internally consistent. It's like there is no proper thought behind it. I find it hard to understand how they've joined everything up. I feel like I must not be getting something. It irritates me more than it should.

You're an intelligent person in academia yet you write a whole post on an extremely rare DSD about a person who fathered children and thought they were male but they were actually a female (apparently at one point the doctors told this person he had now become a female - hmmm). OK fine, let's just overlook what becoming female actually means to someone who presumably still has male parts down there and well also presumably a lack of, well female ones. So the person can be said to be a female because of their chromosomes? But then in other cases you'll argue that chromosomes are irrelevant to what sex you are? It makes no sense right? And then in the final paragraph after talking about nothing but this specific DSD you'll say we should believe what trans people say they are because it's their body not yours - well if that was what you were writing about then why all this talk of a DSD and biology? In the case you outlined the person didn't say they were female the doctors examined them and found a rare condition. If you believe a male with no medical ambiguity over his sex is whatever sex he says he is why not just state that outright and argue for that?

Sorry if that was rambling but I saw such a thing on my social media and I just had to vent here 😅.

Bloody hell, not surprised you had to rant after reading that drivel!
Have a nice cuppa!
☕️☕️☕️

You're writing in response to something specific, but I take your general point.
There are some issues which seem to take hold of reasonably intelligent people's minds and make them say the most blatantly untrue things - jaw-droppingly daft things that at some level they must realise are factually wrong.

Currently it's the gender thing. There are many historical examples - the PIE scandal is being re-examined at the moment, for instance, but you could go way back to the Dutch Tulip Bubble in the 17th century.

The power of sticking to the fashionable consensus can override just about anything, by the looks of things🙄

I think it's a case of having enough intelligence / education to know that things are a little more complex than the layperson thinks they are, but drawing completely the wrong conclusion.

Biological sex as an example.

A layperson knows there are two sexes, male and female. It's observable reality and everyone learns this from a very young age.

An expert biologist knows that sex categories can vary between species, e.g. shape of chromosomes, hermaphrodite organisms and organisms that can change fully from one to fully the other (e.g. the infamous clownfish), and that DSDs can lead to atypical chromosomes or phenotypes - however, there is still a fertiliser category and a fertilisee category.

An intelligent person is aware of the expert's knowledge but not the full picture, since they aren't experts themselves. They fill in gaps with their own suppositions, or read someone else's misunderstanding / politicised twisting of fact, and draw the wrong conclusion. They end up thinking sex is a vague spectrum with arbitrary lines drawn in by society.

I think the Dunning-Kruger effect tends to kick in at a certain level of education or intelligence, as people become more confident in their abilities to judge and analyse data whilst not being able to actually do this at a high academic level. Add on the superiority complex and anti-oikism that's becoming increasingly prevalent in certain political circles, and you have a recipe for a load of pseudo-intelligent drivel that gets repeated as gospel.

Excellent post @LittleMyLittle

Gurwinder Bhogal: When intelligent people affiliate themselves to ideology, their intellect ceases to guard against wishful thinking, and instead begins to fortify it, causing them to inadvertently mastermind their own delusions, and to very cleverly become stupid.

Bhogal also wrote this essay about influencers that aligns to Little's post. The Perils of Audience Capture How Influencers Become Brainwashed by Their Audiences

Audience capture is an irresistible force in the world of influencing, because it’s not just a conscious process but also an unconscious one… It involves the gradual and unwitting replacement of a person’s identity with one custom-made for the audience.
[…]
When influencers are analyzing audience feedback, they often find that their more outlandish behavior receives the most attention and approval, which leads them to recalibrate their personalities according to far more extreme social cues than those they’d receive in real life. In doing this they exaggerate the more idiosyncratic facets of their personalities, becoming crude caricatures of themselves.
The caricature quickly becomes the influencer’s distinct brand, and all subsequent attempts by the influencer to remain on-brand and fulfill audience expectations require them to act like the caricature. As the caricature becomes more familiar than the person, both to the audience and to the influencer, it comes to be regarded by both as the only honest expression of the influencer, so that any deviation from it soon looks and feels inauthentic. At that point the persona has eclipsed the person, and the audience has captured the influencer.

https://gurwinder.substack.com/p/the-perils-of-audience-capture

Thoughtful discussion here: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5047883-spiked-why-was-gender-ideology-allowed-to-run-amok-for-so-long

I find it perplexing that the parents when they first had their children were very much into the science behind breastfeeding, baby led weaning, attachment parenting etc and would disparage anything that they felt was not robust enough are the ones that seem to have fallen for the 'sex is sooo complicated " theory.

@ShamblesRock yes and for the parents how many of them had harmony tests or were aware of them -a test where you can find out the chromosomes of your baby to know the sex. Funnily they promise over 99% accuracy on that test yet at the same time people will say “intersex” people make up 6% of the population or possibly higher since most people don’t test their chromosomes. I had the test done privately and when I told medical professionals in the nhs they said it would definitely be a boy and when he was born the doctor luckily assigned him male!

I made the mistake of checking Facebook this morning. There was a post on there that was trying to claim Trump's made everyone female because "all fetuses start as female".

The comments section was chock-full of people who were supremely confident they were right, and supremely smug about how much cleverer they were than the science-illiterate "hillbillies" who "shouldn't be allowed to vote" (actual quotes).

It was the same story with the Imane Khelif bots. I know it's clickbait Facebook but it certainly illustrates my point nicely.

I find it perplexing that the parents when they first had their children were very much into the science behind breastfeeding, baby led weaning, attachment parenting etc and would disparage anything that they felt was not robust enough are the ones that seem to have fallen for the 'sex is sooo complicated " theory.

The commonality is that in both cases, it's not about "the science", it's about having esoteric knowledge to lord it over other less-educated folks.

In the first case, it may be that the esoteric knowledge actually is correct, but that wasn't the point.

There's kind of a supply-demand issue here too - the demand for esoteric knowledge is possibly outstripping the supply of true esoteric knowledge, so people have to invent bullshit esoteric knowledge.

Really interesting thread. I also think there’s a powerful emperors new clothes effect where people find themselves seeing or thinking something they think they shouldn't see or think according to the righteous social justice stance - and so they move faster to slap that down or suppress it out of shame, assuming they are being terrible white middle class western fascists who haven’t got it yet and must improve themselves.

For example, Imane Khelif does look like a man physically and most people can see that. For a “pro-trans” but scientifically under-aware wokebro or handmaiden type, that may trigger shame that they can see that and a panicked reaction that they must therefore assert the opposite - overriding any consideration that this isn’t actually a trans situation and is more complicated. Even in a trans situation, they can generally like the rest of see who is male and female and instinctively take that on board - but know that’s “wrong” hence all the apparently silly pretending and fawning.

Really interesting thread. I also think there’s a powerful emperors new clothes effect where people find themselves seeing or thinking something they think they shouldn't see or think according to the righteous social justice stance - and so they move faster to slap that down or suppress it out of shame, assuming they are being terrible white middle class western fascists who haven’t got it yet and must improve themselves.

For example, Imane Khelif does look like a man physically and most people can see that. For a “pro-trans” but scientifically under-aware wokebro or handmaiden type, that may trigger shame that they can see that and a panicked reaction that they must therefore assert the opposite - overriding any consideration that this isn’t actually a trans situation and is more complicated. Even in a trans situation, they can generally like the rest of see who is male and female and instinctively take that on board - but know that’s “wrong” hence all the apparently silly pretending and fawning.

Yes, nail on head. And that's why they get so very angry when a non believer forces them to confront something in public that they know to be bullshit (defend their argument etc). They know they look stupid and they're also frightened of slipping up and appearing transphobic in some way with all the problems that would cause them. It's cognitive dissonance.

I find it perplexing that the parents when they first had their children were very much into the science behind breastfeeding, baby led weaning, attachment parenting etc and would disparage anything that they felt was not robust enough are the ones that seem to have fallen for the 'sex is sooo complicated " theory.

I agree it’s the same types, but the breastfeeding “science” also only appealed to them if it supported BF exclusively - again as a route to feeling superior, or safely “on the moral high ground”. There’s plenty of evidence for example that formula feeding may be lifesaving at times or that you can be formula fed without suffering any great harm and go on to live a perfectly functional life, but I met pro-BF, science spouting parents who insisted it was literally poison that would cause harm. FF was vital for my firstborn when I was very unwell but that couldn’t be discussed honestly, even though I went on to BF.

This need for (supposedly) esoteric knowledge and moral superiority really fascinates me - why is it so important that people will embrace extremes of belief, if they’re told that is the “progressive” or “kind” or “superior science understanding” position, even if they cannot make it make sense?

Galileo said something like “the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of one individual “ (paraphrasing) but I find it interesting that humble reasoning is not valued by so many, and is happily buried in favour of being seen to be a “good person”.

a powerful emperors new clothes effect

Yes, that is one of the details from the story that probably gets overlooked - the competitive, performative descriptions of the imaginary finery from the flattering courtiers. They weren't just too cowardly to say point out the truth, they actively made stuff up to support the lie.

Very much like the people who could see Khelif's ovaries.

I remember people insisting they'd seen evidence that Imane Khelif had been pregnant. But maybe they were bots or trolls deployed to stir the pot.

I remember people insisting they'd seen evidence that Imane Khelif had been pregnant. But maybe they were bots or trolls deployed to stir the pot.

If IK had ever been pregnant surely IK and his handlers would have been able to point to that as evidence he was female. In the mysterious absence of this 100% guaranteed "woman" agreeing to take a sex text.

The commonality is that in both cases, it's not about "the science", it's about having esoteric knowledge to lord it over other less-educated folks.

I know a lot of people who are exactly like this. The strange thing is that I'm probably on a similar level to them in terms of formal education, but something about me - wrong accent, wrong social background, not speaking jargon - means they feel compelled to explain things to me like I'm in the remedial class.

These people love gender identity, and I think a lot of it is because, identifying as very clever people, they think a position that needs a lot of complicated theory to justify it is more likely to be correct than a common sense position - because they, the very clever people, have read the books and understand the theory.

They assume everyone else is just ignorant, or using "common sense" as some kind of dog whistle. They can't compute that an intelligent person might have seriously looked at their theory and concluded that it's bollocks.

I don't even think it's really about knowledge. It's a system of etiquette that's supposed to mark off the elect from the broad masses.

Intelligent people are critical thinkers and see more than one side to any arguement ...

I wonder if conspiracy theories are both a populist riposte to this sort of thing (i.e. "you think you're so clever but you've been taken in by the establishment and we know the real score") and a populist version of it ("we know what's what and everyone else are stupid gullible sheeple")?

Interesting question. I think there are certain conspiracy theories that are disapproved because they're downmarket. When conspiracy theories are espoused by high status people they aren't conspiracy theories. Or at any rate it gets very situational.

There's a definite thing in African American communities where a folk history of the community veers into conspiracy territory, like the idea that Richard Nixon and the CIA manufactured the crack epidemic. I think it's understandable in a way because it's a community that distrusts authority. But white liberals find it very uncomfortable to talk about. So there's a city councillor in Washington DC who has very strong views about the Jews controlling the weather, but the media seem to have tacitly agreed not to mention him.

I suspect a lot of it's to do with the decline of religion. Something has to fill that vacuum.

I used to be involved a lot in discussions/teaching around science education, and one of the things I found interesting was how many educated people thought their own understanding of some scientific idea - black holes maybe, or gravity - was true knowledge.

They could not seem to grasp that while there might be some people with true knowledge of these things, their own knowledge was authority or even faith based - an image of something real. They tended to dismiss this as a distinction without a difference, but I always thought it made them very vulnerable. Not accepting authority, but thinking that gave them true knowledge.

I think it's understandable to want some authority, an expert or priest, who has knowledge, because there aren't enough hours in the day to investigate all the things we might be interested in.

The problem I have is that, from my experience on the activist scene, the priestly caste often lie to you.

But I think it's an important learned skill to be modest about what you know and how you know it. I don't know how the commodities market works. I know a bloke who's a commodities trader, and if he explains something about silver futures I'll take his word for it, but I'm aware I'm taking his word for it.

Lots of educated people seem to have serious trouble admitting that there are things they don't know.

Yes, it has similarities with a religious explanation (the wrath of God etc), doesn't it? A deliberate act by an identified actor(s) rather than "just one of those things". I guess we are naturally wired to ask "why?" about things and look for an answer - it's a good survival instinct. And randomness is scary because there's no way to control or appease it.

I think everyone takes many things from authorities, no one is an expert on everything. Most of us aren't experts on anything.

But you have to know the difference between real, direct knowledge, and hearing about it from someone else who might have a kind of direct knowledge. Or knowing a thing as it is, vs. a scientific model. Or even, a dumbed down version of a mathematical model.

It's not just the worry about lies. With any kind of model or approximation, if you get a small thing wrong, or it's not quite an accurate representation, you can start to get bigger things wrong if you treat it as if it's the real thing. By being aware of the fact that it's an approximation you will be much more careful about extrapolating.

There are people who do that with some issues and not others. Only they think they do it with everything.

Great post!

They assume everyone else is just ignorant, or using "common sense" as some kind of dog whistle. They can't compute that an intelligent person might have seriously looked at their theory and concluded that it's bollocks

This 100%. If you try to push back or point out an issue they’ll come at you with some basic stuff that doesn’t address what you’ve criticised. It’s because they think you’ve never looked at it before. And when they talk or post about it they always have such a righteous and condescending tone. Always attacks on others who don’t hold their position as ignorant and the like.