For example:

Jack is looking at Anne, but Anne is looking at George. Jack is married, but George is not. Is a married person looking at an unmarried person?

A) Yes.

B) No.

C) Cannot be determined.

Regardless of IQ, most people get it wrong by choosing C because the status of Anne was not given. Looking at all the possibilities shows that A is correct whether Anne is married or not.

The underlying reason why smart people get the wrong answer is (according to the article) that they simply don’t take the time to go carefully through all of the possibilities, instead taking the easiest inference. The patience required to go through all the possibilities doesn’t correlate very well with intelligence.

You can quibble with the test, perhaps noting that for social primates the burning question is whether Anne is married or not, and so the problem isn't lack of patience it's just a silly example. But the larger point may simply be that intelligence isn't a primary determinant of rationality and plays only a small role in life. That role may be enough to allow those with greater intelligence to prosper relative to their less able peers, but on any single subject it may play no helpful role, or even be a liability when the issue is tricky and most likely to snare those who are confident of their abilities.

One of the life puzzles that I spend energy contemplating is how seemingly smart people are so often and so comprehensively wrong. It's as if humanity is an idiocracy in which the very smartest are still crushingly stupid.

In one sense this is obvious and uninteresting: intelligence as it exists is small compared to what we can and have imagined. One of our hopes for the future is machines that are more intelligent to help us live better. Another is to engineer ourselves to be better.

What concerns me is that this obvious and uninteresting truth is so often ignored. Consider this Vaclav Smil article: On Meat, Fish and Statistics: The Global Food Regime and Animal Consumption in the United States and Japan

The easiest way to compare dietary commonalities or peculiarities of individual nations is to check the food balance sheets that the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (headquartered in Rome) prepares for virtually all of the world’s countries (FAO 2008). These accounts are based on the best available national statistics of food production and trade and on the estimates of plant and animal harvests diverted to animal feeding, seed and other non-food uses or lost during storage and industrial processing. Their final tallies show per capita annual consumption of individual foodstuffs (in kilograms) and daily intakes of food energy (in kilocalories) and dietary proteins and fats (both in grams). Perhaps the most obvious measure of dietary affluence is the average consumption of animal foods eaten for their special tastes and distinguished in nutritional terms particularly because of their relatively high content of perfect protein.

This may be an easy way but is it of any actual value? Do national statistics about estimates and tallies give any real information one could use to develop useful policies or even just draw useful conclusions? Of course not. The data is sparse at best and inaccurate at every level. One can fault bureaucracies for numerous defects but the base problem is that such information is simply not available. It never has been.

Why would a smart person set himself this task? It is a clear example of dysrationalia no matter what the rest of the paper says. It may be simply a performance for pay which will be judged not for its utility so much as its virtuosity. It's a silly test but may be entertaining if the performer is skilled.

It can also be used as a factoid collection: a loosely linked series of knowledge nuggets not necessarily related to one another in any useful way but of use to others in assembling their own dysrational performances. Just as social primates are chiefly concerned about the marital status of females, they have a vast appetite for entertainments of all sorts.

American culture is, of course, principally an overseas extension of Judaeo-Christian beliefs that include the human dominion over all living creatures and that entail a number of dietary rules but no absolute proscriptions of carnivory. In contrast, the Buddhist faith is one of Japan’s ancient cultural pillars and ahimsa -- defined by Vyasa’s commentary on Yoga Sutras as “the absence of injuriousness (anabhidroha) toward all living things (sarvabhuta) in all respects (sarvatha) and for all times (sarvada)” –- is one of that faith’s cardinal tenets (Chappel 1993). Moreover, there used to be various Shinto taboos on the eating of cattle, horses and particularly of fowl, which were seen as announcers of dawn rather than a source of food, and these taboos were generally respected until the 15th century (Ishige 2000).

Gradually, and after 1945 rather precipitously, everything changed.

That's somewhat entertaining. Useless, irrelevant but entertaining. Very few people actually live by their beliefs, no matter what they are, and those from hundreds of years ago are seldom even known by those living today, but it's a knowledge nugget that can be taken out and displayed for the entertainment of others at various venues, perhaps something like an interesting pebble found on a beach.

Feeding domestic animals is a far more inefficient way of using plant biomass than eating it directly: for example, it takes about four kilograms of good feed to produce a kilogram of chicken meat, for boneless lean pork the ratio is around 10 and there is an even higher ratio for beef depending on how much time an animal spends on pasture and in a finishing feedlot

All cats are gray. The assumption here is that all animals eat the same things - biomass is biomass - and that those things are also food for humans. This is wildly inaccurate, as anyone with even the smallest amount of actual knowledge is aware. Cattle, and other ruminants, don't naturally eat the grain on which this analysis is based, but even poultry and hogs don't eat such diets to such an extent in nature. Though poultry and hogs are omnivores like humans, and so can be considered competitors, ruminants can thrive on diets that no human could consume or digest. They are more usefully seen as complementary, even symbiotic with humans, rather than as competitors.

The real trouble comes in the attempt to force fit various unrelated and inaccurate nuggets into some coherent whole.

Of course, the westward expansion of America’s cattle-based agriculture was one of the key factors leading to the demise of the continent’s enormous herds of wild buffalo during the 19th century and the feeding of large numbers of domestic animals puts great pressure on the country’s soil quality and water.

America's agriculture was not cattle based, it was and is grain based. It was the bulding of railroads and the devlopment of John Deere's steel plow that led to the extermination of the native bison, though it was also a strategic military objective to defeat the various plains indians by eliminating their food supply. It is a complete absurdity to claim that cattle in some way exert a pressure on soil when millions and millions of ruminants, including bison, actually created those once fertile soils.

Is Smil just very, very stupid? No, but he is having a fit of dysrationalia. He can't be bothered to consider all of the details and possibilities since he thinks that he already knows the answer and that it would be tedious and unproductive to actually think.

This brief comparison of two very different meat- and fish-eating systems ends up with very similar conclusions. America’s pattern of excessive red meat and poultry consumption cannot be extended to the rest of the world. The US population is now less than 5% of the world total but it consumes nearly 15% of all terrestrial meat. If a similar level of consumption were to be replicated worldwide there would not be enough high-quality feed (corn and soybeans) to produce so much poultry, pork and beef; moreover, the requisite energy needs would further tax the global supply of hydrocarbons and the combustion of these fuels would increase the overall CO2 emissions while larger ruminant herds would produce more methane, a more powerful greenhouse gas than is CO2. And high levels of meat intake would be problematic even if the environmental impacts of intensive animal husbandry were kept to a minimum: international comparisons indicate that extraordinarily high levels of carnivory contribute to high rates of overweight, obesity and common chronic diseases.

This is the desired conclusion that the unrelated and innacurate knowledge nuggets were assembled to support. Smil did not reason from good data and valid premises to reach useful conclusions. This is an utterly nonsensical conclusion that is contradicted by real knowledge and data, but it provides political cover for those who are burdened with intellectually crippling ideologies.

Global convergence toward a high-consumption mode typified by the US and Japan is a physical impossibility on a planet with finite resources. The only hope for a more equitable sharing of the world’s natural resources, and for the reduction of the deleterious environmental consequences of their use, is in moderating the rich world’s reach in order to allow for higher per capita claims by the modernizing nations. Although this appears to be the only rational solution (only some fabulous technical breakthroughs that would provide us with unlimited amounts of inexpensive energy would open another path toward more equitable modernization) its adoption is by no means certain and future generations will most likely see more inequality, more conflicts and more destruction of the global commons.

It won't take "some fabulous technical breakthroughs" to enable continued modernization and development, though they will happen too. Raising developing world productivity and efficiency to modern levels will do much of that, and continued improvement in developed world productivity and efficiency will do more, which enables another round of developing world improvement. Just as it has been, and will be. We may be stupid and clumsy, but we do improve with time.

One bit of Smil's muddled performance is true: inequality and conflicts will continue. That's how primates do.

Update: RQ

The problem with IQ tests is that while they are effective at assessing our deliberative skills, which involve reason and the use of working memory, they are unable to assess our inclination to use them when the situation demands. . .

A study published last year … found there was no correlation between intelligence and a person’s ability to avoid some common traps of intuitive-thinking. … A survey of members of Mensa (the High IQ Society) in Canada in the mid-1980s found that 44 per cent of them believed in astrology, 51 per cent believed in biorhythms and 56 per cent believed in aliens. … A study of 360 Pittsburgh residents … found that, regardless of differences in intelligence, those who displayed better rational-thinking skills suffered significantly fewer negative events in their lives, such as being in serious credit card debt, having an unplanned pregnancy or being suspended from school. . .

Stanovich maintains that while developing a universal “rationality-quotient (RQ) test” would require a multimillion-dollar research programme, there is no technical or conceptual reason why it could not be done. … However: unlike with IQ, it would be relatively easy to train people to do well on RQ tests. “They measure the extent to which people are inclined to use what capacity they have,” says Evans. “You could train people to ignore intuition and engage reasoning for the sake of the test, even if this was not their normal inclination.”

Several million dollars spent trying to develop an RQ test seems money well spend to me. But even though I’d more want to know someone’s RQ than their IQ, I wonder how much others care. After all, we admire tall and muscular folks, even if they have little inclination or opportunity to reach high things others cannot, or open jars others cannot. And we mostly choose academics who show impressive abilities, mostly ignoring how much they contribute to intellectual progress.

How much do potential mates, employers, etc. actually care about your willingness to use your intelligence to discern truth? Yes, sometimes the truth can help your team win, but at other times speaking inconvenient truths helps your team lose.

Sad but true. Rationality is such a buzz kill.