| This article has been cobbled together from a few threads here and there taken from Kahneman's own recent book popularising his research (Fast and Slow Thinking, 2011). The book explores several interesting ideas, but I think I can safely say that "why smart people are stupid" is almost certainly NOT one of the more important themes in the book. Which I think is why, as you've noted, the results from the CRT testing don't line up with the conclusions in the article. Actually I'll go a bit further and say that in simplifying a fairly nuanced and complex concept down to an attention grabbing headline, this article is ironically appeals to the intuitive bias trap that Kahneman describes in his book. "Why smart people are stupid" gives us an easy bypass to answer a complex question and saves us the mental effort of actually coming to grips with the problem. The explanation is satisfying, but it's also flat out WRONG. No, the deeper theme is something of an inconvenient truth for both smart and not so smart alike. Best for you to read the book yourself if you're really interested, but I think it's not too big a stretch to say that PG was approaching the same idea in his wisdom (intuition, fast thinking) vs. intelligence (slow, deliberate thinking) essay: "And while wisdom yields calmness, intelligence much of the time leads to discontentment. That's particularly worth remembering. A physicist friend recently told me half his department was on Prozac. Perhaps if we acknowledge that some amount of frustration is inevitable in certain kinds of work, we can mitigate its effects." |