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It always gives me a surge of vindictive glee when someone says something to the effect of, "I hate when outsiders learn to co-opt our language to scam us."* Sucks to suck! Next time learn to receive and transmit factual observations instead of markers of ingroup status!
I'd wager this happens because it's a time-efficient mental heuristic-- you learn that people in your ingroup are unlikely to lie to you because they share the same goals, so when you recieve ingroup-signals you spend less effort discerning truthfulness. Intelligent people need this heuristic less and therefore groups full of high-average-intelligence people have a sort of herd-immunity against this type of scammer. Scammers often try to signal that they're high-intelligence by talking like LLMs trained on smart-people-talk... but that only fools dumb people who've trained themselves to have the separate-but-related heuristic of trusting anything that includes enough technical language. (See: homeopathic remedies, the medbed people, anything "quantum.") To the high-intelligence group, they just look like nuts, cranks, and schizophrenics.
However, implicit understanding of that herd-immunity becomes its own type of heuristic. Which works fine under normal conditions because you need to be smart** to lie to a smart person, and if you're smart you have more alternatives to being a scammer. But there's a particular failure case that I think is especially interesting: when a formerly high-average-intelligence group reduces its selection criteria and lets lower-intelligence people in. High-intelligence people become vectors of information instead of firewalls against it, because their level of laziness when evaluating ingroup claims is no longer adaptive.
I don't have any real conclusion to draw from this... Actually, I suspect I shouldn't draw any conclusions from this, because "the ingroup gets shittier when we let new people in" is exactly the sort of heuristic I suspect I'm already predisposed to have by genetics and culture. It's almost certainly priced in so to speak. So having the mechanistic explanation for the heuristic should actually push me toward being more open to expanding the ingroup-- at least, in cases where I suspect the new members are equal or greater intelligence to the existing ingroup. (Should I be even more in favor of increasing green card caps for technically skilled workers? But then again, I'd guess that I'm predisposed to be biased in favor of that by political affiliation and cultural influences anyways so this might be a wash.)
Though-- if human intelligence actually declined after the invention of agriculture (I'd put a sub-50% probability of this being true, but it would be really interesting if it was) it would imply that we were in a sweet-spot in terms of ingroup formation. If you live in a optimally sized band of primates, there's no need to send ingroup signals because you already have a deep, personal connection to every member of the ingroup. If you live in our current, massively populous, highly-anonymous society, relying on signals of ingroup membership gets you scammed. But for a thousands-of-years-long golden age you could afford to be stupid. Ingroups were both large enough that you could rely on yours to avoid having to think for yourself, and small/impermeable/anti-anonymous enough that scammers weren't a risk.
* See: fake-feminists seducing feminists, trump supporters donating their kids' entire inheritance on accident because of predatory web design practices, LGBT getting suckered into buying rainbow capitalist merchantise, megachurch pastors fleecing their denominations into giving them private jets, etc. (I'm providing politics-related examples of this because they're the most visible, but I'd wager the most common version of this is, "this fast-taking fellow convinced me we'd both be rich but he got away with the money and I was left with the bag.")
** well, you need high fluid intelligence specifically
I think it depends on the group of smart people and what their domain of knowledge actually is. My observation is that smart people tend to vastly overestimate their ability to understand things not in their own domain. They think the6 can tell if someone is scamming them in another area but often they’re just as vulnerable as anyone else.
Part of this is the way society works. Everyone specializes in one or two areas, and outside of those areas you really don’t have much more base knowledge than the average person. This makes it much easier to sell a scientist on a financial scam. Not because the guy is stupid, but because he doesn’t know much about finance and doesn’t spend a great deal of time thinking about it. Or maybe it’s home repairs where a roofer can come into a neighborhood full of lawyers after a big storm and make bank by scamming the lawyers on repairs they don’t need and cheap materials that don’t last.
The other part is plain ego. Smart people have been praised for their intelligence for a long time. Everybody since their third grade teacher has probably told them how smart they are. Add in the success they get in their domain, and you believe it. They’re smart and can figure it out. And they actually are much more vulnerable simply because their ego won’t let them notice that something is off. In fact I would consider this an advantage for the less intelligent. They know how much they don’t understand about stuff they didn’t understand at school.
This is a vibes-based claim rather than a data-based claim, but I genuinely don't think scam rates are comparable across intelligence brackets even after controlling for domain-specific intelligence. When you're smart you end up learning meta-strategies to evaluate fact-based claims like checking your assumptions against known cognitive biases and using formal logic to determine whether claims are contradictory without having to access the actual underlying truth value of either claim. If me and a random joe were presented a list of scammy and non-scammy investment options for... I don't know, undersea mining concerns, or instagram influencer management companies, or whatever, I think I would outperform the random joe on avoiding the scams. I wouldn't be immune, but I'd fall for less of them.
And in turn, even after controlling for intelligence-- I think a random joe trained to ignore signals of ingroup membership would do better at avoiding scams than an equally intelligent random joe left to his native heuristics. There's a valid question of global performance-- heuristics are mostly useful and adaptive. But I think, in the current age of massive, permeable, low-trust, groups, I think most peoples' heuristics are lagging behind what's actually efficient.
Re: ego, it's debatable whether the Dunning-Krueger effect is actually real.. If it is real, then smart people must be less unjustifiably confident than non-smart people. If it's not... well, then we still haven't found any evidence in the reverse direction, so the null hypothesis should be that the level of unjustifiable confidence is the same, and non-smart people don't have any relative advantage. (While also suffering from the other phenomena I talked about in my original post.)
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