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If we restrict it to the last, say, 55 years, which Prime Minister might have handled this virus crisis, & the subsequent huge economic consequences which will surely follow, best?

Wilson

Heath

Callaghan

Thatcher

Major

Blair

Brown

Cameron

May

Johnson



Think, for me, Thatcher would be head & shoulders above the rest, with Blair maybe second best.

Thatcher .

Had the courage of her own convictions .

Strong and positive .

A leader not a follower .

Not having Thatcher.  She was too stubborn, so if she decided early that we weren't going to close everything, that is what we would do until it was too late.

I'd go for Major, Blair, Brown or Cameron ahead of her, and probably ahead of Johnson too. I was too young to have a view of Wilson and Heath.  May and Callaghan nope, though both were unlucky in their timing, as is Johnson.

Can we pick Moon Jae-in?   

She would have been the first to close borders and restrict travel to save UK lives.

Can’t imagine for a second she wouldn’t take decisive action to protect the UK.

It can only be Thatcher for me.

Thatcher had a science background and the balls to act on her belief. Sadly, if the outbreak occurred post ‘84 we might have had even more difficulty imposing any lockdown. She was a tad divisive...


Given that she is unavailable now, I’ll take Boris over any of the alternatives. Including Blair.

I’d be looking for who is the most intelligent. I’d go Brown, Blair, Major, Thatcher, in that order. As I say all
the time , I think intelligence is directly correlated to the ability to change your mind and be flexible, that will be key here. Brown had experience of playing a leading role in response to a global crisis, it seems outside of the U.K. most agree that he was excellent.

The problem with Boris is that for the average person, who is not interested in Coronavirus or politics, if you heard him say something significantly outside of the norm, you would assume (quite reasonably on all evidence) that he was lying or that he was joking. It’s hard to imagine anything less desirable in this spot.

Thatcher

I must admit that my first thoughts were Thatcher then Blair.

Wilson and Heath were both far too weak imo.

Blair and Brown closely followed by Cameron and Boris. Thatcher after these, not sufficient empathy or flexibility in my book and a bit of tough, bit of kindness, and an ability to change views quickly needed in this spot I think.

I kind of disagree with this. Being able to change your mind is only of value if you change from a poor position to a better one.

As for Boris and the ‘average person’, I think you are seriously underestimating their intelligence. Sufficient numbers of them voted for the Conservatives, and by extension him very recently.

The theory is that you change your mind to a greater or lesser extent once more information becomes available, it’s like an iteration to gradually improve quality of thought/level of understanding.

There’s just so much we don’t know about perception of Boris, it won’t be much more than 25% of the population that voted Conservative, plenty of those imo would vote for him because they like the fact that he’s a clown.

Hearing Brown being interviewed about this on Thursday morning, it was like he was on a different level of understanding than we have been seeing (as was David Miliband the previous day), so I’d have to go with Brown. After that, I find it hard to chose between Major, Blair and Cameron, but I guess it would be Blair.

I understand the iterative process, but I’m going to disagree with your view of intelligence out of sheer bloody mindedness. Or because it makes no sense.

You equate being able to ‘change your mind’ with being ‘intelligent’. They aren’t at all the same, unless, when you say ‘change your mind’ you actually mean ‘learn something new’. Which is a very different kettle of fish.

It's really easy to be interviewed about this when it doesn't matter one jot what you actually say.

Boris has to be so careful, one wrong word and he's screwed.

Brown and Milliband can say wtf they like with literally zero consequence.

This explains it better than I ever could. It‘s a long read but is completely backed rigorous science and well worth reading:

 https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/why-facts-dont-change-our-minds?fbclid=IwAR0Qz_CsVFebSavTyQJdhTBov8m9kWIvVHtuc6WUlu4eNfcZwkihCh2ipiM (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/why-facts-dont-change-our-minds?fbclid=IwAR0Qz_CsVFebSavTyQJdhTBov8m9kWIvVHtuc6WUlu4eNfcZwkihCh2ipiM)

Interesting stuff. But it doesn’t really add anything to the debate over what constitutes intelligence.
The article, and I assume the book, demonstrate that changing your mind about something in the face of new evidence is difficult. It doesn’t suggest that those individuals who are capable of changing their mind are intellectually superior though. It just says they are rare.

What do you think the purpose of the studies were? Are you saying there is something that is hard to do but with benefits if you can do it (let’s call it a skill) can’t be labelled as intelligence? It seems like overcoming this difficulty is absolutely what intelligence is and that’s my point.
 if you can do it but refusing to label this talent as intelligence?

We’re debating semantics now.
Seems we won’t reach agreeement on this question, nor on many others.

But I’m open to seeing any new evidence you may have to offer.

I know of those studies about evidence not changing people's minds.

They've got nothing to do with intelligence.

"What do you think the purpose of the studies were?"

The purpose of the studies is because somebody or some people had the hypothesis that people are likely to not change their minds even when given evidence they're wrong. So they created an experiment to test it, and the results favoured their hypothesis. Nowhere has it got anything to do with intelligence.

It's a study to show a human trait, you could argue that using rational thought to overcome your evolutionary nature is a skill. And you could label that skill as being part of intelligence (once you'd also defined what that meant).

But that is your interpretation, this study doesn't provide support for your theory - your theory is an interpretation of that study.

FWIW I think being able to change your mind can indirectly be a sign of intelligence but I'm using the defintion of intelligence as being your capacity to learn things; so being able to change your mind could be a sign that you are able to learn and synthesise new information better than average. But it's still an interpretation, using definitions that not everyone agrees on and it's one explanation of being able to change your mind more easily - not the only one.

In terms of the thread I'd probably go with a synthesis of the other answers.

I think Thatcher would be best if she was convinced of the seriousness of it; because of her science background and decisiveness - but she'd be risky because if she didn't think the state should interfere she might be one of the hardest to convince otherwise.
I think Blair would be kind of the opposite - he'd be more easily convinced but would have to be spoon fed everything. He'd work well though (assuming in his prime) because of his charisma - I think people would tend to trust what he said and take him seriously.
I think either Gordon Brown or John Major after that - I hadn't thought of Major, but seeing the suggestion I thought 'good point'; I think both of them would be a safe pair of hands in a crisis.

You didn't catch the interviews then.

Haha. Were they not that easy after all?

I'm not sure what you mean. Both of them were critical of the lack of a co-ordinated international response (Miliband: "What international response?"), saying in different ways that it shouldn't be being left to national governments. Brown set out actions that he said the UK government had to do by the end of last week, and which they then did do on Thursday and Friday evening.

The only answer I can think of here is that we don't have a common understanding of what intelligence is. All of the work from Festinger to Mercier/Sperber is saying that 'confirmation bias' or 'holding on preciously to ones views' is a 'cognitive dissonance' (not keen on the term myself, it's their term) that it is a legacy from an earlier time that gets away in the way of accurate thought and developed understanding.

(copied from the article, last paragraph is key)

The Stanford studies became famous. Coming from a group of academics in the nineteen-seventies, the contention that people can’t think straight was shocking. It isn’t any longer. Thousands of subsequent experiments have confirmed (and elaborated on) this finding. As everyone who’s followed the research—or even occasionally picked up a copy of Psychology Today—knows, any graduate student with a clipboard can demonstrate that reasonable-seeming people are often totally irrational. Rarely has this insight seemed more relevant than it does right now. Still, an essential puzzle remains: How did we come to be this way?

In a new book, “The Enigma of Reason” (Harvard), the cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber take a stab at answering this question. Mercier, who works at a French research institute in Lyon, and Sperber, now based at the Central European University, in Budapest, point out that reason is an evolved trait, like bipedalism or three-color vision. It emerged on the savannas of Africa, and has to be understood in that context.
Stripped of a lot of what might be called cognitive-science-ese, Mercier and Sperber’s argument runs, more or less, as follows: Humans’ biggest advantage over other species is our ability to cooperate. Cooperation is difficult to establish and almost as difficult to sustain. For any individual, freeloading is always the best course of action. Reason developed not to enable us to solve abstract, logical problems or even to help us draw conclusions from unfamiliar data; rather, it developed to resolve the problems posed by living in collaborative groups.
“Reason is an adaptation to the hypersocial niche humans have evolved for themselves,” Mercier and Sperber write. Habits of mind that seem weird or goofy or just plain dumb from an “intellectualist” point of view prove shrewd when seen from a social “interactionist” perspective.
Consider what’s become known as “confirmation bias,” the tendency people have to embrace information that supports their beliefs and reject information that contradicts them. Of the many forms of faulty thinking that have been identified, confirmation bias is among the best catalogued; it’s the subject of entire textbooks’ worth of experiments. One of the most famous of these was conducted, again, at Stanford. For this experiment, researchers rounded up a group of students who had opposing opinions about capital punishment. Half the students were in favor of it and thought that it deterred crime; the other half were against it and thought that it had no effect on crime.
The students were asked to respond to two studies. One provided data in support of the deterrence argument, and the other provided data that called it into question. Both studies—you guessed it—were made up, and had been designed to present what were, objectively speaking, equally compelling statistics. The students who had originally supported capital punishment rated the pro-deterrence data highly credible and the anti-deterrence data unconvincing; the students who’d originally opposed capital punishment did the reverse. At the end of the experiment, the students were asked once again about their views. Those who’d started out pro-capital punishment were now even more in favor of it; those who’d opposed it were even more hostile.

If reason is designed to generate sound judgments, then it’s hard to conceive of a more serious design flaw than confirmation bias. Imagine, Mercier and Sperber suggest, a mouse that thinks the way we do. Such a mouse, “bent on confirming its belief that there are no cats around,” would soon be dinner. To the extent that confirmation bias leads people to dismiss evidence of new or underappreciated threats—the human equivalent of the cat around the corner—it’s a trait that should have been selected against. The fact that both we and it survive, Mercier and Sperber argue, proves that it must have some adaptive function, and that function, they maintain, is related to our “hypersociability.”
Mercier and Sperber prefer the term “myside bias.” Humans, they point out, aren’t randomly credulous. Presented with someone else’s argument, we’re quite adept at spotting the weaknesses. Almost invariably, the positions we’re blind about are our own.

I'm really not sure what your point is Kush.

The only extra thing I got from that is that you think intelligent people can't act irrationally.

And in terms of how the conversation started; even if intelligence is directly correlated to the ability to change your mind (which is a pretty bold statement even if you think there is some correlation) - that doesn't mean someone being able to change their mind shows they are intelligent.

If it's true:
Being intelligent implies being able to change your mind
Being able to change your mind does not imply intelligence.

I don’t have a need to make a point, I just think discussing things usually means everyone understands better in the end.

I think intelligent people can act irrationally but they are less likely to than average.

I have a belief and everything about these studies support it, that intelligence means being flexible in your thinking and being less likely to be defensive or protective of previously held ideas, which is what we do because it has and does confer social benefit.

We are (all three of us) being very reluctant to change our minds 😊.

I didn't think we were particularly disagreeing, I was just arguing that it's only a one way implication (intelligence implies flexibility) and that it's a soft correlation not a hard one.





But I might have changed my mind :D

FYP

Can you see the irony in the bit in bold?

Seems like my last sentence was there to acknowledge that irony.

Nobody on here is an expert about any of this, you are just random blokes with an opinion that you think you have researched that you are desperate to be proven right about, don’t try and pretend otherwise.....

ORLY?

Ya Think?

You’d think they were by the way some rattle on about it....