A Conspiracy of Psyche

Seeing Our Stupidity's Smarts Can't Hurt As We Pursue Wisdom

HarperCollins, 2023

Yale professor Paul Bloom has a new book out about the state of Psychology called, cheekily, Psych.

As one is wont to do, he’s on the podcast circuit promoting it, including this conversation with Curiosophy Now guest Robert Wright.

The book and interview address a number of common ideas in psychology and elsewhere where Bloom casts a grain or two of his own opinion.

In this snippet, they get into a bit of controversial territory. Being the Universalist I am, I tend to get a bit excited when I hear things like this:

Bloom: I think actually a lot of things like conspiracy theories, and fake newsy things — where people say "Look how stupid people are!" — are actually cases where these are actually fairly intelligent things for a social animal.

Wright: You mean in the sense that conspiracies do happen, and they may threaten you, and it would make sense to be able to entertain hypotheses about them if you wanna stay alive?

In two senses. That's one of them. There are conspiracies. I've been involved in one or two. I've been a professor for a long time. They involved hiding information and doing this [sort of thing]. We often use the term "conspiracy" to refer to conspiracies that we don't like. [. . . ] But if you take the word "conspiracy" in its literal sense, they happen all the time. It's good to keep an eye out for them.

But there's also a second sense. Sometimes people hold views like Q-Anon, and people sort of say "well, that's really foolish." But what they forget is that, in everyday life, your goal isn't necessarily truth. Sometimes your goal is to get along. And whether something's rational or not has to be judged relative to what your goal is. If my goal is to be popular among my neighbors, I am being very rational to hold views that maybe are objectively silly, but if I held other views — if I disagreed with them on everything, and I'm ostracized — am I smart? I think I'm stupid. It's only smart if you don't value social contact.

So, before we call people stupid for their views, ask what are they trying to maximize? What's their goal, here? I think when we do that, we find they're smarter than they look.

Dr. Vervaeke (no, I won’t shut up about him) would say “the very machinery that makes us adaptive makes us susceptible to bullshit.” He’s not wrong.

Nor is Dr. Bloom. And it’s for this reason (Bloom’s perceptive intelligence) that I wanted to transcribe that bit of chat and share it with you all. No one would be happier were nonsense to suddenly disappear from the Cosmos than I would. Still, the Cosmos is the Cosmos, and while our cognition has an embodied component, we need to accept that and work with it.

If I were to blather one of the Declarations of which I’m wont, I’d say: “It’s time for the smart people who are also literate to create new, comprehensive and comprehensible narratives which still-smart lesser-thans can clip on a la veneers. If we give ourselves a jumbled, inchoate story, we’re going to get jumbled, inchoate results.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, in her poem Aurora Leigh said:

When God helps all the workers for his world, The singers shall have help of Him, not last.

And Y'shua of Nazareth (Who is called the Anointed One) confers:

Thy Kingdom Come Thy Will Be Done On Earth as it is in Heaven

Let us work for one another in this this world.