Being a great intellectual does not mean you can anticipate what will come next. Being very intelligent does not mean you know how to proceed in the presence of incomplete knowledge. It does not mean you understand what aspects of a situation really matter. It does not mean you have a superior awareness of what you don’t know. It does not mean you are better than other people at detecting the flaws in your thought processes. Do you want to know what highly intelligent people are really good at? They are really good at persuading themselves that their own false beliefs are true.
So, if intelligence is not the key ingredient of wisdom and good sense, what is? Let me offer a couple of observations. First, our society has completely–screwed-up notions about what ability is. Ever since the French Enlightenment, we’ve lived in an overly rationalistic culture. We assume that the highest and defining human faculty is reason and that the most important human trait is intelligence, which we measure in academic settings via the ability to earn good grades and do well on standardized tests. We’ve built our meritocracy around this rationalistic view of the world.
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