Idea: well-defined problems related to people and society have objective, specific answers as they do for any other area of the natural world. Our debates would be more productive if we accepted our awareness of these answers, or our ability to discover them, is determined by differences in intelligence.
What’s intelligence? We don’t know is the simple answer. Scientific disciplines like physics, chemistry, or biology can accurately define the things they label, but this isn’t the case for those that study intelligence. What’s important in this comparison is how those disciplines make a connection between some testable, physical reality and what’s being labelled. I would say we will know what intelligence is when we can unambiguously link the biology of the brain with behaviour we label as intelligent. And as I suggested in ‘Reclaiming The Word Intelligence’ this may collapse the word intelligence and its synonyms into a single physical or biological mechanism.
So, we don’t know what intelligence is, but I think there is a test for when people are debating intelligently and it’s built from the ‘First Assumption’, which goes: any well-defined social problem will have an objectively true answer, to the point of being just one answer if the problem is sufficiently well-defined. This idea is inspired by the ‘hard’ sciences like physics, chemistry, and biology. For example, take the way physics can exactly define the path of a thrown object if the initial conditions are known. What’s important here is there’s an objective, rule-based world outside our own minds that we just discover.
The First Assumption seems to me a natural extension of the discovery we live in a rule-based, material world that exists independent of our own minds. How can people and society be separate from this? And what’s driving our behaviour if we are? Magic, God? I don’t accept these explanations. I’m a scientist, and this blog will be based on the assumption there are single, objectively true answers to well-defined social problems.
So, how might the First Assumption improve our discussions? Think about a question such as, ‘how can we reduce poverty?’ A question such as this often divides along political lines, but this implies there are multiple ways to answer this question. Imagine instead people debating this question assumed an intelligent examination of it would naturally find a single, objectively true answer; this would be transformative. I’ll use this question about reducing poverty as a way to illustrate the First Assumption in more concrete terms in another post but this assumption can also be illustrated using simple problems as examples.
Take something really basic like needing to walk across a room to pick up a cup. No one would suggest there’s a Right-wing or Left-wing way of doing this, or that you would need to consider various confirmation biases or motivated reasoning. What’s needed to complete the action is obvious because the required information is saturated, and everyone would agree. I would suggest that when people have similar goals the only reason they disagree on solutions to problems is because the necessary knowledge and understanding is either currently not complete or one or more of those debating lack awareness of what’s already established, or the intelligence to acquire it. There’s also the problem of how well a problem has been sufficiently defined, but this feeds back to how well the situation is understood. And how well a problem is understood can also impact how people frame their goals, with a convergence towards similar goals when people are being intelligent.
The First Assumption generates a useful rule of thumb that when a diverse group of people are debating intelligently they will naturally coalesce around a single solution to some well-defined problem. They don’t need to share the same values or like each other because the objective limits for how a problem can be resolved will be the same regardless of who they are or what they would prefer to be true. The emphasis on arguing intelligently is essential and unavoidable which is why I’ve referred to it already during my blog posts and will continue to do this.
To summarise, people and society are as much part of an objective, rule-based world as everything else. If objective truths exist then it must follow that people are being objectively more or less intelligent when trying to discover these truths. As I stated in ‘Reclaiming The Word Intelligence’, I don’t think intelligence is a fixed thing we can currently measure and which people have equally available in all situations. It’s more like a temporary state specifically related to some truth about the external world that has a complex relationship to lots of factors that we’re only just discovery and which I’ll discuss in other posts. So, throughout this blog I’ll make claims about when I think people are discovering truths about the world or not. And if the ideas in this post are true, then people will be able to make objectively true claims about whether I’ve been intelligent when I’m wrong.