Trego's Mountain Ear

I saw this dialogue quote, attributed to Jim Butcher’s series “The Dresden Files”:  ““He’s Black Council,”, I said.  “Or maybe stupid,” Ebenezar countered.  I thought about it. “Not sure which is scarier.”

Ebenezar blinked at me, then snorted. “Stupid, Hoss. Every time. Only so many blackhearted villains in the world, and they only get uppity on occasion. Stupid’s everywhere, every day.” Ebenezar McCoy”

That brought me thoughts of the folks involved in the Enron financial shenanigans – where a movie was made about the scandal (ripoff?) referring to them as “The Smartest Guys in the Room.”  There are a couple of problems that we should think about if we’re the smartest guys in the room.  First, smart people can do stupid things.  Matter of fact, there are some stupid things that only smart people can envision – sometimes slow and steady just can’t make the logic jumps it takes to do something astonishingly stupid.

The second situation is when you’re the smartest guy in a very small room.  Statistically, being the smartest guy in a room filled with a dozen people doesn’t put you in Einstein’s class.  Enron used creative accounting tricks that could be called downright fraudulent – and the lack of ethics doesn’t give bonus points on intelligence tests.  I guess it isn’t a question of picking out the smartest guy – the challenge may just be recognizing the room you’re in.

If I pick my room, I can be the smartest guy in the room.  I may be alone, but I can be the smartest guy in the room.   It’s important to pick the right room – and equally important to accurately judge the people who share that room. At SDSU, if I saw Nels Granholm, I knew that the best I would manage would be second.  When I started teaching at Trinidad State, one of my students was a Christian fundamentalist with a serious alcohol and drug problem – and he may have been the brightest student I have ever encountered.  His classmates nicknamed him ‘God’s Own Drunk’.  I have no doubt that he was the smartest guy in the room . . . and probably the least successful. 

At MSU, I knew Frank Dudas – while his first college teaching post was at Dickinson State in North Dakota, he retired from MIT – another colleague who qualified as the smartest guy in the room.  I’ve been blessed in working with people who were brighter than I.  I’m a cow college guynd, and MIT isn’t my room.  Frank could start his academic career at a land grant and finish at MIT.

Like so many things in the world, finding out that you’re not the smartest guy in the room is basically statistics and self-awareness.  If we base the decision on the smartest guy in the room on IQ score it’s easy to figure out how many people are in the room.  Average is supposed to be 100, so the room has to be small – like an old telephone booth – for the folks who score in the seventies and eighties to be the smartest guy in the room.  At 100, it’s a 50-50 chance.  But let’s look at how IQ numbers and room size work out on the right hand side of the IQ Bell Curve:

IQ Score                      Rarity

110                              1 in 4

120                              1 in 11

130                              1 in 44

140                              1 in 261

150                              1 in 2,330

160                              1 in 31,560

170                              1 in 652,598

180                              1 in 20,696,863

190                              1 in 1,009,976,678

200                              1 in 76 billion

Rarity is the room size.  The calculator I used for this table is at gigacalculator.com

IQ test scores probably don’t measure intelligence perfectly.  The explanation is that they measure the ‘G factor” – which basically stands in for intelligence.  It is the most commonly used measurement, so I’m using it.  My calculations also called for a standard deviation of 15 – which can be explained that there are 2 standard deviations between 100 and 130 – but also 2 standard deviations between 160 and 190. 

I’ve read that Ted Kaczinski tested at 165 or 167.  165 has a rarity of 136,074 – so Ted, was probably one of the half-dozen brightest Montanans before his relocation to SuperMax prison.  Being the smartest guy in the room doesn’t necessarily translate to the most successful.  (Ted tested at 136 on the Wechsler after his arrest – I suspect he wasn’t in his best form)

The reverse – for those under 100 – takes little to chart, because the rarity is identical – just on the other side of the line, and someone with an IQ score of 60 is just as rare as someone who scores 140.

IQ Score                      Rarity

90                                1 in 4

80                                1 in 11

70                                1 in 44

60                                1 in 261

So the quote was “Stupid’s everywhere, every day.”  As Kaczinski demonstrated, you can be really smart and still do stupid things. Bonhoeffer’s Theory of Stupidity Explains The World Perfectly | by Peter Burns | Lessons from History | Medium

“Against stupidity we have no defense. Neither protests nor force can touch it. Reasoning is of no use. Facts that contradict personal prejudices can simply be disbelieved — indeed, the fool can counter by criticizing them, and if they are undeniable, they can just be pushed aside as trivial exceptions. So the fool, as distinct from the scoundrel, is completely self-satisfied. In fact, they can easily become dangerous, as it does not take much to make them aggressive. For that reason, greater caution is called for than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous.” — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Bonhoeffer looked at stupidity as a sociological function – believing that your need a group to be really stupid:

“The power of the one needs the stupidity of the other. The process at work here is not that particular human capacities, for instance, the intellect, suddenly atrophy or fail. Instead, it seems that under the overwhelming impact of rising power, humans are deprived of their inner independence, and, more or less consciously, give up establishing an autonomous position toward the emerging circumstances. The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

 The challenge isn’t in being the smartest guy in the room.  The challenge is not doing something stupid.  To Bonhoeffer, the best way to avoid stupidity was to avoid groupthink.  Carlo Cipolla had a different tack – he wrote The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity.  They’re online at principia-scientific.com

The 5 Basic Laws Of Human Stupidity

1. Always and inevitably, each of us underestimates the number of stupid individuals in the world

2. The probability that a certain person is stupid is independent of any other characteristic of the same person

3. A stupid person is one who causes harm to another person or group without at the same time obtaining a benefit for himself or even damaging himself

4. Non-stupid people always underestimate the harmful potential of stupid people

5. The stupid person is the most dangerous person that exists