In September 6th, 1987, conjoined twins Patrick and Benjamin Binder were brought into the surgeons table. For 22 hours, a team of 70 surgeons worked tirelessly to separate them. The operation was considered risky, as these twins were conjoined by the head. Yet, despite the risks, at the conclusion of those 22 hours, Patrick and Benjamin were safely apart, and all eyes were on the brilliant mind that allowed theirs to live separately: Dr. Ben Carson.
Born September of 1951, Dr. Carson had a troubled childhood, a fact that has in recent years only added to the mystique that surrounds him. In his teenager years, Carson admits to having attacked others with hammers, bricks, and bats, having violent, aggressive urges and tenancies. He believed that this violence was born from his environment, as he grew up poor with a single mother suffering from depression and suicidality. Yet, as his later politics would seemingly be informed, he pulled himself up by his bootstraps, overcame the adversity of his childhood, and became a genius.
Attending Yale on the back of SAT scores in the 90th percentile, Carson graduated with a Bachelor's in Psychology, before receiving his MD at the University of Michigan. Following this, he moved to the great state of Maryland (which is coincidentally my home state), being accepted into the prestigious Johns Hopkins school of medicine for neurosurgery residency. There, he worked for a number of years in his neurosurgery residency, building up a passion and talent for the delicate field.
Upon completing his residency from Johns Hopkins, he took a brief stint as a surgeon in Australia, before returning to Johns Hopkins. There he worked for 3 years before being appointed the role of Director of Pediatric Neurosurgery, which brought him to the lead of the 70-person team on that day in 1987. 22 grueling hours later, he did the unlikely; what some thought impossible. 22 hours later he separated those twins. 22 hours later, he was a legend. But how does a legend respond to their newly found fame? In the case of Carson, the brilliance of his mind and the gift of his hands brought an ego that carried him to the foot of the White House as an overqualified surgeon, but severely under-qualified politician. Because there's something else about Ben Carson that I have thus far not mentioned; Ben Carson is an idiot.
Alongside the legend of his brilliance as a surgeon is another legend, one which now taints the legacy he had built for himself: his ungodly number of ridiculous beliefs. Despite notably not being an egyptologist, Carson decided that the widely held beliefs of Egyptologist since as far back as the time of Egypt itself that the Pyramids were tombs was false, and instead, his genius intellect allowed him to see what no one else had: they were built to store grain! You see, he believed that an Old testament story that stated Joseph predicted a famine, and advising the Pharaoh to store grain in the Pyramid was evidence enough that it was not thousands of laborers over hundreds of years that built the pyramids to house the God-kings of their civilization, instead they were built by Joseph to store grain in preparation for the incoming famine! This is, of course, ridiculous. No academic or even religious body holds these beliefs outside of the local community for which Carson himself attends. In fact, the Bible itself does not report that the Pyramids were used to store grain, only that Joseph had stored food in preparation for the incoming famine, and distributed this food to the Egyptians in the midst of the famine itself. Nowhere does it suggest that the Pyramids were used to store this grain, and this belief was largely abandoned by everyone after the Renaissance period allowed for easier trips to Egypt itself, which demonstrated how unlikely such a theory was. Well, everyone except our own local genius Dr. Ben Carson. To Carson, the wide scientific, cultural, societal, and logical consensus of the Pyramids purpose is simply false because his faulty, outdated interpretation of the Bible suggests so. A belief I have held for some time is that the mark of a fool is one who refuses to change their mind in the face of new evidence, and in this sense, Carson is a massive fool. Because his insistence of unsubstantiated, pseudo-scientific beliefs does not stop at Egyptology, but often goes towards far more sinister ends.
Ben Carson is homophobic. I do not say this lightly, as in the modern era, an accusation of homophobia can often be as damaging as of racism, antisemitism, or other isms that employers are non-to fond of finding on your record. Yet for the better part of Carson's career, he has made a number of statements that consistently demonstrate a deep-seeded prejudice against gay people. From relatively common right-wing beliefs such as religious people have a right to refuse service to gays, to the far more extreme, even among the right, such as decrying gay marriage as being comparable to bestiality, pedophilia, and murder. At one point, he stated that being gay was a choice, as evidenced by the existence of gay sex in prisons by individuals he claimed were straight, although he later apologized for this comment. What this suggests is a person who develops beliefs in unfamiliar fields through religious, unscientific means, rather than rational ones. For he, a genius neurosurgeon, surely would have done his own research, and thus you should believe him in his firm belief that the Pyramids are granaries, and gay marriage is as bad as murder.
These conservative, unscientific beliefs lend themselves well to the first Trump administration, so from March 2017 to the conclusion of Trump's first term as president, Carson served as the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development for the United States. What does brain surgery have to do with housing and urban development? Absolutely nothing, yet in his infinite wisdom, Donald Trump appointed him all the same.
His tenure as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development was a rocky one to say the least. Early writing about his work found it meandering, clueless, and contrarian; simply doing the opposite of whatever the Obama administration did, which often meant defunding necessary programs to help low-income families, remove any references to equality and race in their mission statement, and largely undermine the prior functioning of the systems he now governed. These problems extended themselves to a number of controversies, including deeply transphobic comments mirroring his past homophobia, with him referring to trans women as big hairy men. Moreover, he famously referred to immigrants as being akin to slaves, claimed that poverty was a state of mind that might be altered with effort, and overspent on office luxuries– including 5,000 dollars on furnishings– all while the department’s budget was undergoing drastic cuts for crucial services. During the Pandemic, when Carson contracted COVID-19 like nearly all of us, he abandoned his previously scientifically grounded medical practices and instead took homeopathic remedies at the behest of a pillow salesman, and when he got sicker, he blamed experimental treatments that the president reportedly allowed him to take. All of these are actions that one would expect from a moronic, under educated small-town politician who got their office through nepotism rather than any genuine competency to lead, not a world-renowned surgeon who had achieved the unachievable. There was no nepotism, Carson grew up as a poor nobody. There is not a lack of competence, Carson is a genius neurosurgeon. But there is idiocy, an idiocy that is thus far unaccounted for. How can such a brilliant mind come up with such terrible ideas? This brings us to something that has been observed by writers in the past: Ben Carson is egotistical.
In 2015, after launching an ultimately unsuccessful presidential bid, Carson released a baffling video onto YouTube which has since been taken down. In the video, Carson is reported to have compared himself to Martin Luther King, and Abraham Lincoln, treating the potential of his election as some ground-breaking achievement. An unthinkable acceleration of the causes of civil rights and black liberation that had never been seen before: A black president! Only, he would not have been the first black president had he won, as the presiding commander in chief at the time of the videos upload was the two-term president and black man, Barack Obama. Even so, he would still be the first black Republican [president]! So that must be worth something! Describing this election as potentially would mirror the writings of authors with "such profound magnitude", and that "[g]reat transformations begin from a single event". This single event not being the election of the first black president, but evidently, the second. The first black president therefore must have been a failed attempt to break new ground, and a second one is required to actually break this seemingly unbreakable dirt. The bedrock of racism would be undone, if only you elected the (second) black president! This campaign approach was not successful. As it turned out, the very same Republicans who didn't vote for Obama as a black president were uninterested in voting for Ben Carson, and instead preferred a former Reality TV Star and Casino Mogul Donald Trump. And like so many other failed Republican prospectives, Carson kissed the ring, and was rewarded an office he was not qualified for as a result. And now, like so many other legends turned politicians, his legacy is tainted by the sin of being the dumb as bricks.
This egotistical nature, the one that made Carson think he, a former brain surgeon with zero legal or political experience, could successfully serve as president, I argue is also what lead him to believe that his views of the Egyptian periods were superior to centuries of Egyptology; that lead to his beliefs of gay and trans people superseded the wider medical and scientific world; that lead to his beliefs that homeopathic medicine would treat his COVID-19 infection, despite wider medical consensus. The arrogance of a former genius lead him to conspiracism and idiocy. Yet he is not alone in this fate.
Jordon B Peterson is a Canadian Clinical Psychologist who received his PhD at McGill University. He is a career psychologist and has long taught as a professor of his field, and is thus an expert in psychology. He is also an idiot. Jordon Peterson has made a significant name for himself online and off for having strong opinions on social issues. Declaring himself a classical liberal, yet holding beliefs far more akin to a far-right conservative, Peterson often hides his blatant hatred behind the guise of free speech advocacy. Despite not being a lawyer, he championed against a Canadian bill C-16 which would have protected trans and non-binary people from discrimination, but he believed would restrict the freedom of people who would have liked to discriminate on them. He then later dead-named trans actor Elliot Page, and got himself banned off of YouTube and Twitter as a result (although he was later reinstated on Twitter when Elon Musk bought it--one of many right-wing individuals brought back tot he platform after being banned following the use of hate speech). Additionally, despite not being an economist or researcher in Gender Studies, he argued that the Pink Tax was fictional, outside of the current consensus. Moreover, he is a climate change denier, frequently arguing against the scientific consensus on anthroprogenic climate change, and instead asserting that he, a reported genius, knows better than the wider scientific community. Often lauded as a forerunner in modern western philosophical and economic thought by non-philosophers, and non-economists, Peterson himself seems to know very little about actual philosophy and economics. One of his most infamous misunderstandings is of Marxisms, which he consistently mistakes as a post-modern, and not modernist philosophy, and for which he has such little understanding that he believed reading only the Communist Manifesto prior to a debate with famous Marxist Slavoj Zizek would be sufficient research, which was also seemingly the first and only time he had read it. Yet, Peterson arrogantly believed that all there was to know about Marxism was found in a single pamphlet written nearly two-centuries ago. Once again, we arrive at a similar conclusion: a seemingly brilliant mind brought to its knees by an intense arrogance. Why might Carson and Peterson both have the same problem of over-inflating their own competency in areas beyond those which they are an expert in? Well, there is some data to suggest a reason why.
In the book titled "The Invisible Gorilla" by Charles Chabris and Daniel Simons, the failures of human intuition, particularly those of experts, may lead to individuals misapply their knowledge towards areas it doesn't apply to as a sort of cognitive short-cut. This idea that experts with domain-specific knowledge may not extend that knowledge to other domains was shown in the study "The influence of deliberate practice on the development of expert performance", with these ideas expanded upon in the book Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, who argued that experts may make errors due to overestimating their ability to make predictions due to their domain-specific expertise. In further support of these ideas, the study "Behavioral economics: Past, present, future." found that expertise in one area does not always translate to another, and that experts might misapply beliefs developed from one field in the assessment of another. All of these studies and pieces of literature fundamentally circle around a central idea: the Anchoring Effect. This effect, which was theorized by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, is the idea that individuals might make judgments based on a single anchoring point, which in the case of someone like Peterson, would be their PhD in clinical psychology, and for Carson, his status as a legendary surgeon. Here, the anchoring effect might account for the reason why these two otherwise brilliant men hold such poorly founded beliefs about such a wide-range of topics.
Yet, this seems incomplete to me. It is easy to point at the flaws of Carson and Peterson as them overestimating their beliefs based on an anchoring point, and that they themselves are an advanced form of the Dunning-Kruger effect. Yet, the Dunning-Kruger effect is flawed, and has been contested in the past for its validity in its assertions regarding people of low-skill. In the article by Eric Gaze for the Scientific American, Gaze suggests that the Dunning-Kruger effect did not find what the original others' suggested. Instead, he argues that the data points towards the broad tendency for people to overestimate their abilities in general, not necessarily overestimate them in greater amounts at lower-skill levels. But Gaze is not a psychologist, he is a mathematics lecturer, so could this be yet another anchoring point? Gaze's arguments seem sound to me, however I am not an expert either. I am a graduate student and hold only a Bachelor's Degree in Psychology for the time being, and as such I am hardly the right person to judge the legitimacy of his critique. Moreover, I am not an Egyptologist, or an Economist, or philosopher, so how valid can my opinions be said to be? But therein lies the rub--my opinions are not more valid at all! This is why I will not tread outside the scientific consensus on issues for which I am not an expert, as I know full-well I am clueless in the fields of economics, Egyptology, and philosophy. All I can purport expert knowledge in is the Godzilla franchise, and even here I would not stray further than where existing sources might lead, and here I critique Peterson and Carson. I know I am clueless, and as such I do not pretend otherwise. I do not go beyond scientific consensus, and report only what I know. Carson and Peterson seem unwilling or unable to place restrictions on the formation of their beliefs, even in the face of consensus-contradiction in areas they too are clueless. Thus, I wonder if following my completion of graduate school, will I too develop an anchoring point of expert in Psychology? Only time will tell, and it would be a bitter reality where I adhere to my own hypothesis, yet am a worse thinker as a result.
So, we are left with a conclusion in sight: Carson and Peterson are incorrect about a great many things, and this incorrectness seems to adhere to an observed pattern that relates to the Anchoring Effect. Yet, I believe that it goes somewhat further than this. It is not simply that Peterson and Carson have anchored all of their ideas around their experience within a given unrelated field, but that so many others have as well. Ben Carson, despite dropping out of the race in 2016, received 857,039 votes in the Republican Primaries, which accounted for 2.75% of the total votes. Nearly one million human beings decided to vote for a man with zero political experience on the back of his career as a surgeon. Jordon Peterson's work 12 Rules for Life has been described as "the most thought provoking self-help I have read in years" by non-philosophers on the right, despite it promoting his conspiratorial and uninformed ideas about cultural Marxism. Indeed, Peterson has been described as a leader in the so-called "Culture War", despite his ideas within this war being demonstrably false. What this suggests to me is that the effect of their ego is contagious: they are able to convince others that they are as they believe themselves to be. Their anchoring point in this sense becomes a viral anchor, in that the anchor point of their beliefs becomes the anchoring point of the people who listen to them. Due to this, Carson and Peterson are far more dangerous than the average ill-informed political commentator, as their status as legends and genius's pushes their ideas away from the fringes and into the mainstream. Thus, I will posit the following: to be a good thinker, you must accept the limitations of your knowledge, and avoid those that refuse to do so.
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