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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Against the "smarts fetish", published by MagnusVinding on April 8, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. It seems to me that the effective altruism community has a tendency to overemphasize smarts and to underemphasize other important traits. (Some related remarks on this forum are found here, here, and here.) Yes, smarts do matter greatly, and IQ tests are indeed predictive of various outcomes and achievements. But something can be both important and overemphasized at the same time. By analogy, vitamin C is no doubt necessary for our health, yet to focus on vitamin C to such an extent that one neglects most other vitamins can risk deficiencies of those other vitamins. A focus on smarts to the exclusion of other important traits and capacities may likewise lead to “deficiencies” along those other dimensions. To clarify, my claim here is not that anyone holds the cartoonish view that “IQ is everything, period”. My claim is simply that the relative emphasis on smarts versus other important traits seems quite far from optimal, and that it would therefore be beneficial to focus more on those other traits, some of which I will outline below. Note also that my aim here is not to point fingers at anyone; I think most people, myself included, occasionally fall into the trap of being too focused on smarts compared to other things — and that is no sin. (Intelligence can be fascinating, after all.) The point is just that we would do well to focus (more) on a broader range of important traits and virtues. One can have a high IQ while still not. Below are various traits that all seem necessary for optimal altruistic impact, and which are plausibly worth emphasizing more relative to smarts (on the current margin). Many of these traits are likely correlated with IQ, but that does not negate the point that one can overemphasize IQ at their expense, and that one can have a high IQ and still completely fail to develop these other traits and virtues. (Needless to say, the following list of important traits is far from exhaustive; I hope you will add to it in the comments.) Being knowledgeable and widely read Becoming informed and insightful requires a dedicated pursuit of relevant information, for which pure smarts is no substitute (even if it can be very helpful). This is related to what Robin Hanson said when Sam Harris asked him about who he thought was the smartest person ever: “I don’t really care about who is the smartest person . I care much more about who's the most accomplished, and I actually think it's a problem that people are so focused on showing they're smart and not focused enough on showing they're accomplished.” Being good at scrutinizing one’s own ideas and convictions One can be extremely smart yet still be dogmatic and overly defensive about one’s pet ideas. In other words, being smart is no cure for confirmation bias or myside bias, and studies have even found that “the magnitude of the myside bias shows very little relation to intelligence”. While smart people are better at identifying bad arguments, they are also better at rationalizing their own pre-existing views. This is related to the concept of “dysrationalia” and the gap between IQ and rationality. Being willing to face unpleasant views and inconvenient conclusions While higher IQ is helpful for understanding problems and views that involve a high level of complexity, there is little reason to think that high IQ is similarly helpful for contending with problems and views that are disturbing or inconvenient. In other words, raw smarts are no cure for wishful thinking and convenience-based worldviews and customs, suggesting that everyone may benefit from efforts to face up to disturbing and inconvenient conclusions (examples of such conclusions might be that one could have a greater impact by switching care...