society’s intellectual bargain

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“Resplendent intellect gone mad.”

Mark Twain

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The unthinkable becomes inevitable, and once inevitable, acceptable.

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It was Salih Reisoglu who suggested the idea of social intellect:

“Social intellect which is a balanced blend of intelligence social education social experience and social awareness. Being intellectually adult is defined as being educated and experience in social sciences that improve our awareness of the social environment around us both as a political participant and as an economic participant in this society. This intellect means that we have to be aware of a wide range of opinions point of views ideologies and even concepts so that we can actually critically assess the choices that we are being asked to make.”

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I begin there to discuss the bargain society seems to be making with its intellectual intelligence versus technology. And, yes, I just made them opponents. Why? The relationship between humans and technology is asymmetrical. Technology has become not only greater than the people who created it, but the humans who use it. Yeah. While pundits dance on the head of the “what is intelligence” pin, the everyday world simply believes the computer/smartphone/technology is smarter than they are, can make decisions faster and better than any one person can. I say that because anyone who imagines we can defend and protect ourselves through our own awareness and willpower is simply failing to grasp the depth and dimensions of which technology brings to bear its power. The technology revolution is wreaking havoc on the human mind and, consequently, the world we live in.

Havoc can be created several ways:

• the platform itself makes it that an unconstrained actor will always win.
• As a corollary, technology’s power to reshape human minds resides not in control, but in subtle manipulations where the changes occur in single digit %’s at a time rather than one sweeping 100% shift. Once again, these actors, with these actions, will always win.

The consequence of this havoc is society is polarized and fragmented and overall social intellect is being suffocated. And its only getting worse. Even curiosity stagnates when caged within a tribe <digital echo chambers or filter bubbles>. This is a global societal problem. Intellectually we are shrinking to fit into the narrower dimensions of our worldview. It is no coincidence we are polarized as we coalesce into likeminded groups even while connected to a larger world. Simply by being connected we convince ourselves we are ‘openminded’ and ‘seeing worldview to influence the broadening of our minds” when in reality the technology itself is steering us into smaller and smaller, more distant from broader reality, groups and tribes. We are not getting stupider, its just that our social intellect isn’t optimized, in fact, our intellect is being reduced.

Which leads me to say that simply stating that this barrage of information over stimulates us cognitively is certainly imprecise if not a little lazy.

The most important aspect of our intellectual cognitive condition reflects a fundamental feature of human existence – human beings are in the finite predicament of having fixed limits on their cognitive capacities in the time available to them. Actual human beings in everyday situations do not have potentially infinite memory and computing time that most computers have. This is the cognitive friction within which the social intellect conflict occurs. It is within this combinatorial explosion of multiple proofs, forcing probabilistic thinking rather than black & white binary choicemaking, where we get cognitively stretched. Unable to construct complete theories – to be fair, often many things are just too complex to understand – we lean in on our existing biases which causes us to accept far too many falsehoods (partial truths) and reject far too many truths. Basically, we are attempting to build our social intellect on the fly.

“We are like sailors who must rebuild their ship on the open sea, never able to dismantle it in drydock and reconstruct it there out of the best materials.”

Otto Neurath

To do this we find what is called “the minimal inference condition.” We make decisions, well, not precisely, but often based on what we think is apparently appropriate to what would satisfy our own beliefs (and desires I imagine). Yeah. We adopt convenient, but often unsound, inferences to make ‘logical’ (or what we deem rational) choices. Technology giveth and taketh. I believe it was Marshall McLuhan who explained how it gives and takes away simultaneously. It gives us the simplistic (easy and quick to grasp) yet takes away the depth and nuance and the invisible, unless sought out, that gives the intellectual depth to not only sensemake, but make good choices. It makes the advantages easy to see and the disadvantages more difficult to see. This creates a cognitive asymmetry where an illusion that technology is positively enhancing human progress is shaped. In other words, we don’t see, or ignore, the price we pay for technology. This is a dangerous intellectual bargain.

Which leads me back to Salih Reisoglu and his thinking that social intellect is made up of the intellectually immature versus intellectually mature.

And this is where the bargain gets tricky. Depending on where you stand, individually on the social intellect scale, will be how you make your bargain with technology. So let me spend a minute on that social intellect spectrum. Independent of your age, people who did not have enough of the chance to get a basic education or much of an experience due to a lack of exposure to different environments/cultures/thinking-behind-a-belief skew toward being more intellectually immature. It can get a bit more complicated beyond that. A lot of people get a good education concentrating on a specific skill or topic and become valuable experts in their areas of interest, yet, will have blinders on for what exists outside that specific expertise (and do not have the ability to ‘lateral think’, i.e., use that expertise as foundation for solid thinking outside that expertise). Yeah. I am saying that deep expertise does not necessarily translate into social awareness learning and experience. This means simply being an expert doesn’t mean you have a good relationship with social reality and effective social contribution.

I would be remiss if I didn’t point out something Reisoglu emphasizes that that the ratio of the intellectually mature in a society is the primary determinant of how good the political and economic systems of the society develop and function. This is true because the socially intellectual immature remain in some form or fashion ‘innocent’ (I like this word better than ignorant in that it just shows a bit of unexperienced naiveté rather than choiceful stupidity) as a consumer and a voter. While intending to make the best choices they can the reality is due to poor social intellect they just make too many mistakes in their economic and political judgments or are easily misguided by others to make choices that do not really serve their best interest. They simply lack the ability to properly see the correct causality relation between their actions and that consequences of those actions end up opposite what they wanted. This can get a little worse. The reality is not all intellectual mature, socially or intelligence-wise, are good people. Many choose to serve their own interests at the expense of others in society – even playing without rules, being unethical or ignoring the rule of law. To serve their own purpose they will not hesitate to misguide the intellectual immature. If a society is dominated by intellectual immature, the economic and political system is left to the mercy of the few intellectual adults and we have clearly seen globally, the ‘non-good people’, but intellectually mature, can easily discredit the good people and dominate a system. They overpower complex situations by making the intellectually immature crowds believe in the fast, simple, but false promises, which are much easier than explaining complex issues with the less comfortable long-term solutions. Reisoglu points out something which I have said for decades: the primary contributors to the marketer system failures are not primarily the evil characters, but those (of social intellect) innocence who did not have the chance or the motivation to develop themselves and remained intellectual immature throughout their lives.

Which leads me to education.

Our next bargain is now with education. Education, generally speaking, is of no use to society unless it is purposefully designed to better society. And this is where things begin to go awry. The intellectually immature tend to reduce the design while the intellectually mature tend to expand the design. This becomes even more true when that education falls under the construct of social education. Reductionism is actually harmful to society mostly because it doesn’t foster critical and conceptual thinking (which I tend to believe most people believe is important in a complex dynamic world).

This would lead me to suggest that a social education needs to include alternative opinions and point of views, including ideologies, to benefit the overall welfare of the society. This isn’t to ‘indoctrinate’ anyone, but rather what it does is make people more intellectually mature which, as a consequence, means that their decisions are more well-rounded and more rationalized in reality. Therein lies the first, and possibly the biggest, bargain. Exposure to alternative thinking strengthens your belief in what you already believe, not diminishes it. yeah. I purposefully worded it that way to make a point. You are bargaining that the idea, or ideology, or belief, is strong enough to withstand the intellectual rigor found in exploring opposing ideas, ideologies, and beliefs. This bargain is an important one because to build an intellectual framework educational infrastructure society must demand a system of basic education that teaches young people not what to believe in without questioning, but how to think through curiosity with access to complete information. I imagine I believe if an education system fails to create a solid social intellect mental construct far too many people will remain intellectually immature and as a consequence not question answers being offered by who they ‘feel’ are serving their interests. The social intellectually immature will remain comfortable in the little mental playgrounds that they feel comfortable playing in and no others.

As the opening of this piece suggests, social education must go way beyond civic education and must span the basics of the primary social sciences, of politics economics finance, law, and sociology in order to enable every person to understand and to evaluate the dynamics of the system within the society. This social education creates a general social awareness to provide context for comparisons and enhance critical thinking. To be clear. The aim of social education is not, and cannot be, to create an economics or politics or even a sociology expert out of each individual. The objective is to make each person of the society intellectually mature enough to be able to understand and evaluate not only the system, and the choices demanded of the system, but also the experts, so they can make rational choices as consumers and voters. I would suggest not accepting this bargain just makes you easy prey for the charlatans who may seem to serve your interests, but do not.

To be clear because I am talking here about education. Professional expertise is not social education. I could even argue that social intellect is not directly associated with professional expertise. Professional expertise can exist and the individual can still be intellectual immature socially. This is not to suggest that this is healthy for society because if professional experts are social intellectually immature they slow the pace of societal progress, i.e., society and progress is not optimized and, I imagine, you could posit that if the world becomes increasingly complex, that progress drag has a multiplicative negative effect on society over time. Conversely, if we increase the number of professional experts WITH a good social education, THEY will not be able to optimize their potential if the societal system is driven by the socially intellectual immature. It is a looped education challenge to ensure the environment is conducive to fostering social intellectually mature potential. At some point we need to take a good long hard look at the bargain society is willing to make with education (which includes how technology educates).

Which leads me to why we should embrace a larger bargaining discussion.

I am a business person who talks about societal issues through a business acumen filter. In almost every business model, interaction and connectivity is seen as a bargaining process between efficiency & effectiveness, pragmatism an& possibilities and intellectual & productivity. This gets exacerbated in a more interdependent world in which the task of calculating a utility function is almost virtually impossible. The truth is that a business is both rational and habitual, both intellectual and emotional, and it only progressing through bargaining on those issues. A business is organized around a central premise in which the form and direction of microactions are conceived to spring from a combination of habits and experiences that allow for thoughtful probabilistic thinking and are open to change. A society is the same. At any given point we will never have enough information, therefore, any decision a society makes will be some bargain. That bargain improves the higher the social intellect of the grander society.

Or as Ernst B. Haas said “a distinction is made between adaptation and learning. The former is defined as the ability to change one’s behavior so as to meet challenges in the form of new demands without having to reevaluate one’s entire program and the reasoning on which that program depends for its legitimacy, while learning is reserved for situations in which an organization is induced to question the basic beliefs underlying the selection of ends.”

A society is simultaneously marked by coherence and breakdown. It is a puzzle in which the demands of the subsystems and the needs of the macro systems need to bargain. Within that bargain resides the paradox of how can society be moving in two different directions at the same time, i.e., toward coherence and towards breakdown?

Both Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson emphasized that prosperity meant little without societal, or social, betterment, and that a proper balance between them had to be maintained. Progress, to them, meant the pursuit of technology and science (and education) in the interest of human betterment as in intellectual and ethical as well as material prosperity. Both men worried about corruption and how their idea of a healthy society could be corrupted. As much as they embraced progress, they considered all innovations as a means to achieving the larger social end. They understood that a healthy society was an unending bargaining process. In their day it was machinery, in today’s world it is now technology attempting to bend the arc of society.

Which leads me to end with this discomforting tidbit from Azeem Azhar’s 6/4/23 newsletter:

• Bye-bye science: India has recently excised evolution, the periodic table, and energy sources, from its school curriculum — setting aside learning that lays the groundwork for scientific comprehension and foster critical thinking. Other topics that have been removed include analysis of democracy, pluralism and political dissent. If this is rolled out across the country, it’s terrible news for India. Investments in human capital – education – are key drivers of shared prosperity in times of technological change. Freedom to think, whether through the scientific method or simply being critical of the system, is an essential enabler of research, entrepreneurship and wealth.

Society’s intellectual bargaining is happening right before our eyes – everywhere. At stake in this bargaining process is, pragmatically, our social intellect – i.e., our choice to be intellectually immature or mature societies – and, possibilities, what kind of future do we want or even need? What kind of bargain are we willing to strike? And, relevant to today, what role do we want technology to play? Ponder.