When debating, which causes the most concern?
A) Someone you know to be intelligent disagreeing with you
B) Someone you know to be an idiot agreeing with you
My friend asked me this question. It's a funny question, but a good'n. My answer is 'A'. Idiots still have opinions and blind squirrels find nuts. Plus, half of the people are dumber than the average man.
A fool thinks he is wise, but a wise man knows he's a fool. But you don't have to be smart to be wise. The reason so many smart people never get wise is because they tend to overvalue intelligence and therefore fail to see their own blind spots. So humility is as key as intellectual honesty. So when a humble but confident intelligent person is disagreeing with me, I start to worry that I've got it wrong, but I also get excited that I might be about to learn something important.
Learning, especially at a high level, or about human nature at any level, is often painful. It often means discarding cherished beliefs (even ones that are partially true) in order to accept something more thoroughly true. Politic truths are particularly difficult to ascertain because so few of them are universal, but are usually trade-offs which contain their own contradictions.
The path to wisdom has lots of detours on it, where one finds themselves saying, "well, if he is right about this, not only am I wrong, but I must walk back a lot of other things I thought were true." Correct a wise man and he'll thank you for it. Correct a fool and he'll resent you for it.
I always appreciated Hayek's answer to the question: why are so many smart people socialists?
"Indeed, the basic point of my argument--that morals, including especially, our institutions of property, freedom and justice, are not a creation of man’s reason but a distinct second endowment conferred on him by cultural evolution--runs counter to the main intellectual outlook of the twentieth century. The influence of rationalism has indeed been so profound and pervasive that, in general, the more intelligent an educated person is, the more likely he or she now is not only to be a rationalist, but also to hold socialist views (regardless of whether he or she is sufficiently doctrinal to attach to his or her views any label, including ‘socialist’). The higher we climb up the ladder of intelligence, the more we talk with intellectuals, the more likely we are to encounter socialist convictions. Rationalists tend to be intelligent and intellectual; and intelligent intellectuals tend to be socialist.
One’s initial surprise at finding that intelligent people tend to be socialist diminishes when one realises that, of course, intelligent people will tend to overvalue intelligence, and to suppose that we must owe all the advantages and opportunities that our civilisation offers to deliberate design rather than to following traditional rules, and likewise to suppose that we can, by exercising our reason, eliminate any remaining undesired features by still more intelligence reflection, and still more appropriate design and ’rational coordination’ of our undertakings. This leads one to be favorably disposed to the central economic planning and control that lie at the heart of socialism… And since they have been taught that constructivism and scientism are what science and the use of reason are all about, they find it hard to believe that there can exist any useful knowledge that did not originate in deliberate experimentation, or to accept the validity of any tradition apart from their own tradition of reason. Thus [they say]: ‘Tradition is almost by definition reprehensible, something to be mocked and deplored’.”
~Page 52 from Friedrich Hayek’s spectacular book The Fatal Conceit