The Intellectual Yet Idiot

by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

What we have been seeing worldwide, from India to the UK to the US, is the rebellion against the inner circle of no-skin-in-the-game policymaking “clerks” and journalists-insiders, that class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts with some Ivy league, Oxford-Cambridge, or similar label-driven education who are telling the rest of us 1) what to do, 2) what to eat, 3) how to speak, 4) how to think… and 5) who to vote for.

But the problem is the one-eyed following the blind: these self-described members of the “intelligenzia” can’t find a coconut in Coconut Island, meaning they aren’t intelligent enough to define intelligence hence fall into circularities — but their main skill is capacity to pass exams written by people like them. With psychology papers replicating less than 40%, dietary advice reversing after 30 years of fatphobia, macroeconomic analysis working worse than astrology, the appointment of Bernanke who was less than clueless of the risks, and pharmaceutical trials replicating at best only 1/3 of the time, people are perfectly entitled to rely on their own ancestral instinct and listen to their grandmothers (or Montaigne and such filtered classical knowledge) with a better track record than these policymaking goons.

Indeed one can see that these academico-bureaucrats who feel entitled to run our lives aren’t even rigorous, whether in medical statistics or policymaking. They cant tell science from scientism — in fact in their eyes scientism looks more scientific than real science. (For instance it is trivial to show the following: much of what the Cass-Sunstein-Richard Thaler types — those who want to “nudge” us into some behavior — much of what they call “rational” or “irrational” comes from their misunderstanding of probability theory and cosmetic use of first-order models.) They are also prone to mistake the ensemble for the linear aggregation of its components as we saw in the chapter extending the minority rule.

The Intellectual Yet Idiot (IYI) is a production of modernity hence has been accelerating since the mid twentieth century, to reach its local supremum today, along with the broad category of people without skin-in-the-game who have been invading many walks of life. Why? Simply, in most countries, the government’s role is between five and ten times what it was a century ago (expressed in percentage of GDP). The IYI seems ubiquitous in our lives but is still a small minority and is rarely seen outside specialized outlets, think tanks, the media, and universities — most people have proper jobs and there are not many openings for the IYI.

Beware the semi-erudite who thinks he is an erudite. He fails to naturally detect sophistry.

The IYI pathologizes others for doing things he doesn’t understand without ever realizing it is his understanding that may be limited. He thinks people should act according to their best interests and he knows their interests, particularly if they are “red necks” or English non-crisp-vowel class who voted for Brexit. When Plebeians do something that makes sense to them, but not to him, the IYI uses the term “uneducated”. What we generally call participation in the political process, he calls by two distinct designations: “democracy” when it fits the IYI, and “populism” when the plebeians dare voting in a way that contradicts his preferences. While rich people believe in one tax dollar one vote, more humanistic ones in one man one vote, Monsanto in one lobbyist one vote, the IYI believes in one Ivy League degree one-vote, with some equivalence for foreign elite schools, and PhDs as these are needed in the club.

More socially, the IYI subscribes to The New Yorker. He never curses on twitter. He speaks of “equality of races” and “economic equality” but never went out drinking with a minority cab driver. Those in the U.K. have been taken for a ride by Tony Blair. The modern IYI has attended more than one TEDx talks in person or watched more than two TED talks on Youtube. Not only will he vote for Hillary Monsanto-Malmaison because she seems electable and some other such circular reasoning, but holds that anyone who doesn’t do so is mentally ill.

The IYI has a copy of the first hardback edition of The Black Swan on his shelves, but mistakes absence of evidence for evidence of absence. He believes that GMOs are “science”, that the “technology” is not different from conventional breeding as a result of his readiness to confuse science with scientism.

Typically, the IYI get the first order logic right, but not second-order (or higher) effects making him totally incompetent in complex domains. In the comfort of his suburban home with 2-car garage, he advocated the “removal” of Gadhafi because he was “a dictator”, not realizing that removals have consequences (recall that he has no skin in the game and doesn’t pay for results).

The IYI is member of a club to get traveling privileges; if social scientist he uses statistics without knowing how they are derived (like Steven Pinker and psycholophasters in general); when in the UK, he goes to literary festivals; he drinks red wine with steak (never white); he used to believe that fat was harmful and has now completely reversed; he takes statins because his doctor told him to do so; he fails to understand ergodicity and when explained to him, he forgets about it soon later; he doesn’t use Yiddish words even when talking business; he studies grammar before speaking a language; he has a cousin who worked with someone who knows the Queen; he has never read Frederic Dard, Libanius Antiochus, Michael Oakeshot, John Gray, Amianus Marcellinus, Ibn Battuta, Saadiah Gaon, or Joseph De Maistre; he has never gotten drunk with Russians; he never drank to the point when one starts breaking glasses (or, preferably, chairs); he doesn’t know the difference between Hecate and Hecuba; he doesn’t know that there is no difference between “pseudointellectual” and “intellectual” in the absence of skin in the game; has mentioned quantum mechanics at least twice in the past five years in conversations that had nothing to do with physics.

He knows at any point in time what his words or actions are doing to his reputation.

But a much easier marker: he doesn’t deadlift.

Keep the pause button on GM pressed

JACK A. HEINEMANN in The hindu

  

 

Questioning a technology, especially of the kind that has serious unknowns and lacks clear social benefits, is not an attack on science

Jairam Ramesh, former Environment Minister for India, made the brave decision in 2010 to tell his then apex regulator of genetically modified organisms (GEAC) that it had failed to properly use available science to determine the safety — to human health and the environment — of Bt brinjal, created using genetic modification (GM). His decision followed careful evaluation of the science.

I was involved in Ramesh’s review. I read first hand the scientific evidence in my area of expertise provided to the GEAC and its responses. I was heartened to see that his decision was validated by the esteemed scientists that made up the Supreme Court Technical Expert Committee who have advised the Court on the need for better research and better process before continuing to release GM crops into the environment or using them as food.

Creating confusion

G. Padmanaban (“Sow the wind, reap a storm,” The Hindu, September 2) believes that the events surrounding the evaluation of Bt brinjal and now extending to other kinds of GM plants is an assault on science. He confuses science with technology. Science is the process of knowledge creation (or discovery) whereas technology is the means of knowledge application. This confusion causes some scientists to defend technologies that are questioned because they perceive questions on the technology as an attack on science. It is not.

There is much knowledge discovered or to be discovered that cannot be applied wisely — at least not now. GM plants are among the technologies that have both serious scientific unknowns and lack a clear social benefit — at least for now.

For over 30 years, GM has been promised to produce plants that will resist the stresses of drought, heavy metals and salt, that will increase yield, reduce the use of toxic pesticides and even fix their own nitrogen. To be fair, some GM crops have reduced the use of some toxic insecticides for a brief period. To be precise, though, none of these promises has been sustainably delivered to farmers.

Why not? Well, it isn’t complex regulation holding them back. By the year 2005, over 1,000 applications were approved to field trial stress-tolerant GM plants in the United States alone. None ever progressed out of the testing phase. The explanation for this is likely because stress tolerance is not a solution to the causes of stress. No matter how tolerant you make the plant to drought, using it in soil low in organic matter and unable to hold water will eventually further deplete the soil of moisture and the plant will struggle or die. GM is an attempt to use genetics to overcome the environment. This never works for long. That is why some call GM a distraction from investing in real solutions to the problems faced by real farmers.

A symptom

Herbicide use is increasing in the U.S. since it adopted GM maize (corn), soybeans and cotton. Insecticide use is down by a small bit, but extremely high compared to countries such as France which do not use GM crops. Western Europe’s maize yields match or exceed the U.S.’ yields using less pesticide. The yields in wheat and oilseed rape are increasing at an even faster rate in Western Europe than in the U.S. and Canada. This indicates a dangerous trend: those countries choosing to innovate in agriculture using GM are demonstrating lower productivity increases and greater dependence on chemical inputs in all crops compared to economically and environmentally comparable countries choosing to not use GM crops.

What is it about investing in GM products that seems to undermine other technologies in agriculture? GM products attract the strictest intellectual property (IP) rights instruments possible in agriculture (e.g., process patents). The use of those instruments concentrates investment and drives out simple but even more effective technologies.

Now every government research centre and public university seeks to compensate for the fall in direct public investment through licensing royalties from IP and the creation of partnerships with the private sector. This necessarily changes the kinds of questions they favour being asked by their researchers, the kind that will be supported by institutional resources or rewarded with promotion. With these policies in place we shouldn’t be surprised that every problem looks like it has a GM solution even to researchers who claim to have no entrepreneurial motivations.

Prof. Padmanaban’s ambition for a crop that provides all nutritional needs and grows everywhere demonstrates the poverty of the GM approach to hunger and malnourishment. Such a crop would quickly become obsolete as it would also serve as a wonderful meal for every conceivable form of pest. Meanwhile, it would undermine both biological and agricultural diversity as it became a weed in its own right.

Instead of that approach, supporting communities with education on nutrition and farmers with technologies that build up their soils, manage pests with little or no application of pesticide and manufactured fertilizers gives them the means and independence to grow a variety of crops and livestock to meet their dietary needs and sell their surplus in local markets.

This investment in agriculture is not as good at making intellectual property, but better for growing food. To properly support India’s mainly small holder farming requires removing the penalties and incentives on the public scientist to develop primarily technologies that bring direct revenue to their institutions. Instead, invest in them with public money and measure their success by the yields of farmers, the reduction of pesticides and fertilizer they use, and the increase in their wealth and health.

No missed opportunities

India is not missing out on the benefits of GM. So far, there haven’t been any proven to exist, or proven to be sustainable. GM crops are not designed to increase intrinsic yield and the largest scale and longest term studies bear out that they don’t yield more. Meanwhile, the cost of GM seeds is the fastest growing expense for U.S. farmers who are simultaneously suffering from weeds resistant to the herbicides excessively used on GM crops and pests resistant to the insecticides over-used in Bt crops. That likely would be India’s experience had it commercialised Bt brinjal which was developed with the least effective form of Bt for the target pest.

In addition, the safety issue still lingers over these products. It shouldn’t. The science needed to establish their safety exists and is affordable but it must be applied dispassionately and transparently. That is all Jairam Ramesh asked.

Claiming that GM crops are demonstrated safe by the absence of specific health claims from Americans is glib. There are no validated health surveillance programmes in the U.S. which could both detect and diagnose the cause of the most likely manifestations of harm if they do exist.

Meanwhile, more research studies accumulate with evidence of adverse effects, some quite serious. These studies require replication, but they run into roadblocks or fail to find new funding. Most often these studies report low level health effects using animal feeding studies, so it is not clear whether the effect would be the same, more or less in humans and more or less likely to be caused using GM plants cooked and processed, as humans eat them, rather than raw or processed the way they are provided to test animals.

Hunger, pestilence, and economic failure are the images of fear increasingly being used to drive acceptance of GM crops. Ignorance, anti-science, ideology and hypocrisy are the insults used to counter questions about the safety of GM crops coming from scientists and the public. What is right for India’s agriculture is too important a question to leave to fear and insult to decide. I think that both Ramesh and the scientists of the Technical Expert 

Committee knew this when they asked India to pause on the use of GM products. Pause so that all voices can be heard. Reflect on what the problems are and whether technologies solve them or mask them for a time, or even make them worse later.