Medical Government Elites - Midwits or Stupidity?
There are 5 things you have to know about stupid people
Dumbness alone is rarely the driving threat; at the head of almost every dumb movement, you will find the stupid in charge.
Medical doctors must have some degree of smarts, not only to be accepted to the program but also to complete the training. Therefore, I don’t think that I met any doctors who I would classify as ‘dumb’ or ignorant - they may, like all of us (me included), lack knowledge in a certain area - but they knew enough about medicine. I would remind the public (they may not have thought about this), however, that the average doctor was likely below average in their class.
I try to be charitable in my criticisms of the medical elite - those physicians who have administrative jobs particularly in the government. I am a believer in Hanlon’s Razor: "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity". So, I will not attribute their behaviour, which appears to me to be amoral and unethical, to a malicious intent. Hanlon, it would appear, was correct - maybe it all boils down to stupidity. Midwits are just a subpopulation of the stupid. Now let me explain.
Stupidity
Stupidity is a very specific cognitive failing. It occurs when one doesn’t have the right conceptual tools for the job. The result is an inability to make sense of what is happening and a resulting tendency to force phenomena into crude, distorting pigeonholes. Stupid people have a limited way of looking at things and they try to force their views into their limited paradigms. No matter what. It is NOT merely making errors. We all make mistakes for all kinds of reasons. Stupidity is far worse.
Importantly, stupidity is perfectly compatible with intelligence, like just about any other cognitive bias. In fact, being intelligent can actively abet stupidity by allowing rationalization – the intelligent stupid have better cognitive skills to try to rationally explain their stupidity. Stupidity is also often domain specific (like dealing with a pandemic). This explains why someone can be smart in one area, and such an idiot in another. In addition, one can see that there will be many cases that aren’t fully fledged stupidity but that mimic its effects - some one could ‘act as if they were stupid’ but it was due to, for example, political pressure. In this kind of case, the physicians may possess the necessary intellectual tools but lock them away for a different narrative.
There are 2 features that make stupidity particularly dangerous. First, unlike character flaws, stupidity can be a property of groups, and not just individuals. Once stupidity has taken hold of a group or society (like now), it is particularly hard to eradicate. Second, stupidity begets more stupidity. Take politics, where stupidity is particularly prevalent: a stupid idea is accepted by a stupid voter, not because it is the truth, but as I have said before, I think people believe things because it mirrors the way they see or wish to see the world. And on it goes.
Stupidity is a tough nut to crack. It often dovetails with other vices. For example, stubbornness will stop the stupid from revisiting approaches or policies even as they obviously fail. The worst, and the most on evidence now in the pandemic is: the combination of arrogance + stupidity. If history is anything to go by, a few hundred years from now, our descendants will find at least some part of the pandemic response to be almost unintelligible. They might very well have to conclude that we were stupid.
5 Laws of Stupidity
I obtained this from a decades old article written by a professor Carlo Cipolla at UC Davis.
Law #1: Everyone underestimates the number of stupid people.
Law #2: The probability that a person is stupid is independent of any other characteristics.
Law #3 (and the Golden Law): A stupid person causes losses to others without gains to themselves. Or: A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.
Law #4: Non-stupid people underestimate the danger of the stupid.
Law #5: Stupid people are the most dangerous people on the planet
Rational and reasonable people have difficulty in conceiving and understanding unreasonable behaviour. I suspect most of use would agree that most of us do not act consistently. Under certain circumstances a given person acts intelligently and under different circumstances the same person will act helplessly. The exception is the stupid people who are perfect consistency in all fields of human endeavour. There is a sub-class of stupid people - the super-stupid who by their improbable actions not only cause damages to other people but in addition hurt themselves. Look at the completely irrational behaviour of our Canadian Prime Minister (he is hurting the population and his own reputation)- this is the a combination of super-stupidity, stubbornness, and the highest form of arrogance. This is very dangerous, as we have seen and are witnessing in real time.
Non-stupid people constantly forget that, at all times and places and under any circumstances, to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake. “Through centuries and millennia, in public as in private life, countless individuals have failed to take account of the Fourth Basic Law and the failure has caused mankind incalculable losses.”
Midwits
Brian Chau has an excellent essay on midwits. He states: “A midwit [] describes a person with slightly above-average ability in any domain—someone who is able to pass basic qualifications and overcome standard hurdles but who is in no way exceptional.”
Further and more concerning he writes: “An existing model of institutional power describes institutional decisions as arising from conflicts between factions. Recruiting, HR policy, and governance are not just procedures for choosing the best person for the job or promotion; they are means of choosing the person who would most benefit the faction making the choice. In other words, it’s politics all the way down.
With this in mind, midwits and the ideological conformity they favor can spread through incumbent institutions fairly easily even without any organized effort. How? First, incumbent institutions disproportionately select for midwits; second, ideologically conformist midwits select for others of the same ideology, which can be done through hiring decisions, HR law, or employee activism; third, the selection process is amplified further by incentives—because ideological conformity benefits midwits, they change procedures to elevate themselves over their less conformist but more productive colleagues; fourth, the increase in ideological conformity skews selection further toward midwits.
This cycle helps explain why incumbent institutions become stagnant or decline, and eventually become incapable of doing what they were created to do.”
To my view there is a large overlap between being a midwit and being stupid or they are on a spectrum.
Bottom Line: I am intensely disappointed with the obviously deceiptful behaviour from those physicians who have powerful roles in government. They have made, and continue to make (double down in the current vernacular) the same mistakes. They lie and claim they are following ‘the science.’ That is clearly a lie as not all jurisdictions within Canada have used the same strategies - and yes I understand that local disease epidemiology may explain some of this - but there has to be more.
Their behaviour is such that it must be on the spectrum of being either a midwit or being stupid. And if they are acting stupid the next question is whether they are stupid in the context of their job or in the management of a pandemic or whether they are acting this way because they are succumbing to political pressure. That is something that an ideological midwit would do with relish.
I think the way to sum up what the medical leadership is comprised of: an intelligent person who is acting stupid and like a midwit and this is further compounded by stubbornness and arrogance. The 5th law is correct. I cannot think of a more dangerous combination.
“Never argue with stupid people, they will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience.” - Mark Twain