Book Review - The Intelligence Trap, David Robson

A couple of months ago, I came across a post on LinkedIn, where a senior professional with an IIM degree had shared a post about an Indian student. This student, in his late teens, was said to have secured two patents in his name already and he was also said to have rejected the invitation from  the then US President Donald Trump to join NASA. Under the message and the said student’s photograph was a nationalist slogan. The fact is, this message was proven to be a fake information more than a year ago, but our senior professional had no clue about it. Neither did he bother to check the truth before posting it on a professional forum like LinkedIn. There was this stinging comment under that post – ‘Can’t you differentiate fake news from the real ones? How the h*** did you pass from IIM?’

Well, we all have that one friend (or many, as in my case) that shares fake news or unverified information on their social media posts or through WhatsApp. While I have been able to change a few of them and make them verify anything before they share it with others – or at least with me – I have also lost friends due to what they consider to be my ‘pedantic’ approach. I have always wondered about what makes these people, most of them well-educated and in respectable professions, share fake information without ever checking its veracity. This book is an apt answer to that question.

Well, this book isn’t purely about debunking fake information, but about why supposedly smart, well-educated people do stupid things and end up with egg on their faces. Starting with how we mistake IQ as a measure of intelligence, though people with much lower IQ scores often outperform such ‘geniuses’, the book lays down its arguments for how often intelligence is nothing but thin ice – cool and shiny but fragile and pointless.

Starting from a Nobel prize winning scientist that denied climate change and HIV to detailing the whims of Steve Jobs, the man who made Apple what it is today, the book delves into the logical fallacies that plagues every intelligent mind. Becoming myopic due to their acknowledged genius, having their ideas and opinions crystallized despite proven facts to the contrary, inability to listen to the opinions and learn from others are some of the mental malaises that victimized many of the most brilliant minds in human history. This book speaks about such weaknesses and elicits lessons from their mistakes. Speaking about organizations, it states the reasons for why even the most successful organizations like Nokia went into a tailspin and why NASA had to have more than one disaster to strengthen its engineering processes.

There are still people that believe that the world is flat and, at present, that COVID is a hoax, despite glaring evidences staring at their faces. The tragedy is that most, if not all, of these people are well-educated and supposedly of sane minds. The logical fallacies that dominate their thinking is all laid bare in this book. The cure to such malaises? Curiosity and intellectual humility.

In an age when ultra-nationalists and bigots are taking over every public forum to spew venom by spreading lies and misinformation, books like these can boost rational thinking and logical abilities. It gets a tad slow at times, but is a worthy read nevertheless!

A.