Much like our modern food and environment have made it hard to eat healthily without effort, and our modern transportation and farming and automated manufacturing have made exercise an optional activity, extreme wealth and power make difficult thinking an optional activity for the super rich. The billionaires can’t help it; they’re victims of their own success.

You can pretty easily recognize when someone is physically out of shape, and the reasons for it are fairly clear. Regular people see others or themselves with that condition and they know the cause and the standard remedy.

For the average person, becoming severely out of shape mentally (apart from actual dementia) when you once were pretty fit is less common and less visible, so when the rich and powerful exhibit the signs, it’s more mysterious. By mentally “out of shape” I mean not only the inability to work through complex ideas and solve hard problems, but lof ack basic social judgement and resilience.

We tend to expect permanence to people’s insight and personality and beliefs up to a point. Actually, due to their environment, mental decline among highly successful and wealthy people is to be expected, especially those who experience meteoric success.

If your intellectual environment and information diet changed drastically over ten years, why would you expect no effect on your thinking?

If you go from being a bike messenger to a video game tester and quit your good diet for vending machine trash, obviously your body undergoes some bad changes, and it’s similar for your mind.

Social Intelligence Supports Systematic Thinking

While the younger once-brilliant engineer-investor would carefully think through a wild hypothesis and put real work into validation, the now older intellectual couch potato gets sloppy and throws it out there in public on social media and puts his reputation behind it.

We have many tales of the brilliant scientist or inventor going off the rails:

  • John McAfee (international fugitive)
  • Kary Mullis (Astrology, lots more)
  • James Watson (linking race to intelligence)
  • Linus Pauling (Megadosing Vitamin C)
  • Charles Lindbergh (America First, Nazi sympathizer)
  • Henry Ford (published “The International Jew”)
  • Isaac Newton (Alchemy)
  • Nikola Tesla (Death Ray/”Peace Beam” and the “Thought Camera”)

It’s a common story. But why? “They were always like that” doesn’t cut it.

  • Maybe they said something at a dinner party of fellow elites and everyone agreed with them. This is not actually the same thing as their college friends loving an idea; their dinner party guests are not regular people.
  • Maybe they were right once about a big idea and all their critics were wrong. If your biggest success was an idea everyone said was insane, how do you even process feedback after that? Your judgment may be permanently compromised.

Both of these are real explanations I like. They aren’t the whole story, but fit within the bigger picture of what’s going on.

My hypothesis is that loss of social intelligence directly leads to a decline in systematic thinking. Among other things, the possibility of social and material consequences keeps people mentally fit at a baseline. Vast wealth and privilege remove that pressure and allow (but don’t necessarily force) people to lose their edge. Keeping an edge is hard though.

Engineers and inventors who got wealth and social capital from their technical skills and good sense no longer need those skills to prop them up once they reach a certain level of wealth and influence. They acquire a circle of sycophants. Years go by. Their degraded social thinking allows them to stop worrying how their ideas will be received—either socially, or by technical experts who can tear them apart. And when they get roasted for their stupidity in public, they’re shocked and resentful, and they double down.

The Dynamic

Weak social intelligence can lead to publicly saying unpopular and stupid shit regardless of how much of a rigorous thinker you may be.

Weak systematic thinking leads to developing ill-founded “theories” about the world or scientific topics you don’t know shit about, no matter how socially adept you may be.

Weak social thinking prevents you from checking your bad ideas.

It’s a feedback loop.

Fear of ridicule (among other things) prevents engineers from publishing and selling nonsense ideas. Also, rigorously developing those ideas is truly hard mental work. If you’re not forced to by circumstances, chances are you will skip the really hard parts. Political scientist Philip Tetlock’s research on expert judgment supports this, finding that when people are held accountable to an audience they must explain their reasoning to, their thinking becomes more complex and self-critical.

This phenomenon relates directly to what researchers have termed “Hubris Syndrome” — an acquired personality disorder that develops in people with power. According to research by David Owen and Jonathan Davidson, the syndrome is characterized by excessive confidence, contempt for advice, and loss of contact with reality. The longer someone holds power, the more likely they are to develop this syndrome.

Shouldn’t wealth and power make a person immune to criticism? You might believe lots of money can insulate us from having to care what others think, but it doesn’t seem to exactly work out that way. Rather I think it’s the opposite: Some wealthy people become insulated from regular feedback, becoming victims of sycophancy. Once they don’t have to practice basic social resilience, they lose it. Contact outside their circles becomes painful. They seem to react badly to any pushback. Hubris Syndrome doesn’t seem to offer any mental protection. Perhaps exposure therapy is called for.

The Dunning-Kruger effect adds another layer to this problem — incompetent individuals lack the metacognitive ability to recognize their incompetence. Combined with Power Induced Over Confidence, wealthy people may be particularly susceptible to this double dose of incompetence.

Research by Dacher Keltner has shown that power actually causes measurable changes in behavior, making people more impulsive, less risk-aware, and less able to see things from others’ perspectives, as if they had suffered a traumatic brain injury. There is a neurological basis for the behavior changes: Power seems to impair the brain’s ability to mirror others’ experiences.

Democratizing Sycophancy

Until recently, only the rich and powerful could reliably experience temporary agreement with all their half-baked ideas and whims. But with AI, some form of always-on sycophant is available to everyone.

Many AI models are explicitly trained through methods like Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) to be agreeable, supportive, and non-confrontational. Parasocial (one-sided) relationships with AI companions can atrophy the “social muscles” needed for real-world interaction described in the book by Sherry Turkle “alone together”.

For the average person, the insulation layer between them and real-world consequences will be more precarious than for the ultra-rich, even with a personal AI bootlicker. Perhaps the effects will look more like “AI Psychosis” than general mental unfitness.

Loss of intellectual rigor may manifest in the general population as “cognitive offloading,” a decline in critical thinking skills first identified as the “Google Effect” by Sparrow and colleagues, resulting from over-reliance on effortlessly available external information sources. Unsurprisingly, when people expect to have future access to information, they have lower rates of recall of the information itself and enhanced recall instead for where to access it.

Final Thought

Whether enabled by extreme wealth or AI assistants, we’re creating environments that make rigorous thinking optional. How can we maintain our intellectual fitness in an age of unprecedented cognitive convenience? If the analogy to physical fitness holds, we’ll need to get used to the idea of an analog to working out at the gym. Doing a few puzzles on the phone will not do the job.

References

  1. Keltner, D. (2016). The Power Paradox: How We Gain and Lose Influence. Penguin Press.

  2. Tetlock, P. E. (2005). Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?. Princeton University Press.

  3. Fast, N. J., Sivanathan, N., Mayer, N. D., & Galinsky, A. D. (2012). Power and Overconfident Decision-Making. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 117(2), 249-260.

  4. Christiano, P., et al. (2017). Deep Reinforcement Learning from Human Preferences. arXiv:1706.03741.

  5. Sparrow, B., Liu, J., & Wegner, D. M. (2011). Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips. Science, 333(6043), 776-778.

  6. Turkle, S. (2011). Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. Basic Books.

  7. Owen, D., & Davidson, J. (2009). Hubris syndrome: An acquired personality disorder? A study of US Presidents and UK Prime Ministers over the last 100 years. Brain, 132(5), 1396–1406.

  8. Kruger, J., & Dunning, D. (1999). Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one’s own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77(6), 1121-1134.

  9. Garrard, P., Rentoumi, V., Lambert, C., & Owen, D. (2014). Linguistic biomarkers of Hubris syndrome. Cortex, 55, 167–181.

  10. Obhi, S. S., Hogeveen, J., & Inzlicht, M. (2014). Power changes how the brain responds to others. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143(2), 755–762.