Ask A Genius 1051: The Chris Cole Session
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/07/31
Rick Rosner, American Comedy Writer, www.rickrosner.org
Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Independent Journalist, www.in-sightpublishing.com
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: This is from Chris Cole. “You can ask him if intelligence implies values, such as the will to live.”
Rick Rosner: Consciousness implies values, so…
Jacobsen: No, no, no. Does intelligence imply values?
Rosner: Oh.
Jacobsen: This is the will to live.
Rosner: I understand the first part of the question.
Jacobsen: So I can frame it as a question. ‘Does intelligence imply values such as the will to live?’
Rosner: So what Chris is asking? If you think he’s asking the same thing, does being smart imply that you have values? Is that what he’s asking?
Jacobsen: Does intelligence imply any value? So, does it imply goodness? Does it imply the will to live? Does it imply the will to power? Does it imply empathy? Does it imply things like that? It’s a two-parter. Does intelligence imply values? And if so, what values?
Rosner: Right. You and I have been talking for ten years. We’ve seen bad behaviour from people who do well on IQ tests, Raniere and that other guy. The press is apart from the majority of people. The bad guys are the exception. So, what we’ve seen, at least about people who have high IQs, is a willingness to pursue activities and lines of reasoning to extreme degrees. Would you agree with that?
Jacobsen: That seems more… there are cases of that. I go down a zillion rabbit holes. I engage in a bunch of obsessive behaviours, not always the same behaviour. To do well on the mega test, for instance, takes a certain amount of OCD, the willingness to buckle down and spend a ton of time on problems that are meaningless except that they’re super freaking hard.
So, can you argue that being super smart means that you use your smartness? But basically, do you become a smartpsychopath or sociopath? That you look at the world with your smartness. You see that, to some extent, Morality is a construct that may not be super embedded in the world itself. That is a thing that people agree on, but even knowing that, you decide not to behave like a psychopath. It is more reasonable not to. You have a better life without being a psychopath. Other people have a better life, all things being equal. Why not let the people you encounter have decent lives? Apply the golden rule to them. You don’t want to be fucked over.
You decide not to fuck over other people. So the question is, do smart people follow lines of reasoning that they can look at moral constructs dispassionately but decide to embrace them? Even though they’re smart enough not to believe in some supreme babysitter who’s watching to ensure you don’t act badly. It goes that deep with people, even smart people. OCD aside, people can see ways of being that are less hassle than other ways of being.
Often, those ways of being involved in moral behaviour and the golden rule. So, in a weak to medium-strength way, intelligence implies some morality. We have evolved drives, including the will to live. If not derailed by quirks, a smartperson will try to find the best way to live within reason. An intense study of the best strategies for life and success. But a smart person may not be less inclined to fuck themselves over than a dumb person.
I’ve fucked myself over in several ways. So it’s not, but I’ve also done many things that have been helpful to me. So, I stick by my answer to a weak to medium-strong extent. What do you think?
Jacobsen: Take an extra statistical approach, from weak to medium strength. How would you codify those moral behaviours and thoughts? So, what would be the pattern of reasoning? All of them are from some of the thoughts about the evolutionary background, social relationships, and the outcomes for oneself and others.
Rosner: Let’s look at Einstein, a very smart guy. He made many decisions that made his life easier. Some of them were moral, and some weren’t. He got the F out. He saw what was going on in Germany. He got out, made his life easier and safer, and had a hot and horny first marriage with, I want to say, Mileva Marić. They were banging before they were married. How common was that in the 1890s? 1900s. But they got after it; they had a kid out of wedlock. They had a passionate deal. They talked a lot about physics. She was a decent physicist herself, but they couldn’t deal with each other and got divorced.
Then, for his second marriage, Einstein married his cousin, a housewife. They got along pretty well, but she did everything he didn’t want to deal with. So he could walk around and think about stuff, go out and take many walks around Princeton, or go out in his sailboat. She handled daily life’s drudgery, and that worked great for him. It wasn’t a moral thing. It was just that we should make life easier. She’s fine with me. I like her. She’ll take care of all this.
How much did they bang? But he was, in a smart person’s way, making life easy for himself. He got this job at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, right? He could think about things and write equations on the blackboard all day. Again, he was making things easy for himself. He came to Hollywood and hung out with Charlie Chaplin. He liked doing that stuff. He liked being a celebrity. If some woman wanted to bang him because he was Einstein, he’d say yes to that, too. Not a lot. He had five known affairs but took it as it came to him.
It was all right without being constrained by normal Morality; this is happening. She’s up for it. I’m up for it. Honestly, there’s a lot. And then finally, in the end, he’s 76 years old or so. The doctor says you’ve got an abdominal aneurysm; the artery or vein that carries a ton of blood out of your heart has a weakness. If we don’t operate on it, it’s going to blow. You’ll almost instantly be dead. Einstein says, “No, I’ve had a good run; leave it alone.” He exercised judgment and decided that was just how he wanted to go.
He wasn’t suicidal, but he didn’t want the hassle and the pain. He just decided, “All right.” What else? When Israel became a nation, he got an offer to be president of Israel or prime minister. He said, “No, I’m not qualified.” So anyway, there’s all sorts of evidence in Einstein’s life that he looked at his life and, to some extent, made self-serving decisions. You could argue that one of the self-serving decisions was not to be a total psycho. Just take it easy, don’t… He seems like a very reasonable guy. He wasn’t particularly immoral in his behaviour. He just behaved like a guy who looked at ways of being to some extent and decided that just behaving not like a monster was the way to go. Does that sound reasonable?
Jacobsen: I have a comment. You can finish your point, but mine is short. My thought is that general intelligence has components or sub-components. So, I hypothesize that in Morality and immorality, sub-component variance produces more immorality, statistically speaking. Perspective implies balanced intelligence, and that could be ethical. By balanced intelligence, I mean that the sub-component variance is minimized. Perspective implies a balanced intelligence enacted wisely. So, a balanced intelligence is more likely to produce ethical output. The idea is that it will have a lower variance rate, giving you the perspective to act wisely in life.
Rosner: Yes, that’s what I’m arguing for, though there are counterexamples. Isaac Newton, one of the smartest people ever, was a prick and a bitter, jealous, vengeful dude. That may have to do with being shipped out by his mom when he was ten. She married a new guy. A super smart person may not be able to entirely overcome their life experiences, which may make them misbehave. Feynman, another counterexample, is a delightful guy.
He was a good-looking, funny, entertaining, good storyteller, and fun guy. He had a standing bet at Los Alamos and later said that if you gave him a minute and a word problem in physics or math, he could come up with the answer within 10%, within 60 seconds. He safe-cracked as a hobby.
At Los Alamos, he’d break into top-secret safes and leave notes for people saying, “Yes, this safe isn’t very safe, is it?” And he played the bongos—a cool guy, a very cool guy. But they made a movie about how he lost the love of his life at a young age. He married his childhood sweetheart, and while he was working on the bomb, she died of TB 60 miles away or 90 miles away in Albuquerque or Santa Fe. After that, he decided to become a sexual predator. Did the loss of his love turn him into that?
But he approached picking up women analytically. He looked at it as a problem. He applied the same analytics to hooking up that he did to subatomic particles. He came up with similar principles—some similar to those used by pickup artists. One is, don’t ever buy a woman a drink. That means you’re a sucker. You want to be the guy who isn’t that easy to crack. It’s similar to the principle of negging, where you diss a woman, a beautiful woman who’s used to being complimented.
You give her something that’s not a compliment to knock her off her game and give you an opening. So he seduced a ton of women, including the wives and girlfriends of his grad students. Probably Chris knows the details of this and whether I’m full of crap. Or better than I do because Chris was at Caltech, where Feynman was for decades. But there’s a guy whose history led him to engage in behaviour that we wouldn’t find acceptable now. Generally, super-smart people want orderly, non-chaotic, pleasant lives, which include a certain amount of moral behaviour.
Rosner: You look at Ranierie, who decided to transcend normal Morality. It didn’t go well for him. Was he super happy during his years of running? I want to say NXIVM, but is that right?
Jacobsen: Yes, NXIVM.
Rosner: Did his years of running NXIVM make him happy? I doubt he was super happy. He was probably juggling so much bullshit, so busy psychologically manipulating the members of his cult. That seems like a terrible way to live that you’re just bullshitting 24-7. I doubt that he was super happy, but I haven’t had a sex cult. So I can’t compare. The overall result, spending the rest of his life in prison, seems like a terrible outcome.
Or maybe. He’s so smart; he decided this might end terribly, but “I don’t care about the future me. Fuck him. I care about present me, and present me right now has a sex harem. I can get laid with eight different women. I am manipulating all these people. I’m scamming people out of millions of dollars. I’m loving it. Maybe I’ll get in trouble later, but I don’t care about later.” That is rare and exceptional behaviour. Most smart people want to live in pleasant conditions for themselves and those around them, which implies morality. Thank you very much, and I will talk to you tomorrow.
Jacobsen: All right, talk to you then. Thank you. Bye.
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