Tyler Cowen once said over lunch “I don’t know why I don’t agree with everything Greg Mankiw says. He’s much smarter than me.” He was being entirely earnest and it doesn’t seem on it’s face a crazy question. Yes, with a little reflection is easy to observe that smart people are wrong sometimes, but there’s nonetheless a probabilistic logic to it. If someone is smarter than me, I should just adopt all of their ideas which are, on average, more likely to be correct than those I form on my own, therefore increasing my average “correctness” through pure imitation, adoption, and replication. Almost none of us do this, thank the gods of ecological rationality and group selection, thus preserving the wisdom of crowds and the robustness of our collective wisdom, but I think it’s still worth revisiting how intelligence correlates with “correctness.” Specifically, I’m taking this as my opportunity to run a little thought experiment I like to call “The Genius Trap.” I apologize if there is a pre-existing thought experiment associated with someone famous. I haven’t read nearly enough philosophy.

To start, let’s make some gratuitous, outright rude reductions of people. People will be characterized by two attributes: how often they make correct assessments of the information being considered, which we will call “wisdom”, and how complex of an abstract system they can hold in their head while maintaining the consistency and coherence of each individual element, which we will refer to as “intelligence.” Now, it’s easy to observe that some people are wise but not intelligent, or vice versa, but that’s trite. To make things interesting, let’s assume that wisdom and intelligence are positively correlated. Some people will be low in both (“slow”), others will be medium (“average”), and a few blessed folks will be both highly wise and highly intelligent (“geniuses”).

Now typically in a thought experiment we leave everything in the realm of adjectives (high, low, slow, genius, etc), but bear with me here because this experiment benefits from assigning hard numerical paramaters. Let’s say that slow people are correct 85% of the time but can only only a 2 element system in their head. Average people are correct 90% of the time and can consider and evaluate an 32 element system. No need for symmetry here, let’s really go all-in on geniuses, and say they are correct 95% of the time and can hold a 1024 element system in their head. Following so far? Geniuses are carrying around 2^10 element models in their head, each element of which is correct 95% of the time.

You ever play “Mousetrap”?

Rube Goldberg Machines (RGMs) make for useful allegorical references, but why are some funny and others just sweaty metaphors? An RGM is an overly complex device drawn or conceived for comedic effect. They are purposefully absurb in their individual design elements, but what is key is that, if the events proceed as planned the intended result will actually occur. The metaphorical intent is usually that the complexity is unnecessary, but what makes an RGM funny is precisely that it would work if events proceeded as expected. The audience, of course, knows with certainty born of experience that there is absolutely no way this machine will function because anything with high levels of complexity and narrow tolerances for deviation will always fail. Comedic irony comes for us all.

It is in this manner that the opinions, most notably the politics, of really smart people can go so entirely off the rails. Recall our slow individual. Sure, they’re only right 85% of the time, but in a two elemement model of the world that still gets you home intact 72.25%. And for most of daily life, a two element model is more than sufficient to get you through your day hale and hearty. But alas, our poor geniuses, they cannot help themselves. The world is a rich and complex place of which they want to unlock the deepest mysteries. And why not? Point by point their lived experience is confronting all of the exam questions they knew the correct answers to when others were obviously mistaken. The rub, of course, is that being right 95% of the time can’t survive in the face of a 10 element model, for which their understanding remains pure and intact only 59.87% of the time. By the standards of a daily life, they have been reduced to dullards, clumsily shouting their world view at those without the luxury of ignoring them.

It is precisely because they are capable of holding in their heads and considering the ramifications of fantastically complex mental models of the world, each element itself well considered and defended, brilliant people can find themselves with very specific opinions that stand no chance of being remotely correct. The solution, of course, is social. It’s friends and coworkers who challenge you, pointing out your foolishness in fun and good faith. It’s the the academy, going through every line of your proof with a fine toothd comb, sometimes perhaps taking a little too much glee in pointing out your errors (often, in turn, making errors of their own), but the system persists and science proceeds in no small part because of the wisdom of crowds.

Some of the worst political ideas in history have come from geniuses, but as a light consumer of intellectual biography, it’s interesting how often the very worst ideas happen after the world decides someone is a genius, isolating them in a web of fame, worship, self-regard, and, in our modern era, extreme wealth. In many ways, it’s the opposite of herding, where the mechanics of herd safety disables the wisdom of crowds. Less common, do doubt, than herding simply because of the tautologically lesser prevalence of extreme intelligence, but nonetheless important.

Which is a long-winded waying of saying that the trap is not in being a genius, per se, but in being a genius alone. Of becoming surrounded by yes men or moving to an off the grid cabin in the woods. Of building a steel cocoon of your own narcissism, formulating ever more complex models within models, each mistake compounding and eroding your mind like intellectual termites. Avoiding the genius trap is not to limit yourself or the complexity of your thinking, but simply to open yourself to the criticism of others, particularly those invested in neither your brilliance or your censure. To wholly avail yourself of the possibility that the mouse trap might never fall because you are completely and utterly wrong.