Principles of Applied Epistemology (APPLIED EPISTEMOLOGY)

[Mick Harper]

It is me by a country mile. However, this is not merely non-operable, it is denied. Vociferously. My status in the family, sort of halfway, is what is deemed also to be my smartness status. It is something of a family joke that I'm the only person who dissents from this view. It is one of the things that keeps me in my place because, you may be sure, I am my own worse enemy in this regard. Even in areas where it would be conceded that I have some expertise my opinions would never, remotely, have any chance of changing anybody's mind.

Think on't.

[Wile E. Coyote]

Quite right. Group survival is surely the priority.

[Mick Harper]

You have reached my conclusion before I had thought of it. You must be the smartest... no, I can't go on.

[Mick Harper]

The smartest person in the room (Part Six)

We now move into a room with people who are guaranteed to be not like us, and nor are the people in the room like one another. Who are they? If you're so smart, you tell me. No? They are people randomly selected from the population you come from. It seems odd on the face of things to find yourself (and themselves) not fitting in with 'your own people' but such is the case. Each one of us is highly peculiar though we never notice it because we live so steadfastly among a highly selected group from that population, our peers. But even so we might easily fight and die for one another.

But presently we are only trying to find out who is the smartest person in the room. You might very well assume it is you. You have a high IQ, you have an outstanding array of educational qualifications, your cultural standards are of the highest, relative to this sorry bunch. You're not being big-headed, it is a simple matter of statistics. Arising from you being the only person in the room who has not been randomly selected, you are in there because you are reading a piece of high level discourse. It is unlikely any of them would be. You are quite likely to be the smartest person in the room. Top three certainly.

Ask anyone. Ask anyone selected from your peer group. But none of them are in the room to ask. They are so small in numbers, none of them got randomly selected. Or, if you prefer, you are that person. You'll have to ask the people in the room, so now the question is

[Mick Harper]

The smartest person in the room (Part Seven)

Many of them might concede you are smarter than they are because smartness is widely correlated with qualities you have and that they might not have -- accent, vocabulary, fluency, self-confidence, age, appearance, paper qualifications and so forth. The ordinary ways by which human beings judge pecking orders. If it was the Green Room for a Miss World Pageant you might not fare so well.

In this room, it is entirely possible that a general consensus would place you as 'the smartest person in the room'. But as soon as you pull out a handy orange box, stand on it and begin, "As the smartest person in the room, I would like to say..." you will be in deep trouble. One of the great paradoxes of life is that while everybody acquires the vast majority of their knowledge by listening to people they judge to be smarter than themselves, they are only prepared to do this if it is mediated.

[Mick Harper]

The smartest person in the room (Part Eight)

Mediation is of huge importance because it sidesteps the 'smartest person in the room' factor. Let's say you are watching a telly programme about something serious but that you don't know much about. Generally you will accept the information (including the interpretation of that information) in the manner you would in the classroom. That is you accept it whole and without reflection.

You may be smarter than the person who first put the information together (an academic), smarter than the person responsible for what is on the screen (a TV researcher), smarter than the presenter (either a personality or an academic slumming it), smarter than the direct mediator (a TV producer) and smarter than the űbermediator (an industry watchdog).

But your brain is telling you that you are not smarter than all of them combined. Especially as you didn't know much about the subject in the first place. What's more, you have acquired information guaranteed to be pretty good practically for free in terms of effort. But you have paid a price for this. You have acquired what is, from your point of view, possibly substandard material -- if you had done the whole thing off your own bat you might easily have produced something better. And worse, your brain will from now on be protecting this knowledge even from your own superior smartness. This is called

[Mick Harper]

I was introduced to the concept of 'the slowest person in the room' yesterday. The phrase was enunciated by someone called Matt Goodwin who has apparently garnered a lot of attention by (a) developing a theory about the intellectual heights being captured by an ideology that frames all policy-making in terms of the poor, the less able, the disadvantaged etc and (b) which has been adopted by the Sun et al.

Neil Maggs, the bloke on the radio who informed me about this person, and briefly interviewed him, then (a) denounced the whole idea before (b) proceeding to demonstrate that it was true.

[Mick Harper]

The smartest person in the room (Part Nine)

Let us fill the room with a hundred people who watched that TV programme. They are pre-selected on the basis of people who watch 'serious' documentaries but other than that they are reasonably representational of the country as a whole. Yet that one factor has plunged you down the rankings. You may still be near the top thanks to your a priori smart qualifications but you no longer have the easy a priori superiority you held when they were a true cross-section.

And remember one other factor. People who watch serious programmes are self-consciously smart(ish). Worse: the criteria for smartness in this room, it quickly emerges, is knowledge of a recondite subject about which you and everyone else are sort of more or less equally au fait but not much more than that. Again, you can deploy the various tricks of the trade to discourse in a superior manner but the going is undeniably tougher.

And then in comes a whole gaggle of people. The makers of the TV documentary including all those people they rang up to pick their brains on the subject. In fact there is nobody in the country that knows more about this subject than they do. Who's the smartest person in the room now? It might be you but how on earth are you going to demonstrate it?

[Mick Harper]

The smartest person in the room (Part Ten)

There is only one way you can. By dissent.

[Wile E. Coyote]

It seems to Wiley that the most likely scenario is that if we accept it's a random sample of 100 folks, then it is likely that we are coming out as averagely smart on this TV topic.

If we fill the room with experts then very quickly we, like most people, will quickly reach the level of averagely smart within this group. But then fail to progress.

[Mick Harper]

You are making a common error. Repeat the exercise but this time use your actual self and not some generalised person that you believe fits the requirements of the exercise.

[Wile E. Coyote]

With 100 people in the room, on a topic I know little about I will quickly get to average and stay there, if it's mediated presumably I get to average quicker, if I dissent I don't think it will make much difference, there are too many average people in this room.

What I really need is a smaller room (let's say 10) full of smarter people than in the previous room of 100 random. If I was in this smaller room I would quickly reach average, but that means I am now smarter than before. If I would now go back into the previous room of 100, I would be above average. People start to think I am smartish.

[Mick Harper]

[Grant]

But what do you mean by "smart". You said at the beginning that it doesn't mean IQ so what is it? It can't be knowledge because rote memory doesn't make you smart. So what is it?

[Mick Harper]

This was quite deliberate. What I said was