Are The Smart Blind To Adaption?

Richard Hanania:

While social conservatives are stupider everywhere, the relationship between intelligence and economic [conservatism] varies across societies. … Social views here includes not only sexual morality and attitudes towards women, but also nationalism and immigration policy. … Negative relationship between social conservatism and IQ appears to be practically universal. … 

Elites have always had more open-minded sexual norms than peasants. In the US, civil rights, opening the borders, feminism, and the secularization of public life have been top-down phenomena. The leaders of Middle Eastern countries have usually been less devout than their population … Even the Ancient Greeks and Romans had a strain of religious skepticism among their elites, which we can also see in an even more consequential form among the American Founders. …

Most obvious potential explanation for the universal pattern we see is that social conservatism is stupid. … Soon as smart people from different cultures start to think about questions of sexual morality and how they should relate to outsiders, they converge towards liberalism because it is more logical. … 

Another possibility is that being smart makes you susceptible to accepting certain fallacies. … Being open to alternative viewpoints makes one subject to manipulation by supposed representatives of outgroups or clever ideological hucksters. … stupidity might be protective against women’s tears. … Another possibility is that different classes are accepting values that are generally adaptive for their own lives. …

All of this is very bad news for social conservatives. … it’s going to be very difficult to influence elite institutions. … When I talk to Yarvin about these things, he says I’m being parochial in my thinking and history provides plenty of examples of this, but it seems reasonable to me to believe that things have fundamentally changed since the Industrial Revolution and with the advent of instantaneous global communication. (More) 

How can we explain long term social trends over the last few centuries, especially value/norm trends? Re that issue, “conservative” means how things used to be centuries ago, while “liberal” is how things are now. And, like Hanania, I’m willing to set aside econ/tech trends, and attitudes toward these. So we are talking more about long-term trends in attitudes toward religion, slavery, democracy, rights, class differences, work, sex, gender, parenting, patriotism, militarism, and immigration.

I do think I see overall long term trends in such non-econ/tech social norms/values, trends that look more like steady changes than random walks. Some of these trends may plausibly be caused by econ/tech trends, but many others not so much. I also find it plausible that, over the last few centuries, smart people, who also tend to be more “open”, have tended more to favor these trends. 

There are many possible explanations for these patterns. But a popular “moral progress” story is that the world became more liberal as smart people spread persuasive arguments supporting social liberality. Smart people are better able to understand and accept these arguments, while others rely more on the social proof of others previously persuaded. (Note: this isn’t obviously Hanania’s story.)

There are several problems with this account. First, it predicts a random walk pattern of changes over time. Second, it seems hard to pinpoint solid relevant arguments that weren’t available to people a very long time ago. Third, if smarter people always saw liberal views as more plausible, why were social value/norms so consistently so far from liberality long ago?

An alternative cultural drift account, that I prefer, postulates that it was cultural selection pressures which held ancient societies in their socially conservative positions, but that those pressures greatly weakened in the last few centuries, allowing other drift tendencies to express themselves. So smarter people might have always seen liberal norms/values as more plausible. Or richer people, or those who live more densely, could have always tended to prefer more liberal norms/values. 

Any of these variations predict norms/values getting more liberal in a relatively steady manner after selection pressures weakened recently. They presume that liberal norms were not previously adaptive, and suggest that such norms are also not adaptive now. 

So why do the smart get this so consistently wrong? I’d guess that they can more easily see that liberal norms/values would do well for most people around them, but find it much harder to see the long term adaptive effects of such norms on societies.