Is Intelligence Overrated?
[[Post from Johnny Anomaly.]]
When we think about who we want to be friends with, or what qualities we appreciate in a romantic partner, intelligence is probably not the first thing we think about. We value kindness, loyalty, creativity, beauty, courage, and many other traits. And intelligence can be a negative trait. A smart psychopath makes him more dangerous than a dim one.
Still, most people are attracted to traits that require intelligence, including a sense of humor, and the ability to solve practical problems. And whatever people say they value in children, when they have a choice, as when lesbian couples shop for sperm donors, they generally want smart children, though there are threshold effects.
These preferences reflect an intuitive sense of the value of intelligence for individual welfare. A large body of research shows that intelligence positively correlates with many life outcomes we value, including health and longevity, income, education, even the likelihood that we’ll have stable romantic relationships. Some of this is likely due to patience, self-control, and other traits that correlate intelligence. And although correlation is not the same thing as causation, it is now clear that intelligence predicts many important life outcomes, and that intelligence is highly heritable.
Nevertheless, many academics downplay the importance of intelligence, perhaps for ideological reasons. One reason may be that if our intellectual capacities are deeply constrained by our genetic endowment, egalitarian hopes of using schooling to achieve equal outcomes will be doomed to fail. Self-identified progressives and liberals are especially likely to deny evidence that intelligence is highly heritable, though some have embraced the literature that connects intelligence and genetics and have used it to justify policies involving redistribution and targeted educational interventions.
The high heritability of intelligence has important social implications that have mostly been ignored by social scientists and journalists. In Hive Mind Garett Jones summarizes the literature showing a correlation between intelligence, patience, and the propensity to cooperate in group settings. In essence, Jones shows that smarter people tend to play a conditionally cooperative strategy in repeated prisoners’ dilemmas. They seek out partners who are disposed to cooperate and who have long time horizons, and they find ways of cementing their relationships with them.
Life is full of situations in which there are advantages to reciprocity, but incentives for each to act in a way that increases immediate benefits at the expense of future opportunities. Working on team projects and sharing the benefits, looking after the neighbors pets while they are away, giving up a little in this month’s political battle because that’s better than raising the probability of a low-grade civil war: all are examples of cooperation based on long-run reciprocity, which helps make the group better off even if the individual has to pay a short-run cost.
In a recent paper, Garett Jones and I review the literature showing that more intelligent people are generally more cooperative, and we explore the implications for bioethics and political philosophy. If how well your life goes is affected by the average intelligence of those around you, this may influence the place we choose to live and, to the extent we can control it, the traits we wish our children to have. It also suggests that as genetic enhancement becomes feasible, we can think of cognitive enhancement as a form of moral enhancement. While smarter people don’t necessarily have better moral motivations, they do seem to foster the kinds of cooperation that make everyone in a group better off. Even if smarter people don’t have better motivations, groups of smart people tend to create the conditions for social welfare to improve. In this sense, we might consider cognitive enhancement a form of effective altruism.
Some of the smartest people in universities deny that intelligence is real, that it is heritable, or that it makes a significant difference in people’s lives. As Russell Warne shows in his excellent new book, they are wrong. University professors and public intellectuals are full of bad ideas. But my guess is that as genetic testing and reproductive technology improve, many parents will ignore the pundits and seek to enhance their children’s intelligence. Some will do this the old-fashioned way—through mate selection. Others are likely to select embryos for intelligence using polygenic scores, along with other traits. But few of them will continue to deny what is increasingly obvious: intelligence is good for individuals and groups, and more intelligence is generally better, at least within the normal range of current human abilities.