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Until I started working with geniuses, I never really understood the laments you sometimes hear that go, what a pity it is that our brightest minds have all gone off to Wall Street. I thought, that can't really be the case right? But then I joined a quant trading firm, in a sort of supporting role, and suddenly I also find myself wondering, as I interact with certain people at the office: shouldn't you be uncovering the secrets of the universe or something?
It took a while to hit me. I think I spent my first few months constantly debating people on this or that, convinced I had something to teach them, at least in my little domain. After all, it isn't always immediately apparent when someone is far more intelligent than you. But time and again I would have these epiphanies: oh, he is right, he was right two weeks ago, and I should've just listened then, as it would have saved me two weeks of trouble, and now I have to rewrite this code, and he had foreseen all this, and all this time he's been gently, politely nudging me to understand, as with a child, never brashly asserting his superiority, which must have been obvious to him. And I would feel ashamed remembering all my impassioned but mistaken arguments. After a while I picked up a sort of epistemic helplessness: even if my intuitions disagreed completely with one of these people I knew to be brilliant, I would go along with them. Eventually I would understand.
I'll call one of these brilliant and competent people Mark. I hesitate to say "genius" but I wouldn't object if you used the word. If I had to guess, I'd say he's 4 standard deviations above the mean, but really it's kind of impossible to judge people much smarter than you I think. Anyway, at some point I noticed Mark never came in anymore; he always worked remotely. That isn't normal at my company, but I assumed he must have negotiated an arrangement with the director. Perks of being a star. Was he on some beach? I don't know. He was still on Slack, ready to explain some point about statistics whenever I messaged him occasionally.
One day the midwits of HR took it upon themselves to organize mandatory in-person harassment training for everyone. Up till now, the annual training had been online and easy enough to click through without too much thought. But now we were forced to sit and discuss various hypothetical scenarios aloud, under the guidance of a training facilitator. In one scenario, a black employee is offended when someone describes her as "articulate". I wanted to pull my hair out, listening to the facilitator explain to my genuinely confused Indian coworker why this description was problematic. It struck me that our baroque American woke social norms perhaps do more to exclude minorities than to include them, on net. In another scenario, an intern with they/them pronouns is misgendered by those around them. Our guided discussion of this scenario was absolutely farcical. No one managed to utter two sentences about this hypothetical scenario without also accidentally using the wrong pronouns (and amusingly it was always "she", never "he", that people accidentally said), prompting stifled giggles all around. Even the training facilitator slipped up and had to conclude by mumbling something about how “intent matters”. It was as if we all knew subconsciously that individuals such as the hypothetical intern had on some level deluded themselves. Overall, I was (and am) annoyed that HR had been permitted to waste the valuable time of these smart people in this silly way, since the company had otherwise been very no-nonsense. I supposed Mark was somehow exempt from this training.
Weeks later, Mark returns to the office, ending his long absence. Only now he's a she, and goes by Mary.
And now maybe some of you are rolling your eyes at this post: you’ve been duped into reading propaganda. But no, I don’t really know what I’m trying to say here. I’m just trying to reflect on my own perspective on trans people suddenly shifting based on this one person. It’s not that I’d never encountered trans people before, but in the past they were always of the annoying sort, the sort that you could dismiss as a self-deluded victim of a weird sort of social contagion. But I can’t see Mary as self-deluded. Self-delusion is the one thing those of her profession are good at avoiding. Can you tell she’s trans? I dunno, kind of? Is it autogynephilia? No clue. It feels a little impertinent to ponder, though that’s the sort of question that I might have said mattered a lot before. Somehow just witnessing one extremely competent and effective person I respect turn out to be trans made it “real” for me, especially after all the other times I deferred to her judgment.
(I recognize that not everyone worships mathematical talent like I do, and you may find my automatic deferral of judgment weird or even disqualifying of my opinion. I know there are brilliant mathematicians with stupid and wacky beliefs in other domains. I do think, though, that the intelligence of Mary and some of the other quants goes beyond the academic; trading real money tethers your beliefs to the real world. She is not some aloof ideas person. She was and is reasonable levels of well-adjusted, funny, and courteous, and unreasonable levels of good at cranking out code that makes millions of dollars. Make of this story what you will.)
Has my opinion changed on any concrete trans issue? I don’t know. If a random person insists on referring to Mary as a man, and I’m required to say that between the two of them one is a fool, I’d have to say that Mary is not the fool. I don’t know if she’d be very angry about it anyway; she’s a level-headed person. What about sex change therapy for children? Still seems bad. Maybe the main change is just that I feel like I should be less quick to judge people in general.
I wasn’t there when Mary walked into the office for the first time as a woman. I don’t think anyone made a fuss over it or anything, and now everyone respects her new name and pronouns, but it still makes me anxious just imagining what it must have been like. Surely a measure of bravery was required, probably more than I’ve ever mustered on any occasion. What compelled her to do this? On a visceral level, it still doesn’t make sense to me, and I can still make it gross if I want to, just by thinking about it. But why do that? I’m inclined to defer to her, whether or not I understand.
I do wish she'd go and pursue science though.
Several responses:
One of my favorite interview quotes of all time, and one I live by, from boxer Tex Cobb:
I could rephrase that last line personally. I thought intelligence was everything. And I've argued with college professors and with wall street CEOs, I've debated with Senators, Congressman, drunk philosophers and internet impersonators, gamblers on commodities and on blackjack, rationalists and bishops, ivy league lawyers and both elected and appointed judges, most everything living and half the stuff dead, and ain't nobody smart, I know, I looked...just God.
Don't get overly into the idea that there is such a thing as generalizable intelligence. I know many brilliant people who are into religious or philosophical concepts so stupid I can't imagine sitting through them, let alone making them part of my week. I consider transition a primarily religious belief, having to do with a metaphysical gender-soul which exists separate from any physical evidence thereof, and a philosophical requirement that one live in conformance with it. If I tried to believe in every religious belief that someone brilliant I know believed in, I'd have a set of contradictory and useless beliefs, some of them so stupid I can't even reckon with them.
That said, I broadly agree with your vibe. When I interact with trans people, I don't generally find them either dangerous or disturbing, and I do my best to respect their choices personally, but that doesn't mean I philosophically agree with them, nor does it require that I buy into the metaphysical framework they live under, and least of all does it require of me any political position. I simply find them to be fine enough people and don't make a big show of hurting them. I suspect most people who hold "transphobic" positions online are probably similar. I recall a tweet that went something like: if instead of asking yes/no polling questions, one interviewed Americans about their opinions on trans people, the actual answers would converge towards something both intensely bigoted and basically accepting in ways that neither political party would find acceptable. Most people go along to get along, and I believe that if you respect Mark broadly then you reasonably ought to give his religious beliefs respect in conversation.
There was a bait post on here some weeks ago asking what evidence it would take to change your opinion on HBD, iirc in some annoying fake math that I didn't feel like messing with. But my first thought about it was, well you'd have to somehow prove to me that my black friends, professors, coworkers, etc were hallucinations, that they weren't really there or weren't really what they seemed. Until then, I'm not going to buy into a strong framework that predicts that those people would be so much rarer than they seemed to me to be. Whatever is going on in the graphs, it can't change my actual experience, and that's going to predominate in how I see the world.
Reality is under no constraint to be philosophically consistent for us.
As the author of the alleged bait post: might it be that we observed nearly disjoint chunks of society? IIRC you went through a professional/verbal education at elite institutions on or near the East Coast. I did pure math at thoroughly non-elite ones in the West. The elite vs non-elite selection effects would account for a lot of the difference.
I do think that's an interesting angle on why Affirmative Action is such a crime against society, it takes the talented tenth and pulls them out of general life for most people. Harvard is, as it were, hoarding all the smart Black Friends.
I didn't get into this in the prior post for that reason, no one will get anything out of the discussion.
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