Ok—what I mean is that the reason historical events work out one way and not another rarely, if ever, is described or explained in terms of the intelligence and cleverness of those whose actions shape those events.
I think I understand the heart of your question better now.
The reason historical events are not explained in terms of intelligence is because attributing historical decisions to the actors’ intelligence (or cleverness, stupidity, etc.) usually does not explain anything.
Suppose Agent Johnny English does stupid things. We want to know why Johnny English did these stupid things. You could say “because Johnny English is stupid”. How do we know Johnny English is stupid? Because Johnny English did stupid things. This is circular reasoning.
This feels unsatisfying to me and I’m not fully sure why.
If we want to know why Johnny English does things with his left hand, we could say “because he’s left-handed”. But we know he’s left-handed because he does things with his left hand. That seems just as circular, but still basically fine as an answer? More broadly we’d say “look, some people just favor their left hand. We don’t know exactly why, but there’s a fraction of the population who tends to do things with their left hand, even when it causes them to smear ink or makes scissors less efficient. We call these people left-handed.”
So when we say “Johnny English does things with his left hand because he’s left-handed”… it’s arguably more definition than explanation, but it does also have predictive power. It points at a pattern that lets us say “okay, Johnny English will probably use his left hand in this situation too, and if we try to make him use his right instead he probably won’t do a very good job”.
Handedness is a discrete phenomenon with two peaks. 90% of people are right-handed, 10% are left-handed and the cross-dominant population is small. “Right-handed verses left-handed” is a natural bucket because there is a trough between them on the handedness histogram.
Intelligence, on the other hand, exhibits a bell curve with a single peak. There is no trough on which to draw a dividing line between “smart” and “stupid”. The bucket is arbitrary instead of natural.
The English words “smart” and “stupid” are vague. They do not point to a numerical location on the bell curve. We could draw the line between smart and stupid at an IQ of 70, 100 or 145. If we draw the line at x then the theory has almost no explanatory power. You cannot say “Johnny English does stupid things because he is stupid” when you draw the dividing line at x because a person with an IQ of x−1 does almost exactly as many stupid things as a person with an IQ of x+1. (The observed difference in stupidity between individuals of IQ x−1 and x+1 is swamped by noise.)
Could we rephrase HumaneAutomaton’s question in terms of a continuous distribution instead of a binary distinction?
Yes, but it would cost a lot of entropy.
Suppose Johnny English did things with a stupidity level such that his posterior expected IQ is 85. It could be that Johnny English has an IQ of 85. It could be that Johnny English has an IQ of 65 and got lucky. It could be that Johnny English has ah IQ of 105 and got unlucky.
Under the best of circumstances it takes much more information to nail down Johnny English’s precise intelligence level than to deduce his handedness. History is not the best of circumstances. We have scarce data, deal with confounding unknowns and must counteract historiographic bias.
Handedness is different from IQ in two ways, both related to the continuous-discrete distinction.
It takes more information to deduce precise IQ than precise handedness and we usually don’t have that information for historical figures.
IQ predicts specific behavior with less precision than how well handedness predicts behavior. Context is more important for judging intelligence than for judging handedness.
To put it in terms of Occam’s razor, continuous distributions have many buckets. Hypotheses with many are more complex than theories with few buckets. IQ has more buckets than handedness.
Did the intelligence of individuals influence historical events? Yes. Can we isolate the signal? Generally, no.
Technically, saying that someone has high or low IQ is not a “mysterious answer”. You could measure it.
But you cannot measure the IQ of individuals or populations who died centuries ago.
Or, hypothetically… an archaeological research could find out that e.g. textbooks for 6 years old children in Carthage contained problems that 8 years old solved in Rome, plus some more evidence of this type, from which we might conclude that Carthagians were smarter as a whole, which would explain why Hannibal Barca was smarter than his opponents.
But without this extra information, the intelligence hypothesis reduces to a circular argument: “He won because he was smarter.” “What is your evidence he was smarter?” “He won, duh.”
I think I understand the heart of your question better now.
The reason historical events are not explained in terms of intelligence is because attributing historical decisions to the actors’ intelligence (or cleverness, stupidity, etc.) usually does not explain anything.
Suppose Agent Johnny English does stupid things. We want to know why Johnny English did these stupid things. You could say “because Johnny English is stupid”. How do we know Johnny English is stupid? Because Johnny English did stupid things. This is circular reasoning.
This feels unsatisfying to me and I’m not fully sure why.
If we want to know why Johnny English does things with his left hand, we could say “because he’s left-handed”. But we know he’s left-handed because he does things with his left hand. That seems just as circular, but still basically fine as an answer? More broadly we’d say “look, some people just favor their left hand. We don’t know exactly why, but there’s a fraction of the population who tends to do things with their left hand, even when it causes them to smear ink or makes scissors less efficient. We call these people left-handed.”
So when we say “Johnny English does things with his left hand because he’s left-handed”… it’s arguably more definition than explanation, but it does also have predictive power. It points at a pattern that lets us say “okay, Johnny English will probably use his left hand in this situation too, and if we try to make him use his right instead he probably won’t do a very good job”.
Handedness is a discrete phenomenon with two peaks. 90% of people are right-handed, 10% are left-handed and the cross-dominant population is small. “Right-handed verses left-handed” is a natural bucket because there is a trough between them on the handedness histogram.
Intelligence, on the other hand, exhibits a bell curve with a single peak. There is no trough on which to draw a dividing line between “smart” and “stupid”. The bucket is arbitrary instead of natural.
The English words “smart” and “stupid” are vague. They do not point to a numerical location on the bell curve. We could draw the line between smart and stupid at an IQ of 70, 100 or 145. If we draw the line at x then the theory has almost no explanatory power. You cannot say “Johnny English does stupid things because he is stupid” when you draw the dividing line at x because a person with an IQ of x−1 does almost exactly as many stupid things as a person with an IQ of x+1. (The observed difference in stupidity between individuals of IQ x−1 and x+1 is swamped by noise.)
Could we rephrase HumaneAutomaton’s question in terms of a continuous distribution instead of a binary distinction?
Yes, but it would cost a lot of entropy.
Suppose Johnny English did things with a stupidity level such that his posterior expected IQ is 85. It could be that Johnny English has an IQ of 85. It could be that Johnny English has an IQ of 65 and got lucky. It could be that Johnny English has ah IQ of 105 and got unlucky.
Under the best of circumstances it takes much more information to nail down Johnny English’s precise intelligence level than to deduce his handedness. History is not the best of circumstances. We have scarce data, deal with confounding unknowns and must counteract historiographic bias.
Handedness is different from IQ in two ways, both related to the continuous-discrete distinction.
It takes more information to deduce precise IQ than precise handedness and we usually don’t have that information for historical figures.
IQ predicts specific behavior with less precision than how well handedness predicts behavior. Context is more important for judging intelligence than for judging handedness.
To put it in terms of Occam’s razor, continuous distributions have many buckets. Hypotheses with many are more complex than theories with few buckets. IQ has more buckets than handedness.
Did the intelligence of individuals influence historical events? Yes. Can we isolate the signal? Generally, no.
Thou shall not speak of scissors! Apparatus of the devil that be!
.. yes, I am left-handed :P
Technically, saying that someone has high or low IQ is not a “mysterious answer”. You could measure it.
But you cannot measure the IQ of individuals or populations who died centuries ago.
Or, hypothetically… an archaeological research could find out that e.g. textbooks for 6 years old children in Carthage contained problems that 8 years old solved in Rome, plus some more evidence of this type, from which we might conclude that Carthagians were smarter as a whole, which would explain why Hannibal Barca was smarter than his opponents.
But without this extra information, the intelligence hypothesis reduces to a circular argument: “He won because he was smarter.” “What is your evidence he was smarter?” “He won, duh.”
Yes. Another example would be the Habsburg Jaw.