Confidence Interval

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ANU KHOSLA is an emerging writer based in San Francisco. She is a recent alumna of the Lighthouse Writers Workshop Book Project. Her writing has also received support from the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, Tin House, and VCCA. Her work can be found in BOMB, Electric Lit, The Millions, Barrelhouse, and elsewhere.

Sometimes, the joy in Jeopardy! is in hearing people give wrong answers.

Clue: “Stefano Ferrara is a famous maker of these, which can reach a temperature of 800 degrees inside.”

Contestant: “What is calzone?”

The correct response is: What is an oven?

Clue: “While performing in Philadelphia, the future father of this man sent a letter threatening to slit Andrew Jackson’s throat.”

Contestant: “Who is George H.W. Bush?"

The correct response is: Who is John Wilkes Booth?

Clue: “Tell your old man to drag this ‘70s UCLA & Trail Blazer center (& Lanier!) up & down the court for 48 minutes.”

Contestant: “Who is Kareem Abdul-Jabbar?”

The correct response is: Who is Bill Walton?

This last one was especially funny because the contestant who got it wrong was, uh, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

In 2016, I was on an email chain where somebody shared an Atlantic article entitled “The War on Stupid People.” David H. Freedman writes, in the opening of the essay, “The 2010s, in contrast, are a terrible time to not be brainy. Those who consider themselves bright openly mock others for being less so. Even in this age of rampant concern over microaggressions and victimization, we maintain open season on the nonsmart.”¹

The responses were something like this:

This is so mindbogglingly stupid I can’t even put words together. Apparently nothing can be glorified these days and society should be able to reap the benefits of intelligent people without acknowledging that their accomplishments make them superior.

Superior at what? I think.

I’m certainly not superior to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

And what are the benefits of superiority anyway? What are the benefits of intelligence?

When did I learn about Buck v. Bell? High School? College?

According to Oyez, these are the Facts of the Case:

Carrie Buck was a "feeble minded woman" who was committed to a state mental institution. Her condition had been present in her family for the last three generations. A Virginia law allowed for the sexual sterilization of inmates of institutions to promote the "health of the patient and the welfare of society." Before the procedure could be performed, however, a hearing was required to determine whether or not the operation was a wise thing to do.²

Feeble-minded woman was just another way of saying unintelligent woman. Was just another way of saying dumb woman. Was just another way of saying idiot woman.

The case was argued in April of 1927. It took a week and three days for the Supreme Court of the United States of America to rule that the Virginia statute, which authorized the forced sterilization of Carrie Buck, was not in violation of the United States Constitution.

Most of us around here know Darwin’s big idea: “Intelligence is based on how efficient a species became at doing the things they need to survive.”

Sometimes, I’m not convinced that intelligence is about survival. Being a smart woman can feel like a trap. Being a woman at all leads to a certain type of assumption, mostly that you’re not smart. You have to work extra hard if you want to prove this assumption wrong. Then, when you do prove your intelligence, there’s a whole other challenge coming your way. When they tell you you’re smart they say it like an insult, like it’s almost a threat, or like maybe you’re a threat, or at least they feel threatened by you, or like they want you to feel like you’ve acted threatening to them by outing your own intelligence, or like by being intelligent that you think that they think you’re a threat and so they’re going to prematurely put you down, put you in your place, to show that you’re no threat to them and in fact it’s your own haughtiness about your own intelligence that’s the problem and suddenly you’re feeling a little threatened and confused by all this.

I wonder how Carrie Buck thought of herself. I wonder if she felt feeble-minded. Did she know what it meant to be feeble-minded? Could she identify with the sentiment of feeble-mindedness regardless of what she knew of it?

Being an intelligent woman makes you some kind of freak. But being a feeble-minded woman makes you some kind of freak too, doesn’t it? The intelligence makes you aggressive, the womanhood makes you off-putting.

June Jordan has a poem called A Poem about Intelligence for My Brothers and Sisters. You should read it. You’ll see it goes like this:

“Mrs. Johnson!” I say, leaning on the gate
between us: “What you think about somebody come up
with an E equals M C 2?”
“How you doin,” she answers me, sideways, like she don’t
want to let on she know I ain’
combed my hair yet and here it is
Sunday morning but still I have the nerve
to be bothering serious work with these crazy
questions about
“E equals what you say again, dear?”
Then I tell her, “Well
also this same guy? I think
he was undisputed Father of the Atom Bomb!”
“That right.” She mumbles or grumbles, not too politely
“And dint remember to wear socks when he put on
his shoes!” I add on (getting desperate)

You’ll have to look up the rest of the poem yourself. Some things we have to learn ourselves.

On a trip to Mexico, our group sat around talking before dinner. Someone pulled up a YouTube video of an Octopus solving some kind of cognitive challenge.

“See, look at how intelligent they are! This is why I would never eat octopus.”

“Or, would you never eat octopus because you’ve never liked seafood, and it’s easy to make it a moral choice by conceptualizing it as judgement of their intelligence,” I proposed.

“No, it’s not about that, I just don’t get how you can eat something that smart!”

“Are chickens not intelligent enough?”

We debated half-heartedly until we were sat at the table in front of ceramic plates and heavy cutlery.

“Okay,” I continued, in my annoying line of reasoning, “Let’s just say we had a Donner Party situation on our hands and people were starting to starve. Should we decide who we would eat first based off who we deemed the least intelligent in this group?”

They didn’t seem to like it. Nobody really wanted to engage with it. But wasn’t it the logical consequence of the idea that we shouldn’t eat octopus because of their intelligence?

(Or did they just not want to tell me they would eat me first? And if that were the case, was it because I was the least intelligent, or because I was the most annoying? And if it was the latter, what was it that was so annoying about me? My facility with logic? My powers of rhetoric?)

Promptly, the waiters came around with food. Imagine: the perfectly grilled pulpo.

As I understand it, the original sin, for Christians, was when Adam and Eve ate from the fruit of the forbidden tree. That tree was the tree of knowledge. What to do with the fact that seeking knowledge is a sin in this religion? I feel compelled to mention, also, that it was Eve, oh treacherous crone, who first grasped for that fruit of knowledge.

(Crone.

Hag.

Carline.

Hellcat.

Trot.)

In Hinduism—as in Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism—knowledge is synonymous with freedom, rather than sin. Moksha, or nirvana, is the release from samsara, the cycle of birth and rebirth. Moksha is self-knowledge; self-actualization, if you like.

In samsara you are stuck in suffering, in ignorance.

And I feel that this country is sometimes stuck in this cycle of suffering due to our unwavering commitment to ignorance. Perhaps if we saw truth and intellectual knowledge as divine, rather than sinful, we could break out.

But on the other hand, maybe the moralizing of knowledge was the problem in the first place—the original sin, if you will.

Is it possible to treasure knowledge without making a hierarchy of intellect?

Maybe if intelligence was just a trait and not a moral measure Carrie Buck could’ve had children.

Actually, Carrie Buck did have a child, but not children plural. Her child, Vivian, was at the center of the ruling that led to her forced sterilization. She was maybe even the whole thing.

Stephen Jay Gould wrote of Carrie in Natural History:

She grew up with foster parents, J.T. and Alice Dobbs, and continued to live with them, helping out with chores around the house. She was apparently raped by a relative of her foster parents, then blamed for her resultant pregnancy. Almost surely, she was (as they used to say) committed to hide her shame (and her rapist’s identity), not because enlightened science had just discovered her true mental status. In short, she was sent away to have her baby. Her case never was about mental deficiency; it was always a matter of sexual morality and social deviance.³

But still the story told about Carrie Buck is the story of intelligence. The legacy of Buck v. Bell was a eugenics of intelligence that culminated in the forced sterilization of 70,000 people. The justification for her sterilization was that her mother was feeble-minded, and that she was feeble-minded, and that Vivian—assessed of her intelligence at only seven months old—also appeared to be feeble-minded.

Vivian died at the age of eight, of causes Gould believes were likely “preventable childhood diseases of poverty (a grim reminder of the real subject in Buck v. Bell).” In writing about her, Gould—who was one of the most respected scientists, science writers, and historians of science to ever live—went searching for Vivian’s school records from those first few years of life. He determined that she was “a perfectly normal, quite average student, neither particularly outstanding nor much troubled.” He felt the evidence of Carrie and her mother’s own feeble-mindedness was also lacking.

Carrie’s sister Doris was also sterilized. When she went in for the operation, they told her it was for appendicitis.

Would knowledge of the truth have helped her?

I want to free Carrie Buck from the trap of the intellect, but it feels impossible. Here I am, attempting to argue my way out of it. Gould’s defense of Vivian rested on the idea that she was average. But what of the women who were below her average? Would they have deserved the forced sterilization?

I feel so certain that Carrie Buck deserved the right to children, but I feel so lost about how to show you this. Arguing to you only seems to open up the possibility of disagreement, but this must be insisted: What happened to Buck was an injustice, and no space should exist for its justification. And yet, it happened. Somebody justified it. And now here I am, falling into the trap they have set. I am using my intelligence to convince you to put less weight on intelligence, but it is only by weighing my intelligence that you decide whether or not to buy into my contention. I am asking you to reconsider the importance of intellect by making an appeal to the intellect, and in so doing, I am reinforcing the importance of intellect.

Clue: This philosophical term describes a type of argument that disproves itself by proving itself.

The correct response is: What is a self-refuting idea?

Volume 15.2 ✧ Summer 25

Anu Khosla