“Smart” people are as susceptible to bandwagon effect as stupid people

(as susceptible to jump on a bandwagon)

 

This is because bandwagon effect is not driven by lower cognitive abilities — but by desire to fit in, to find consensus

Which is universally human

 

Of course smart people have superior accuracy. Superior sense of incoherence, superior sense of logicality.

This should filter out most of the common delusions, shouldn’t it?

 

The problem with this argument is that any given fragment of REALITY is rarely this perfect edifice of neatly coherent logically interconnected truths

On the contrary,

Our image of a reality is a messy combination of myriad probabilistic best guesses, stitched together to the best of our ability into something but resembling coherence

Smart people may have it more accurate

Experts may have far more details, more thoroughly arranged

But fundamentally — we are all dealing with opacity

 

And this is why “smart” people and your favourite experts — will invariably jump on a bandwagon

Because UNLESS this is indeed their very area of expertise, a subject they dedicated their superior cognition to penetrate — then their intelligence will avail them very little

Definitely won’t be enough of a counterbalancing force to the desire to identify, fit in, find consensus

Unless their investment in the pursuit of truth in given matter overpowers desire for reassurance of identification with given group’s beliefs — than the influence will override the reason

 

Please be mindful that bandwagon doesn’t necessarily entail mainstream. It may as well be fringe, contrarian, etc. Group, movement, must only be of certain minimum scale — doesn’t have to be big. And the fringe and conspiratorial is often more deluded than ignorant consensual mainstream

 

And this is not even unreasonable to expect

OF COURSE you want to rely on the consensus wisdom

OF COURSE you want to learn from the unending trial-and-error of the humanity

It would be MAD not to

You can only try and test so many things

OBSERVE what others do and learn from them

This is completely reasonable program — learning from the group, learning from each other

 

The problem ONLY begins in not realising that “smart” people and “experts” are NOT exempt from this program

Therefore in that area of reasoning — as accurate as an average person

THEREFORE NOT more accurate at all

THEREFORE no longer “smart” and “expert”

NOT unless they approached that problem in an expert-manner, with vigorous research, creating hypothesis, criticising it, testing in real world, correcting error iteratively…

Which they did not

 

Which they did not

Smart people don’t even understand why they’re smart

Nor do we understand what smart means

Again: there are problems where smart will outperform the less smart

AND there are problems where smarts provide little advantage. Where brute trial-and-error, brute experience, intelligent or not, far outperform smarts

I’m not saying smart can’t themselves conduct trial and error, learn from experience, and again outperform

I’m saying that we, smart or not , often fail to tell apart the problems which are best solved with experiential methods — vs problems which are best solved with top-down logical reasoning

And thus often smart is outperformed by average — when the latter happens to be vigorously experimenting, building, trying and failing and succeeding

 

And what ultimately results is this confusion, where smart people and experts espouse bandwagon beliefs with EXPERTLY confidence — because they fail to realise they have no advantage in this area, no credibility

And then from this bandwagon a sub-bandwagon emerges — people now looking into EXPERTS who jumped on PARTICULAR BANDWAGON

Can you see?

-First credible “smart” people and experts espoused certain set of beliefs — because they thought they learned enough to form that opinion

-And then the people who still haven’t picked the side — are now gladly jumping on the bandwagon to which “smart” and “expert” people converged

Thus creating this loop of self-reinforcing delusion

 

Finally,

When you have a smart person jump on a bandwagon, espouse a certain set of beliefs — you can expect them to use their intelligence and erudition to EXPERTLY justify those beliefs

And this again would be a great thing — if this was indeed their area of expertise — which would GUARANTEE that all this intelligent and logical reasoning is coming from well-founded premises

Here however — the BANDWAGON is the premise

The bandwagon they espoused subconsciously, out of desire to fit in, overriding intellectual scepticism and pursuit of truth

The BANDWAGON is the premise — and it can be highly inaccurate premise

Computing on top of it, reasoning on top of it, arguing on top of it — only creates a spate of LOGICAL NONSENSE

If the premise is not correct, or not even well defined — then EXPERTLY REASONING on top of it doesn’t make it more so.

In truth it does the opposite — it CONFUSES the matters only further

It’s the PREMISE which should be reevaluated

 

Conclusion?

Expert is only an expert in his area of expertise

Intelligent person has intelligent insight only when he IS in truth USING his superior intelligence, on a problem actually requiring those particular SKILLS

The conclusion is not that experts are useless.

The conclusion is NOT that one can’t have superior insights OUTSIDE of his area of expertise.

The conclusion is that we all like to have OPINIONS on EVERY SUBJECT

And if those opinions are not formed carefully — they are formed less carefully.

And experts and “smart” people are as susceptible to bandwagon effect as stupid people

Understand when expert is actually an expert.

Understand when intelligence is actually being used to provide superior insights — rather than superior rationalisations of collective misinformation