Why being too smart makes you stupid
Plus, why logic is bad, why creativity is bad, Galileo in Pisa, and why you won't find many women at Star Trek conventions.
The online dating coach Louis Farfields has a theory that women are more attracted to dumb men than smart men.
(If you don’t believe him, go to a Star Trek convention or a Magic: The Gathering tournament and then count how many women you see.)
Women are probably right to go for dumb guys. I think that past a certain point, being smarter actually decreases your genetic fitness.
Obviously intelligence is good, up to a point. But past that point, being too smart can get in your way. We’ve all met a “too-smart” college kid who learns weird theories in school and then can’t function in the real world. (Once upon a time I was that college kid.)
The good news is, intelligence can be a superpower. But like all superpowers, you have to learn how to use it — otherwise it does more harm than good. More about that at the end of the article.
But why are smart people so stupid? 6 reasons. Here they are:
Reason #1: Smart people are better at rationalizing their emotions
A bunch of economists today believe in something called “Modern Monetary Theory,” which basically says that the government can borrow as much money as it wants to with no consequences.
There isn’t any evidence for Modern Monetary Theory — it’s just that economists really want to justify the insane amount of money that the US government is borrowing.
A dumb person would never believe in Modern Monetary Theory. A dumb person would say “you have to pay back what you borrow, end of story.” Only a smart person could ever convince themselves otherwise.
In other words, smart people have a bigger “bag of tricks” for justifying the stupid bullshit they believe. It’s easier for them to come up with a convincing explanation for believing something dumb. So they’re less likely to realize they’re wrong.
Reason #2: Smart people think in top-down theories
In the late 1500’s, Galileo went up to the top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa and dropped 2 objects. One was way heavier than the other. They hit the ground at the same time.
This shattered 2,000 years of theory. Before then, people thought that objects would fall faster if they were heavier. They believed this so fervently that nobody bothered to actually go do the experiment!!!
Smart people love to explain everything about the world using top-down theories. Marxists think everything is about class warfare, incels think that they can’t get a girlfriend because of the shape of their jaw, et cetera.
But top-down theories don’t actually work very well. Political scientist Philip Tetlock found that foxes — people who know a bunch of little things — were best at predicting the outcome of current events. Whereas hedgehogs — who saw the world in terms of one big theory — were worse at making predictions than dart-throwing chimps.
Why is this? Because the world is super complicated, and you can’t reduce it to a model. Any model of the world you build in your head is gonna be wrong — a lot. If you fall in love with that model, and you use it to think about everything, then you’ll be wrong — a lot.
That’s why you should generally avoid thinking in top-down theories. They’re useful sometimes, but it’s better to rely on your intuition and real-world experience.
Reason #3: Smart people don’t understand normal people
There’s evidence that smart people are worse at making friends, because they just don’t relate to most people. They’d rather hang out on their own.
That means their social skills just don’t get as sharp. Maybe they have the technical intelligence to build a rocketship or debug a computer program, but they don’t have the emotional intelligence to get along with people.
And in today’s world, emotional intelligence matters more. (People who drink alcohol make 10% more than people who don’t drink, solely because people who drink have more friends.)
If you can’t relate to other people, then it’s harder to get along with people — which makes life a lot harder.
Reason #4: Smart people think too much and do too little
Anytime a car passed by my childhood bedroom at night, it would cast a shadow in my room.
When I was 5 years old, this scared the shit out of me. Every time it happened, I thought there was someone in my room.
Today I do the same thing, but with different fears. Whenever I get in a car I think I’m gonna crash. Whenever I go outside late at night I think I’m gonna get mugged. Whenever I go on my balcony in my 27th story Bangkok apartment I think I’m gonna fall. Et cetera.
(Other people do the same thing. If you don’t believe me, turn on the news: they’re always imagining everything that’s gonna go wrong in the world, like major terrorist attacks and a climate apocalypse.)
The problem is, if you’re constantly thinking about everything that can go wrong, it messes with your brain. You won’t take as many risks, because you’ll be way more afraid. That means you won’t do as much stuff and you won’t be effective in the real world.
It’s better to just not worry about the bad stuff that can happen, and enjoy life.
Reason #5: Smart people get too creative
I work in digital marketing — my job is to write words on the internet that sell stuff.
When I get a new client, the first thing I ask them is to send me all their emails. I look at which ones sold well, and which ones sold poorly. This tells me what my client’s audience actually wants to buy, and what sales messages they respond well to. Then I copy whatever’s done well in the past.
Learning to do this was really hard for me. I love to be creative. But whenever I try to get “creative”, I usually fail.
The problem with new ideas is that they’re more likely to be wrong than right. The world is infinitely complex and there’s always something you haven’t thought of. Every brilliant new idea sounds great on paper, but then when you actually try it, you realize it’s got tons of flaws.
That’s not to say that new ideas are bad — without new ideas, the world would stagnate. When you create something new and it does work, it’s awesome. But in the short term, it’s usually better to just copy what’s already working.
Reason #6: Smart people are out of touch with their intuition
This is extremely unintuitive (ironically) but we’re way smarter when we use our intuition than when we try to be logical. That’s because when we try to be logical, we use only a very small part of our brain. Whereas when we’re intuitive, we’re using our whole brain.
Obviously we’re a lot more precise when we think logically, but we think about less stuff. And if you haven’t considered everything, then logic is airtight: one premise you haven’t thought of can destroy your whole argument. Our intuitions are less precise but more accurate, because they consider more stuff.
When people are out of touch with their intuition, you get retarted stuff like social justice. If you just listen to your gut, you realize that making a huge fuss about pronouns and giving gender transition surgeries to 15 year olds is fucking stupid. But a lot of smart people don’t listen to their intuitions — they listen to the logical parts of their brains, which lead them astray.
How To Not Be So Stupid If You’re Smart
The first thing you need to understand is that just because you’re smart doesn’t mean you’re that smart. Even the smartest people in the world have tons of flaws in their thinking. And the difference between the smartest people and the dumbest people is really small.
The second thing you need to understand is that there’s more to life than just being smart. If you want to be successful, smarts help, but courage, social skills, and grit matter a lot more. (I wrote a whole article about that here: https://medium.com/@theo.seeds/the-5-things-you-need-to-be-successful-cc2f0714cf08)
If you want to actually use your smarts, then the first thing you gotta do is stop being afraid. Fear is the #1 thing that gets in the way of doing stuff, and smart people are usually more afraid than dumb people because they can imagine more things going wrong.
The way to defeat your fears is to face them. So go do something that scares the shit out of you. Move to Japan. Start a business. Go do door-to-door sales. Run towards your fears instead of away from them. It’ll be super uncomfortable in the moment, and then once it’s done, you’ll be so glad you did it.
The next step is to stop overthinking things. This is hard, especially for people coming from academia, because in science you’re supposed to be 100% certain before you do anything. But the real world doesn’t work this way. You have to make decisions with limited information, and some of them are gonna be wrong. It’s not the end of the world.
Not overthinking things means trusting your subconscious mind to get the right answer. Instead of taking forever to make a decision, just pick something and move on. (There are probably some things you want to overthink — this article wouldn’t be as interesting if I hadn’t overthought it — but don’t overthink everything.
Once you figure this stuff out, you can actually start using your smarts to make your life better. And that’s the whole point, isn’t it?
Hey! Thanks for reading.
A note to my new readers: My name’s Theo and every Monday I publish an article like this one about whatever was on my mind the week before. Usually it’s about something social science-y.
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Happy trails!